The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

“When did he die?” he asked, looking down.

  “At least fifteen years ago.”

  The poet bit his lips and passed a nervous hand over his face. They remained silent, pensive, listening to the crackle of the fire and the caw of gulls as they glided around the house. As the birds flew toward the bay, they formed white crosses that slid against the vault of the sky. For a long time the poet watched them, as though they contained the answer to his search, and as though he smelled the intense perfume of distant eucalyptus.

  “I feared as much,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Don Pablo. I did everything I could. Would you like the details?”

  “What did I hire you for, Cayetano, if not so you could find out and tell me everything?”

  “It isn’t much,” he said, adjusting his glasses as he stood in the middle of the living room, which now seemed as large as an ocean. “Some remember him as a romantic. Others as a visionary unable to realize his dream. And there are those who believe he wasted his life’s work by not leaving written evidence of his research.”

  “He didn’t even leave disciples?”

  “Not a single page of notes, Don Pablo.”

  The poet shook his head several times and muttered something unintelligible. Cayetano had the feeling that during his absence Neruda’s cheeks had become bluer. He sat down on the floral-print armchair across from the poet, quietly, without making the floorboards creak.

  “I did what I could, Don Pablo.”

  “Bracamonte may have been nothing more than an angel who sought to delay death. But it didn’t work. Perhaps it’s better this way,” the poet murmured in resignation. “It would be terrible if we were immortal. There can’t be anything more boring than eternity. Life would become a torment in later years.” Beneath his philosophical tone lay certain rancor toward the reality of death. “Did you at least find his wife?”

  “In a way.”

  Now he changed his position and attitude, as though trying to shed his sadness over the news.

  “What the hell does ‘in a way’ mean?” he cried in irritation, imitating Cayetano’s tone. “Now you’re going to talk like the doctors and Matilde? You think I’m an idiot who’ll buy anything you say? Did you see her or not?”

  Cayetano suddenly felt a cold current seeping in through the window, and he wondered how it felt to the poet, whether the cold of death was different from the cold of winter.

  “I couldn’t find her,” he explained. “Her name is Beatriz, but nobody knows her maiden name.”

  The poet looked at his hands. “I met her as Bracamonte’s wife, and you know what an old man’s memory is like? Pure fog.”

  Was Don Pablo hiding something? Cayetano wasn’t getting paid to play psychologist. He decided to press forward with his own information. “It seems she lives in Cuba …”

  The poet frowned in surprise. “In Cuba? Since when?”

  “Since around 1960. She left Mexico when she was already a widow, according to an acquaintance.”

  “She had children with the doctor, right?”

  “A daughter. Tina.”

  The poet’s large brown eyes grew more alert, as they always did when he was talking about women. Cayetano already knew this expression, with its fleeting, youthful glow. “A young woman, then. How old?”

  “She was a teenager in the early sixties. So today she should be around thirty.”

  “Curious,” he said, passing his hand over the moles on his cheek. “In 1960, I was also on the island. I spoke with Fidel. He didn’t like that poem where I say that revolution is made not by leaders but by the people. Some writers and poets, recently converted communists, attacked me for it. They, who’d never once gotten their hands dirty for socialism, accused me, a lifelong communist, of not being a true revolutionary. … In any case, young man, you can’t give up the search for Beatriz Bracamonte.”

  Once again he sensed that Don Pablo was acting, as though he were hiding beneath another disguise, one that didn’t hang in the top-floor closet but that he kept inside, under his skin. Could he be even more ill than Cayetano had believed, and hiding his despondency? He needed to tread lightly.

  “Beatriz is probably in Cuba, Don Pablo. But I doubt she has the information you need. She taught German and manners at a girls’ school in Mexico.”

  “Manners, now that I don’t believe. Who cares about manners these days? German, more likely. She had a lot of German in her. It’s incredible that I can’t remember all her last names, but she was definitely half German.”

  “But if she taught German …”

  “What?”

  “She probably knows very little about plants that cure cancer.”

