The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  One night, I was woken by the creak of floorboards and saw her walking, circling the mosquito net. She was naked. Her body was coated in coconut oil, and her skin glowed like that of a Tantric god. She held a long, sharp dagger in her fist. I still recall the elusive shine of the blade, her agitated breath, the wild beating of my heart, the terror that numbed my limbs, my mouth as dry as if I were crossing the Atacama Desert.

  “I know you’re awake,” she murmured as I pretended to sleep in my barricade of shadows. The steel blade shook in her hand. My body began to sweat with fear. Her eyes gleamed with jealousy and madness in the dark night of the room. “I’ll kill you while you sleep. You’ll never betray me if you’re dead.”

  I fled the next day, in the early morning, to Ceylon, where I took a consul post secretly negotiated for me by a friend from the State Department. But the malignant woman lost no time in arriving there with the records and clothes I’d abandoned in my escape. She stalked outside of my house. Knife in hand, she harassed any woman who tried to approach my door. I had to flee again. Far away. To a place where she wouldn’t ever be able to find me.

  I still remember the last time I saw her. It was a suffocating morning at the port. The waters exhaled a vapor that smelled of logs and putrefied bodies, of gasoline and rotting food, cut through by the scent of spices. I was about to board the vessel that would save me from Josie Bliss when I realized with a shudder that she was waiting, purse in hand, in the middle of the gangway to the ship. I had no choice but to keep approaching in the queue of passengers, until the furious woman stood directly in my path. I stopped, sweating, terrified, having glimpsed the tip of a dagger shining eagerly at the edge of her purse. My heart leaped to my mouth, my surroundings became hazy and unsteady, and suddenly I saw Josie Bliss stabbing my chest with fury, each stab an ember biting at my flesh as blood poured out, dark and thick, staining my white shirt and suit and the old planks of the gangway, making me lose my balance and fall into the river. That vision took an eternity to dissipate, a product of my unfettered imagination and the water’s pestilence, because in truth Josie Bliss had not made a single move. She simply stood in front of me, as if petrified, crying without words, reduced to a nuisance in the way of other passengers. As we met, she kissed my forehead, delicately, and then her kisses descended over my nose, chin, and chest, slipping down the length of my immaculate ironed suit, along my body, until she reached my freshly polished white boots. She remained there on bended knee, prostrated before me, embracing my feet as if I were a god freshly arrived from heaven. Gulls cawed over us, flying in circles, and a ship’s whistle rent the sky. When Josie Bliss lifted her beautiful face up from the ground, I saw something painful and indignant that I’ll never forget: her cheeks, forehead, and nose were completely smeared with the polish of my boots. She cried in silence, distraught and tremulous, as pale as a sick ghost.

  “Don’t go, please,” she implored me, on her knees, on the swaying gangway.

  “I’d stay for you,” I remember telling her. The queue waited mutely behind me.

  “Then why are you leaving, Pablo, if you’d stay for me?”

  “I’d stay for you, Josie. But if I stay, I’ll never become the poet I long to be one day,” I replied, before moving her aside with a gentle yet decisive gesture, continuing up the gangway with my wooden suitcase onto the ship crowded with passengers and animals.

  That was the last time I saw Josie Bliss.

  10

  That night, when Cayetano Brulé returned to his rented home in the Marina Mercante neighborhood, on San Juan de Dios Hill, he found his wife packing a suitcase in the bedroom.

  “What’s going on, Ángela?” he asked. “Weren’t you going to stay in Santiago a few more days?”

  It was almost ten o’clock, and mist had enfolded the city. After the conversation with the poet, Cayetano had confirmed his plane ticket and his hotel in Mexico City, and later, on a barstool at Antiguo Bar Inglés, armed with a pisco sour, he’d whiled away the time watching domino players assault the tables with their game pieces. Nevertheless, he did not expect to find his wife home, already repacking a suitcase no less.

  “I’m leaving for Havana,” she replied.

  “Havana?”

  “You heard me. For three months.”

