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Augusto Monterroso wrote that sooner or later the Latin American writer faces three possible fates: exile, imprisonment or burial   I met Roberto Bolaño right at the end of his period of imprisonment, although it would be more properly called one of anonymity, of isolation, being shut away   I met him on the 21 November 1999 at Bar Novo in Blanes, a kind of granja catalana, one of those places characterised by their spotless milk-churn decor, but in reality they’re as foul as they are supposedly hygienic and all the more so for those who, like me in those days, loved the murky darkness of big nocturnal bars   I’d gone into the Novo with Paula de Parma to have a juice, and I’d just ordered it when Bolaño walked in Paula, who used to work at a secondary school in Blanes, had just read Distant Star (recently published by Anagrama) and I remember like it was yesterday her asking Bolaño if he was Bolaño He was, he said And I, Bolaño added, was Vila-Matas…   ‘Jesus Christ!’ we heard uttered soon after   The exclamation was Bolaño’s, and I have the impression the following conversation lasted as long as ‘the drawn out laughter of all these years’, as Fogwill would say   I remember that I always talked to Roberto like we’d known each other all our lives He was living with his wife Carolina López and their son Lautaro at 17, Carrer del Lloro (Parrot Street), and kept a little work space at no 21 At no 19 was the butcher’s where he got the inspiration for the memorable poem ‘Among Flies’: ‘Trojan poets / Now that nothing that might have been yours / Exists / Neither temples nor gardens / Nor poetry / You’re free / Admirable Trojan poets’   He didn’t have a telephone and his post box was at no 441, where he hear if he’d picked up some regional prize; the of these was from San Sebastián at the end of 1996 for the story ‘Sensini’, a masterpiece The value of that prize was really a very modest amount but Carolina and Roberto, who were living off