  He had said the cursed word. But the poet was not afraid of words.

  “What do you know? Women are the ones who taught me everything, starting with my grandmother Trinidad, who raised me after my biological mother died. Without her, I wouldn’t be who I am, Cayetano,” he affirmed with a sudden spark in his eyes. “If there’s anyone who can help me now, young man, it’s Beatriz, widow of Bracamonte. You have to find her, and now I’m going to tell you why.”

  21

  They went for a walk on Alemania Avenue, despite the poet’s exhaustion. He was the one who wanted to go out so they could breathe the clear, cold afternoon air and take in the bay as they talked. They walked past Alí Babá and the Mauri Theater, whose marquee read “The 39 Steps,” and passed Yerbas Buenas Hill with its Oriental banana trees, still without leaves, and Guillermo Rivera, with its grocers on three corners, and then they arrived at San Juan de Dios Hill, with its English architecture, where Cayetano lived. Echoes of cranes and metal rose from the port, as well as a briny aroma that comforted the poet.

  “You have no choice but to travel to Cuba,” he said as they sat down on stone steps that rose toward the houses. A few dogs dozed beside a kiosk selling bread and soda, where a sign announced that there was no butter left. Farther on, some children glided down the street on a chancha, a board with small steel wheels tacked on by hand, as the sun drew warm brilliance from the pavement.

  “You want me to travel to Cuba?”

  “Without anyone finding out why, mind you.” The poet adjusted his cap, tipping it lightly over his eyebrows so that he wouldn’t be recognized.

  “But, in that case, you believe Beatriz Bracamonte can help you?”

  “I am sure of it.”

  “Then I’m more confused than ever.”

  They watched the children hide their chancha under a car the moment a military jeep passed on Alemania Avenue.

  “It’s not for medicinal plants that I need you to find Beatriz,” the poet said, studying the soldiers in the back of the vehicle, with their bayonets.

  “No? Then for what?” So Don Pablo had been hiding something, after all. He didn’t only toy with words according to his art, but also hid behind them as a way of toying with people. Laura Aréstegui was right. His budding detective’s intuition had not misled him.

  The poet gazed at the thick soles of his brown shoes and said nothing. Seated on a staircase, far from La Nube, which awaited him by the warmth of a lit fireplace, Neruda was now an anonymous, helpless person. A Plazuela Ecuador bus stopped in front of them, and out stepped a handsome woman, middle-aged and poised, along with her husband, who had a mustache and wore a suit and tie, and a gangly, long-haired young man wearing the amaranth-colored shirt of the Communist Youth.

  “How are you, Don Roberto and Doña Angélica?” Cayetano called out.

  They were neighbors of his, calm and amiable people. The man sympathized with Allende even though he worked at a traditional shipping business, Pacific Steam Navigation Company. Sometimes Angélica invited neighbors over for piure empanadas, made from that strange Chilean fish, that were good enough to make you suck on your mustache, or for a memorable cochayuyo salad, and on very rainy afternoons she fried up sopaipilla pastries and served them with Paita-style chancaca syrup, the best version of the dish Cayetano had e
ver tasted. In the spring, she cultivated roses from Wales and tulips from Amsterdam, which flourished as though her garden were in Europe, while her husband spent his free time carefully constructing marvelous replicas of English boats inside glass bottles.

  “We’re like the weather. How are you and the missus?” Don Roberto answered, smiling at the poet as well.

  “I’m getting by, as always, and my wife is traveling.”

  “Well, if you like, stop by soon for a bite to eat. To take the edge off your solitude,” Don Roberto said. Addressing the poet, he added, “By the way, my son is on a path similar to yours: he belongs to the same party and he wants to be a writer.”

  “What do you write, young man?” the poet asked. “Poems?”

  The son blushed thoroughly at the question.

  “Stories, Don Pablo,” he said in a tremulous voice. “One day I’ll write a novel.”

  “Just as well,” the poet said, with mock solemnity. “In this country there are poets under every rock, growing like mushrooms. It’s high time for some novelists. When you write your novel, include what I just told you. But don’t forget. Do you promise?”

