The Neruda Case (11 page)

Cayetano considered what he’d left behind: a sad, divided Chile, where food was scarce and uncertainty ruled; a Valparaíso lost every morning in a thick fog that erased outlines, softened echoes, and wrapped its inhabitants in sorrow. Though stifled, Colonel Souper’s rebellion had had disastrous consequences for the government. A few days earlier, the wives of several generals had thrown corn at Prats at a public event and called him a faggot for failing to oppose communism. Discouraged by the campaign and the pressure, Prats had submitted his resignation to the president. Allende replaced him with a general who had little talent and poor oratory skills, a vulgar and affected man who, according to the constant commentaries of Bar Inglés’s patrons, had at least one thing going for him: He respected the constitution to the letter. His name was Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

What was the poet doing now? Cayetano Brulé wondered as he exited the taxi at the Savoy, in a beautiful neighborhood of two-story houses and tree-lined streets studded with restaurants, bars, cafés, bookstores, and galleries. At this very moment, he might be working on his memoirs or perhaps composing new poems, or running his hands across his collection of conches, immersed in his amphibian calm. After each session at Van Buren, he rested in bed for hours, quiet, without a spark in his eyes, dozing, trusting that the young Cuban would succeed in finding Bracamonte. Matilde probably came through
periodically to tidy the books, costumes, furniture, and figurines brought all the way from France. The effort and detailed attention with which his wife organized these objects made the poet suspicious.

“I think that, more than organizing the things we’ve brought back to Chile, she’s doing it for the museum they want to open after I die,” he’d confided in the living room of La Sebastiana, just before Cayetano’s departure.

“Your room, Mr. Brulé. Fourth floor,” the receptionist told him as a bellhop took his suitcase.

The bed frame groaned pitifully when he sat down on it. He looked up Ángel Bracamonte in the phone book, and as he’d imagined, he found a long list of entries with that last name, but no Ángel. He wasn’t daunted. He acted as though he were Maigret: The next day he’d visit the places where he could seek facts for his investigation: the Medical Association and the
Excelsior
newspaper.

It didn’t take long to make both appointments by phone, one with the public relations representative for the Medical Association, and the other with a manager at the paper. In both cases he introduced himself as a freelance journalist who wrote articles for the Chilean leftist magazine
Hoy
. And in both places they promised to welcome him with open arms. Salvador Allende and his government inspired sympathy in Mexico, where he was seen as a sign of hope on a continent riddled with corrupt politicians.

Then he called Laura Aréstegui in Valparaíso, promised to look for the books she’d requested, and assured her that Mexico City filled him with vitality and optimism.

“It won’t be hard to reconstruct his time there,” she said. She was in her office, trying to optimize the distribution of bread, meat, and oil in the port city’s hills. This, when vegetables and eggs were also disappearing, not to mention chickens. “Neruda was friends there with the muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, and in the 1940s he traveled to Cuba.”

“To Cuba? Long before the revolution?”

“Even long before the
Granma
, the yacht Castro bought in Mexico to transport his tiny army to Cuba, set sail toward the island with its eighty-two voyagers, in 1956.”

“In that case, my girl, the poet has always had a tremendous nose for politics.”

“Don’t kid yourself. There’s a detail nobody wants to remember today.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the forties, he admired Batista. In Havana he delivered an apologia in his honor, calling him the ‘sublime son of Cuba.’ At that time, Batista governed with the support of Cuban communists and the Soviet Union.”

“Just a moment. Are we talking about Batista, Fulgencio Batista, the tyrant?” he asked, alarmed.

“One and the same. I guess that’s why Fidel and Neruda can’t stand each other. As the saying goes, they couldn’t even swallow each other with codfish oil.”

13

C
ayetano ate coffee, tortillas, scrambled eggs, and beans for breakfast in his hotel room as he perused the newspaper. Later that morning, at around nine o’clock, he took a taxi to the Museum of Anthropology, following the express instructions of the poet, who had told him it was a must-see. The previous afternoon, the public relations representative at the Medical Association had confessed that she’d never heard of any Dr. Ángel Bracamonte, but that she was more than happy to assist Cayetano, and if he returned to her office the following afternoon, she would search the files for any more information. On his trip to Chapultepec Forest, he racked his brains but couldn’t think of a single chapter in which Maigret visited a museum, not even the Louvre. It seemed that detectives did not usually interrupt their investigations to explore museums.

However, on arriving between those high walls, testimonies to pre-Columbian cultures, he found himself speechless, reduced to an uncomfortable insignificance, paralyzed in front of such marvels and shamed by his own triviality. The profusion of temples, sculptures, ceramics, and wrought gold and silver embarrassed him, not only for their richness, variety, and perfection, as well as the complexity of the societies they represented, but also because they showed him
something that, as a Cuban, he’d never fully realized, because of the less developed cultures of his island’s original peoples: The New World had existed millennia before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, and Tenochtitlán was a more advanced city when Cortés arrived than any European metropolis at the time. For the first time, he was clearly aware of the magnitude of disaster dealt to the indigenous people of the Americas by the invasion and domination of white men, whose blood, he could not deny as he glanced at himself in a windowpane, flowed copiously through his veins.