  The news startled him and made him envious. He saw himself strolling through Old Havana, listening to the din of voices and music that erupted from tenement buildings until dawn, spying shaded interiors of houses through open windows while people lazed in doorways on warm nights, redolent of rum and sweat. He knew that his wife was politically radical, and that she supported Allende’s government, but he would never have imagined that she could leave the country at such a decisive time, when the situation was “so complex,” in the words of Commander Camilo Prendes. And she was leaving for three months. He felt disappointed, threatened, and betrayed, despite the fact that he himself was also preparing for a trip.

  “Can you say what you’re going to do there? Chile is falling apart, and you’re wandering off to the Caribbean …”

  Ángela leaned all her weight on the suitcase, which refused to close, and said, “It’s a political mission.”

  “Political?”

  “Right.” She stared at him defiantly.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to prepare for what’s coming. I’m going to Punto Cero.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, tense and incredulous. Punto Cero was the military base where the Cuban government trained guerrilla fighters from all over the world. A shot rang out in the distance.

  “Are you crazy? You’re tired of inspecting factories, so now you’re becoming a guerrilla?” he protested. “Are we that bad off? Do you really think the Chilean military is some kind of operetta, like Batista’s? This isn’t the kind of army you can beat with three hundred bearded guys with guns and rifles. It’s irresponsible.”

  “Call it what you want, but that’s where I’m going. This government is going to be overthrown if we don’t defend it with weapons. The right is conspiring with Nixon and the military.”

  “What about that ‘No to Civil War’ slogan your party keeps proclaiming?”

  “There won’t be civil war if the enemy sees we’re prepared to win it. That’s precisely what the good old boys in the Party don’t understand.”

  He had to admit that his wife wasn’t the only one who thought this way. It was rumored that members of the Socialist Party, MAPU, MIR, and even the Christian Left and the Revolutionary Radical Youth, who had been moderate until recently, were now traveling to Havana for crash courses in military training. They were taught to shoot guns, leap over obstacles, climb ropes, make Molotov cocktails, and employ various tactics for attack and withdrawal, and then they took off from José Martí Airport on flights to Mexico City or Prague, taking long and winding routes back to their country. Punto Cero, at the outskirts of the capital, was one of the most prestigious and famous centers because its star instructor was the legendary Benigno, a commander who’d fought with Che Guevara in the mountains of Bolivia, and who had miraculously survived the siege carried out by Bolivian and American troops. And now it seemed that the communists, who until recently had faithfully defended the pacifist route to socialism that President Allende promoted, were also marching to Havana, only to return a few months later dressed in berets, olive-green jackets, and tall boots, with Caribbean accents, wild gesticulations, and cigars hanging from their mouths, as though they were the very commander in chief? As if all revolutionaries were required to become caricatures of Fidel Castro. These youths would return obsessed with iron and revolutionary theory, with the versatility of AK-47s, and the history of the Rebel Army, casting aside the Chilean political tradition and prepared to impose socialism with cries of “Homeland or death.” And now his wife was involved with all this …

  “I thought you’d talk to me before making such a significant decision,” he said, smoothing his mustache. He d
idn’t hide the tremor in his voice.

  Ángela crossed the room with her hands on her hips and paused in front of the window. Behind her, the city seemed less solid and real to Cayetano.

  “Our relationship can’t be fixed,” Ángela said coldly. “This separation will be good for us. Perhaps it would be best if you left Chile, where you’ve never made a place for yourself, and instead of returning to Miami, go back to your island to join the revolution. Here and in the United States you’ll always be a foreigner. There’s nothing worse than having no nation to call home.”

  “You know, this is too much. Now you not only don’t know what’s good for you, but you don’t know what’s good for me—or for the rest of the world,” he replied, stung. He was irritated by his wife’s impetuous vehemence, her tendency to make decisions hastily.

  “It’s better to have a mediocre time in your own country than a good time in a foreign one.”

  “Ángela, don’t try to run my life, especially not now.”

  “At least I’m honest.”

  “You’re accustomed to making decisions that affect the lives of others—in this case, mine.”

  “It’s just not working between us, Cayetano. Don’t kid yourself. What do you want me to say? Does my frankness bother you?”

