The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  30

  It all happened just as I’ve told you, Don Pablo. What should I do now?”

  Static crackled on the phone line, like a shortwave radio station. Cayetano had the distinct impression that his call to Chile was being tapped, that his words were being listened to by the CIA or Cuban state security in a dismal room somewhere on the planet. He had no choice but to speak in ambiguous terms. It had served him well to read Simenon’s crime novels, after all, those calm, delectable stories about Peter the Lett, Maigret’s first case, or Maigret’s memoirs, which were truly entertaining, and which transformed their author—a man addicted to the pipe, sex, and writing—into a simple fictional character.

  “Well, follow her tracks,” he heard the poet say with enthusiasm. Cayetano pictured him with his feet on the leather stool, with its green ink stains.

  At the outset of the conversation, Neruda had suggested that he was feeling more energetic and hopeful, as though he were making a recovery, and that for that reason he was diving into verses in the afternoons and dictating his memoirs to Matilde at night. Cayetano imagined that the memoirs were incomplete, that they would later be filtered through his wife, though he also suspected that the poet said this only to throw off his enemies. His heavy breathing made Cayetano doubt his claims of getting better. He had just arrived home from the hospital and had probably already settled into La Nube, wrapped in his woolen poncho, looking out over the bay as it split into a play of light and shadow under the metallic Valparaíso sky.

  “Do you still believe the same thing, Don Pablo?”

  “Of course I do. The same as I described it that day on Alemania Avenue, when we sat on the steps. I just need you to confirm my suspicions.”

  Fragile as a bird but stubborn as a mule. That was the poet.

  He pressed further. “Don’t you think you’re better off just deciding that it’s as you imagine, and letting things be?”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying, young man. I can’t just leave things as they are. The fact that you’d even say that makes me think you don’t understand me, that we’ve wasted all this time.”

  “I don’t know, Don Pablo. Sometimes hope is better than disappointment. That’s what I say.”

  But Neruda said the opposite. Despite the doubts his words described, his voice was firm, convinced, emphatic. “The young are nourished by hopes, the old by certainties, Cayetano. Suspicion has a corrosive effect, and speeds up death. I’d give anything, including my Canto General or my Residence on Earth, to know the truth. Believe me, I’d give them up gladly, right this moment, to find out.”

  At that point Cayetano took a chance. “What about love?”

  “What?” The voice sounded disconcerted.

  Through the window, Cayetano studied the Hotel Habana Libre as it hovered, clear and light, over the city, under soft clouds that glided toward Miramar. The whir of the air-conditioning muted the echoes of El Vedado. He knew that he had hit the nail on the head. “Love, Don Pablo, I’m asking you whether you still believe in love.”

  “Don’t be naive, young man. That’s a lifelong thing.” He felt that the poet was putting him in his place. “Which is good news for you, incidentally, since you’re just starting out. Look at me, I’m almost seventy and I’m still strong. The Greeks were wrong to think that old people were more fit to govern because they had lost their physical appetites. At my age, I have more heat and urges than ever, since I know the reapers are following me everywhere, eager and impatient.”

  Two packed buses drove by at a feverish pace, passing a knot of people waiting at the stop. Beyond them, others baked in the sun while standing in line at Vita Nova Pizzeria. Steam rose from the tar on the street, making the neighborhood oscillate like a mirage.

  “Once the spurs of desire leave me, I won’t be able to write,” the poet continued. “Desire feeds my poetry, young man. Don’t forget, it’s that simple.” He took a surprising turn. “Any news from Ángela?” They barely brought her up since that night, by that window facing Valparaíso and the sea beyond, when they had shared what he now knew was their mutual anguish.

  “It’s over, Don Pablo. ‘We, the ones we were, are no longer the same.’ Your own words.”

  “I remember them, and I also remember why I wrote them. But once I was older and wiser, I also wrote, ‘together we face the tears!’ Don’t forget that. Life is long, even though there’s little left for me.”

  He didn’t know whether he should feel comforted or saddened. He asked, “So what do we do now?”

  “Do about what?”

  “Don’t forget that I’m in Havana, Don Pablo. What should I do now that the trail has gone cold?”

