Spain Diaries: Never meet your heroes
Finding and losing the trail of a literary hero on the Costa Brava
Like most people familiar with the cliché, I have a very real fear about meeting my heroes. I am afraid they will be rude, unpleasant, vain, or do or say something that means they are if not entirely cancelled then at least severely postponed. Because of this, I tend to prefer heroes that are dead.
So, Roberto Bolaño. I read his novel The Savage Detectives for the first time in the summer of 2019 and promptly fell in love. It became then and still is my favourite novel. He was a brilliant writer and a very interesting person and is, as you’ve probably gathered, dead.
He was born in Chile in 1953, spent time in Mexico, but spent the bulk of the last years of his life in Blanes in north eastern Spain, before dying in 2003. Blanes sits on the Costa Brava, just over an hour by train from Barcelona, and so is perfect for a literary pilgrim like me who prefers his pilgrimages to be in warm, sunny places, and ideally easily accessible by public transport.
The train from Barcelona speeds past all of the beaches that people not obsessed with an obscure Latin American poet and novelist alight at when wanting a day away from the city on gorgeous white sand and a dip in the Mediterranean. But L. and I sit on the train all the way to Blanes and get off with a fairly large crowd. I assume I’m not the only Bolaño fan in town.
The good people of Blanes have grasped the opportunity of having an adopted literary son. A whole section of their website is dedicated to Bolaño. All through town there are red and black plaques that talk about his connection to various places and landmarks. There are seventeen in total and this is, as we will see, even for a superfan like me, perhaps a little over generous.
The first stop for example is the train station. Sure it’s a handy and convenient place to start the tour but then it’s only included because this is how Bolaño first arrived in Blanes. It’s nowhere near stop number two which is over a mile away in the centre of town. The crowd of people who were on the train are also milling around waiting for the bus, though I notice they’re not spending a whole lot of time examining the plaque. Perhaps they looked at it while I was in the toilet or finding my way out of the station, which despite being a small building still manages to detain me for longer than strictly necessary.
The bus eventually arrives and we all pile on, I a little uncertainly. The line advertised on the bus stop doesn’t have any recognisable places on it, but I look up the first couple and they’re closer to the centre of town than where we are at the train station and so I sit down. It does not trouble me that when I say in a pitifully weak voice, “town centre?” to the gruff bus driver, that he looks back at me with a mixture of contempt and confusion, I just clutch my ticket and scan Google Maps to check where to get off for the next stop on the Bolaño route. Though I’m sure that’s where all of my fellow passengers are disembarking too.
I had thought, on the train, that a town further up the line from Blanes, Lloret de Mar, sounded quite picturesque. I don’t know what it was, but something about it’s name just made it sound quite pretty. I thought it a shame we wouldn’t have time to see it, what with all the literary sightseeing we have on the agenda.
I needn’t have worried. Soon the bus is careering away from Blanes at what feels like breakneck speed, down a dual carriageway and straight to Lloret de Mar. The bus goes fast but the journey is still at least half an hour, long enough to allow me to truly reflect on my mistake. Blanes, I had thought, would be the sort of town where everyone would get off at the train station and need one bus. We’re all be going the same way, to the beach or to the centre, we can ride together. In Blanes you have two options, Bolaño or beach.
But of course Blanes is a town with real people who are still alive. These real people need more than one bus route. There is a bus that goes from the train station in Blanes to the centre of Blanes. But I am not on it. I am on the bus to Lloret de Mar.
After all I thought about wanting to see Lloret de Mar, about how nice it sounded, I stay for approximately five minutes, four of which are spent sitting on a different bus waiting for it to move which, according to the driver, is absolutely definitely going to the centre of Blanes. Those fellow passengers I arrived to Blanes on the train with have disembarked here in Lloret de Mar. They are not interested in obscure Latin American novelists.
Eventually, here we are, in the centre of Blanes, an hour later than planned. I’m switching between a PDF and Google Maps trying to follow the route the city has planned out to show me all the places that meant the most to Roberto Bolaño, trying to make them mean something to me.
The second stop on the tour is the site of his old costume jewellery business that he set up when he arrived at the city, and if you think that’s obscure wait until you get to the Serra Video shop, where Bolaño used to rent films.
In the seventeen stops there are the three homes Bolaño lived in while in Blanes, which are interesting until you realise he’s not in them anymore. Now his old homes are someone else’s. There’s the pharmacy where he picked up his medication, which is still open, but he’s not in there, since eventually the medication stopped working.
There’s the bar where he drank and made friends, but on the morning we pass it’s empty. There are stops such as his old writing studio that were surely integral to his life and work, and then there are stops such as an old newsagent’s where he used to buy the paper. These seem less integral, if we’re being polite, and if we’re being impolite seem like they decided on seventeen stops for the Bolaño route and had ordered the plaques before walking around the town to see how many sites they actually reasonably had.
I guess that, when I think about it, I walk around Blanes, which is not a pretty town but instead dusty and a little run down, a long way from Barcelona, to see where Roberto Bolaño once was, and to say I was there once, too. I had thought I might have some literary epiphany, that a masterpiece might be born here in Blanes, or that maybe I would see some of his characters, or their inspirations, in the streets. Would his literary alter ego Arturo Belano look at me askance as he smoked a cigarette down an alley? Would Udo Berger, his German wargames champion, hero of The Third Reich, peer out from his hotel room as I walk along the promenade?
If they’re there, I can’t see them. Blanes meant something to Bolaño but it only means something to me because Bolaño was here. We eat a surprisingly good lunch after the tour at a grotty little café and L. points out that we have plenty of time to see two non-Bolaño related sights while we’re here, the botanical gardens and a little beach set in a cove, away from the town.
The botanical gardens are incredible. Set on a hillside overlooking the sea they have viewpoints galore. All the tourists with sense came straight here to spend time in the shade amongst plants and to look out at the water. The beach is picturesque and has kiosks that charge eye-watering sums for cans of Coke, the sand is soft and golden and the water is calm and so it is perfect.
Come to Blanes and look for Bolaño if you’d like. He’s not here anymore. He’s dead. So he’s the perfect hero for me. I wish he’d picked somewhere a bit nicer than Blanes to spend the last years of his life, his most productive time as a writer. But he didn’t and so I am here. And thankfully so is L., so she can gently nudge me away from the old jewellery businesses and the newsagents towards the botanical gardens and the beach, where we can have a nice time.
Some housekeeping.
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Next stop, the Sylvia Plath archives. You owe me 🤣