The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  “I trust you. You’re a bright young guy, you’ve lived in three countries, and nobody will be surprised that you’re looking for a fellow Cuban.” He sighed and looked out at the cloudy Valparaíso sky. “I’m lucky to have met you.”

  Cayetano felt honored by the remark. And, confident in his new role, he proceeded with his questioning. “What’s the story behind that shell?”

  It was a good question. It drew a light smile out of Don Pablo.

  “I bought it a half-century ago in Rangoon, Burma, where I held my first diplomatic post, thanks to some friends with contacts in the State Department.” He turned his face upward, giving himself an air of importance. “Of course, it was only later that I figured out why nobody else wanted the job: it paid next to nothing. I ended up paying the bills by writing columns for Santiago newspapers. There wasn’t much to do in Rangoon, so I wrote poems. Well, to be frank, my verses from that period were hermetic, indecipherable; to this day even I can’t fully penetrate them. The academics of Europe and North America, on the other hand, enjoy them as though they were a naked woman on a bed, or a naked man, perhaps, because all things can be found on God’s green earth, Cayetano.”

  He thought again of their first meeting, the day of the party by the shores of Playa Ancha, and thought that the poet, on occasion, could still be quite hermetic. But he kept his opinions to himself and stayed focused on the poet’s reminiscence.

  “I suppose the climate in Rangoon must be like Havana, no?”

  “Rangoon is as humid, hot, and exotic as your city, Cayetano. The air is so thick it won’t fit in your mouth. The plants and trees are identical to those of your island, and the fruits are the same, too. At midday, you’re forced to lie down in a hammock for siesta. I lived by the sea, between coconut palms, on a beach with sand as white and fine as flour …and now, my friend, there isn’t even enough flour here to make sopaipillas. My house was modest, made of wood, with a pitched tin roof. I didn’t manage to learn the language of the people, who were descended from typhoons. At night I’d drink at the bar of the Grand Hotel, on the river, where I’d go on the prowl for women.”

  “Beautiful?” he dared to say.

  “Gorgeous.” To judge from his smile, the poet hadn’t forgotten them. “But I never knew what they were thinking. When they made love they were as silent as iguanas,” he added, lowering his voice. “They had sturdy thighs, girlish waists, an ass that could fit in your palms, light and timid breasts, and there was something gymnastic about the way they did it within the confines of those mosquito nets. Cayetano, those women are nothing like ours.”

  The poet invited him to the top floor of the house to see his studio, up a few concrete stairs. It was a wood-paneled room with shelves full of books and a mirrored wardrobe. The city and bay struggled to slide in through the windows. Cayetano was intrigued by an old black Underwood typewriter on a worn desk between two windows.

  “Do you write poems on that machine?”

  “Are you crazy? Nobody writes decent poems on keys. Poetry is written by hand, with a pen, my friend. Verses descend from the brain like the tide on the Chiloé coast; they flow through the body to your hands and pour out on the page,” he explained as Cayetano examined a door hidden behind a large sepia photograph of a slim man with a long white beard.

  “What’s behind that door?” he asked.

  “A heliport designed by Sebastián Collado. This room was going to be a giant aviary, open to the city, but as you see, it’s become my studio.”

  “Excuse me. Did you say heliport?” Cayetano repeated, astonished.

  “Exactly.” The poet calmly half closed his eyes.

  A heliport. Sebastián was a great dreamer, a visionary. And now they’d moved from spaceships to heliports. Poets truly left no stone unturned. He was determined to keep up. “And the man in that photograph. Is he your father?”

  “In a way,” Don Pablo said, amused. “He was my poetic father. One of my greatest teachers. Look, I even have an outfit in his image.” He opened the wardrobe by the door. “That’s Walt Whitman, a marvelous poet from the United States.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Let’s say that he continues to live. Great poets never die, Cayetano.”

  He took a hanger out of the wardrobe, from which hung a white beard, a cloak, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He tied the beard around his neck with a cord and donned the hat and cloak. He took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses out of the cloak’s pocket, along with a long, straight pipe.

  “Do I look like him?”

  Cayetano compared the portrait with Don Pablo. “I’d say it’s he who looks like you.”

