The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  “I never wanted to see her again. I didn’t believe her when she said I was the one who got her pregnant. I didn’t want to be a father anymore. I was haunted by the grotesque nightmare of Malva Marina. I was happy then, with Delia del Carril, an older woman. She was rich and well connected, my fame was in full force, my poems were being read all over the world. What was I supposed to do with an unfaithful wife, carrying a potentially appalling baby in her womb, for whom I would be no good? That’s why I left her.”

  “My God, Don Pablo …”

  “Well? What do you want?”

  “I don’t know, I mean …something different …”

  “It seems that one never matures, Cayetano. That in the face of life one is always a shitty youth. And when you do reach maturity, it’s too late, because by that time you’re at death’s door. In my forties, I didn’t care whether or not I was the father. My work as a poet demanded all my time and effort. I wasn’t moved when I later found out Beatriz had given birth to a girl. I opted to eradicate that chapter of my life. Until now, Cayetano.”

  Now that the whole world recognized him as a sublime poet, that he was bathed in the light of admiration from every direction, the shadow of that old guilt had leaked in between the man and his fame, and could not be cleared away. Or could it? Cayetano felt compassion and responsibility: beyond the moral judgments that his first client—and creator—deserved was the fact that any hope of reparations depended on him. He had a mission to fulfill.

  And a time frame, as Don Pablo’s next words made clear.

  “None of this mattered to me until now, that I smell death.” His voice changed, sped up. “I already smelled it as a youth, you know. ‘Death is in the bed frames: in the slow mattresses, in the black blankets she lives, spread out, and suddenly blows: she blows a dark sound that swells sheets, and there are beds sailing toward a port / where she awaits, clothed as an admiral.’ Death clothed as an admiral, the one waiting for us all, yes, sure, I had smelled that one. But not my own, Cayetano! Not the real one, the one that counts! The naked one, who simply arrives without words and just adds up bodies—that one had yet to arrive.” He stopped beside a public school. The loud clamor of children at recess carried over the walls. “I want to know whether that daughter is mine or Ángel’s. Can I confess something else?” He paused and stared at Cayetano, serious, tense, a Neruda he did not know. “I need her to be my daughter!”

  The sudden emphasis made Cayetano doubt the poet’s lucidity.

  “Are you sure?” he said, to test him.

  “My women never gave me children. Not Josie Bliss, who was a tornado of jealousy, nor the Cyclops María Antonieta, who gave birth to a deformed being; nor did Delia del Carril, whose womb was dried up when I met her; nor Matilde, who had several miscarriages. I’ve had everything in life, Cayetano: friends, lovers, fame, money, prestige, they’ve even given me the Nobel Prize—but I never had a child. Beatriz is my last hope. It’s a hope I buried long ago. I’d give all my poetry in exchange for that daughter.” They resumed their walk through the drizzle as the children’s voices flowed and ebbed behind them. “Immortality is bestowed by children, Cayetano, not by books; by blood, not ink; by skin, and not by printed pages. That’s why you have to find out whether Beatriz’s daughter is mine. My friend, you have to go to Cuba, find Beatriz, and bring me the truth before the old woman with the scythe gets the best of me.”

  22

  María Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang entered my life at a British Country Club on the Island of Java, by a wide and sinuous river whose name I no longer recall. The breeze faltered that morning, soft clouds filled the sky, and the swamp scent of the river’s currents pervaded the air. I saw her by chance as I walked past a tennis court, where María Antonieta was playing another woman on the lawn. The British colony had clubs, restaurants, shops, and offices, which only British people, diplomats, and a few chosen locals could patronize. I didn’t usually frequent them because their colonial attitude disgusted me, but on that particular day, loneliness, or perhaps destiny, who knows, led my steps there.

  María Antonieta captivated me immediately. She was taller than me, and had slow yet graceful movements, white skin, long limbs, and dark hair. Her figure reflected on the undulating surface of the river. Accustomed as I was to the slight bodies of Burmese women, I was seduced by her statuesque appearance, like a Greek caryatid at the door of a temple, and her Valkyrian vigor. I decided to wait for her to finish the game so that I could introduce myself.

