The Neruda Case (2 page)

1

W
hat could be bothering the partners of Almagro, Ruggiero & Associates, who had asked him to appear at their headquarters in such a hurry? Cayetano Brulé wondered one warm February morning as he left his office in the attic of the Turri Building, in the heart of Valparaíso’s financial district, and took the elevator down to Prat Street. Ever since democracy was restored, AR&A had become the most influential consulting firm in the country, and it was rumored that no stipulation or public litigation of any importance could pass without its sanction. Its tentacles spanned from the presidential palace to the neo-Gothic headquarters of businessmen, and from Congress to the National Comptroller’s Office, passing through ministries, political parties, embassies, and courts. Its attorneys could not only obtain laws and decrees, subsidies and pardons, exemptions, and amnesties, but also wash away disgrace and polish the prestige of public figures down on their luck. AR&A operated in corridors and behind the scenes, and though its top executives attended key receptions and dinners in the capital, its proprietors were essentially invisible, and rarely attended social gatherings or granted interviews to the press. But when they did decide to appear on the great stage of the nation’s political and business affairs, they glowed in their Italian suits and silk ties, with
their triumphant smiles and cosmopolitan manners, as they cryptically offered opinions on various matters, like the Oracle at Delphi. When Cayetano lifted his gaze along the buildings on Prat Street, the Turri clock marked eleven forty-five as its bells pealed mournfully and seagulls soared and cawed under the crystalline sky. He thought of
The Birds
, the Alfred Hitchcock movie he’d seen in a Sunday matinee at the Mauri Theater, before diving into the everyday din, whistling, keeping a steady pace.

At Plaza Aníbal Pinto, a rumbling in his gut made him stop at the Café del Poeta. It wouldn’t matter if he spent a few minutes there. The big bosses at AR&A wouldn’t be upset if he was late; on the contrary, in their nervous state they’d imagine other clients were in need of his services, he thought, as the aroma of roasted coffee slid through his Pancho Villa–style mustache. Many things delighted him about this place, aside from the coffee with a dash of milk and of course the sandwiches: the old polished floorboards, the display of porcelain English tea sets in the window, the oil paintings with port motifs, and the cozy light of the bronze lamps. He preferred the table by the entrance, from which he could contemplate the hundred-year-old palms in the plaza and the statue of Neptune seated amid the rocks and the multicolored fish of a fountain, as well as the cemetery at the top of Cárcel Hill, a capricious graveyard that, in every earthquake, spewed an avalanche of mausoleum bricks, wooden crosses, and ramshackle coffins full of cadavers down into the center of the city. From that table, he could also watch the imported trolleys, secondhand from Zurich, as they circulated from place to place with their original German signage, as if they were still running past the plain façades of silent Helvetian neighborhoods, and had never disembarked to find the potholes, stray dogs, papers, and street vendors of Valparaíso.

In any case, the illustrious Almagro and Ruggiero would have to be patient, Cayetano Brulé concluded as he adjusted the knot of his tie, which was bright purple with little green guanacos, and waited
for the waitress, a pale goth girl with jet-black hair and black clothing who wore a Kanye West–style headset to communicate with the kitchen. He unfolded the local newspaper and read on the front page about the defeat of the long-suffering soccer team the Wanderers, the slashed throat of a model in the gardens of the Viña del Mar casino, and the alarming rise of unemployment in the region. This last piece of information didn’t surprise him. The decline of Valparaíso was no secret. In the nineteenth century, it had been the most important and prosperous port on the Pacific; Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt acted in its theaters, Gath & Chaves and exclusive European boutiques opened along its streets, and a quarter of its population, being foreign, spoke no Spanish. But a ferocious earthquake on the night of August 16, 1906, devastated the city and buried more than three thousand of its inhabitants under the rubble of buildings, houses, and mansions, all in a matter of seconds. That same night, thousands of people abandoned the city for good, and those who remained, began, from that moment on, to live by evoking the splendor and glitter of the past, the beauty of the disappeared city, convinced that in some not-too-distant future a miracle would restore the march of progress. But just one day short of eight years later, that same progress dealt them another brutal blow: the opening of the Panama Canal, which was celebrated on August 15, 1914, and strangled Valparaíso. The bay became desolate overnight; the warehouses in the port went empty; the cranes stood still on the wharf; and the bars, shops, and restaurants closed their doors forever; casting employees, whores, and pimps into permanent unemployment.

Without any knowledge of this tragic history, of this unending decline (which seemed more like a deliberate divine punishment than the result of random fate), and captivated by the delirious architecture and topography of the city and the affable and taciturn nature of its inhabitants, Cayetano decided to settle in Valparaíso when he arrived in Chile, in 1971, on the arm of María Paz Ángela Undurraga Cox,
his wife at the time. Those were the days of Salvador Allende and Unidad Popular, as well as of an unbridled social turmoil that would lead not to what the people dreamed of but rather to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. How many years had passed since then, since the start of that period that so many preferred to forget? Thirty-odd years? In any case, the people of this port city, or
porteños
, ever dignified—and he now considered himself one of them—believed that good and bad luck crouched, waiting, around any corner or just beyond the curve of some stone staircase, and for that reason everything in the world was relative and fleeting. For
porteños
, accustomed to climbing and descending hills, existence was like their city: at times one soared joyfully, trusting the wave’s crest, and at times one lay depressed and unmoving in the depths of a ravine. One could always rise or fall. Nothing was certain, nothing was forever. No circumstance was permanent. With existence came uncertainty, and only death had no room for change. For that reason—and because he was an incorrigible optimist as long as he didn’t want for bread and coffee, as well as an occasional cold beer or glass of rum, and despite the fact that work opportunities were scarce for a private investigator in this city at the end of the earth, which had now become a respectable exporter of fruit, wine, and salmon, and where more and more families were acquiring second cars, vacationing in Havana and Miami, or getting into limitless debt—he didn’t mind making the owners of AR&A wait.

