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THE STORY BEHIND THE COLLECTION

The year I spent on this commission, the line between reality and dream blurred. Tracing Bolaño's steps, I found coincidences: we stayed at the same hostel on Talleres Street in Barcelona at the same time; his wife and son lived in Arenys de Mar, where I lived too, in the same years; and we frequented the same bookstore in Mexico City. I like to think we crossed paths in those cafés without knowing it.

Those coincidences led to a series of dreams. For months I went to sleep to meet Roberto. In one of them, the key to the collection appeared: the smoke of his cigarettes, which runs through his books, as the birthplace of ideas. A metaphor, and a creative license. From that smoke came killer whales, a nod to *Antwerp*, where in one scene Bolaño himself walks out through a door and finds them, as if inside a fish tank. They were ideas floating outside us, in front of Roberto, and their tails drew the crescent moon that runs through the covers.

This unpublished piece comes from that process: a portrait of Roberto in the void, drinking coffee and smoking, leaning over a chasm with his elbow as his only anchor to the earth. His foot rests on the crescent moon, the tail of an exhaled killer whale. The idea keeps him suspended.