Suddenly, as he stared at two human hearts in the hands of a god carved into the center of a giant Aztec solar disk, he realized it was noon and he’d completely lost track of time. He rushed out to Reforma and flagged a cab to take him toward Zócalo. He struggled to catch his breath. He should try not to get worked up like this, he thought, alarmed by his shortness of breath; he should take Mexico City’s elevation seriously, as it was more than two thousand meters. As he recovered his calm in the back of the taxi and tried to focus his thoughts, he had to admit that after this visit to the museum, he’d never again be the same Latin American as he’d been before. He could never forget the magnificence of this city’s pre-Columbian era, or the oppressive, apocalyptic feeling that must have swept over the startled Aztecs when their emperor, Montezuma, first met that man with blond hair and white skin, Hernán Cortés, whom their ancestors had prophesied with precision. He, who felt proud of the legendary past of Havana and the vague origins of Valparaíso, now understood that Mexicans, as a people, inhabited a realm unknown to him, rooted in millennial depths unimaginable to someone from an island that had barely five hundred years of recorded history. He lit a cigarette and watched the city and its inhabitants with new eyes, as though he could now see their ancestors as well walking through the translucent air of Tenochtitlán, traversing epochs, temples, and florid wars; he felt insignificant, and thought of calling the poet to tell him everything
and ask how he was and how he had perceived Mexico when he had lived there. Had the poet had time to capture this sensibility, or had he spent his time consumed by his work at the consulate, poetic creation, love affairs, and remorse?

That very morning, as a breeze whispered in through the window, he had finished reading another detective novel, a very curious one. In the book, Maigret poured his memories out to Simenon. This original and engrossing approach, in which a fictional character addresses his flesh-and-blood author, had made him sympathize with Maigret, who resided in a Paris from the movies, where minor dangers lay in wait and colleagues were not always loyal. He also sympathized more now with Louise, his wife, who cooked his favorite dishes with care and devotion—scallops à la Florentine, duck in white wine sauce, and lamb shanks with lentils—while keeping his house clean and tidy. He was also entertained by the array of criminals that populated the book’s pages, Simenon’s gift for stirring one’s sympathies for them, and the cozy bistros and bars where Maigret liked to drink Pernod and kill time, putting off his return home or the interrogation of a suspect as if for the express purpose of giving his literary father, Simenon, a chance to provide the novel with a few pages of reflection and psychological depth. Now, reading the Belgian and investigating in the real world, Cayetano felt he was grasping certain tricks used by crime novel writers to make their books more weighty and profound. Reading Simenon’s novels, he had begun to envy Maigret’s placid existence. Here was a guy who got up in the mornings without haste, and ate breakfast with his wife in an apartment with hardwood floors and old pictures on the walls, while outside the autumn rains, spurred by the wind, pattered against the windows. As if that weren’t enough, the Eiffel Tower rose over many of the cobbled streets the detective roamed at a leisurely pace, its presence a pleasant and perpetual reminder of the city where he lived. He enjoyed reading such details, but he sensed that the lives of real investigators
weren’t as placid as Simenon portrayed them to be. That afternoon, after lunch and a small glass of tequila, he would start reading another of the Belgian’s books. This time he’d approach it as a master class for a novice detective like himself. At least literature is good for something, he thought with pleasure, beyond mere entertainment.

Mónica Salvat was waiting for him in an office rented by the Medical Association on the fifth floor of a decrepit building. She was young, with black hair and eyes, and a melodious voice. She was just shy of beautiful. However, there was one thing she had plenty of that Ángela had lost a long time ago: tenderness. In Florida, he had first fallen in love with his wife’s vivacious eyes, alternately languid and decisive; her voice, husky yet warm; her resplendent hair; but, above all, he’d been fascinated by her tenderness. It had erased any qualms he had about leaving the United States and heading to the southern end of the earth, guided by the sudden love she had inspired. When had Ángela lost her tenderness? What mistakes had he made that stripped it away from her? And through which crack in his soul had his passion for Ángela drained away?

“I’ve been examining the files, and I’m sorry to tell you that I haven’t found a thing on Dr. Bracamonte,” Mónica Salvat said, pulling him suddenly from his thoughts. “Would you like coffee?”

When she left the office to prepare it, he took advantage of the moment to examine the yellowing wallpaper, the dusty blinds, and the old Olivetti she wrote on. The office seemed sad and soulless, the dead space of a bureaucrat bored by her own existence. Down on Insurgentes, the traffic was slow and thick, and the signs on buses announced neighborhoods he knew nothing about. Mónica returned with a tray that held two cups and a tin sugar bowl, and he was cheered by the slight sway of her hips, which reminded him of Cuban women, and of course the aroma of the coffee, which he hoped would be superior to that unpalatable brew served by Chileans.

“The problem is that the files are completely disorganized,”
Mónica said as she held the tray toward him. “When you look for something, you never find it.”

“In that case, what do you suggest?” He took a cup, added three spoonfuls of sugar, and stirred, looking skeptically at the reality of watered-down coffee. “I need to see Dr. Bracamonte. I came all the way to Mexico to speak with him.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” She sipped her coffee, which she took without sugar, another dismal omen. “But you’re not Chilean, are you? You don’t speak like a Chilean.”

“I live in Chile, but I’m from Cuba.”

They began to talk about how far Chile was from Cuba, and how different it was from Cuba and Mexico. They also spoke of Allende, the Unidad Popular, the Chilean revolution, and Nixon’s steely opposition to the South American nation. When she asked what would become of the so-called Chilean path to socialism, he was stumped. Would it turn into a Cuban-style socialist state, or would there be a different model? Cayetano said he didn’t know, and that was true. Who did know? Not even Allende himself, he said. But it was nothing to get overly upset about; people behave as though they knew where life was headed, but in the end it was anyone’s guess. Life wasn’t only a parade of disguises, he added, plagiarizing the poet for a metaphor that clearly pleased Mónica, but also a lottery that dealt new tickets every morning. In reality, life was like Valparaíso. Sometimes you were up high, other times low, but in an instant everything could change. An unexpected staircase was enough to climb the heights, while a single trip over a stone could send you crashing downhill, just like the bones that had rolled from the graveyard to the docks. Nothing in our lives was forever, he said, nothing, except, of course, for death, he corrected himself, and then he tried the coffee, which was disastrous.