  Was I ever truly in love with her? I ask myself this now, seated in La Nube, breathing the sad sighs of this Valparaíso, which various earthquakes have conspired against, one after the other, as well as the opening of the Panama Canal and the centralism of Santiago. Of María Antonieta, I remember thick calves, upright breasts, and nipples as pink as certain beach pebbles. I recall her penetrating eyes, which over time lost their shine and depth, to be replaced by an air of resentful indifference. When we made love, her moans had a dark masculine resonance that disturbed me and stirred my own emigrant’s loneliness. She was, I realize, noble, diligent, and honest, a true Dutch peasant, and she trusted me in a way she never should have.

  In the mornings, her thighs gathered up the beams of sun that pierced the lace curtains of our bedroom. Then that light set fire to her sparse blond pubic hair and climbed toward her belly, where it submerged itself in the shade of her navel and slid to the heights of her breasts, from which my avid lips had drunk. I studied that dance of light in silence, spellbound. What a name she had! María Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang. Now that I slide it across my tongue, over and over, it tastes of the alfajor cookies of La Ligua and of street names in Amsterdam. I regret that I didn’t know how to appreciate her when we were a couple. Hagenaar. The third syllable, clear and sustained, like the murmur of a stream that splashes and flows over stones that blend into the shade of boldo plants, whose leaves provided an old natural medicine for anxiety. Vogelzang: a v that intones like the resolution of a full-bodied f, vehemently, and a z that demands a crackling snort, a dart grazing the ear. Vo-gel-zang. I think it means “birdsong” in Dutch. But I didn’t want to hear the musicality of her name. My provincial ignorance, with its smell of a woolen poncho drenched by southern rains, made me change the name to something low and miserable: Maruca. How to compare that plain Maruca with the joyful fount of vowels that flows from the throat on saying María Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang?

  I met her in 1930, in Java. I abandoned her in Spain, in 1936. I left her for Delia del Carril, and never mentioned her again. Only two of my poems mention her, and only in passing. But when I abandoned her, I also abandoned our poor Malva Marina. That is what pushed her to pursue me with ferocity. Resentment is never extinguished, it grows over the years; time is its best fertilizer. In Chile she even became an ally of the tyrant of the moment, that despicable traitor Gabriel González Videla, in an attempt to destroy me. She could never stand for me to be happy with another woman.

  I now recognize that, early on, things were good with her, that nothing about her bothered me. Not even the fact that she was taller than me or that we barely understood each other’s English. She didn’t speak Spanish, I didn’t speak Dutch, and my knowledge of English was always lacking. I loved poetry and bohemian ways, while she embraced a practical and disciplined life. I liked to spend what I didn’t have, while she preferred to save every last cent. We got married in Batavia, four months after we met. That day, without knowing it, I came between María Antonieta and the timid Dutch accountant who had been courting her for a long time, and who was also waiting for her by the tennis court. Why did I interrupt what was slated to become a marriage, and steal her from the road that fate had laid out? She could have been happy on the island; she could have loved her husband in Dutch; she could have visited Rotterdam every once in a while and admired the immaculate European cleanliness she so idolized. A consul without prospects or resources, who had come from a poor and melancholy country in the world
’s other south, should simply have returned alone to his slow Andean evenings. If, on that Sunday, I had continued home without stopping at that tennis court, another rooster, as they say, would have sung.

  If memory serves, our relationship began to splinter, not long after the wedding, when Maruca contracted a strange illness that made her lose the first baby. Those were painful months. We lost the child, and the medical bills took all our savings. And Maruca’s health did not improve. With the global crisis of 1929, the government had reduced my salary; in addition, it could not send me return tickets to Chile. A year into our marriage, Maruca no longer ignited any passion in me. To make love to her, I had to conjure up the soft skin, malevolent smile, and redolent cracked fruit of Josie Bliss.

