Guided Tour: Along the Ruta Bolaño in Blanes, Girona, Spain (Journey in Six Parts)

“I came to this town years ago, at a dull and dingy time in my life”

––Roberto Bolaño, The Skating Rink

Part Four: Residents and Tourists

Behind the line of seaside hotels is the working class Blanes neighborhood Bolaño first called home. One afternoon, I walked its streets examining its anti-facist graffiti and less than picturesque buildings.


It was there I took a photo of a dog on a grassless playing field. The sky above was cloudy and overcast in a manner that recalled the author. Though in reality the dog was in the company of a woman who smiled and threw a ball to it, in my favorite photo she remains out of frame. There is only a black dog, walking over a bare field under an oppressive sky, and I am reminded of Goya, who reminds me of Bolaño all over again.

Later I learned that Bolaño arrived in Blanes with an inventory of costume jewelry purchased in Barcelona, only a half-hour away by train. During the day, he and his mother sold it from a storefront a few blocks from the beach, which was also their home (02 along the Ruta). Even knowing Bolaño died having married, raised children, and formed close friendships all over town, I’d so often imagined him as an anguished literary figure, living at the edge of social convention, I now found it hard to picture him running a small business and living with his mom.

At point three, not far from the store, the oddest sentences are posted, which capture something about Bolaño’s relationships with Bolaño's other citizens. The Ruta’s text reads, “[Here] was one of the bars frequented by Bolaño during the first years of his stay in Blanes. In these premises, whose clientele were quite marginal, Bolaño met his first friends.”

Today, the site where the “marginal” once gathered is home to yet another ice cream shop and a fish-fry place that serves beer and bland snacks to tourists. It was while sitting there sipping from a copa, that I finished The Third Reich. Upon reaching the last page, I saw a quartet of swallows flitting high overhead, and once again I became sentimental, taking them for a sign, but a sign of what I didn’t know.


Nowadays all the costume jewelry in Blanes seems to be sold from tented stalls across from the sea. There African women braid children’s hair, and local men sell homemade sock puppets, leather wallets, and t-shirts silkscreened with marijuana leaves and the names of old bands. I bought some jewelry––trinkets for family and friends––from two smiling sisters, who allowed me to take their picture under a hot summer sun.

Guided Tour: Along the Ruta Bolaño in Blanes, Girona, Spain (Journey in Six Parts)

“The door was behind me; when I heard it swing shut, I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or crying.”

––Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star

Part Three: Writing Alone and Together

I took pictures of doorways. Perhaps they are difficult to find interesting without realizing Bolaño once walked through them to family apartments and writing studios. On the other side, he met blank pages and unfinished manuscripts, things that would later become 2666, or Last Evenings on Earth, or Distant Star, or some other incredible something that occupies once empty space because Bolaño walked across a threshold and took time to create it.

Thanks to information provided along the Ruta, I now believe Bolaño preferred to write alone and in quiet (05, 13, and 17). But along the Ruta are glimpses into his friendships with Blanes’ citizens–– drinkers at a local bar, a video store owner, a bookseller, and the players of strategic war games of which he was said to be a top competitor. Each of his connections documented along the trail (03, 04, 09, and 11).

I prefer to do my writing in cafes surrounded by people, people going about their day. It keeps me feeling less lonely during writing’s most difficult tasks––facing the blank screen, managing the confusion, even terror of infinite possibility, and the brutal necessity of accepting an image or scene that was not was wanted, only what arrived.

Here is a photo of the fly that joined me at one my favorite writing spots in Blanes (the Café Terrassans. No word if Bolaño frequented it, but it would be hard to imagine him not knowing it was there, sitting, as it does, at one end a busy pedestrian thoroughfare not far from the sea).

And here is what I hope is a respectful photo of the waiters who served me copas, pulpo, and Spanish tortilla while I wrote.

The Bolaño doorways are plain, but the town itself is charming in just the way one might expect.