  “Keep following it. Wait there until I get you a visa for the German Democratic Republic.”

  “I go to Germany from here?”

  “To East Germany. Call me as soon as you land. I’ll give you the name of someone who can help us. I trust you’ll find the person we’re looking for there. But, Cayetano, don’t forget the most important thing of all: discretion.”

  DELIA

  31

  Before touching down on Schönefeld’s landing strip, the Aeroflot Ilyushin II-62 circled over the divided city, turbines whirring. From a sky streaked with clouds, Cayetano glimpsed the line—sometimes straight, sometimes sinuous, but always wide and clear—of the Wall, with its mined areas, observation towers, and wire fencing. As the plane turned, it glided through the air from east to west and back to east, ignoring the border between the two sides of greater Berlin, gliding from one world to another with the still indolence of a pelican.

  At first, Schönefeld seemed like any other airport in the West: cold, modern, functional. It did, however, lack the colors, scents, and sheen of capitalism. People were wearing clothes that had gone out of fashion, in muted colors, as though life had frozen in the 1950s. Perhaps that was why Cayetano sensed a tranquillity he associated with places far removed from the frenetic pace of major Western cities, an atmosphere that reminded him of Sunday siestas in Havana and the Valparaíso hills.

  “Cayetano Brulé?” asked a voice from behind.

  He turned and saw a man with unkempt hair, a thick mustache, and small dark eyes. He looked a bit like Charlie Chaplin, with the same pale, melancholy, mischievous face; the same high eyebrows; the same sad, ingenuous expression; and gleaming eyes.

  “I’m Eladio Chacón.” They shook hands. “I’m the director of labor affairs at our embassy. I handle relations with the main office for the Free German Trade Union Federation, the FDGB. A few days ago, the state department notified me of your visit so that I could be of assistance. Welcome to the land of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg!”

  “I’m most thankful, Chacón.”

  “You can call me Merluza, if you like. That’s how I’m known to comrades in the Party. You can also call me Carlitos Chaplin; personally, I think I resemble the comedian more than the merluza fish. But you know how Chileans are, handing out nicknames right and left. So. I know that you’re Cuban and you’re looking for a Mexican woman of German origin who emigrated to East Berlin some time ago.”

  “Ten or twelve years ago, to be more exact.”

  In the parking lot, Merluza placed the luggage in the trunk of his Wartburg. The car clattered like a scooter as they drove down cobblestone streets, and Cayetano wondered whether everyone had a double hidden somewhere in the world. Proof abounded: the blacklisted poet in Havana looked just like Roy Orbison, and the Chilean diplomat was identical to Charlie Chaplin. Somewhere, there must be someone who strongly resembled Neruda, Ángela, and Cayetano himself. At some point he should articulate it to the poet. He was sure of at least one thing: he was Cayetano Brulé, and not a double of himself.

  In the distance, beneath the incandescent sun, he glimpsed the Television Tower, as well as the skyscraper that housed the Stadt Berlin Hotel. The Wartburg dived into downtown, weaving between cars of unfamiliar makes, such as Volga, Škoda, and Trabant, as well as Ikarus
buses and Czech trams. They turned onto a crowded commercial street. Pankower Allee, Merluza explained. As soon as he laid eyes on it, Cayetano realized that East Germany was not at all like Cuba. Here, the store windows were packed with wares, there were no lines outside grocery stores or restaurants, and the people enjoyed a well-being unimaginable on the island. Merluza told him he’d be staying at the Stadt Berlin, near Alexanderplatz, but that first they’d go to lunch at Ratskeller, a restaurant with seven hundred years of history.

  “They make the most incredible ham,” Merluza went on. “Though there are also some Klösse, from Thuringia, that are good enough to raise the dead. And what can I say about the baked carp and boiled potatoes? Do you prefer Bulgarian wine or Czech beer? We diplomats don’t need to wait for a table there. We rise over the mortals, and that’s how it is.”

