The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  I wish I could have had a daughter with Delia, a healthy and joyful girl who could have helped me forget the melancholy smile that would glimmer on Malva Marina’s monstrous face. But Delia was already barren when I met her, and could not give me what I longed for. Perhaps I’m confused by my own memories. The fact is, I couldn’t have borne another disaster, another Malva Marina. Which is exactly why I escaped from Beatriz when, years later, at Xochimilco Lagoon, she told me she was bearing my child. I refused to believe it. I lacked the courage to cast aside my literary career with Delia and face the uncertainty of new fatherhood. And much less could I risk a change of such proportions in July 1943, when I had just symbolically married Delia in Tetecala, in the state of Morelos. She was fifty-nine at the time, and I was thirty-nine. She was beautiful and still desirable, no matter what my enemies might whisper to the contrary. The Tetecala night brimmed with mosquitoes. Under the full moon, I gave her a silver necklace made by the indigenous people of Oaxaca, and promised her that we’d be together until death did us part.

  “Are you sure I’m the father?” I asked Beatriz in Xochimilco. We were gliding through canals, holding hands in a canoe adorned with flowers. The lead-colored water smelled like deep roots, and the moon’s patina lit the fireflies.

  Beatriz glared at me. “Who else would it be?”

  “It could be your husband,” I said quietly, letting go of her hand.

  She said nothing. Behind us, the boatman kept rowing through the water with long strokes.

  “I don’t have the balls to be a father,” I confessed in a whisper. “You know about the monster that was born to me in Spain. That could happen again. If it’s mine, I’d like you to have an abortion. All I can father is deformed beings—and my poems.”

  Beatriz leaped out of the canoe and waded through the dark water to a nearby field. Then her silhouette disappeared among the bushes and tree trunks. I never saw her again. Years later, I found out she’d given birth to a different child, a boy, or perhaps a girl, I didn’t even want to know. I supposed at that point that it must have been the offspring of the good Dr. Bracamonte, since they were still married …

  33

  We have a meeting with Comrade Valentina Altmann,” Merluza informed the Volkspolizist, who had emerged from a wooden sentry box hidden among birches, to meet them on the asphalt path. “We’re from the Chilean embassy.”

  The JHSWP School was in northeastern Berlin, on the shore of a small lake called Bogensee, surrounded by forests. Across from the Wandlitz, another nearby lake, stood a gated neighborhood, home to leaders of the United Socialist Party of Germany, or USPG, headed up by Erich Honecker.

  The crossing gate rose slowly, and Merluza drove down a winding gravel path that ran through the shadows of trees.

  “This was Goebbels’s summer refuge,” Merluza said. Through the greenery, they glimpsed a stone mansion with a wooden roof. “After the war, it was transferred into the hands of the Soviets, who gave it to the East German government. First it was a center for denazification. For thirty years now, it’s belonged to the FDJ, the nation’s youth association.”

  Cayetano looked at the building with a sense of loneliness and despair. He couldn’t understand why Beatriz had abandoned the vitality of Mexico City and the luminous exoticism of Havana to settle in such a remote, anonymous place.

  “Now it’s a monastery for teaching Marxist Leninism,” Merluza went on. “They say the Stasi recruits foreigners here. Classes start in September and end in June. In the summer, the only people here are teachers and translators, who live at the school or in Bernau, a nearby city.”

  “And the Mexican woman we’re talking about?”

  “Don’t be so impatient. The comrades here should know.”

  He parked the Wartburg beside a rusty Volga, and walked to a plaza surrounded by robust, gray three-story buildings of Stalinist design. Valentina was waiting at the front steps. She was a slim woman with sharp features and blue eyes. Merluza introduced them, and they entered the building together. They crossed a spacious lobby and entered a large, desolate restaurant with imposing bronze lamps.

  “I’ll wait for you outside,” Merluza said, and left discreetly.

  “Ask me anything you like,” Valentina said as she ordered tea for both of them. “If there’s information I can’t provide, there are experienced people in the administrative office who know the school’s history inside out.”

