By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

potboy at the inn, while the shoemaker lay exhausted, sprawled on the rumpled sheets, sometimes not even properly undressed), absorbed as he was in his obsessional dream, marching on through his nightmares, on the far side of which Heroes’ Hill awaited him always, grave and quiet, dark and noble, his project, the work of which only fragments are known to us, the work we sometimes think we know but which in fact we hardly know at all, the mystery we carry in our hearts and which in a moment of rapture we set in the center of a metal tray inscribed with Mycenaean characters, characters that stammer out our history and our hopes, but what they stammer out in fact is nothing more than our defeat, the joust in which we have fallen although we do not know it, and we have set our heart in the middle of that cold tray, our heart, our heart, and the shoemaker shivered in his bed and went on repeating the word
    heart and also the word gleam and it seemed he was drowning and his assistant came into the room at that cold inn and spoke to him in comforting words, Wake up, Sir, it’s only a dream, Sir, and when the
    shoemaker opened his eyes, eyes which a few seconds before had beheld his heart still beating in the middle of a tray, his assistant offered him a cup of warm milk, to which his only reply was a half-hearted swipe, as if the shoemaker were attempting to brush away his nightmares, and then, looking at his assistant as if he hardly recognized him, the shoemaker told him to stop fooling around with milk and bring him a glass of cognac or some eau-de-vie. And so he went on, day after day and night after night, in fair weather and foul, digging deep into his own funds, since the Emperor, after having wept and cried, Bravo, excellent, had not said another word, and his ministers too had opted for silence, likewise the most enthusiastic of the advisers, generals and colonels, and although without investors the project could not go ahead, the shoemaker had got it going all the same, and now it was too late to stop it. He was hardly to be seen in Vienna any more, and only when engaged in fruitless petitioning, for he spent every minute he could at Heroes’ Hill, supervising the work of his ever less numerous
    laborers, mounted on a hardy hack or nag inured to the inclement weather, as tough and stubborn as its master, who, when the situation called for it, would not hesitate to dismount and get his hands dirty. At first, news of his idea spread like nimble wildfire lit by a mocking god to amuse the public, but then it went the way of all things, subsiding into oblivion. A day came when nobody mentioned his name any more. And then a day when people began to forget his face. His shoemaking business probably fared better than he did over the years.
    Occasionally someone, an old acquaintance, would see him in the streets of Vienna, but the shoemaker no longer greeted anyone or replied to greetings, and no one was surprised when he crossed to the other side of the street. A
    difficult, confusing period had begun, a terrible period indeed, in which difficulty, confusion and cruelty were as one. Writers went on invoking their muses. The Emperor died. A war broke out and the Empire collapsed. Composers went on composing and the public kept going to concerts. Nobody remembered the shoemaker any more, except, at odd and fleeting moments, the lucky few who still had a pair of his splendid, long-wearing shoes. For the shoemaking business too had been affected by the worldwide crisis and it changed hands and disappeared.
    The following years were even more confused and difficult. People were
    assassinated and persecuted. Then another war broke out, the most terrible war of all. And one day Soviet tanks rolled into the valley and, looking through binoculars from the turret of his armored vehicle, the colonel in charge of the tank regiment saw Heroes’ Hill. And the caterpillar tracks creaked as the tanks approached the hill, which gleamed like