  We set sail from Batavia in 1932 in a boat bearing the beautiful name of a Dutch writer, Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft. Our final destiny met us in Valparaíso. In Chile, Maruca was modest, loyal, and self-sacrificing. She stayed at my side as we settled into a gloomy, windowless apartment in the center of Santiago, where my bohemian friends lingered until dawn, without her understanding the source of laughter or topics of conversation. Language kept us apart. I managed to once again escape my own nation and escape poverty as well, thanks to another position as consul, this time in Spain, where I met Delia. I am often tortured by a vision of a disconcerted and fearful María Antonieta in our last weeks in Madrid. I’m still haunted by the memory of her impotent despair on realizing that I was leaving her for another woman. Delia, cultured, refined, twenty years older than me, connected to the crème de la crème of European intellectuals, awaited me impatiently in a nearby city. I packed my suitcase, closed the door, and left, abandoning María Antonieta and our daughter. Why must happiness be built at the cost of others’ misfortune? From this Valparaíso where I await my sunset, I want to beg your forgiveness, María Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang. Forgive me, woman of noble soul, for having betrayed you and Malva Marina; forgive me for having taken advantage of your loyalty and naïveté, for having left you under such abominable circumstances, for having forgotten you as I ran, crazed, through the bombarded streets of the Spanish Republic, to be with Delia del Carril.

  23

  Stepping down from the Russian two-engine plane into the humid heat of José Martí Airport, Cayetano immediately recalled his deep connection to the island. The green alligator-shaped land seemed to recognize him and embrace him like an old friend. He had left Havana as a boy, and his remembrances were frequent, though tormented and diffuse. His memory retained the colors, noise, and aromas of the island; the scent of its fruit; the sensuality of its women; the exaggerated gestures of its men; and the caress of saline breezes on its streets. The scorching air, the perfume of flowers whose names had been lost to memory, the bright glare of the asphalt, the coolness promised by its doors: all of these reconciled him at once with his own Cuban soul. The island had inoculated him with its light and rhythm, its fierce enthusiasm for life, all the things that yoked him to it forever, making him a perpetual hostage to nostalgia.

  He showed his passport to the officials in green uniforms, who still vaguely resembled the bearded revolutionaries of Sierra Maestra, then took an Anchares cab—a 1951 Chrysler with shining chrome and muted speed—and got a room at a dilapidated hotel in El Vedado. El Presidente had simple architecture and looked out over the mansion that housed the Ministry of Foreign Relations, as well as a sports complex and the tower of La Casa de las Américas. He went out to explore his surroundings, guided by the mix of helplessness and euphoria he felt upon recognizing buildings and corners in their current state. Havana was falling to pieces and in desperate need of paint yet was still beautiful, exuding a pleasant rural calm. He got in line at a café called El Carmelo, and when he found a seat, he asked for a cup of coffee, a guanábana juice, and a medianoche sandwich. In Valparaíso, he thought, no one knew that black, syrupy coffee, or the lovely thickness of guanábana juice, or the delicate consistency of that legendary sandwich.

  He needed to organize his next steps or else he’d lose his way, and not even Simenon’s little novels would help him recover it. The poet’s unexpected disclosures and the subsequent change in his mission disconcerted him. Was he fully aware of the responsibility in his hands? It was no longer a question of finding a doctor who could postpone death but of finding the woman who held the secret information Neruda needed in order to die in peace.