  After explaining that she knew he was an emissary of an Unidad Popular leader, Valentina declared, out of the blue, that she recalled no one at the school by the name of Beatriz Lederer. She warned him that his investigation would be complicated by the fact that the school used pseudonyms, and prohibited taking photographs. When Cayetano showed her the photograph of Beatriz, the translator assured him that she’d never seen the woman. The tea was Russian, and a slice of lemon perched on the lip of every cup. They drank in silence. Cayetano feared the terms of “reasons of state” could be blocking his efforts. If that was the case, not even Neruda could push the investigation forward unless he disclosed his real purpose.

  He felt depressed, not only by the bitter tea that smacked of lemonade, but also because he recalled Maigret and envied the faith that man had in his own talent, experience, and skill. Reality, he thought, was much harder on people than any fictional world ever was on its characters. The fates that reigned over the universe were crueler than the flesh-and-blood writers who composed novels. It was easier to be an excellent detective in a crime novel than a mediocre detective in implacable reality. He’d have to discuss this one day with the poet, over drinks, while relaxing in that comfortable floral-print armchair, beholding the gorgeous view out of La Sebastiana’s windows.

  “How long have you worked here?” he asked Valentina, who was squeezing her lemon slice into the tea.

  She had arrived at the school four years earlier, in 1969, and liked the grounds and the foreign students, though not her colleagues, whom she found dull and lacking in passion. A drop of lemon juice struck her chest and rolled down the triangle of skin revealed by the collar of her blouse. Cayetano pictured small and upright breasts, tanned from sunny afternoons that she surely spent naked by Lake Bogensee. He wondered what it would be like to spread that acidic teardrop over her breasts with his fingertip, and pictured Valentina translating paragraphs of The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels, and Lenin’s The State and Revolution in classrooms packed with revolutionaries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, who after a few months would be staring at her with eyes full of desire. He saw young men determined to share ideals and study political theories, just like his wife at Punto Cero. He saw the JHSWP full of youths anxious to learn the secrets they needed to topple the bourgeoisie and create socialist societies in Third World nations. He saw them studying revolutionary texts by morning, singing battle hymns and organizing forums in the afternoons, and forging secret alliances over long nights of beer and dialogue, during which they fell in love with German girls and fornicated with them in the forest. He saw many of them dying in combat, or being tortured or killed by the police back in their own countries. And as for him, Cayetano, to what was he devoted? What utopias drove him? His wife was right to criticize his skepticism, his refusal to embrace any cause, his tendency to watch things from a distance.

  “If you arrived here in 1969, you obviously couldn’t have met the person I’m looking for,” he grumbled, returning from his musings in a bad mood.

  “That’s right,” Valentina admitted as she wiped the drop from her chest with the edge of a napkin.

  “In that case, why don’t you take me to meet your colleagues who have been here longer?”

  As they crossed the plaza, on their way to the administrative office, they ran into a young woman with a pale face and light-colored hair, dressed in a long smock that drew attention to her hips. Her name was Margaretchen Siebold, and she hugged a stack of thick-covered books to her chest with a certain theatricality. She asked them what th
ey were doing, and Cayetano explained.

  “I don’t remember anyone by that name. But I’ll walk with you. I also need to speak with Käthe.”

  The office was on the top floor of a building on a hill overlooking the edifices clustered around the plaza. It housed the library, the auditorium, classrooms, and the school’s administrative office. Valentina walked through a door and left Cayetano with Margaretchen in the hall.

  “Historischer und Dialektischer Materialismus, Grundlagen der Kapitalistichen Wirtschaft, Geschichte der KpdSU,” Cayetano read aloud from the spines of the books the young woman carried. “Is that what you teach here?”

  “I don’t teach. I translate for Latin Americans. You have to keep up with your subject matter.”

  “So that’s why you speak perfect Spanish.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s a shame that nobody remembers your colleague anymore. We spend our lives thinking we’re essential, and then, when we die, we’re lucky if our own children bring us flowers on the Day of the Dead. Then nobody remembers us anymore. And to think how urgently I need to find Beatriz!” He shook his head, a burdened man.

