The Neruda Case (6 page)

A vehicle approached the large metal door. Cayetano crushed the cigarette butt with his foot and hid behind a pillar. He didn’t want to be seen from outside. It was said that members of the Nationalist Movement for Homeland and Liberty, or of the Rolando Matus Command, shot at the drop of a hat. He held his breath. The paved stones shone in the headlights of a vehicle that slowly approached. At last he saw it. It was a soldiers’ jeep. Not long ago, the army had shot at workers at a factory they’d taken over, then refused to turn the murderers over to justice. The jeep turned the corner slowly, without its occupants seeing Cayetano.

“What are you reading?” asked a voice at his back.

When he turned, he saw a pale, bearded youth with long hair. He wore a beret, a long jacket, and boots. Two individuals in olive-green jackets accompanied him but stood at a distance.

“Simenon.” He showed the man the book cover.

“You like crime novels?”

“They’re entertaining.” He looked toward the street. No trace of the jeep.

“I read him for the first time in Paris, when I was studying there,” the young man said as he sat down on the raised blade of a parked forklift. He was tall, thin, and good-looking, with an unmistakable resemblance to Che Guevara. He took out a case of Hiltons and offered Cayetano a cigarette. They smoked and listened to the clamor of the factory machines. “He’s a prolific writer, and popular, a supporter of the French status quo. I’m Prendes, of course. You’re Cayetano Brulé, and you’re looking for me, or so my comrades say.”

“That’s right.”

“And you like crime stories …”

“Though I prefer poetry.”

“Oh, really? Like whose, for example?”

“Neruda’s,” he lied, to get to the point.

Prendes lowered his gaze and calmly stroked his beard. “Where are you from?”

“Cuba.”

“Fidel is no fan of Neruda’s.”

Cayetano stroked his mustache and adjusted his glasses to buy some time. He recalled a venomous letter by Cuban writers criticizing Neruda for rejecting the armed approach to socialism, and for visiting American universities.

“There, they have Nicolás Guillén.
Sóngoro cosongo
and all that Afro-Cuban music,” Prendes went on.

“You prefer Guillén?” Cayetano asked, feeling that he was treading in a field he was completely ignorant about.

“I prefer the way things are done over there: the workers’ party, the revolutionary army, everybody eats the same thing, they go to the same schools and all have work, without bosses. That’s how it should be here. But back to Neruda.” He took a drag from his cigarette and let out a puff of smoke. “Do you like his love poems, or the political ones?”

“Love.”

Prendes murmured, in a mocking tone, “‘I can write the saddest lines tonight. / Write, for example: “The night is full of stars, trembling, blue, so far away.” / The night wind spins in the sky, and sings …’”

A shot rang out like a cosmic lash, striking echoes in the distance, followed by several more shots.

“Mausers! They’re from the Maipo Regiment,” Prendes muttered, frowning. “They try to intimidate the people with their rusty World War Two guns …”

They stood still, breathing the pale night air, listening to dogs
barking in the hills and the echoes rippling out across the bay. Suddenly the factory had gone quiet.

“It’s the damn parts. I should go,” Prendes said. He stood up. He threw his cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it with his boot. “If the Bulgarian comrades don’t send us the replacement parts they promised, it’ll be the end of those cookies.”

“You know what they say. When there’s no bread, cakes will do.”

“Doesn’t sound bad as a proverb, but the people prefer cookies,” he said, massaging his hands.

“Pete Castillo told me you know someone who knows a lot about Neruda,” Cayetano said before Prendes could get away.

“He must mean my cousin. Her name is Laura.” He smiled, lost in thought. For a moment, however brief, the question seemed to transport him from the troubles of the factory. “She studied in Moscow, at Patrice Lumumba University. She’s been writing a dissertation on the poet for a long time, but right now she works in food distribution, at the Committee for Supplies and Price. Here, write down her number. …”

6

T
he night was as dark as the inside of a coffin. Down below, in front of the closed shops on Serrano Street, an empty Verde Mar bus passed slowly. Tropical rhythms rose from a bar called La Nave, and the squadron on the breakwater rocked in silent shadows. A pair of heels rang out in the darkness. Cayetano turned and glimpsed a woman in a long jacket and scarf near the Lord Thomas Cochrane Sea Museum, with her hands in her pockets, coming up the cobbled street.

The day before, he’d called the number Camilo Prendes had given him. Laura Aréstegui had been surprised that someone would be interested in her academic thesis in such turbulent times, when people talked no longer about verses but only about the seizure of power, the proletarian dictatorship, and the Chilean road to socialism, vertiginous days in which everybody quoted Lenin, Trotsky, Althusser, or Marta Harnecker’s manuals on historical and dialectical materialism. They agreed to meet at the museum at eight o’clock in the evening, after a party meeting she needed to attend. It was now 8:20 p.m.

“Sorry to be late,” Laura said. “There’s always a comrade who comes up with something in the last minute.”

She was attractive. She’d just transferred from the Communist Youth to the Party itself. She had a mole near her mouth, and deep-set eyes, like those of someone who slept very little because of insomnia or an excess of work or sex, Cayetano thought. He guessed, without knowing why, that Laura was experienced in the ways of love and that her eyes were the result of passion. They walked down the steps in front of Hotel Rudolf into the deserted grid of the city, and on to Plaza Aníbal Pinto for dinner at the traditional restaurant Cinzano.

