All Men Are Liars (12 page)

One afternoon, El Chancho returned to the cell after a short “informative” session, and told Alejandro that La Pájara would not be coming anymore. He said that the surgeons, after reeling off countless numbers and dates which El Chancho claimed not to remember, had blindfolded him and put a hood over his head. Then he had heard the door of the little room open, and the soft voice of Muñeco told him that their patience had come to an end and, with it, the privileges. He shouldn't expect a visit from his wife that night, or ever again.

And slowly, in fine detail, Muñeco explained what had happened to La Pájara. El Chancho refused to believe it. He prepared himself to wait. That night passed and the one following. Alejandro didn't dare speak to him. El Chancho neither ate nor slept. He kept his eyes on the door of the cell, as though the slightest distraction on his part could cause a fragile apparition to vanish.

Sometime later, one of the other prisoners managed to whisper in El Chancho's ear that there had been a shoot-out near the Cesspit, that a car carrying several women had been set ablaze. El Chancho passed from depression to anger, then from anger to an animal fury, punching the walls and howling like a wolf, and—even after three guards had softened him up—he was still fuming. Finally they took him away.

At the same time the surgeons resumed their sessions with Alejandro. One day, after a particularly violent session that left him with a constant ringing in his ears, which were already sensitive after the demonstration in Buenos Aires (“as though I were in the midst of a thousand bell towers,” he once told me), Alejandro was sitting on his bed with his feet still tied and his eyes bandaged when he heard Muñeco's voice speaking to him. “I came to say good-bye,” said Muñeco. “Perhaps we'll see each other again. If we don't die first, you or I.”

The seven or eight months Alejandro spent at the Cesspit left its mark on his memory—and on his arms and legs—for years. Suddenly everything ended in as inexplicable a fashion as it had begun. A week after El Chancho was taken away, a couple of strangers entered the cell and ordered Alejandro to leave it. They blindfolded him once more, tied his feet and hands, led him down the familiar corridors and through the hellish gates and put him in a car. “It was as if they were running the film backward,” he told me. “I had the impression that everything was about to start again.”

After an hour, the car stopped. They removed the shackles, the ties and the blindfold; they placed a bag in his hands and told him to get out. Overhead, several planes were drawing furrows through the sky. The next day, Alejandro landed at Barajas Airport, in Madrid. Who would have imagined it? Now we know that the feet that trod Spanish soil for the first time that day would lead him irrevocably to the fateful balcony.

But what a question, Terradillos! You have to remember that this happened three decades ago. There is an infinite distance between the twenty-five-year-old girl I was then and the half-century me of today. I get the sequence of events muddled up, you know, like in a badly shuffled pack of cards. I can no longer say for sure exactly when I heard about Alejandro's death, whether Quita told me about it that same day, or if, on seeing me come into the Martín Fierro, the poor woman sent me away, shouting like a lunatic that he was dead, he was dead. Perhaps someone had already told me—Berens, I think—that there were two deaths, because Tito Gorostiza had also taken his life. Or it could have been Inspector Mendieta, who came to see me once again, asking more questions than there are in the catechism, until I ended up not knowing what either of us was talking about. I can no longer remember which things I imagined and which I knew for sure, which stories I was told and which I wove myself, in an effort to figure things out.

Later it came to matter less. The world changed. When Quita fell ill, poor thing, she called me, but we didn't talk about what had happened. Berens was probably the one who came out of things best, forever isolated by his Alzheimer's. Perhaps we get used to everything in the end, even oblivion.

Sometimes I am haunted by an image from those days, and it's as if I see myself in a mirror as I was when Alejandro loved me. Look at me now! But in those days, this body was still attractive and this mind was sharper and quicker. I don't care what wise men say—age does not sharpen our senses, it deadens them. We need keen banderillas to get us going after fifty. That's what my father always said, and nowadays I find myself agreeing with him.

