The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  “I have to find Dr. Bracamonte. It’s a matter of life and death,” he insisted gravely, placing the cup back on the tray. “He researched cures for cancer in plants from Chiapas. Only you can help me.”

  “We should try another approach.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In addition to poring through files, it would be helpful to find a doctor who practiced in those days. Someone must remember Bracamonte. Over the next few days, I can make some calls.”

  “Over the next few days, you say? I don’t have that kind of time, Mónica. That is to say, the ill person …you understand.”

  “I do,” she said, and lowered her gaze. “Four years ago, that same illness took my mother. It dried her up until she was left with nothing but pain and bones. My mother was a saint, and, poor thing, what she suffered.”

  “I’m truly sorry, Mónica.” He paused, stroked his mustache, and waited for the woman to regain her calm. “Could you help me as soon as possible?”

  “Tomorrow you can look through the records yourself. My boss won’t be here, so you can peruse them freely,” she added softly, her eyes damp.

  “And you’ll ask around among retired doctors?”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “And you’ll definitely let me into the records?”

  Mónica let out a sigh, surprised at her own sudden willingness to comply with this stranger. “But don’t get your hopes up,” she added. “There’s terrible chaos in there, and not all doctors register with the association. But, as my mother would say, may she rest in peace, there’s no worse step than the one you don’t take.”

  14

  It didn’t take him long to see how hard it would be to find anything on Bracamonte in that dim, windowless room, which stored not only dusty files but also teleprinter rolls, accounting books, and discarded furniture. The dry air irritated his throat and forced him to retreat from the battlefield and return to Mónica’s office.

  “If the doctor was around forty years old in the 1940s, then he should be about seventy today,” she calculated. “Nobody lasts that long in our city. Did you find anything?”

  “Nothing.” He snorted in frustration and sat down across from the secretary. “Didn’t you say you’d consult with some doctors he might have worked with?”

  “I’LL DO IT THIS AFTERNOON, as soon as I finish some urgent business, Mr. Brulé. I’m being pressed by a lawyer called Hugo Bertolotto, who’s determined to update even the General Archive of Simancas. But to return to your matter, there’s something that worries me.”

  “What?”

  “If you’re looking for a supposedly well-known doctor, and the name doesn’t ring a bell to me or anyone else in this office, it can only mean …”

  “That the doctor is dead?”

  “Or that he simply never registered as a doctor with the association.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That his research never succeeded, and that’s why no one’s heard of him.”

  “A charlatan?” he asked, discouraged. If that was true, the poet would have no cure and was wasting his time with this quasi–detective search.

  “Maybe. Didn’t you say he cured cancer?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Well, if he was a doctor and that was his work, it’s strange that no one remembers him, don’t you think?”

  He imagined the poet seated in his armchair, La Nube, among books and newspapers, trying to compose his memoirs, placing his hopes in what he, Cayetano, was now doing in Mexico. The poet hated seeing himself as a fragile, sick old man, an impotent witness to how reactionaries cornered his friend Allende’s government, and how illness invaded his body. First the French doctors’ treatment had failed, then the Soviet specialists’ attempt, and here, though he didn’t know it yet, was the collapse of his final hope, which he’d placed in a Cuban doctor who had told Neruda decades before that he could conquer cancer with medicinal plants.

  “Maybe Bracamonte left Mexico City a long time ago, and that’s why no one remembers him,” he mumbled. “He could be in a Yucatecan town, or perhaps in the United States, like so many others.”

  “Let’s not jump the gun here,” Mónica said. “Are you sure he was Cuban?”