Sixteen years earlier, in 1990, the Chilean people had regained democracy through peaceful protests, and now, in this supposedly gray and conservative country where, not too long before, divorce was illegal, the president was a divorced woman, a single mother, and a socialist, not to mention an atheist. President Bachelet was a clear sign that this stiletto of land, which extended from the Atacama Desert (the most arid and inhospitable one on the planet) to the South Pole, and which balanced between the fierce waves of the Pacific and
the eternal snows of the Andes, always on the brink of collapsing with all its people and goods into the ocean’s depths, was a unique place, inimitable and changing, that swung vertiginously from euphoria to depression, or from solidarity to individualism, like one of those complicated hieroglyphs from the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann that no one could entirely decipher, and that one loved or hated, depending on the circumstances, changes in mood, or color of the season.

“Here no one dies forever,” Cayetano mused as, from his table, he glimpsed the whitewashed niches, gleaming like the salt flats of Atacama, in the cemetery on Cárcel Hill. “At the first earthquake they’ll return in a flash to the realm of the living.”

“What can I get you, sir?” the goth asked him.

He requested a double espresso with a dash of milk and the sandwich menu, which he awaited anxiously, preening the ends of his mustache.

Now he recalled it with precision. He had landed in Valparaíso thirty-five years before, after disembarking from the LAN Boeing in Santiago with Ángela, a rather aristocratic Chilean with revolutionary convictions, who was studying at an exclusive women’s college in the United States. One night, as they made love beneath the coconut palms on the still-warm sand of a beach in Cayo Hueso, she had persuaded him to join the movement for socialism as led by Salvador Allende in the Southern Cone. Both experiences—with Allende, and with love—had ended for good, in an abrupt and calamitous way, with Pinochet’s coup on September 11, 1973. She sought refuge as an exile in Paris with the
charango
player of a folk band, while he ran aground like an old barge in Chile. He had to hide from the leftists, who spurned him as a Miami
gusano
, and the right-wingers, who spurned him as an infiltrating Castro supporter. During the dictatorship, he was forced to try his luck at various jobs: he sold books and insurance, promoted Avon beauty creams, and was an assistant for a
judicial receiver, traversing the steepest and most dangerous hills of Valparaíso on foot, delivering notices to individuals such as petty thieves, black market merchants, or smugglers. The title of detective, bestowed by a shady distance-learning institute in Miami, would later save his life, as it would attract people who wished to task him with minor investigations—such as tracking a loose woman, the theft of a day’s earnings from a soda fountain, or death threats from an aggressive neighbor—which allowed him not just to survive with a certain dignity but also to ply a trade that better fit the independent, fun-loving spirit of a dreamer like him.

“Here you go,” the goth announced as she unfolded a menu containing full-color photos of the sandwiches and pastries served at the café.

The menu aimed not only to whet the customers’ appetite but also to give a sense of culture, as it tried to describe the marvelous history of that city with seven lives, known as the “Jewel of the Pacific.” Strictly speaking, the gem in question was quite worn down—it had not been founded by any official authority, civil or ecclesiastical, and now had half a million long-suffering inhabitants in its fifty teeming, anarchic hills. A horseshoe bay formed a dazzling amphitheater, and people risked their lives on shabby postwar trolleys and a handful of whining cable cars each time they rode to work or to homes with crumbling balconies and gardens that settled gracefully on peaks or clung precariously to hillsides. Declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in honor of its architecture and topography, Valparaíso now began, once again, to show signs of recovery, thanks to retired North Americans and Europeans who, dressed like adolescents and with pockets full of dollars and euros, disembarked en masse from cruise ships that arrived every day during the summer.

It wasn’t a bad life in Valparaíso, he thought with satisfaction. He rented a yellow house, in the neo-Victorian style, on Gervasoni Avenue, on Concepción Hill, and from there he could gaze at the
Pacific and, on warm and pristine summer mornings, even imagine he was in Havana, frolicking in the currents of the gulf, with the Malecón breeze at his back. In his work as a private investigator, he had the help of a man named Suzuki, a
porteño
of Japanese origin who spent his nights attending to the Kamikaze, a modest, tiny fried-food stall that he owned. It was in the port district, between the plazas Aduana and Matriz, on a narrow street lined with cobblestones and bars, which allowed him to stay abreast of the murmurs of whores and their pimps, who now again enjoyed, along with pickpockets and muggers, the generous fruits of tourism. Though already in his fifties, Cayetano still believed he might one day find the woman of his dreams and become the father of a little boy or girl (it didn’t matter which, as long as the child was healthy) before going completely bald and becoming an arthritic, cantankerous retiree. And if in the beginning it had been hard for him to adapt to the severity of Chileans and the rigorous climate of its mountainous land, now the island of Cuba, its people, and its weather were more of a pale and distant evocation, because his new homeland, with all its light and shadows, had ended up conquering him, despite the fact that it was neither green nor an island, unless, perhaps, it was, just in a different way.