It has an ancient Roman fountain from which drinking water still flows. There are gilded saints in its churches and grottos where sailors’ families pray for their safe return. Picturesque arches lead to neighborhoods with narrow sidewalks and hidden plazas. Some of the buildings are tiled in spectacular ways. There are farmer’s markets with displays of local honey and saffron, and sidewalk cafes, and, of course, the beautiful sea, which one can look upon from restaurant tables while drinking sangria and eating grilled sardines, and every evening families walk along the promenade and climb the rocky peninsula where a red and yellow Catalan flag snaps freely in the breeze.

Guided Tour: Along the Ruta Bolaño in Blanes, Girona, Spain (Journey in Six Parts)

“Through the window comes the murmur of the sea mingled with the laughter of the night’s last revelers, a sound that might be the waiters clearing the tables on the terrace, an occasional car driving slowly along the Paseo Marítimo, and a low and unidentifiable hum from the other rooms in the hotel.”

––Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich

Part Two: Bolaño on the Beach

During the six days I spent in the tiny coastal town of Blanes, I shifted between two books: Bolaño’s the Third Reich and one by his translator, Chris Andrew, Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe. In the first case, the story was set in a Blanes-like town, much of the action taking place at a fictional seaside hotel seemingly near the real life one where I stayed. In the second case, the novel’s terms were being exposed in a manner that was both liberating and disconcerting.

From the beginning, Bolaño’s work has had a terrible hold on me; Andrew’s book showed why. It wasn’t as complicated as I once might have thought––a kind of celebration of anarchistic tendencies, a fascination with failure, and mostly unrealized threats of violence, which magnify tension and heighten even the most banal of fictional stakes.

So, on the one hand, I was engrossed in a tale featuring a vacationer’s mysterious death, an unlikeable protagonist playing a WWII strategy game, and the local people he perceives as enemies. On the other, the story’s unrelenting tension were revealed as a kind of magic trick that, in theory, anyone might pull off, the way we sometimes convince ourselves we could produce magic, if only we had the magician’s tools.

As described in The Third Reich, the protagonist’s hotel seemed stately and deteriorating in an elegant and interesting way. The guests were Western Europeans with disposable incomes and minimal worries.

My hotel was not like that. It too was deteriorating but in a predictable and unfashionable manner. It seemed to have been built quickly, like all the hotels lined up on either side in one neat row facing the sea. Its walls were thin. Its mattresses cheap foam. Its elevator smelled of cigarettes and human sweat. The lobby staircase mimicked a chrome and wooden showpiece of a stylish place. But it wobbled when you stepped on it, and seemed to pull away from the wall.

Also staying at the hotel, were troupes of young dancers and their adult chaperones from countries like Armenia, Albania, Serbia, and Poland. There was a folk dancing festival in town, but I couldn’t seem to determine where it took place.

Each day just before sunset, Europe’s young people emerged from the hotels and walked along the sea in their national costumes behind silken banners, heading toward the older more local part of town. Each night, they returned from their performances and a local DJ played Eurodisco in the hotel bar. Children clustered in groups of manic dancing while their chaperones drank beer and watched from the sides.

Also at the hotel––four blonde unaccompanied young men with Aryan chins right out of Bolaño’s novel. They spoke English with the hotel staff, but I didn’t recognize the language they spoke amongst themselves. At night, they came to the bar in white jeans, fitted t-shirts, and gelled hair. The boys were silly and compelling and bursting with sexual energy. They drank to excess, played pool, and hit on the female chaperones, who responded with patience and pity.

Once, as evening approached, I sat on my balcony, peering at the endless sea in a split state of gratitude for the beauty before me and unrelenting longing for something more.

Suddenly, the four young men walked onto the deserted beach with three young women between them. The group sat upon the sand in heterosexual pairings of lust and attachment, leaving one lonely young man without companionship. He tried, for a moment, to be cool. He wasn’t the least good-looking or, perhaps, the most undeserving, just unlucky. After all, four willing girls would have been a lot to find in this quiet seaside town.

