Roberto Bolaño: The Redhead

.

American Flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber), National Zoo, Washington, D.C.: photo by Stevehdc, 2007

She was eighteen and she was mixed up in the drug trade. Back then I saw her all the time but if I had to make a police sketch of her now, I don't think I could. I know she had an aquiline nose, and for a few months she was a redhead; I know I heard her laugh once or twice from the window of a restaurant as I was waiting for a taxi or just walking past in the rain. She was eighteen and every two weeks she went to bed with a cop from the Narcotics Squad.

Lesser flamingos (Phenicopterus minor), Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania: photo by Charles J. Sharp, 2004

She watched him from the bed ... She smoked Camel Lights and maybe at some point she imagined that the furniture in the room and even her lover were empty things that she had to invest with meaning ... Purple-tinted scene: before she pulls down her tights, she tells him about her day ... "Everywhere is disgustingly still, frozen somewhere in the air." Hotel room lamp. A stenciled pattern, dark green. Frayed rug. Girl on all fours who moans as the vibrator enters her cunt. She had long legs and she was eighteen, in those days she was in the drug trade and she was doing all right, she even opened a checking account and bought a motorcycle.

Lesser flamingos (Phenicopterus minor), Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania: photo by Charles J. Sharp, 2004

Roberto Bolaño: The Redhead (excerpts), from Antwerp, 1980, translated by Natasha Wimmer, New Directions 2010