  “Well said, Cayetano. But without him, I wouldn’t be who I am,” he said pensively as he searched the wardrobe again. “Put these clothes on.”

  “Me?”

  “Who else?”

  “But …”

  “But what?”

  Cayetano saw no choice but to bare his discomfort and prejudices. “Forgive me, but costumes and disguises make me think, with all due respect, of faggots, Don Pablo, to tell you the truth …”

  “So what? It’ll stay between us.” He added, mischievously, “Walt Whitman was a faggot.”

  “You see? Better not to dress up. I’m happy simply to be myself.”

  “Nonsense! Life is nothing more than a parade of disguises, Cayetano. You yourself have, until now, disguised yourself as a Havanan, an emigrant, a North American soldier, and a husband, and now you’re playing the part of private detective. One more disguise is neither here nor there, and in any case, the habit isn’t what makes the monk. I love throwing costume parties for my friends. It’s the best way of getting to know them. The costume they choose strips them completely, and they don’t even know it. Come on, young man, don’t be shy. Put it on.”

  He had no choice but to obey.

  “It’s a costume from the Caucasus. It fits you,” the poet affirmed, stroking his false beard when Cayetano had finished dressing. “The cloak is called a bashlik, ideal for the winter, and the cap is made of karakul wool. I should tell you that the outfit costs a fortune. It was a gift from the Union of Soviet Writers, from Stalin’s time. Better not to remember …”

  “I look like a Cossack.”

  “And look at this.” He reached back into the wardrobe and took out a lilac tie covered in small green guanacos. “Made on an indigenous loom. A gift from Delia, my second wife, but Matilde doesn’t let me wear it. Women, you know, are like Christopher Columbus: they want your history to begin with their arrival. I’ll give it to you because it brings good luck, and she could throw it in the garbage any day.”

  “Are you sure?” It had a coarse texture, though a nice feel. On the lilac background, the guanacos leapt joyfully, grazed placidly, or contemplated the horizon.

  “It’s always brought me good luck. It’s almost forty years old. I was wearing it when I met some of the greatest European intellectuals when I lived in Madrid, in the Argüeyes neighborhood. I also wore it when I went underground in the fifties, when the Chilean government was searching for me to throw me into the concentration camp of Pisagua. I wanted to wear it to accept the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, but Matilde and Swedish protocols conspired to force me into a bow tie, like some waiter at a fine restaurant. All I needed was the tray. So ridiculous. But do you know what I did?”

  “No, Don Pablo.”

  The poet closed the wardrobe door, and suddenly both of them—Walt Whitman and the man from the Caucasus—stood in front of their reflections in the mirror, motionless, surprised at themselves. Who was disguised as whom? Cayetano asked himself. Whitman as Neruda, or Neruda as Whitman? And who was he, Cayetano, in a life that, according to the poet, boiled down to a never-ending carnival?

  “A detective who doesn’t know how to disguise himself is like the poet who doesn’t understand drink, food, or love,” Whitman said, draping the tie around the Caucasian’s neck.

  “But you still haven’t told me what you did
with this tie in Stockholm.”

  “I folded it and kept it in the inside pocket of my suit jacket.” Whitman adjusted the knot, smiling through his glasses. “So I still accepted the Nobel Prize with it. I’m giving it to you so it can protect you. It might not help you win the Nobel, but it might at least keep people from talking poorly about you as a detective. Let’s go back downstairs.”

  In the living room, the logs crackled in the fireplace, while outside the thick fog dispersed, revealing a bit of clean sky.

  “We were talking about the women of Rangoon,” Cayetano reminded him, wondering whether he owed his sudden confidence to the disguise. The city’s name struck him as voluptuous. He told himself that on some not-too-distant day he should leave the cold of Valparaíso for a visit to Rangoon, returning to the sticky intensity of the tropics.

  “They’re enigmatic,” the poet said, settling into La Nube. The beard hung all the way down to his stomach. “And in matters of love, at the end of the day, frustrating. I never knew whether it was me giving them pleasure in bed, or whether they always enjoyed themselves that much. I could never tell whether I was expendable and everybody gave them the same pleasure, or whether I was the chosen one. Even today I ask myself whether women experience the same pleasure with different men,” the poet added. He suddenly became taciturn.