  He left the office with the secretary’s phone number in his pocket and an agreement to have dinner together the following night in a restaurant downtown. He liked the woman, her delicacy, which rose effortlessly from her gestures, from her gaze, and from within her. Being a detective wasn’t so easy, after all, he thought. Maigret sometimes took days to fully launch his investigations. But he shouldn’t place too much trust in the fictional detective. Even if he braved the underworld and greased his relationships with informants, Maigret could never accomplish anything in a region as chaotic, improvised, and unpredictable as Latin America. Just like the gentleman Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, Maigret could investigate his heart out in stable and organized nations like the United States and France, where a rational philosophy reigned over the people, rules and clear laws prevailed, logic shaped daily life, and solid, prestigious institutions and an efficient police force worked to ensure respect for the law. On the other hand, in Latin America—where improvisation, randomness, corruption, and venality were the order of the day—everything was possible. In a place where a communist nation coexisted with modern capitalist cities, feudally exploitative if not enslaving plantations, and jungles where history had frozen in the times of the cavemen, European detectives weren’t worth a thing. It was that brutally simple. In those Amazonian, Andean, or Caribbean worlds, detectives such as Dupin, Holmes, or Poirot would find their dazzling deductive powers failing to clear matters up. The crux of the problem was that the North’s logic simply didn’t apply in Latin America. Nor would Miss Marple, Marlowe, or Sam Spade find any success.

  Detectives are like wine, Cayetano thought, like wine, rum, tequila or beer, children of their own land and climate, and anyone who forgot this would inevitably fail. Could anyone imagine Philip Marlowe in front of the cathedral in Havana? The two o’clock sun would burn his skin, and he’d be stripped of his hat and raincoat without realizing it. Or Miss Marple, walking with the slow, distinguished pace of an elderly lady, through downtown Lima? She’d get drunk off the first ceviche she tried, and sinister cabdrivers would stray from their route to the airport to a hovel where delinquents crouched in wait. They wouldn’t even find her well-crafted dentures. And how about the affected Hercule Poirot crossing Cardonal Market in Valparaíso with his tight rump and white-gloved hands? They’d steal his walking stick, his pocket watch with its gold chain, and even his bowler hat. People would mock them to their face, stray dogs would chase them with their fangs bared, and street kids would throw rocks at them without mercy. He now began to suspect that Simenon’s novels, while pleasant and entertaining, could not make him a detective in the world south of the Rio Grande. The poet was wrong. A Maigret was incapable of taming the bursting, capacious reality of Latin America. It would be like telling Bienvenido Granda to sing Franz Schubert’s Lieder in the bars of Managua or Tegucigalpa instead of boleros, or making Celia Cruz imitate María Callas at a jam session on Eighth Street. The tangled files of the Mexican Medical Association alone would pose an insurmountable, maddening challenge to the structured brains of Holmes, Maigret, and Marlowe, accustomed as they were to scrupulously perusing organized files in the silent amplitude of rooms in prestigious institutions, ensconced in stately buildings with parquet floors, chandeliers, and sumptuous drapes.

  He took a crocodile taxi toward the Excelsior. At least he’d get to have dinner with Mónica Salvat. Hopefully, he’d find an experienced journalist and functional filing system at the newspaper, he thought as he passed Chapultepec Forest, nineteenth-century façades, and the scaffolding of buildings under construction. Mexico City teemed. It seemed to be dying and being born at the same time, as though it lamented the loss of tranquility and ancient edifices, and yet celebrated modernity, long
ed for it. Street vendors filled the central streets, where people in modern dress walked, as did women in indigenous clothing and men in jeans and hats, like extras from a Luis Aguilar film. From where he sat, behind the Chrysler’s window, the city seemed to break apart into scenes both modern and traditional, as contradictory as disparate fragments. He speculated that Bracamonte could well be strolling with his miraculous concoctions through that motley Mexico City throng, although he could also be walking around Havana with his chest covered in revolutionary medals. Or perhaps he lived on a beach with turquoise water in Quintana Roo, in a cabin sheltered by the shade of many trees, like the cabin of which he and Ángela had dreamed when they were still in love. The truth was, Bracamonte could be wandering anywhere and at the same time nowhere. He might even be dead, he thought as the taxi turned around Zócalo, with its giant Mexican flag.

  15

  Ángel Bracamonte, oncologist?” Luis Cervantes asked with a frown.