As far as you and your readers are concerned, Terradillos, Alejandro's story holds no surprises now. The facts have been established to the satisfaction of the coroner and the dossier closed with the seal of the Archangel Gabriel.
In Praise of Lying
hasn't been seen for years, unless it's in the window of an antiquarian bookshop, with a hefty price tag attached. A small publishing house here wanted to reprint it, but it was impossible to reach an agreement with some incompetent heirs who didn't want to have anything to do with it. It's for the best. That whole episode was embarrassing enough without having to live through it again.

I still read literature from Alejandro's homeland. I still seek traces of him in the books that reach us from the antipodes. I still believe that one day I'll uncover the proof that my intuition was not wrong, that under the man everyone else thought they knew was hidden a novelist, a poet.

I know that we are all fools in love, that we let ourselves create plausible ghosts in place of our loved ones. Or rather, we create a ghost which enters the solid person we see in front of us, inhabiting him, looking back at us from behind his eyes. And with the certainty that this creature is our beloved comes another certainty: that we shall never forget him, that we shall never betray him, that he will be forever at the center of our lives, of everything that is ours, however unlikely a figment he is.

I'm going to tell you something, but you must keep it to yourself, because it's silly and I'm a little embarrassed to say it. Some time ago, in the window of a secondhand bookshop, I saw a collection of poems: the author's name was A. Bevilacqua. I went in, bought it, hurried to a café, and sat down to read it. The title was something like
Counterflows
or
Crosscurrents
. It was light, romantic verse, with a lot of exclamation marks and capital letters. I flicked anxiously through it, unsure exactly what I was looking for, but wanting to hear Alejandro's somber tones, to feel his hands on the nape of my neck, the smell of his tobacco in my nostrils. I thought I recognized the cadence of his sentences, his measured way of looking at things; I was surprised to see an epigraph from an author I didn't know he liked. When I had finished the last poem, I turned back to the first. I looked for a date on the copyright page: my edition had been printed at the end of 1990s in Montevideo, but the first publication was in 1961; Alejandro would have been about twenty years old then. I read the book a third time and came, once more, to the imprint page. Only then did I spot something I hadn't seen, or hadn't wanted to see before: the author's name was indeed Bevilacqua, but Andrés, not Alejandro. This was an unknown Andrés Bevilacqua, homonymous usurper of my writer, a false prophet, false ghost, with a false voice and false touch. I felt my mistake as an unforgivable betrayal, a violation of his memory. I, who had loved him so much, had been disloyal. I left the book on the café table and went back home, distraught.

I once read somewhere that the only thing we can do to fight against the unreality of the world is to tell our own story. I have never wanted to do that. I prefer to redeem him and what I knew or believed I knew of him. It doesn't matter to me much if the truth turns out to be otherwise. You, my Terradillos, must write what you think best, and time will tell.

Alejandro was whatever I felt or imagined him to be during the time that we knew each other. If I am still looking for proof of my conviction, it's out of habit or need. Does that make sense? My father said that if you have spent years in a bullring, you continue to wield the cape in your dreams, even when nothing is left around you: no bull, no spectators, no sand.

That's how it is. Without a doubt.

3

The Blue Fairy

“Be honest and good and you'll be happy,” the Fairy told him.

 

—CARLO COLLODI,
THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO

 

 

Monsieur Jean-Luc Terradillos,
L'Actualité Poitou-Charentes
Poitiers, France

1st January 2003

My dear Curious Impertinent,

I mistrust letters as a literary genre. They claim to tell an impartial truth independent of their scrumdolious author (my Cuban grandmother used this adjective to describe dresses which look swanky but are badly cut and sewn, and I bet myself that I would manage to use it in the first paragraph), when the opposite is true: only one chronicler gets to give his version of the story. But the epistolary genre is, in this case, the only one left to me. I've exhausted all my options: my literature no longer encompasses the epic genre, and the lyric one, such a conceited form, has always been denied to my muse. So I'll have to be satisfied with this letter. At least no shit-stirring editor is going to stick his nose in it.