  “I thank you for it. And as far as it not working between us, there’s no need for you to remind me. That’s why I don’t make a fuss when you leave the house for several days at a time. You live your life, I live mine.”

  “I’ll have you know, darling, that I’m out there doing political work, not having love affairs. Let’s be clear about that,” she shouted, impassioned.

  “I couldn’t care less what you’re doing, but don’t even think of sending me off to Havana. If our marriage is completely broken, then I’ll decide what I do and where the hell I go.”

  He had let himself be seduced by her words before. As a result he’d ended up in this very Valparaíso house. Before that, he was living tranquilly in Hialeah, which, if it wasn’t Havana, at least had a climate and fauna similar to Cuba’s that inspired in him a perpetual nostalgia for the island. It was strange. Cubans loved their island, but from a distance, while Chileans suffered in their own country but refused to leave it or change for anything in the world. And since he’d fallen in love with Ángela in the United States and become convinced it would be a good idea to participate in Allende’s revolutionary process, he’d followed her to Chile, in March of 1971. At that time, the revolution was running smoothly, Chileans were full of hope, the world celebrated their government’s efforts, while he himself enjoyed the enthusiasm that had swept the nation and heralded a new beginning. He wasn’t acquainted with the socialism of the island, and in Florida he’d become accustomed to enjoying Cuban culture and character through newspapers and radio stations run by exiles, making up for his lack of actual Cuban experiences with the pranks that memory can play. He wasn’t all that familiar with the tropical revolution that Ángela supported so enthusiastically from a distance, and now he was in a nation that wasn’t his own, in which he’d arrived through a curious mix of love and politics. Chile was diametrically opposed to his native island, with winters that cracked the lips and presaged the end of the world; with its profoundly grave and solemn people, so far from the whimsical irreverence of the Caribbean; with an ethic of work and sacrifice unheard of on Cuba, the island of the never-ending party. In the Southern Cone, he concluded sadly, life was taken as seriously as in Frederick the Great’s Prussia. No, he wouldn’t take his wife’s advice again. She might be very refined and delicate, conscious of the injustices and inequities of life, a graduate of La Maisonette and gringo colleges, an experienced skier and equestrian, the daughter of a family with land in Colchagua and company stocks, but he would not obey her. He was done with being a sheep, bowing down to a woman who lived off an allowance from her capitalist father but at the same time had no qualms about backing the expropriation of his properties. He’d never again take her advice; it had brought him only misfortune. From now on he’d do whatever called to him.

  “You should go to Cuba, live there, soak up the revolution,” Ángela insisted. The wooden floorboards creaked under her moccasins. Next to the still-open suitcase lay a bottle of Chanel No. 5, and a silk Hermès scarf poked out between the zippers.

  “What you’re saying shows how much you don’t know me. What I long for most is independence, for God’s sake, to be the way I was in Hialeah and Cayo Hueso. Here I can’t even get a damn job.”

  “I’ve already told you, something could show up any moment—”

  “That’s ancient history. It’s June of 1973 and I’m still waiting, driving the car your daddy gave you, in the house he pays for, with both of us putting food on the table from his wallet. That dependence is what killed our love.”

  “Killed, you said?”

  “Yes, killed.”

  “So you’re throwing away what we had.”

  “You threw it away already.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you over nonsense,” she retorted as she tried yet again, and without success, to stuff the Hermès scarf into a corner of the suitcase. “I’m leaving for Cuba tonight, and that’s it. Better that we talk about all this when I return. This is no time for petit bourgeois arguments, Cayetano. It’s the moment of truth!”

  11

  He heard the breaking news flash at Alí Babá, on Radio Magallanes, and heard the musical gunshots in the background. The reporter spoke from the center of the capital, where the Tacna Regiment had risen up against Salvador Allende’s government and was advancing toward the presidential palace, La Moneda. The attempted coup came live and direct over the radio, like in the American movies, turning the country into a passive spectator. Seated next to the window, as though refusing to admit the danger that was taking place outside, Cayetano drank his steaming cup of coffee and waited for the poet to walk down Collado Way toward his house, so that he could say good-bye.