  Fifteen minutes later, seated at the restaurant in the basement of Red City Hall, they ordered oxtail consommé, ham with boiled potatoes, and Czech pilsner. The poet’s East Berlin contact was clearly offering Cayetano a very special reception. Merluza was a member of MAPU, a tiny petit bourgeois group, as the communists put it, that history would record as a cell capable of dividing and dividing until it disappeared altogether. Merluza had been sent to East Berlin because, in Chile, he’d dared to call for the expropriation of not only North American investments, but also the English, even at risk of stripping Queen Isabel herself, which had sparked an uproar in the government, loath as it was to make enemies in Europe. There, in the German Democratic Republic—in East Germany—the first nation by and for workers and peasants to grace German soil, as the banners proclaimed—Merluza was tasked with absorbing true socialism and the day-to-day operations of the FDGB, as presided over by the hard-drinking Harry Tisch, instead of stirring up the henhouse with his utopias in Chile.

  “Well, nobody here knows this Beatriz,” Merluza said after draining his first pilsner and letting out a discreet burp.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” Cayetano asked, stroking his cold glass.

  “What?”

  “That no one knows anything about the woman.”

  “Calm down. The situation isn’t hopeless, either.”

  “How can it not be? If I’d known that nobody here knows her, I could have saved myself the trip. I was doing just fine in Havana.”

  “I’ll bet you were. Lovely ladies over there, right?”

  “They’re unsurpassable. But if Beatriz is a complete stranger here, unknown to anyone, I may as well go back to Schönefeld as soon as I’ve digested the ham you promised.”

  “Listen to me. I don’t know a thing about your Beatriz, but I found a Spanish translator who can help you.”

  “I don’t need a translator. I understand a little German. I lived in West Germany for years.”

  “Calm down.” He grasped Cayetano’s wrist. “According to a Chilean woman, in the JHSWP—”

  “The what?”

  “JHSWP, the Jugendhochschule Wilhelm Pieck, a school of the FDJ, on the outskirts of Berlin, on the shore of Lake Bogensee.”

  “The FD what?”

  “FDJ, the Freie Deutsche Jugend, East Germany’s youth association,” Merluza explained impatiently. “Under socialism, we speak in acronyms, Mr. Brulé.”

  “Fine. So what happens there?” The oxtails had an acidic taste, forcing him to wash down the first spoonful with a gulp of beer.

  “Well, in the sixties, there was a woman worked there who had arrived from Mexico. It could be a coincidence, or she just may be the person you’re looking for. Her age is the same, as are the period of time and her nation of origin. We learned about her through a retired Chilean translator.”

  “Can I speak with this translator?”

  “Forget about meeting her. She lives in Bucharest now. She married one of Ceaușescu’s government officials. And all she knew was that a woman from Mexico had translated there. What’s important now is that you check out the Wilhelm Pieck School.”

  “So what are we waiting for?”

  “We need a permit to enter there. It’s a place where they indoctrinate revolutionaries from all over the world.”

  The hams landed on the table. They were the most extraordinary Cayetano had ever seen. The pigs in East Germany’s cooperative farms must be as big as cows, and live like princes, or like princes sentenced to death, he thought with an appetite so enormous it nearly verged on the demonic. It was strange that Chilean food had so little in common with food in Cuba, and so much more in common with that of Germany.

  “They’re expecting us the day after tomorrow, at ten o’clock sharp,” Merluza added, examining the dish. “But please, Cayetano, explain this to me, because these days I just don’t understand what goes though our Chilean leaders’ heads. Why is that woman so important right now, when Chile is in such a mess?”

  32

  I was attracted to Delia del Carril from the moment I first saw her. It was in a pub called Correos, in Madrid, in 1934. I was dazzled by her self-assurance, her elegance, and the circle of intellectuals with whom she rubbed elbows. I was thirty years old, and she was fifty. I had just arrived in Spain as a diplomatic consul, accompanied by María Antonieta and poor Malva Marina. The Civil War there was brewing.

  Delia gave meaning to my life, made me a communist, disseminated my poetry, and refined my tastes and manners. Back then I was unkempt and poorly dressed, my fingers always stained with ink, my pockets stuffed with scribbled paper instead of money. She turned me into the poet I am today. That afternoon, when we first met, I placed my hand on her shoulder, delicately, and from then on we were never apart. Not ever. Well, that is, until I met Matilde twenty years later and left one woman for another.