  Cayetano didn’t want to lose the enjoyment they were sharing at that moment, so he went out on a limb. “Well, that depends on how you treat them, Don Pablo. My father used to say that they’re like flutes. How they sound depends on how you stroke and care for them.”

  “The metaphor’s a bit anemic, but your father may have been right,” the poet conceded benevolently. “In that case, it’s not the same,” he concluded.

  “What do you mean, Don Pablo?”

  “That if anyone can get the same notes out of a single woman, then the uniqueness and incomparable nature of each individual love is lost. Well, it’s as I was saying,” he added with a faint sparkle in his tired eyes. “In Rangoon, I ran into women of many different races and customs. Sometimes I’d invite three of them back to my place at the same time, and we’d go wild with ecstasy on those high, humid nights, bathed in sweat between the undulating walls of the mosquito net, and I wouldn’t even know whose sex I drank from, whose mouth I kissed, or what folds I was exploring.”

  “But that’s paradise, Don Pablo,” Cayetano said, beside himself, and he placed the karakul cap on his knees. The tale had made him both hot and incredulous.

  “It sounds exciting, but in truth it’s not so much, in the end. I only entered their bodies, never their souls. Understand? I always succumbed like an exhausted castaway before the unconquerable walls of those graceful, mysterious women.”

  “I’d still like to have swum that far, Don Pablo.”

  “But in the end, none of that stays with you,” he said with agitation. “There are people who would kill over love or jealousy, or out of spite or envy, but in the end no part of those passionate bodies remains, neither the echoes of their voices nor their images in mirrors, Cayetano.”

  He thought the poet was returning to the melancholy he’d exhibited the other day, and that, costumes aside, he had quite a bit of drama in him. As if, in addition to Whitman, he was playing the role of himself, as he’d said during their first meeting, in that dim room, when Don Pablo Neruda—whose real name was Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto—had displayed his passion and sadness with a sense of spectacle that made one wonder what lay behind it. He tried to imagine the poet as a young man. The copious dark brown hair falling over his forehead. His attractive gaze, fresh voice, and shapely chin. It was hard to accept that this old sallow-cheeked man had been that youth who used to hold orgies on the beach, on distant Oriental nights. Could the poet recall the roar of flesh gripped by the urge to touch and possess sweaty bodies, or were his memories of that time now calm and vague, devoid of passion? He picked up the conch that lay beside El Siglo, whose front page denounced the national transportation strike the right was devising to overthrow Allende. He considered that when the conch last slinked across Rangoon’s ocean floor, the poet was a twenty-something, as he himself was now. An irrepressible chill ran down his spine as he imagined that, at this precise instant, over the sands of Valparaíso’s ocean floor, there glided another conch that some young man would take into his hands half a century later, when he himself was in his seventies. With his fingertips, he felt the fine, dry-leaf texture of the conch, and a thought usually reserved for older people occurred to him, suddenly tormenting him, though he wasn’t sure why: that life was fragile and fleeting.

  “This conch is so slender, it feels like a paper kite,” he said. “With a little southern wind, it could even fly over the roofs of Valparaíso, Don Pablo.”

  “What you say shows that you’re turning into a poet,” the Nobel laureate proclaimed, satisfied, stroking his long beard with a philosophical air. “Sometimes certain friends of mine begin to feel like poets, as if my poetry has become contagious. To become a poet, you should first read Walt Whitman, Cayetano. But what the hell am I saying? For what we’re doing, you’re better off sticking to Simenon, who has written a great deal.”

  “Hundreds of novels, according to the introduction in the first volume.” Cayetano took off the cloak and carefully draped it over the back of the flower-print armchair.

  “He wrote over three hundred of them. To tell you the truth, I have no idea when that guy finds the time to shit, piss, or have sex.”

  As the poet stood up and crossed the living room in his slippers, Cayetano wondered why the man trusted him, why he thought that he, Cayetano, would use the money, a small fortune now that the dollar was through the roof, in search of Bracamonte. The truth was that he could decide to forget about the doctor, the poet, and whatever else, and disappear in Mexico City. They’d never find him, not even with a fine-tooth comb.

