The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  “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

  The 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 on
e 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?”

  7

  He knocked on the door of 237 Collado Way and waited with his hands in his jacket pockets. The cold snuck up the hills from the Pacific, which at that hour was submerged in a fog pierced by the siren of the Punta de Ángeles lighthouse, its moan like a dying bull. He walked back the way he’d come, while above him a goldfinch sang numbly on a balcony studded with potted carnations. At Alí Babá, the Turk Hadad prepared him coffee with a dash of milk and a gyro on hallulla bread, and Cayetano settled in, combing through the daily papers. A column by Mario Gómez López announced that the right was planning a coup d’état against Salvador Allende with the support of the United States embassy, but he warned that the attempted takeover would meet with stalwart resistance from the people. He read the column twice; he liked the way the reporter wrote. The radio played the song “Todos Juntos,” by Los Jaivas, and at the grocery store across the street people waited in line for oil.

  Maybe the poet was at Van Buren Hospital, he thought. He needed to obtain final approval for his trip. He was haunted by the possibility that he might fail in his mission. The lessons from Maigret’s novels were not enough to guarantee success. There the poet was guilty of naïveté. How was Cayetano supposed to find an old doctor, with the last name of Bracamonte, in a metropolis with millions of inhabitants that he had never visited before? He tried to bolster his own confidence. Perhaps with the help of the Mexican Medical Association and the guidance of Laura Aréstegui (who in the end hadn’t known a soul in Mexico City) he could get his bearings in the capital. He would tell his wife he was off to fulfill a secret mission, which she would love, since she adored revolutionary political conspiracies. But the mission in Mexico was a secret between him and the Nobel laureate, something nobody else could ever know about, he thought, and then he whispered to himself, from memory, the verses that Neruda had written in honor of La Sebastiana:

  I built the house.

  First I made it out of air.

  Then I raised the flag

  and left it hanging

  from the firmament, from the star, from

  light and darkness.

  “Talking to yourself?” Hadad stood beside him with a brimming cup of coffee. His black eyes glittered with sarcasm, and the naked bulb from the soda fountain shone on his bald Buddha head like a phantom reflection. “If you start raving about political parties in days like these, who knows how it’ll end? Better you just sit back and enjoy my coffee: no one else makes one like it in Valparaíso.”

  Cayetano watched the strands of foam turn in the cup, lit a Lucky Strike, and let the liquid warm his insides. It tasted just passable, but it was better not to mention that to Hadad, who was intently chopping meat behind the bar with a big, sharp knife. Through the window, he saw some dogs sleeping curled up in the foyer of the Mauri, next to a sign for Valparaíso, Mi Amor. He thought that at times he himself had felt like a stray dog, lost in the south of the continent, without a woman, or, more accurately, with a woman he couldn’t get along with, which was worse than having no woman at all. None of this would happen to Maigret—he and his wife enjoyed a honeymoon as perpetual as it was dispassionate; the wife cooked for him and seasoned his favorite dishes with angelic hands and didn’t meddle in politics, and still less in feverish Caribbean guerrilla adventures. What was more, Maigret had his own apartment in Paris and dependable work at the police department, while he, Cayetano, rented a house at 6204 Alemania Avenue and was unemployed, and (too embarrassing to mention) he aspired to become a detective by reading novels. All because the poet, who placed far too much hope in the power of literature, believed that reading the crime genre could turn a young man like him into an actual private investigator.

  “You read a couple of Georges Simenon novels, you enroll in some investigation course, and you’re there!” the poet had said to him at the bar in La Sebastiana as he threw ice cubes into a whiskey glass.

  Sipping his coffee, he recalled that, decades earlier, the poet had married a woman twenty years his senior, as Laura had described. Delia del Carril must have been an extraordinarily seductive woman back then, he thought, while Hadad served him a steaming, greasy platter of gyros. Was it possible that the poet had never asked himself what would occur in his bed when he turned fifty? Had he never imagined it or, intuiting it, had he opted to marry that woman out of sheer opportunism? What would it be like to go to bed with a fifty-year-old woman? How would her flesh feel and her mouth taste? An illustrious domino player at the Bar Inglés had once told him that though young women’s firm flesh might seem more exciting at first glance, older and more experienced women outpaced them by far in the pleasure they could provide in bed. The devil knows more from being old than from being the devil, the domino player had affirmed, winking as he recommended that Cayetano seduce a fifty-year-old woman in Victoria Plaza. It was easier to seduce them on spring and summer mornings, because the heat, the blue sky, and the birdsong were on your side, he had said, eyeing his dominoes. One day, he’d go to Victoria Plaza to confirm the theory, Cayetano told himself, but not now, when he was attracted to young women with smooth faces, taut bellies, and firm calves. So the poet with the monotonous nasal voice, the thick body, and the melancholy gaze, whom he could almost consider a friend, had actually been a kind of gigolo in his youth? Had he conned a mature woman so that she’d open doors for him to the salons of European intellectuals, editors, and politicians? And had he then left her for a singer who was thirty years younger?

  He sampled the gyro and nodded approvingly at Hadad, who waited behind the bar for his verdict, hands on his hips and an intimidating look on his face. If he wanted to work for the poet, it was imperative to know him intimately, he
thought. If he was to travel to Mexico on his orders, he should at least know with whom he was dealing. The fact that Neruda had received the Nobel Prize implied only that he was a phenomenal writer but not, necessarily, a good person. What would it be like to love a woman twenty years your senior? he asked himself again. Could there be desire between two people so distant in age? And what had become of Delia del Carril? According to Laura, she lived in the capital, old, poor, and alone, her family fortune squandered; she spent her time painting energetic, indomitable horses, and was still in love with Neruda.

  At that moment he saw the man in question coming down Collado Way with his chauffeur. He walked slowly, slouched. Cayetano polished off his gyro in a hurry, finished his coffee, put a crumpled bill on the table, and left Alí Babá, releasing a small but satisfied burp.

  8

  Please, have a seat!” The poet had settled into his favorite armchair, which he had named La Nube, and was examining the pearly surface of a large conch with a magnifying glass while his chauffeur, Sergio, arranged hawthorn logs under the copper hood of the fireplace. “When do you go?”

  “If you write a check for this amount to the money exchange office, I can leave next week,” Cayetano replied, handing him a bill.

  The poet gave the document a cursory glance and let it fall on the top of the newspaper El Siglo, which lay on the floor beside La Nube. He waited for his chauffeur to leave the room, then said, “Better yet, you tell me how much you need and I’ll write you a check for the whole thing. I’m no good with numbers. Matilde is off in Isla Negra. I just got back from the doctor, and I’m exhausted. But I trust you won’t let me down with your business in Mexico, my friend.”

  “I’ll find your doctor, Don Pablo, you’ll see. Don’t worry.” His first steps as an investigator had made him feel a bit more sure of himself.