  Delia was absentminded, sensitive, and forgetful, a curious mix of artist and pragmatist, and a disastrous housewife. She couldn’t even fry an egg, mash potatoes, or organize a dinner for friends, yet at the same time she was an outstanding, tireless worker, well versed in the ways of the world, and skilled at forming friendships. That’s how she got the nickname La Hormiga, the Ant. She succumbed like a marionette without strings the day that, in our house in Los Guindos, Santiago, she found a letter from Matilde in my jacket pocket, confessing that she was carrying my child.

  “But it’s you I love, Hormiga,” I mumbled. The letter trembled in her hand, and her face was distorted by shock and suffering. “That was just a passing passion. You have always been and always will be my only queen.”

  “Without love, our relationship means nothing,” Delia answered coldly. “We’re not some bourgeois marriage, tied by social conventions, Pablo, but a communist couple bound by nothing but love. If that love has died, we should end it.”

  She demanded that I leave the house at once. When I did, Santiago was blurred by rain, the thrushes were silent, and the distant peaks of the Andes were enfolded by snow. I moved into La Chascona, a house at the base of Santa Lucía Hill, the house I’d secretly bought for Matilde years before. She was waiting for me there. I switched houses and women like a rider who changes horses in the middle of a race. I haven’t seen Delia since; she’s never spoken out against me and, according to some trustworthy friends, she still loves me. She’s in her nineties now, surrounded by the same walls and furniture that witnessed our breakup. She’s received some recognition as a painter and engraver, and as far as I know, she’s never had another partner. By now, some comrade has probably told her that I’m sick. When I die, her hope of our reuniting will die with me.

  In Madrid, she introduced me to Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, Paul Éluard, and Pablo Picasso. She was the one who published Canto General secretly in Chile, and fought to end the exile imposed on me by that tyrant, González Videla. Delia was Argentinean, divorced, the daughter of a fallen aristocratic family, and she had arrived in Europe to study under the painter Fernand Léger, which was how she came to frequent the Continent’s communist intellectual circles. When we were first living together, she persuaded me not to keep writing her
metic poems like Residence on Earth, and to instead write about love and the political causes that shake the world. Without her, I would not have been a communist, nor would my verses ever have reached millions of readers.

  But the truth is the truth: despite the fact that I was married to María Antonieta and responsible for Malva Marina, Delia surreptitiously slid into my life, and seduced me. I admit that it wasn’t hard for me to leave my wife and daughter to move into la Casa de las Flores, my lover’s house in the Hilarión Eslava section, near the Ciudad Universitaria district of Madrid. In that house, we enjoyed salons with García Lorca, Bergamín, Altolaguirre, Acario Cotapos, and Miguel Hernández. We drank red wine and anisette from Chichón, and then we’d go to the Correos pub, or a nightclub called Satán, which was run by Mario Carreño at 60 Atocha Street, where half-naked women performed “the dance of cocaine” to the rhythm of the Lecuona Orchestra. We drank Montserrat champagne, La Guita sherry, and Sorracina cider, and we’d come home late, quite drunk. I separated from María Antonieta and Malva Marina in 1936, and washed my hands of them in 1943, when they were living in Nazi-occupied Holland.

  Delia helped me give refuge in Chile to thousands of Republican Spaniards fleeing the Civil War. We saved them from thick-walled prisons by sending them to Valparaíso on a ship called Winnipeg. They made Chile their second homeland, and made their mark on our culture. How could I be so altruistic for the anonymous masses, yet at the same time be so cruel and heartless toward a person I’d loved and another person who carried my blood in her veins? It was Delia who bought, with her own money, the land where we built the house in Isla Negra, which despite its name is neither black nor an island, and which I love and many consider to be my favorite house. Dramas, terrible dramas, surround my homes: the ones in the Orient were devastated by typhoons; the one in Las Flores by pro-Franco gunfire; the one in Los Guindos witnessed the epilogue of our love; the house in Isla Negra was purchased by the woman who shaped me and whom I left for a much younger woman; the home in Santiago, in the Bellavista neighborhood, was acquired so that I could hide that very same younger lover. Only La Sebastiana, this opus of air that levitates over Valparaíso, with its aviary and landing strip, was conceived without stains.