  “I already told you: simple poet’s instinct,” he intuited gravely, now behind the bar, still dressed up as Whitman. “Would you care for a Coquetelón?”

  “A what?” the Cossack asked.

  “A Coquetelón, a drink I invented years ago.” He took out some bottles and a pair of glasses, and began to mix. “One part French Cognac, another part Angers Cointreau, and two parts orange juice. It’s good enough to make you suck on your mustache, which, in your case, can be taken literally. Let’s toast to our success, my Caribbean Maigret!”

  9

  Oh, Maligna. By now you’ve likely found the letter,

  wept with rage,

  and insulted my mother’s memory

  calling her a rotten dog and mother of dogs

  —from “The Widow’s Tango”

  Where could she be, Josie Bliss, the furious one, the malignant one, the Burmese panther who liberated me from the demure and guilty sex I practiced as a student between the damp, icy sheets of winter nights in Santiago, and who brought me to the feverish physical combat of Rangoon? Never before had I held such a lascivious, wise, and uninhibited woman in my arms. More than a body, Josie Bliss was a lightning bolt, a goddess with blue hair and long, fine limbs, with dark nipples and narrow hips, the owner of penetrating and mysterious eyes. I met her after a deluge that whipped through Rangoon one day and flooded the house I rented by the sea, on a street called Probolingo. She was a beauty with drops of Asian blood evident in her face, a relatively pure Burmese woman, if there can be such a thing as pure Burmese in that nation of streets crammed with mestizos wrapped in captivating aromas and attire, and flanked with stalls of Indians as thin as needles exhibiting their combs, silks, and spices, geese awaiting sacrifice in bamboo cages, and prehistoric-seeming fish and their accompanying swirl of flies.

  Water still dripped from the roof’s gutters when Josie Bliss appeared at my house. She came on the recommendation of her brother, a young and inexperienced doctor who had not been able to pacify my stomach pains or ease the fever that had racked me since my arrival in Rangoon. She entered my roo
m, as silent as a shadow, when I, in my mosquito net, had resigned myself to hearing nothing but the approaching footsteps of death.

  “I’m here for whatever you desire,” she said in languid English, with a girlish, caressing voice, and after resting her palm on my sweaty, burning forehead, she began to prepare a potion that saved my life.

  During those first days, she dressed like an Englishwoman, but she soon abandoned the European style of dress for a sarong of diaphanous white silk that made her resemble a floating fairy. She was naked beneath it, as I discovered the day I took her to my bed. She laughed as though her mustard-colored body belonged to another woman and she were witnessing the act from a theater balcony. Josie Bliss gave me pleasures beyond the imagination for a melancholy young man from the rainy south, from the desolate streets of Santiago: she smiled as she offered me her sex, damp, aromatic, cracked open like a ripe fig; she swayed her breasts over my thirsty mouth like clusters of grapes. But she never let me kiss her, never allowed my lips to land on hers, or my tongue to rove between the rows of her teeth or explore the treasure trove of her mouth. I recall the night she told me I could use her body, enter its round, narrow boundaries as much as I liked or let off steam between her lips if it pleased me, but that I should not try to kiss her on the mouth.

  Soon, Josie Bliss began to walk naked around the house. She brought me breakfast in bed that way, and ironed my shirts and ties, cleaned the floors, brought me a cup of tea at the end of my day. And she let me make love to her anywhere: while she prepared lunch by the stove, when she was picking my socks up from the floor, as she polished my white boots. She made me love her night and day, every day, every week. She was obsessed with one thing: keeping me satisfied and exhausted so it wouldn’t occur to me to be unfaithful. She wanted me to quench myself between her thighs and her thighs only, never taking my thirst anywhere else. That’s why she started to come to the consulate office unannounced to inspect my letters, destroy the ones that might contain amorous messages, smell my suits, and examine my back in search of scratches left there by another lover. At night, she stood at the window, motionless as a stone, watching for my return. She embraced me, full of impatience, stripped off my clothes, and then massaged me from head to toe with a milky, tepid, aromatic cream. After a while, she’d mount me to make sure that I hadn’t been with someone else. But her mouth remained an impregnable fortress.