  The reporter had thick ears and lips, and rosy cheeks and nose, like a rubber doll. That is, a sixty-year-old doll that typed in an office with stained walls, dirty windows, and faded curtains.

  “In the forties. Mexico City. He was researching the medicinal properties of plants in Chiapas. He must have been well-known,” Cayetano Brulé added, to jog his memory.

  “Mexican?”

  “A semi-Mexican Cuban.”

  Cervantes ran his hands over his typewriter. He looked uncertain. Despite his prodigious memory, he remembered no one with that name. Not all doctors were celebrities in Mexico, as they could be elsewhere, Cayetano thought. In Mexico there were even some who lived precariously close to impoverished Zócalo, especially those who, loyal to their Hippocratic oath, devoted themselves to serving the poor in marginalized neighborhoods, ministering to patients who might never have felt the cold pressure of a stethoscope on their chest.

  “And you’ll have to forgive me,” Cervantes said, “but I doubt this person was a doctor if he specialized in medicinal plants. It sounds more like the work of shamans or witch doctors than a gentleman who’d invested years at the university. Are you sure he was a doctor?”

  In fact, he had not considered this possibility. He had turned certain things over many times in his mind, and considered the options, but had not imagined that the poet could have mistaken an herbalist for a doctor thirty years ago. But why not? When he couldn’t even remember Ángel Bracamonte’s second last name. Of course, the poet was not a man concerned with practical details; he cared a great deal about poetic details, but these were another matter altogether. Cayetano supposed that the reporter had no intention of helping him. In Mexico, Mónica had warned him, a yes often meant no, and a no often meant “depends.” Unlike the Medical Association secretary, the unobliging Cervantes seemed bothered by Cayetano’s presence.

  “To be perfectly frank,” the journalist continued, “I’ve never really liked Cubans, since one of them stole my girlfriend in college.”

  “Then we’re even. A Mexican took the love of my life in Miami. That is, the woman I thought would be the love of my life,” Cayetano Brulé said, thinking fast, like Roy Rogers in the comic books of his childhood. “But I don’t resent Mexico for it. Who knows, he may even have done me a favor.”

  The journalist gazed thoughtfully at the street, as though watching his old girlfriend pass by the window. Cayetano wondered whether the man was right, and Ángel Bracamonte was no doctor, but rather someone who proclaimed his art to be a science, closer to the herbalists who hawked near the cathedral than to surgeons. Perhaps the illness was damaging the poet’s memory. But it could also be a defense mechanism. If modern medicine could no longer save him, as the oncologists of Paris and Moscow had already made clear, then it was perfectly understandable that the poet would seek out a shaman in the hope of eluding death for a little while longer.

  “Isn’t there any way to find this guy?” he asked, picking up the thread of conversation. “I’ve been assigned to write about him for a Chilean newspaper.”

  “And those poor Chileans, with everything they’re going through, have time to worry about some charlatan?”

  “I ask you to consider one thing: Bracamonte’s plants could save dying people in Chile.”

  “I’m sorry. Everything is possible, you never know,” Cervantes acknowledged thoughtfully, as though Cayetano’s words had moved him deeply. “I have an assistant who’s quite bright and who may be able to help you. If we find anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “I’d greatly appreciate your contacting me at my hotel, or through Mónica Salvat, of the Medical Association. Can I trust you?”

  “Completely.”

  “Are you sure? Here people often say yes just to keep people calm.”

  “Where does that happen?”

  “Here in Mexico, or so I’ve heard.”

  “Really. Well, that all depends, sir. In any case, you can count on me.”

  “I truly thank you. Many readers will feel their spirits lift when they find out Ángel Bracamonte is still alive.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m on the case. But first, tell me this: How exactly did that compatriot of mine steal the love of your life?”

  MARÍA

  ANTONIETA

  16

  What do you think about this?” asked Mónica Salvat.