  “I promise, Don Pablo.”

  The family kept walking up the steps of Marina Mercante as the bus disappeared up Alemania Avenue, spitting smoke from its exhaust pipe. Cayetano and the poet were alone again. They stayed silent awhile, watching El Poderoso, the legendary tugboat of Valparaíso, as it cleaved the waters of the bay.

  “Now, listen closely, because what I have to say is extremely important,” the poet continued, leaning his elbows on his knees. “You have to find Beatriz Bracamonte, any way you can. From this momenton, it’s your main mission. What I need most at this stage of my life is that you find her and tell her—”

  Don Pablo stopped short.

  “Tell her what?”

  The poet studied the shine of his shoes and scratched an eyebrow, doubtful, uneasy, looking at Cayetano sideways.

  “You want me to tell her what, Don Pablo?”

  “That I want to know …no, more accurately, I need to know …”

  “Come on, Don Pablo. Today it seems like words have to be pulled from you like teeth.”

  The poet ended his sentence in a low voice, befitting a secret. “That I want to know whether the girl born in 1943 is my daughter.”

  Cayetano felt as if he were falling from a cloud. “What?”

  “Just as you heard it,” he said with determination. “And don’t act scandalized. One day you’ll have a similar experience yourself. I’ve already told you that life is a carnival, full of disguises and surprises.”

  Cayetano quickly put two and two together. Was he talking about Tina? If Tina was a teenager in 1960, the dates fit all too well. It must be her. He felt his way. “But didn’t you tell me that Beatriz was married to Ángel Bracamonte, Don Pablo?”

  “What, were you brought into the world by a stork from Paris? Were you born this way or did you become dense here in Chile?”

  He had caught the poet at fault. He lingered on the topic, not without cunning. “Let’s see, let’s see …so you’re the father of the daughter of Ángel Bracamonte’s wife?”

  “That’s what I suspect, and what you need to confirm,” the poet answered, sulking.

  “Well, that really takes the cake, Don Pablo.”

  The poet ignored him. He murmured something indistinguishable.

  “‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura … Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood. …’”

  “What did you say?”

  “It’s Italian. The words of Dante Alighieri. When you’re old, you’ll understand me. What Dante wrote is inextricably related to all our lives. The problem is that we don’t realize it until it’s too late.”

  Again with the lessons. In this new occupation as detective, Don Pablo was turning bossy; Cayetano rebelled.

  “So all that about looking for Ángel Bracamonte was just an excuse?”

  “It was a way of getting close to her and also of testing you, my friend. Now I at least know that you’re discreet, and that you have the right fingers for the piano of detective work.”

  He was still playing with metaphors, images, pretty words. Poets. Now Cayetano understood why people didn’t trust them. He didn’t back down. “Whatever you call it, you really took me for a ride. That much is clear, Don Pablo.” Although he was still reproachful, he made his words gentler, almost conciliatory.

  “Let’s just say all that matters is for you to find Beatriz and ask her whether that girl, the one born in 1943 while she was married to Ángel, is his or mine.”

  End of conversation. The poet stood up and stared at the bay, which was at rest, so much so that it resembled a great plate of liquid mercury. Cayetano came to his side and cautiously resumed the conversation.

  “So you had an affair with the doctor’s wife?”

  Don Pablo became approachable again. “Cayetano, in my life I have had many lovers. Without them I would not have written poetry. Or do you think poems come out of thin air?”

  “From poetic inspiration, I thought.”

  “From life. They come from your life, Cayetano. From your longings and plans, your failures, insomnias, and frustrations, and they’re created by a profound and hidden part of ourselves, a region of the soul whose location I have yet to find, and then, well, then, as I said to you the other day, they end up pouring onto the page.”

  “Or onto your leather footstool, which, I’m sorry to say, is quite stained with green ink, Don Pablo.”