  He devoured the medianoche sandwich, ordered another coffee, and left El Carmelo after generously tipping the waiter and assuring him he’d return soon. He flagged another Anchares, this time driven by a Spaniard with white hair and an aquiline, Marlon Brando nose, and requested a ride down the Malecón and through Old Havana. He burned to see the city pass before his eyes. Was Beatriz Bracamonte on the island now? Was it sensible to trust the speculations of a Mexican schoolteacher enough to come to Cuba? As he reflected on these questions, he looked out on peeling buildings, water running on the street, lines in front of grocery stores with empty windows, and shirtless boys playing ball, but he thought that the rhythmic waves battering the Malecón and the light on colonial buildings retained the same hair-raising beauty he recalled from his childhood. Downtown, he saw colossal signs praising Fidel and the Revolution, giant portraits of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, and billboards that called on the Third World to fight imperialism. That’s how this Cuba lives, he thought: bursting with patriotic and revolutionary harangues, with calls to fulfill missions and make sacrifices, with promises of paradise around the corner. Would he have stayed on the island if his father, a trumpeter who played with Beny Moré, had not taken him to the United States in the 1950s? he asked himself as a breeze entered through the Chrysler’s open windows, cooling his face and combing his mustache. Would he have put up with Fidel’s socialism with the same stoicism with which he now faced Allende’s revolution? Or would he have emigrated to Miami, like the thousands of fellow Cubans who, on Eighth Street, recreated a vibrant and nostalgic Little Havana? There was no use in asking such questions. It was like Maigret asking himself what he would have done if Simenon had made him a lawyer instead of a detective. What was certain was that he now lived far away, and could travel the world, come and go from the island, and toy with questions such as this one. The bottom line was that he was a very lucky guy, with fate on his side, as the poet had said. And his good fortune consisted precisely of this, of having options, however much they hounded him.

  He asked the driver to take him back to El Carmelo, where he felt at ease in the cool, air-conditioned room. The waiter prepared a table for him across from the Amadeo Roldán Theater and the shriveled garden of a mansion that now housed the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. He lit a Lanceros cigar he’d bought at the airport, inhaled with relish, and estimated that the poet should arrive soon, the one who, according to Neruda, could help him find Beatriz. He was blacklisted for having written a collection of poems that criticized the Revolution. Although his name had also appeared in the letter Cuban artists had written against Neruda eight years earlier, the Nobel laureate knew from a trusted source that this blacklisted writer had not actually signed it.

  “You can trust him,” he told Cayetano as he wrote a letter on the Underwood in his studio at La Sebastiana. “He was the one who told me that Fidel couldn’t stand my poetry. Tell him you’re looking for a woman, but don’t tell him the reason. Avoid Chileans, because over there there are only two kinds: the ones who are with the secret service, and the ones who wish they were. Imagine what would happen if they found out what I was looking for.”

  As he drank his coffee, Cayetano thought that few would believe he was here to invite poets to Neruda’s seventieth birthday, which would be celebrated in the National Stadium in Santiago de Chile. Although the Chilean state department had backed him before the Cuban embassy, the latter office had dragged its heels in granting his visa, which, in essence, constituted a warning. He lit a cigarette, opened a Maigret novel, and started to read with
gusto in that old café.

  “Cayetano Brulé?” someone at his side asked after a while.

  He was a young man, with thick-framed glasses like his own, and a healthy mop of dark, curly hair. He resembled Roy Orbison, down to the sarcastic expression. His pants and short-sleeved shirt were tight, as were those of almost all the men in Havana.

  “One and the same.”

  “I’m Heberto.” He sat down. Outside, in the building’s shade, the line of people waiting for a table was getting longer. “I was told that you wanted to see me.”

  “Coffee?” Cayetano asked, smoothing his mustache. From the radio, the voice of Farah María warmed the room. A waitress passed with a tray of Hatuey beers, singing along with the mulatta.

  “I’ll have a coffee, and one of those Lanceros you’re smoking. They tell me you’re Cuban.”

  “From Havana. The La Víbora section, to be more precise.”

  “From La Víbora, but with a foreign passport. Enviable,” Heberto noted sardonically. “Like Bertolt Brecht, who applauded the communism of the German Democratic Republic but had an Austrian passport and a Swiss bank account. So you’re a friend of Neruda’s?”

  “A friend, yes, but without a bank account in Switzerland or anywhere else.”

  When the waiter returned, the poet placed his order, imitating Neruda’s nasal voice, and after exhaling a dramatic puff of cigar smoke, he began to recite in the Nobel laureate’s droning tone:

  “I love the love of sailors

  who kiss and go.

  They leave a promise.

  They never return.”

  Stunned, Cayetano listened to the perfect imitation of a man who, at this very moment, awaited news beside a cold cobalt ocean at the end of the world.

  “So you’re looking for young poets to invite to Chile. Tell me, what does ‘young’ mean to Neruda? Do I count as young?” Heberto said, going back to his own Cuban lilt.