Better to become an undercover poet.

Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?) But it's hard to be an artist in the third world if you are poor, have no arms and are gay to boot. So, for a time, Lorenzo had to do other things. He studied and improved himself. He sang in the streets. Being a hopeless romantic, he fell in love. His disappointments (not to mention humiliations, put-downs and insults) were terrible, and one day -- to be marked retrospectively with a white stone -- he decided to kill himself. One particularly sad summer evening, as the sun sank into the Pacific Ocean, Lorenzo jumped into the sea from a rock used exclusively by suicides (every self-respecting stretch of Chilean coastline has one). He sank like a stone with his eyes open and saw the water grow darker and the bubbles streaming from his lips and then an involuntary movement of his legs sent him back up to the surface. Because of the waves he couldn't see the beach, only the rocks and the masts of pleasure craft or fishing boats. Then he went under again. This time too he kept his eyes open: he turned his head calmly (as if under anaesthetic), looking for something, anything, as long as it was beautiful, to be his last memory. But darkness enveloped whatever else might have been sinking with him into the depths and he could see nothing. Then, as the saying goes, his whole life flashed before him like a film. Some parts were in black and white, others in color. His poor mother's love, her pride, her weariness, how she hugged him at night when, in Chile's poor neighborhoods everything seemed to be hanging by a thread (black and white); the trembling, the nights when he wet his bed, the hospitals, the staring, the zoo-like staring (color); friends sharing what little they had, the consolations of music, marijuana, beauty revealed in unlikely places (black and white); love perfect and brief like a sonnet by Gongora; knowing with a fatal certainty (but raging against the knowledge) that you only live once. Suddenly drawing courage from nowhere, he decided he was not going to die. Now or never, he thought, and began to swim back up. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface and then he could hardly manage to keep himself afloat, but he did. That afternoon he learnt to swim without arms, like an eel or a snake. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

Roberto Bolano, Distant Star