  Cayetano rooted through his jacket for cigarettes, but couldn’t find one. A Paul Anka song rose from the kiosk, its lyrics speaking of absence and distance and reminding him vaguely of the Havana of his childhood, at dusk. The woman at the kiosk had just hung out another cardboard sign, written by hand, announcing that she had also run out of cigarettes and firewood. The shortage, he thought, was another cancer.

  “Everyone believes that I had only one child: poor Malva Marina,” mumbled the poet. They began to descend the steps. In the distance, the children were still riding the chancha. “I awaited her with tender impatience, Cayetano, but when I saw that enormous head for the first time, attached to that tiny baby’s body, I was terrified, I didn’t want to believe it. I asked myself why the hell this had to happen to me of all people, when all I dreamed of was having a baby. She was a girl with light, sweet eyes, a snub nose, and a delicate smile. I tried to convince myself that time would adjust her proportions, and I refused to believe that I was fooling myself, but hydrocephalus has no cure, Cayetano. I left Malva Marina and her mother to end my own suffering, because if I stayed tormented like that, I would never be able to write the poems I wanted to write, and have now written. Do you understand?”

  Cayetano didn’t know what to say. It started to drizzle. The corrugated iron roofs lost their shine and muffled the echoes of the city. The dense Pacific rocked all the way to the horizon. What could he say? The disclosure discomfited him; he was saddened by the poet’s pain and terrified of disappointing him. At the same time, he found his argument paltry and unconvincing, of having sacrificed wife and daughter in the name of work that he would have created anyway, that already flowed vigorously from his pen when the girl was born. But perhaps, in recent weeks, he’d been slowly conquered by the artist’s distrustful spirit and his poorly concealed vulnerability. He told himself that he should be more tolerant, that maybe, as the poet claimed, he himself was still young and there were many things in life that he had yet to understand.

  “I realize some things are inexplicable, such as my leaving those women,” the poet continued. “I’ve fled many times in my life. In fact, I’ve been a constant fugitive of my circumstances. I escaped from Josie Bliss, and then I left my little Malva Marina and her mother in Nazi-occupied Holland. What’s more, I used my diplomatic connections to keep them from evacuating to Chile with my compatriots.”

  A
t least he was learning how to handle the self-mythologizing the poet resorted to when confessing the unconfessable. Cayetano asked a single question. “Why?”

  “Simply because I feared that, in Chile, they would make my life impossible …”

  It was too much. He was pained by the surprising contempt he felt for this man whom he had, until now, admired more each day. Better to set up a boundary and keep the bitter portion from eating up the sweetness, from devouring the whole cake.

  “Perhaps we should go back, Don Pablo,” he suggested sadly.

  “The casualties of our good fortune are a terrible thing, Cayetano. But the road to personal happiness is paved with the pain of others.”

  Cayetano thought that these mottoes brought solace to no one, but kept that opinion to himself. Had he let himself be taken in? Then he should grin and bear it. They made their way back, winding through the high parts of Valparaíso, past houses with sweeping views from their terraces and picture windows. The poet’s house, a polychrome pyramid in the distance beside the Mauri Theater, stood out against the backdrop of the city. He was suddenly tempted to drop the case, along with his new line of work, but at the same time he realized that he couldn’t. He was another man now: he was the detective to whom Pablo Neruda had given birth.

  “So how did it end with Beatriz, Don Pablo?” he dared ask.

  “I broke it off when I found out she was pregnant.”

  He understood that, in this new occupation, he had to be ready for anything. People would attack or defend themselves with anything. And he couldn’t fear words, however difficult they might seem: paradoxically, it was difficulty that opened investigative roads.

  “You abandoned her?” he asked, to clarify.

  “I got scared. Haven’t you ever been afraid in your life? I thought destiny was mocking me again, and had laid out a trap. It was a brief, passionate love. She was in her twenties, with a husband in his forties. We met in secret at a little hotel beside Café Tacuba, near Zócalo Plaza, and sometimes in her house, while Ángel was at work.”

  “You haven’t spoken to her since?”