  “The rebel is a certain Colonel Souper,” Hadad commented, drying his hands on his apron. “Now everything is really going to shit.”

  The reporters shouted over the fray to make themselves heard, describing the tank movement of that primary Chilean regiment as it moved into Santiago toward La Moneda. Another journalist called on the people to remain calm in their factories, rural towns, ports, offices, and universities. President Allende, another reporter said from a mobile post in Barrio Alto, had left his residence on Tomás Moro Street, and was advancing toward La Moneda as quickly as he could, with his bodyguards in a caravan of blue Fiat 125S. He planned to stop the coup.

  “What about the military men on Allende’s side?” Cayetano asked Hadad, who was gazing pensively through the window at the Mauri Theater, where stray dogs were resting. Collado lay before them, dirty and deserted. “Because if the president himself has to go out to face traitors in this country, then we really are screwed, my friend.”

  “It seems that not all the military squadrons are backing Souper,” Hadad said.

  Cayetano lit a cigarette. “Is that right? How do you know?”

  Outside, life continued as though nothing had changed, he thought, worried, exhaling a voluminous column of smoke. That is to say, life continued mutely, without echoes or shrillness, without impassioned people coming out to protest what was happening in Santiago. A thick mist began to obscure the city, and to Cayetano it seemed a terrible omen. He felt a screw come loose in his soul. Where was his wife now? In some safe house in Santiago, prepared to take up arms for her government, or in the sticky heat of Havana already, in an olive-green uniform, crawling through mud with a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder?

  A communiqué from the party committee of Unidad Popular announced that the government would shortly give instructions for facing down the coup’s perpetrators, and that for the moment Chileans should stay alert and ready for war in their schools and workplaces. According to the journalists, Allende was still heading downtown through morni
ng traffic, on an interminable, winding journey, after which he would address the nation. What use was this call for calm to an unemployed foreigner like him? Cayetano wondered. Should he run off to the Hucke factory, where he’d stood guard a few nights earlier, and place himself at the disposal of Commander Camilo Prendes? Then what? Go out and face down armed soldiers, armored tanks, and the officials who’d been conspiring against democracy since Allende had arrived at La Moneda, if Ángela was to be believed? Face them with what? With the bamboo cane he’d been offered at Hucke, or with slingshots, stones, and nunchucks?

  Two trucks passed down Alemania Avenue, carrying workers waving red and green flags, sympathizers with the popular government who seemed in a hurry to get somewhere. In Collado Way, however, the dogs were still curled up under the theater marquee, and there were no signs of the poet. Maybe he was still in the hospital? Would the doctors attend to him this week, or would the attempted coup distract them? He felt impotent. The situation scared him: a rebel colonel in the capital, Ángela about to leave for Cuba, their marriage on the rocks, the poet sick, and him charged with the mission of finding the only doctor who could save him. He feared that sedition was spreading through the country like the malignant cells in the poet’s body.

  He had no choice but to stay in Alí Babá, with the disheartening sense that he was a mere spectator. His wife was right. Being a foreigner was the worst. Better to suffer misfortune in your homeland than to have only a passable time overseas. He ordered another coffee from Hadad, and as the man filled the small coffeemaker with grounds and grumbled to himself behind the bar, a new radio dispatch began. This time, the reporter announced, in a hoarse, truculent voice like those sometimes heard on afternoon radio theater, that now General Carlos Prats, the army chief, was marching, pistol in hand, into the center of the capital to quash the rebellion. Whom would the rest of the armed forces support? the alarmed journalist asked himself amid shouts and blaring horns. Three coffees later, the tension waned. Souper surrendered, the radio now announced. Order and tranquillity were restored, the pro-government station celebrated Prats as a hero, and it was said that Allende was back in his office at La Moneda, in command of the nation from Arica to Magallanes, including the Easter Islands and Robinson Crusoe Island. The leftist parties immediately called a rally in front of the presidential palace for that afternoon, and “La Batea,” the catchy song by the band Quilapayún, began to cheer up the day with its Caribbean rhythm. People walked on Alemania Avenue once more, cars and buses reappeared, Alí Babá filled up with happy patrons, and the city was bursting with life.