  “They won’t tell you anything here,” the translator whispered. “They never disclose information about their employees. Nobody has a name or face here. Didn’t you know?”

  “I knew, but they’re going to help me because I’m backed by the Chilean embassy. That makes for a convincing argument.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. I have a good godfather. And relations between Allende and Honecker are optimal,” Cayetano answered, put out by the woman’s dubious tone.

  “Your chances will only improve with the Stasi’s support,” she said.

  “I’m not playing around. The Chilean who sent me has a great deal of influence.”

  “Don’t be naive.” She adjusted her hair around her shoulders. “Here no one will tell you anything. Much less about Beatriz.”

  “So you know her?”

  “Who is this influential Chilean who wants to see her?”

  He would not tell her. She could be a Stasi agent, he thought, charged with finding out the reason for his visit. Through the window, he gazed at a bronze, life-size statue that gleamed in the central plaza. It showed a row of children holding hands and leaping happily on the lawn.

  “I understand your distrust,” she said. The hall stretched out before them, polished, empty, with gray doors on one side and clean windows on the other. “If you’d like to keep talking, you can find me tomorrow, at eight o’clock, in the Zum Weissen Hirsch. Come see me if they don’t give you anything.”

  She walked away the moment Valentina opened the door, accompanied by an old woman with pink skin and blue eyes who resembled a Lladró porcelain statue.

  “Come on in, Cayetano,” Valentina said. “My comrade Käthe here will fill you in on everything you need to know.”

  34

  The Zum Weissen Hirsch was on Eberswalder Strasse 37, in Bernau, near a highway lined with apple trees that led to the industrial city of Eberswalde. Its old walls were covered in vines, which occasionally thinned to reveal bricks poking out from the worn stucco like rotted teeth. When Cayetano walked in, he was met with smoke and the thick stench of beer. He walked through the dimness, through which the husky, unmistakable voice of Karat sidled, singing “Schwanenkönig.” It took him a moment to find Margaretchen, who was smoking at a table by the window, with a pilsner and a small glass of Doppelkorn in front of her.

  “I warned you. They never reveal anything about their people,” she said. Cayetano was struck once again by her pale face, the dark circles around her eyes, and the metallic brilliance of her gaze.

  “You were right.” Cayetano settled in across from Margaretchen. “Neither Valentina nor Käthe knew a thing about Beatriz.”

  The radio now played a ballad crooned by Karel Gott, the golden voice of Prague, reminiscent of Elvis Presley and Lucho Gatica. In a corner, behind an umbrella stand, an older couple dined; just past them, some long-haired customers in flowered shirts sat at a table, and beyond that the tables were packed with boisterous customers. Cayetano and Margaretchen ordered onion and Klösse soup with potatoes, and a bottle of Stierblut, a Bulgarian wine that, according to the translator, wasn’t half bad.

  “So you know Beatriz?” Cayetano pressed.

  “I knew a woman at the school who was called Beatriz.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “She may be the woman you’re looking for. She came from Mexico, and her last name was Schall. Beatriz Schall.”

  “Schall? Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But people use false names at the JHSWP.”

  “The foreign students do. But the staff and the German students use their real names. My name is real.”

  Cayetano took the photograph of Beatriz out of the pocket of his guayabera, the one from the Mexican newspaper, and held it in the lamplight. Margaretchen examined it closely.

  “She looks a lot like her,” she said, lowering her eyelids sensually, mysteriously.

  “Is it her or not?”

  “Beatriz Schall was more heavyset. And she was a resolute woman.”

  “But she was only twenty in the photograph. People change over time. When did you say you knew her?”

  “In her last year at the JHSWP. She was leaving, I was just arriving. I couldn’t say that in front of Valentina. She’s an apparatchik of fear. Don’t trust her.”

  Cayetano stroked the tip of his mustache and gazed at the older couple, who were paying their check and preparing to leave. “Forgive my asking,” he said as the old man helped his wife into her raincoat. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven,” she said as she drained her glass of schnapps.