It all seemed so Bolaño-like, the heightened sexual energy, vague potential for masculine violence, and a lone failure bearing the marks of middling performance and an unrealized dream. Though, I suppose, were it unfolding in a Bolaño story, there would also be the sound of a distant barking dog and knowledge of a gun buried in the sand.

The breeze shifted and the couples drew closer, melding into three writhing lumps, while one stiff figure remained in sharp silhouette against the horizon. He took a sneaking glance at his brothers and then rose quickly, walking back to the hotel at a quick and angry pace.

Guided Tour: Along the Ruta Bolaño in Blanes, Girona, Spain (Journey in Six Parts)

“I just hope to be considered a South American writer who was more or less a decent person who lived in Blanes and loved this town.”

––Roberto Bolaño as quoted at 06 Ruta Roberto Bolaño

Part One: Recognizing the Route

The first time I stumbled upon the library (06 along the Ruta Roberto Bolaño) it was closed. Through the window I saw an Agatha Christie book display––a coat rack disguised as a detective (trench coat, fedora, old-timey camera) topped by her books in Catalan translations.

I returned a few days later, and the librarian, a man about my age who spoke little English, kindly escorted me to the Roberto Bolaño Lounge. He told me Bolaño’s children had helped dedicate it before leaving me alone to contemplate. In truth, the room appeared ready for meetings, not lounging. I recall a conference table and seating in rows. A big screen took up most of one wall. Near the door, there was a small collection of Bolaño’s work displayed on a spinning rack. For a few moments, I sat on a folding chair near the entrance. Here the room’s emptiness was most acute, and I waited, I suppose, for something to happen. In all my minutes there, nothing unusual occurred.

I returned to the desk where the kindly librarian once again sat. Still seeking connection, some sentimental exchange, a reason to have travelled 6,000 miles to be among streets Bolaño once walked and sit in the cafes and bars of his own life, I purchased a canvas bag with the building’s name in blue paint across its surface and Catalan words that were outside my comprehension.

The librarian seemed suddenly to take note that while he was a man at work, I was a woman on a journey. He told me he’d never read Bolaño, but understood many foreigners were quite taken with him.

Shortly after arriving in town but before picking up the pamphlet––Ruta Roberto Bolaño––from the Blanes tourist office, I sat on a bench eating ice-cream near the entrance to a United Colors of Benetton store. It was from here I first spied the black and red plaque that would become so familiar over the next several days.

At this site, the sign said in Catalan, before repeating itself in Spanish and English, was once a stationary store that pleased the author. Under the number 15 was something like an engraving of Bolaño’s face imprinted in the center of a red disc. The face seemed softer and more kindly than other images I’d seen of him. At that moment, I finally understood that in Blanes there was a walking tour devoted to the author.

I came here only because I knew Bolaño had lived and also died in Blanes. I loved his work, and choosing this town as a destination gave shape to my travels. Earlier, I had gone to Portugal to stay with family friends. Blanes, in part, was a way to round out my journey––the kind of travelling I’d often fantasized about doing but hadn’t because fantasies, by definition, aren’t real.

Now I knew, where once there was a stationary store now there was a Benetton’s, and the stationary store had pleased Bolaño. It thrilled me to suddenly realize I would be guided all over town in just such a way. Whereas earlier my arrival had made me feel aimless and alone, now I would know what I was seeing.

Like the librarian, the man who sold the ice cream welcomed me. For the most part, Blanes’ streets were empty in the late afternoon, and he––perhaps surprised to see me out and about at a time where every local person was at home with family––asked me where I was from and why I was here. I said I had come because of Bolaño. He said he hadn’t known the man nor read his work. But his mother had taken care of the author’s children. A very nice family, according to the man who sold me the ice cream.

Days later, while photographing the entrance to a writing studio Bolaño had once rented (13 along the Ruta) the ice cream man rode by on a scooter and waved. In this photo, you see him getting ready to turn right just under the arch. There goes the man whose mother once took care of Bolaño’s children.