I met Bevilacqua in prison, but you already know that. I enjoyed talking to him, telling him my repertoire of stories, bouncing my literary inventions off his beleaguered eardrums. Whenever I start remembering things, my lips move of their own accord. If I have a typewriter in front of me, I start typing; if I have a blank page, I start writing; in the absence of any other instrument, I use my tongue. At night, faced with sheep butchers that get in the way of sleep, I make up stories that begin to unravel as I fall into the darkness. Bevilacqua was good for that: he could stop them unraveling.

Right from the beginning I trusted him. I felt that I could trust him the way that, in the army, one instinctively trusts the less daring corporal, the more familiar weapon. Novelty is no friend to success. And for someone like me, whose attractions are not obvious, it's better not to expect aesthetic charity from anyone. Sincerity, yes, that's a different matter. Or honesty, which brings with it a touch of meekness.

He wasn't jealous. That envy which fuels literary inspiration, which desires that everyone else's books fail and all their recompense be derisory—that wasn't apparent in Bevilacqua. His emotions were all on the surface; envy requires a pretense of modesty, a show of reserve, and reveals itself at the corners of the mouth, in the hue of one's skin. Bevilacqua's smile was sweet, and his skin a constant gray. Of course prison would not have put color in his cheeks even if his constitution had favored it. As the Good Book puts it, “When I was in my Father's house, I was in a better place.”

It's weird how the most humdrum places can produce encounters that go on to have momentous consequences. For him, in this case; not for me. Human beings can be divided between those whom the gods, for their own amusement, guide through strange woods only to abandon them somewhere at the edge of a precipice, on a moonless night, and the others who find their own way along well-lit paths. I never lost my way. Whether I was filling a book with letters or a suitcase with banknotes, I was always disciplined; I always knew what I was doing. It isn't true that certain constellations and propitious winds must be in place for our destiny to be fulfilled: all that is required is a solid punt and someone to row it. That's important: some poor, obedient soul. Bevilacqua served my purpose, without my realizing it at the time.

I think, in some ways, my fate has been dictated by my physique. My nickname isn't merely a nickname; I resigned myself early on to acknowledging it as a
nom juste
. The other one, bestowed on me at baptism, is the misnomer. Nobody who looks like me can rightly be called Marcelino Olivares. No one. As a boy, and a devoted reader of
Pinocchio,
I realized that I was my own caricature, the reverse of my hero: a little boy converted into an ugly lump of wood. That had its advantages: it was impossible to laugh at me, because I was already too much of a buffoon. One can't parody a parody. Short arms, truncated legs, a barrel chest, and a face better shaped for disgust than for desire—that's me. My face, in particular, is like something a Romanesque sculptor would place in the buttresses of churches to chase off the devil. Not that I would have wanted to have one of those gentle, light, angelic faces blandly adorning the columns inside. But perhaps something in between. It doesn't matter much, because the conditional tense doesn't get you far. The thing is that, with looks like mine, it was clear that only two careers were open to me: arms and letters. I dedicated myself to both.

When I was twenty years old I went to enlist under the severe gaze of General Batista, whose portrait adorned every room in every office. The sergeant who took my details asked if I would prefer to be known as El Chancho, “The Pig,” or El Sapo, “The Toad.” I don't know why I chose the former—perhaps because the porcine race is more associated with the world of smells and that of batrachians with touch.

To this brief self-portrait I've sketched for you, I must add one last disagreeable feature: my sense of smell. One day, during my adolescence, I woke up in the middle of a terrible stench. I looked for the cause, and unable to find it, I asked my mother what it was that smelled so bad. That was how I found out that the smell did not exist for other people—only, by divine grace, for me. Certain molecules in my chemical makeup communicated to my mind the impression of a constant stink, an olfactory hallucination, a fetid phantasm that did not exist for anyone else. I live with it. They say that the emperor Germanicus suffered from the same ailment. As for me, I have grown so accustomed to its presence (given that more than sixty years of doctors and healers have not been able to cure my disease) that I have given it a name: it's called Rubén, after my father. Rubén inhabits my nasal day and night. I am never alone.