  “If Valentina, who’s been there for seven years, never met Beatriz, then you would much less have had the chance—unless you started working at sixteen.”

  “The thing is, I met Beatriz as a student at Wilhelm Pieck,” she said. She gestured to the waiter for another glass. “I met her in 1963, ten years ago.”

  “If we’re talking about the same woman, she would have been forty then.”

  “That’s exactly how old she seemed.”

  He was disconcerted by the change in Beatriz’s last name. From Lederer in Havana to Schall in East Berlin. What was her real name in Mexico City? Fichte, had the poet said? In the files at the Four Roses Institute she was known as “de Bracamonte.” He put the photograph away and lit a Cuban Populares, which emitted a penetrating odor of dry grass. He inhaled the smoke, worried.

  “Tell me, what did she look like?”

  “She had light hair and green eyes. White skin. A German woman with Slavic features.”

  “And what did she do at the school?” He let smoke out through his nose, feeling like a humble dragon in the great Prussian grasslands.

  “She translated for the courses on Marxism and Leninism for Latin Americans. Just like I do now. It’s enjoyable work, and well compensated. You get to meet people from different countries.”

  “Did you ever know of her having a lover?”

  “If she did, it was outside the school. She rented an apartment in front of the Verdugo tower, near the city’s medieval wall. I also recall that Beatriz had a daughter. Tina was her name, I think.”

  “How old was Tina?” The facts were coming together, he thought, perking up.

  “Around twenty. I saw her two or three times, at school functions. For the first of May and the seventh of October, when we celebrate the founding of East Germany.”

  Cayetano myopically took in the dirty afternoon glare that leaked in through the windows. Things seemed to be falling into place: Beatriz was of German origin, which was why she had taught German at the institute in Mexico City, and why she’d come to East Germany. But was this Beatriz Schall the same Beatriz Lederer from Cuba and the same Beatriz from Mexico whom he was looking for? Assuming it was the same person, why had she left Mexico City
, and later left revolutionary Cuba, to hole up in some isolated ideological school in East Berlin? If she’d arrived in East Germany soon after the Wall was built, she had to be a woman of leftist convictions. Why did she change her name? Who was she hiding from? He wondered whether she might have been involved in the death of her husband, an older man. Had she inherited money from him?

  The barman placed the bottle of Stierblut on the table, opened it with a brusque gesture, filled the glasses to their brims without giving his customers a chance to taste the wine, and slipped back into the shadows of Zum Weissen Hirsch.

  “Why do you trust me?” he asked the woman as he crushed his cigarette butt in the ashtray. A tune by the Puhdys now sang of the yearning to live as long as trees, which made him think of Neruda. “I’m a foreigner, the JHSWP trains revolutionaries, and you’re giving me information about one of its former employees. I believe that could be called a form of treason.”

  Margaretchen sipped her Stierblut slowly, as if searching for her answer in the red wine, then said, “I trust you, quite simply, because I like you.”

  “That’s a rather naive answer for someone who works with undercover agents.”

  “You’re the one who’s mistrustful.”

  “And you could be a Stasi agent …”

  “In that case, to the health of the Mata Hari of Bernau,” she said mockingly, with a gleam in her eyes. She took another drink. “The Bulgarians have pretty good wine,” she said, gazing at him steadily.

  Now Demis Roussos was singing “Forever and Ever,” suffusing the place with Mediterranean melancholy. Cayetano began to feel suspicious of Margaretchen’s ingenuousness. Was it all an act? Was this beautiful woman a Stasi agent or not? At the very least, she worked at a key political institution. He thought that he could be bungling everything even by speaking with her. He saw the poet in his armchair in Valparaíso, trusting Cayetano to devote twenty-four hours a day to the mission with which he’d been entrusted. And here he was, flirting, in the remote town of Bernau, with a German woman who could easily be an East German informant. He thought of Ángela, who at that moment could be crawling through swamps, climbing rope ladders, or taking apart AK-47s in the Cuban mountains, wearing an olive-green uniform covered in dirt and sweat.