The Neruda Case (18 page)

He devoured the
medianoche
sandwich, ordered another coffee, and left El Carmelo after generously tipping the waiter and assuring him he’d return soon. He flagged another Anchares, this time driven by a Spaniard with white hair and an aquiline, Marlon Brando nose, and requested a ride down the Malecón and through Old Havana. He burned to see the city pass before his eyes. Was Beatriz Bracamonte on the island now? Was it sensible to trust the speculations of a Mexican schoolteacher enough to come to Cuba? As he reflected on these questions, he looked out on peeling buildings, water running on the street, lines in front of grocery stores with empty windows, and shirtless boys playing ball, but he thought that the rhythmic waves battering the Malecón and the light on colonial buildings retained the same hair-raising beauty he recalled from his childhood. Downtown, he saw colossal signs praising Fidel and the Revolution, giant portraits of
Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, and billboards that called on the Third World to fight imperialism. That’s how this Cuba lives, he thought: bursting with patriotic and revolutionary harangues, with calls to fulfill missions and make sacrifices, with promises of paradise around the corner. Would he have stayed on the island if his father, a trumpeter who played with Beny Moré, had not taken him to the United States in the 1950s? he asked himself as a breeze entered through the Chrysler’s open windows, cooling his face and combing his mustache. Would he have put up with Fidel’s socialism with the same stoicism with which he now faced Allende’s revolution? Or would he have emigrated to Miami, like the thousands of fellow Cubans who, on Eighth Street, re-created a vibrant and nostalgic Little Havana? There was no use in asking such questions. It was like Maigret asking himself what he would have done if Simenon had made him a lawyer instead of a detective. What was certain was that he now lived far away, and could travel the world, come and go from the island, and toy with questions such as this one. The bottom line was that he was a very lucky guy, with fate on his side, as the poet had said. And his good fortune consisted precisely of this, of having options, however much they hounded him.

He asked the driver to take him back to El Carmelo, where he felt at ease in the cool, air-conditioned room. The waiter prepared a table for him across from the Amadeo Roldán Theater and the shriveled garden of a mansion that now housed the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. He lit a Lanceros cigar he’d bought at the airport, inhaled with relish, and estimated that the poet should arrive soon, the one who, according to Neruda, could help him find Beatriz. He was blacklisted for having written a collection of poems that criticized the Revolution. Although his name had also appeared in the letter Cuban artists had written against Neruda eight years earlier, the Nobel laureate knew from a trusted source that this blacklisted writer had not actually signed it.

“You can trust him,” he told Cayetano as he wrote a letter on the Underwood in his studio at La Sebastiana. “He was the one who told me that Fidel couldn’t stand my poetry. Tell him you’re looking for a woman, but don’t tell him the reason. Avoid Chileans, because over there there are only two kinds: the ones who are with the secret service, and the ones who wish they were. Imagine what would happen if they found out what I was looking for.”

As he drank his coffee, Cayetano thought that few would believe he was here to invite poets to Neruda’s seventieth birthday, which would be celebrated in the National Stadium in Santiago de Chile. Although the Chilean state department had backed him before the Cuban embassy, the latter office had dragged its heels in granting his visa, which, in essence, constituted a warning. He lit a cigarette, opened a Maigret novel, and started to read with gusto in that old café.

“Cayetano Brulé?” someone at his side asked after a while.

He was a young man, with thick-framed glasses like his own, and a healthy mop of dark, curly hair. He resembled Roy Orbison, down to the sarcastic expression. His pants and short-sleeved shirt were tight, as were those of almost all the men in Havana.

“One and the same.”

“I’m Heberto.” He sat down. Outside, in the building’s shade, the line of people waiting for a table was getting longer. “I was told that you wanted to see me.”

“Coffee?” Cayetano asked, smoothing his mustache. From the radio, the voice of Farah María warmed the room. A waitress passed with a tray of Hatuey beers, singing along with the mulatta.

“I’ll have a coffee, and one of those Lanceros you’re smoking. They tell me you’re Cuban.”

“From Havana. The La Víbora section, to be more precise.”

“From La Víbora, but with a foreign passport. Enviable,” Heberto noted sardonically. “Like Bertolt Brecht, who applauded the communism of the German Democratic Republic but had an
Austrian passport and a Swiss bank account. So you’re a friend of Neruda’s?”

“A friend, yes, but without a bank account in Switzerland or anywhere else.”

When the waiter returned, the poet placed his order, imitating Neruda’s nasal voice, and after exhaling a dramatic puff of cigar smoke, he began to recite in the Nobel laureate’s droning tone:

Stunned, Cayetano listened to the perfect imitation of a man who, at this very moment, awaited news beside a cold cobalt ocean at the end of the world.

“So you’re looking for young poets to invite to Chile. Tell me, what does ‘young’ mean to Neruda? Do I count as young?” Heberto said, going back to his own Cuban lilt.

“The young are those who aren’t old. Do you feel old?”

“I feel emphatically young, but he might think my poetry is old. It doesn’t matter. If you could convince Neruda that I’m young and if he were to invite me, and if the government were to let me off the island …well, better not to count on me. He’ll have to celebrate seventy without me.”

“But with an invitation from Neruda, I imagine the government would let you travel.”

“That tells me how long you’ve been traveling without a Cuban passport, my friend. It wouldn’t matter, they still wouldn’t let me leave. The man”—he made as if to stroke a nonexistent beard—“doesn’t like me. What else are you looking for around here? They tell me you’ve got some other little affairs to attend to.”