Do you believe in reincarnation? I do. I believe that this flesh, this brain, these stubby fingers will fall to ashes, but also that the imagination contained in this flesh, this brain, these fingers, will be reconstituted in some other form that I still don't know. An anteater, for example, something that would make sense of my nasal encumbrance. A fat, short-legged spider, spinning patterns with its own saliva, as I did with my writing. Or, why not, a tree, strong and squat, throwing roots down into the shit, like a profusion of
Y
s—
yaicuaje
,
yagruma
,
yaití
,
yaba—
the trees that twist and delve into my native land. Rubén would like that, living in a swamp.

What would my Basque grandfather have made of his horrifying grandson? Eliades Cemi Olivares arrived in Cuba in the nineteenth century, trailing along his younger brother, Miguel. With pleasing symmetry, Eliades and Miguel married Martina and Socorro, two little sisters from Camagüey, more black than mulatto, who gave them litters of children at nine-month intervals. My father was one of the middle rankers in a long line of progeny scattered across the island.

Perhaps it was a contrary nature, rather than any repulsion he may have felt on seeing me, that prompted my father to limit his own progeny to only one. He did not love me. That absence of love may have explained his parsimonious seed-sowing; the kicks and punches that characterized our relationship would seem to confirm this theory. My mother would beg him not to kill me; my father obeyed, stopping on that threshold that separates the body present from the absent soul. My mother really did love me. I listened at her knee as she told me that in a few years I would be like other boys, and with the patience of a hummingbird she attempted to kiss me on my almost inexistent nape, between my outsize ear and my enormous shoulder. Her promise of normality was never fulfilled, of course. But learning to live on the margins of normal life served me well later on, when, in times of hardship, I was tempted to take the lazy option and call it a day. I learned not to suffer from vertigo.

I joined the Cuban army very young, just as it was beginning to fight the rebels in the Sierra. At that time this was not yet a serious enterprise, although (probably to frighten us) the colonel, an enthusiast of war films, handed to each conscript a little yellow-and-black capsule which he said contained cyanide, and which we must break open with our teeth should we fall into enemy hands. That capsule, which I christened my “bee,” accompanied me through many years, from one enemy to the next.

Our mission, when we weren't drinking or groping each other back at base, was to ambush the rebels who came down from the mountains to steal food and munitions. We called this “the vermin hunt,” and we placed bets on who could snare a peasant first. Few of us ever won. At night they sent us out to patrol the streets so that the American marines could finish their puddings in peace at the Miami Prado or the Neptune, or to shoo away from street corners any troubled soul who might otherwise be found hanging from a lamppost the next morning. There's nothing like dawn in Havana.

I have no talent for hunting. When they sent us on those missions, I stayed in the rear guard, letting myself be swept along by the column of handsome, smiling boys. Once we came to some hovel on the beach, where they had told us we would find a peasant who had stolen two pigs from a farm nearby. A small, dark-skinned woman came out, frowning. “What are you looking for?” she asked before we could say anything. “Severo Frías,” answered our sergeant. “He's not here.” “And who are you?” “His mother.” “We're going to come in and look for him.” The woman fixed us with a furious look. “I've told you, he isn't here.” “We're coming in all the same, señora. Just to be sure.” “Well, then take off your boots. I've just washed the floor, and I'm not having you make it dirty again with those filthy shit-boots.” The sergeant ordered us to remove our boots. When we made to enter the house, the woman stopped me. “Not this one,” she said to the sergeant. “He's going to jinx the house.” I waited outside while my fellow soldiers carried out their search. They found nothing. I never told the sergeant that while they were putting their boots back on and taking leave of the woman, I saw a pair of eyes shining beneath the veranda. Before we left, I looked at the woman and smiled. She was still scowling.