“So a Cuban from Havana wants to know about Neruda,” Laura remarked, amused, as they sat down at their table. A man with silver temples and an impeccable blue suit was singing tangos, accompanied by a gaunt, pale man on the bandoneón, a small kind of accordion, who looked as if he were being stalked by death. Two couples danced between the crowded tables.

“As I said before, I’m trying to write an article about Neruda’s life in Mexico,” Cayetano said. “Little is known about those years. I’m headed to Mexico City in a few days.”

“Do you write for
Granma
or for
Bohemia
?” Laura asked. She had thin, arched eyebrows, like Romy Schneider. Only she was a Romy Schneider of the Southern Cone, Cayetano thought, enthused.

“First I write the articles, then I place them,” he said, and immediately feared he’d failed to sound convincing.

They ordered a bottle of red wine, chicken soup, and, as an appetizer,
palta reina
, the avocados stuffed with tuna that had been ubiquitous in Chilean restaurants since the nation gained independence. Cinzano somehow had a guaranteed supply of food, but at prices that were going through the roof, Cayetano thought as he surreptitiously scanned the sad atmosphere of the place, feeling oppressed by a sense of the world coming to an end. The restaurant was one of the favored meeting places of the city’s legendary bohemian revolutionary scene, which included poets and writers who self-published with blind faith
and admirable perseverance; poorly paid though dignified and vehement professors of literature and history; bright university students of letters infatuated with extreme utopias; and local politicians who, at least on this night, seeing themselves reflected in the large mirror beyond the trays of clams and conger eels, managed to forget that the country had become the beleaguered
Titanic
of the Pacific.

All in all, it had been a productive day, Cayetano thought as Laura left for the bathroom. In the morning, after finishing another of Simenon’s novels, which were happily short as well as highly entertaining, he had confirmed his flight and obtained a list of hotels in Mexico City with reasonable rates. Even though the poet had told him not to worry about cost, he didn’t want to abuse his trust. Then, during lunch, Ángela had called to say she’d be extending her visit to Santiago, where she was applying for the position of inspector at a textile factory that had been taken over by workers. She hoped the distance might help them overcome the crisis in their relationship. If that’s what she thinks, then that’s on her, Cayetano said to himself skeptically as he put the matter aside. The most important thing he could do right now was learn more about the poet.

“Neruda lived in Mexico City from 1940 to 1943, as the Chilean consul,” Laura explained a little while later, as they ate olives and drank red wine. “He was trying to escape his time as consul in Rangoon, Batavia, and Singapore—the worst years of his life. He didn’t understand Asia, he didn’t know anybody there. He had only brief affairs with lovers, many of them whores, and a woman who was half British and half Javanese by the name of Josie Bliss, who tried to stab him. Then he married a Dutchwoman and had a daughter with her, Malva Marina Trinidad.”

“It seems you know all about Neruda’s life and miracles.”

“He arrived in Mexico on the arm of Delia del Carril, his second wife, a rich and cultured Argentinean who played a key role in his life,” Laura went on, glad to be escaping, if even for a few hours, the
great headache of Valparaíso’s supply shortage. “In Europe, she’d introduced him to the intellectuals of the left, and convinced him to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. She was the one who made him a communist. Without Delia, Neruda would have kept on writing hermetic poems like those in
Residence on Earth,
and he wouldn’t have joined the left or become the poet we now know.”

“She was older than him, right?”

“When they met, he was thirty, she was fifty.”

“It was obvious that would last less time than a cake in front of a school—”

“You’re thinking of writing about Neruda and you didn’t know about that?” Laura exclaimed, suspicious. “He took advantage of her social contacts, her wealth, her ideology, and her need for company. Then he abandoned her in 1955 for Matilde Urrutia, his current wife, who at the time was a young cabaret singer with an amazing body, a woman who’s an intellectual dwarf compared to Delia.”

Several couples danced between the tables to the tango “Volver,” and were reflected in Cinzano’s beveled mirror, while others conversed passionately over their wineglasses, boiled blood sausage, and french fries, about the revolution and the counterrevolution, about Allende, Altamirano and Jarpa, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and MIR, about the lessons of Sierra Maestra, the Vietnamese resistance and the October Revolution. Through the lace curtains at the window, Cayetano watched a military jeep drive down Esmeralda Street. He sipped his wine with his gaze lowered and a sense of helplessness creeping up his spine.

“That’s my frank opinion of Neruda after prying into his life,” Laura said.

“Let’s just say he’s not the saint you want to pray to.” He recalled the poet at the top of the stairs, watching him in silence as he descended the steps of La Sebastiana with the envelope full of dollars in his hand.

“I have nothing against him as an artist. He deserved the Nobel. What I don’t like is the representation of women in his poetry, nor do I like the way he treats us. It weighs on me, that whole issue of ‘I like it when you’re silent because it’s as if you were absent.’ Pure machismo. A guy’s dream: for women to be docile, passive animals.”

Cayetano stayed silent. Who was he to argue with Laura about poetry? He popped an olive into his mouth and said, “But listen, I’m looking for something different. In Mexico, I’m interested in the places he used to frequent, the friends he rubbed elbows with. Do you know any Mexicans over there who are well informed, and could help me?”

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