The waiter placed the order on the table and left, muttering insults at the crowded Leyland buses passing by. Now Los Van Van were singing furiously, to the rhythm of drums and congas, while outside the queue baked under the tropical sun.

“I need to find a Mexican woman, Beatriz, widow of a Dr. Bracamonte,” said Cayetano. “I don’t know her maiden name, but I do know she arrived here thirteen years ago from Mexico. She’s somewhere in her fifties now. She has a daughter who’s around thirty years old.”

“A poet?”

“Could be.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name. And I’m not going to ask what you need her for. Around here, it’s better to know less each day. In addition, since my fall from grace, I’m forbidden to speak with foreigners. I have some friends who used to be connected with diplomatic circles, but these days they’re all blacklisted. Maybe one of them can find this Mexican woman.”

“That would be a great help. It’s nothing political.”

“Don’t even tell me what it’s about. It’s enough to know the poet sent you. We have almost the same enemies. Beatriz Bracamonte, you say? The truth is, the name doesn’t ring a bell at all. Is it possible that our Nobel laureate is looking on the wrong island?”

24

B
eside the shelves of damp books in Heberto’s apartment, they started drinking the remarkably good Havana Club rum Cayetano had bought in Miramar at a
diplotienda
, a shop only foreigners could enter. After a bit, a few more people arrived: the novelist Miguel Busquet, accompanied by a bus driver from route 132, and Sammy Byre, a small, sickly Jamaican with dark skin and frizzy white hair who made his living cleaning homes and standing in lines at corner grocery stores for women who had been distinguished ladies before the Revolution. A while later, the novelist Pablo Armando Bermúdez came knocking at the door.

The rum, accompanied by Manchego cheese and chorizo from the
diplotienda
, made everyone euphoric. Heberto recited verses inspired by a poem of Bertolt Brecht’s, and Miguel put on a Bola de Nieve LP, flooding the little room with the black musician’s piano and falsetto. Around seven in the evening, as the heat retreated and offered a cooler truce, they finished the second bottle amid shouts and laughter. On opening the third bottle, the group was ready to assist Cayetano in whatever he needed.

“But only those who didn’t sign the letter may attend Neruda’s birthday,” he clarified, recalling that, in this matter, the poet had
been inflexible. The assistants suddenly went silent, as all of them, with the exception of the good man Sammy, who was not an intellectual, had endorsed the letter, whether with their own hand or through the government.

“Don’t get any false hopes, Cayetano,” Heberto warned him, a glass of rum in his right hand. “No one from this island will be able to go, because in the eyes of El Caballo Neruda is not a saint. We may as well focus on finding that Mexican widow you were talking about.”

He suggested that they go to the exclusive El Laguito area, inhabited by Revolution leaders, diplomats, and personalities of an international show business scene as conspicuous as it was secret. The people living comfortably in those confines included, so it was rumored, though nobody knew for sure, the daughter of the interior minister of Portugal’s dictatorship, who had settled in Cuba in the 1960s, who was in love with Che; the pair of Bolivian military men who had recovered the campaign diary and the hands of the Argentinean guerrilla fighter; tycoons escaping the U.S. tax system; some hijacker of a North American airplane; and the widow of Colonel Caamaño, the leader of the failed Dominican revolution. It was possible that this widow might know Beatriz, Heberto said. Miguel, who, between sips, was enthusiastically describing to the bus driver a chapter of the novel he was writing, something about an early-twentieth-century Spanish immigrant, crossed the room and dialed a number on the phone. After hanging up, he told the group that his sources, who were generally very well informed on what took place on this island, did not know of a single widow of a Cuban doctor who had come from Mexico and now lived in Havana, however famous the husband may have been.

“Are you sure she’s Mexican?” Sammy Byre asked, passing the tray of chorizo and cheese around the room with an experienced hand. Before the Revolution, he had worked as a golf caddy and
waiter in Havana’s exclusive clubs, which had now been turned into recreation centers for workers.

“And isn’t it possible that this Cayetano is going to end up screwing us all with this mission of his? I’m dying to go to Neruda’s birthday, but this guy is a Cuban from abroad, something we can’t just ignore,” Miguel warned.

“Well, as far as I’m concerned, with or without Cayetano, they’d never let me go to that birthday,” Heberto said. “I’ve already had enough trouble with Chileans. We may as well talk to Caamaño’s widow. It can’t be a crime to ask around a little about a Mexican woman who came to the island a few years ago.”

“We should think this out logically,” Sammy said. He was wearing a New York Yankees cap. “I propose that first we look to the places where foreigners go.”

“Oh, really?” Miguel exclaimed. “Are you going to go ask around at
diplotiendas
and embassies? Don’t make me laugh. They don’t even let Cubans set foot in places like that.”

“Remember, I’m Jamaican.”

“But the way you look, I wouldn’t even let you enter the corner grocery store,” the bus driver said. He was a broad-shouldered, light-skinned black man with magnificent hands and long nails. He smiled, his mouth full of chorizo. “Could it be that Beatriz is Cuban?”

“Well, in that case, there’s no point in even looking. A Cuban woman, married to a Cuban doctor—there are thousands of those. That’s why we revolutionized our health system, so we could have doctors doing everything, even driving tractors,” Pablo Armando said, cutting open another black fig.