I left Cuba a little before Dr. Castro's first skirmishes, in one of those boats that depart amid streamers and arrive to trumpets and balloons. I'm not heroic. As I've said, my twin-headed vocation was for arms and letters: yes, but neither to get killed, nor to bend over to a publisher's prurience. Our duty in this life is to survive, not to die. In that sense, the military attitude is right. (The true one, not the one which sends poor chancers out on the front line like those sacrificial goats which hunters in Johnny Weissmuller films place in pits to snare tigers.) To identify an enemy, plan an attack, predict a line of defense, devise a withdrawal strategy. That was how I turned up at the Cuban embassy in Buenos Aires, in the summer of 1952.

Do you know what it's like to fall in love? It's like entering another state, an all-encompassing cosmography. Not the dream of love, which we say will arrive one day or which we believe, in spite of everything, to be living in the present. Not the conviction of an attractive exterior, the rational justification of an ecstasy. I mean absolute captivity, heart and mind—unconditional, irrevocable surrender. The blinding revelation:
I no longer belong to myself, I am hers entirely, I live because she lives, and I live only for her
. I compare it to a translation. All of me in another language, everything I am to be read now through her language, which I must learn, as I once learned my ABC.
I shall know who I am when I know who she is
. That is what I am talking about.

The daughter of our commercial attaché was about seventeen at the time. During dinners at which the ambassador liked to surprise his guests—who had never suspected such Caribbean formality—with detailed menus in elegant French calligraphy, Bohemian porcelain bowls filled to the brim with gorgeous fruit, silver cutlery arrayed in decreasing sizes to the right and left, and fancy wines poured into Baccarat glasses, I amused myself telling the girl stories of cannibals, of wild men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders. I seduced my Desdemona with my voice.

It may surprise you to know that I am a man not much given to change. I obey conventions. In general, I write according to the rules of the Royal Spanish Academy, which are the same as those of the Cuban Academy of the Language, and no worse than any others. My sentences all come with verbs, my subjects have a predicate, my pronouns know how to differentiate the accusative from the dative. I wear a tie. I never sit down to eat in short sleeves. I don't work on Sundays. I married Margarita soon after her eighteenth birthday, both of us still virgins. My mother-in-law wept. Several times during the celebrations I heard her whisper: “He's the ugliest man I've ever seen.”

My new family extended to me, among other things, various privileges: a genteel house near the Bosque de Palermo in Buenos Aires, a lowly position at the embassy (revoked in that fatal year of 1959); introductions to various writers and other creatures of the publishing world and, above all, good contacts with a range of Argentine military types who had acquired a certain notoriety after the flight of General Perón. I knew how to make the most of this. Bridges must be built between the Arts and the Arms. We know (because we have read it in
Don Quixote
) that to be eminent in the Arts requires time, vigilance, nakedness, mental confusion, indigestion, and other things; to be eminent in Arms entails all this plus a risk of death. I accept that this is the way things are, although I haven't had to try it myself. Therefore I pressed my literary experience (to say nothing of time, vigilance, etc.) into the service of the army. The military needed stories: I provided them.

The problem, as with almost all the problems of those who hold power, was simple. On the other side of the law (I mean, on the side of those who lack and desire that power) there exists a solid parallel economy. Shady deals, bribes, cash collections, interest, bankruptcies, and fortunes are made and unmade on that murky Wall Street. When the two sides come face-to-face (which happens less frequently than one might suppose) and the powerful side wins (also less common than moralists would have us believe), the rules of the engagement demand that secret fortunes change hands. Were such covert dealings to come to light, it would cause a worse stink than my poor Rubén; it would stir up decades' worth of sludge, unearthing skeletons and putrefaction which nobody wants to remember. In such cases, ideally one would appoint a Charon, accustomed to darkness and willing to ferry these ghostly monies from the side of the living to that of the immortal—the Swiss, for example. I offered my services, with discretion. With discretion, the military men accepted. I could have pictured them, wearing their autumn uniforms, stretching out their hands full of love, toward the other bank.