  In the din of Taquería El Encanto, in the Zona Rosa, they had just ordered Yucatecan penachos and three beverages each: tequila, sangria, and lemonade. A trio was playing a bolero for a table of outrageous, drunk North Americans in Hawaiian shirts who were roaring with laughter. Cayetano glanced at the newspaper clipping Mónica held. It was a typical photograph of diplomatic receptions, the kind that usually appeared in the social pages. In it, four men and three women smiled at the camera.

  “Relatives of yours?” asked Cayetano. On the walk to the restaurant, Mónica had told him about her Russian immigrant mother, her Mexican father, and her upbringing in Coyoacán, near the house where Ramón Mercader had murdered Leon Trotsky with an ice pick.

  “You see the man in the suit and bow tie?” she asked.

  “Is that your father?”

  “That’s Ángel Bracamonte. At the home of the Cuban ambassador, October tenth, 1941.”

  Cayetano took a closer look at the clipping. He studied the features of the man at the center of the group, which dissolved into infinite dots as he raised the page toward his glasses. He made out a gaunt face, large and tired eyes, receding gray hair, and a thick mustache. This was the man the poet was looking for, he said to himself, trying to contain his excitement.

  “Where did you find this?”

  “Cervantes, the reporter, gave it to me. The text doesn’t refer to Bracamonte as a doctor, and, what’s worse, his name isn’t in the association’s register. Either he never joined, or he wasn’t a doctor. But there you have it. He exists. He’s not a phantom. Cervantes found this in the social pages of a magazine that came out around that time.”

  “Do I owe him anything?” he asked, without taking his eyes off Bracamonte’s face.

  “He’ll be fine with a couple of books from the publisher Quimantú and a bottle of Chilean red wine.”

  “I’ll send him all of that, don’t worry. How did he find the photo?”

  “Looking through the celebrations for the National Day of Cuba.”

  “And where is Bracamonte now?” He drained the glass of tequila, then drank the sangria so that the tequila wouldn’t sting his insides. He felt like celebrating. This Mexican night was turning out to be perfect.

  “We don’t know. But at least you know the face of the man you’re looking for.” The trio was now singing “Nosotros.” Mónica added, “And we know he may not have been a doctor.”

  Suddenly he was flooded with worry. If Bracamonte was one of those charlatans who traveled around Latin America promising miracle cures, the poet would be devastated. A waiter refilled his tequila glass. “Do you know anything about the people around him?”


  The women had Rita Hayworth hairstyles and gleamed in low-cut dresses. They seemed sure of themselves and their lives. The men were smiling, sporting dark suits, with a wineglass or Cuban cigar in hand. They were all older, except for the young woman next to Bracamonte.

  “His daughter?” asked Cayetano.

  “His wife. She must be about twenty years old there. She looks like his granddaughter. At this point she’s probably in her fifties. Impossible to find her, since we don’t know her maiden name. Your friend doesn’t remember a Beatriz?”

  “My friend knew the doctor, but I don’t think he knew his wife.”

  Beatriz had light-colored hair, which she wore pulled back, and a melancholy gaze. She looked like a ballet dancer. She was by far the youngest and most beautiful member of the group, the least arrogant, and, judging by her jewelry, Cayetano thought, also the simplest.

  “Did you take a good look at the caption?” asked Mónica.

  “The gentlemen are identified by first and last name, the ladies only by first name. They’re celebrating the National Day of Cuba.”

  “You missed that it also describes an upcoming dinner to benefit a foundation against cancer …”

  “Then it must be him,” Cayetano exclaimed, rereading the text. “This man has to be the Dr. Ángel Bracamonte I’m looking for! Mónica, you’re a genius. Did you also find the phone number of the association?”

  “I tried, but it no longer exists.”

  That news hit him like a bucket of ice-cold water. He returned to his tequila.

  “Well, can’t we find the other people in the photo?” he asked, with a resurgence of hope.

  “They’re dead. Except for the woman on the edge.” Her finger landed on the photo. “She’s the widow of Sebastián Alemán, the bald man on her right, a major stockholder in the biggest beer brewery in the country. She’s still alive.”