Roberto Bolaño’s novel Amulet introduces the reader to a female narrator/protagonist by the name of Auxilio Lacouture. Auxilio opens her tale with a warning to the reader. “This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection, and horror. But it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that” (Bolaño 1). Indeed, throughout her narration the promised episodes of malice never materialize definitively. Instead, they are obscured, whether intentionally or not, by a series of remembrances and digressions, which themselves meld assorted locations, people, and times into an accounting of the significance of the happenings of September 1968.

The convergence of time and literal and metaphorical space in Amulet can be traced to a single location and span, namely a toilet cubicle in the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature. It is in this setting that Auxilio witnesses the occupation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) on September 18, 1968. By a fortunate chance, she finds herself sequestered in the bathroom and has the wits about her to remain hidden while students, faculty, and staff are beaten, arrested, and carted off to unknown fates. More than a hiding place, this bathroom becomes her “timeship from which [she] can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are” (Bolaño 56). It is a temporal epicenter, from which her story races in multiple directions, and back to which it inevitably returns. One might see in this fractured timescape a rhizome as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Like cracks spreading across the surface of a damaged mirror, Auxilio’s thoughts expand laterally into the future and the past, from Uruguay to Mexico and beyond.

Herself a native of Montevideo, she is unsure of the exact date of her arrival in Mexico City. In trying to pin it down, she sets reference points according to the deaths of writers she has encountered. “Hold on, let me try to remember. Let me stretch time out like a plastic surgeon stretching the skin of a patient under anesthesia” (Bolaño 2). In her description, she imparts not only a physical quality to time, but also a pliable one. Time is subject to change; it can be repaired to account for aesthetics. Throughout the novel, Bolaño plays with this malleability of time through Auxilio’s recollections. She often offers ranges of years when recounting meetings with various (usually) literary figures, sometimes blurring when one or the other actually lived.

The same flexibility is true of nationality, as seen in her often-hesitant declaration of herself as the mother of Mexican poetry. Later, she describes some Mexican clay figurines given to her as a gift. “…[T]hey were just figurines made by Indians in Oaxaca, who sold them to traders, who resold them at much higher prices at markets and street stalls in Mexico city” (Bolaño 12). Especially in the second example, nationality and its part in identity formation undergo a sort of evolution. The figurines, created by the indigenous people, become Mexican merely by virtue of an economic transaction.

Location, in the form of nationality, also clashes with time in some of Auxilio’s stories. One of her friends who makes frequent appearances in her thoughts is Arturo Belano. An alter ego of Bolaño himself, Arturo is also Chilean. Auxilio grapples with the disconnect of Arturo’s non-Mexican identity, which complicates his inclusion in either the “young poets” or “new generation” in Mexico. Further problematizing the constraints of canon by means of location versus time, Auxilio ponders a “what if” meeting of two poets, Darío and Huidobro. She speculates that Darío might have been able to establish “an island…between modernism and the avant-garde” (Bolaño 60), a metaphorical ground between two literary epochs.

Auxilio also extracts physical spaces from their real-world locations and brings them together in the non-fixed time of her thoughts in the bathroom. One striking example is the Clover Hotel, where she travels with Arturo to help free another friend from impending sexual slavery. She finds the hotel’s neon sign “funny, in a way, since it was like finding an establishment by the name of Paris in the Calle Berlin…” (Bolaño 90). The improbable Irish name is compared to the almost antipodal relationship between France and Germany, all within the confines of Mexico City. Similar juxtapositions are suggested through language. When listing the places she visited with her friend Elena and her love interest, many seem to have origins in indigenous tongues, though the orthography is clearly Spanish. On another occasion she comments on the return of Arturo’s Chilean accent after he has spent some time in his home country, and wonders if she might experience something similar were she to return to Montevideo.

While the actual time Auxilio spent in the bathroom at UNAM is revealed to be approximately twelve days, the trauma of the military occupation she witnesses clearly skews her experience. Hours, days, and even years swirl together with her memories leading to sometimes contradictory storylines. One could argue that this altered perception of time calls into question her reliability as a narrator. However, I believe that Bolaño’s choice to unanchor his protagonist from the constraints of linear time frees her to better convey the importance of 1968. Her recollections push the boundaries to encompass the time before and after that year, much as Sarah Waters and Martin Klimke and Joachim Shcarloth do in their discussions of 1968 as a truly transnational phenomenon. The main setting in Amulet—the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor—as a non-linear, non-locational focal point for Auxilio’s stories echoes the events of ‘1968’ as they occurred and rebounded around the globe.