# Read the first page of Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño

Read the opening of Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño free, no signup. A mesmerist in 1938 Paris takes a doomed case.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/monsieur-pain-roberto-bolano
- Genre: Literary fiction
- Year: 1999
- ISBN: 9781250898159
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780811217149&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781250898159
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781250898159

## The opening

On Wednesday the sixth of April, at dusk, as I was preparing to leave my lodgings, I received a telegram from my young friend Madame Reynaud, requesting, with a certain urgency, my presence that evening at the Café Bordeaux, on Rue de Rivoli, relatively close to where I live, which meant that if I hurried, I could still arrive punctually at the specified time.

The first indication that I had just been drawn into a singular episode presented itself immediately: as I was going down the stairs I came across two men climbing up to the third floor. They were speaking Spanish, a language I do not understand, and wearing dark trench-coats and broad-brimmed hats, which, since they were below me on the stairs, obscured their faces. Because of the semidarkness that generally prevails in the stairwell, but also because of my quiet way of moving, they failed to notice my presence until I was right in front of them, a mere three steps away, at which point they stopped talking, and instead of stepping aside and allowing me to continue on my way down (the stairs are wide enough for two but not three people abreast), they looked at each other for a few moments that seemed to be fixed in a simulacrum of eternity (I should stress that I was a few steps above them), and then, slowly, very slowly, they trained their gazes on me.

Policemen, I thought, only policemen have preserved that way of looking, an atavism that goes back to hunting and dark woods; then I remembered that they had been speaking Spanish, so they could not have belonged to the police force, or not the French police force, at any rate. I thought they were readying themselves to speak, to jabber as disoriented foreigners always do, but instead the one directly in front of me lurched aside in the clumsiest imaginable fashion, and pressed against the shoulder of his companion in a way that surely must have been uncomfortable for both of them, at which point, having pronounced a brief and unreciprocated greeting, I was able to continue my descent. Out of curiosity, when I reached the first-floor landing, I glanced back at them: they were still there, standing on the very same steps, I would swear, faintly illuminated by a globe suspended over the landing above them, and—even more surprisingly—still holding the exact position they had adopted in order to let me pass. As if time had stopped, I thought. When I reached the street I found it was raining, and I forgot all about that incident.

Madame Reynaud was seated against the far wall of the restaurant, her back held very straight, as usual. She seemed impatient, although when she caught sight of me her expression softened, as if a sudden relaxation were the appropriate manner in which to indicate that she had recognized me and was waiting.

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