The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  “I found the current whereabouts of the Mexican woman.”

  “That’s great news,” he said in the same tone. “Have you spoken with her?”

  “Not yet, Don Pablo, but at least I know where she is. That’s why I’m coming back to Valparaíso. We need to talk.”

  “Did you or didn’t you find her?” At least now he was conveying impatience.

  “I’ve located her. I know where she lives.”

  “Where?”

  “In a nearby country, Don Pablo.”

  “In another country?” He sounded irritated. “What’s she doing there? Is she with her daughter?”

  “I don’t know, Don Pablo. My plane for Chile leaves tomorrow. We’ll talk more when I’m back. I want you to decide whether or not you want me to continue this search. It’s up to you. I’ll come see you as soon as I arrive. In the meantime, Don Pablo, please prepare me a Coquetelón. And make it a double.”

  47

  Now that the crab of this disease bores silently through my insides with such painstaking devotion, my old nightmares have returned to haunt me. They appear between sleep and waking, between the metallic echoes of these interminable, leaden winter afternoons in Valparaíso. I cross thresholds and more thresholds, but I always end up in a dark room. No matter where I roam, I always end up in that cool, dim dream space, where I sense that the woman and daughter I abandoned are crouched in wait. Their eyes study me with the same inclemency with which the crab digs corridors through my body.

  At times, I glimpse María Antonieta and Malva Marina, my deformed little daughter, bathed in a vortex of light. They let out wrenching screams as they try to climb the Dutch dikes, hand in hand. When they’re about to reach the safety of the dam’s top platform, they slip and roll down the concrete ramp, covered with sand and algae. They’re being hunted by a pack of soldiers in Nazi helmets and uniforms, and their faces are grotesque, like those painted by George Grosz. Malva Marina screams, “Papaíto, don’t leave me, Papaíto,” while I, with resolve, but my soul torn in shreds, board a boat and row away as fast as I can to save my own life, listening to the girl’s sobs until they are finally swallowed by the wind.

  In that darkness, I also see Prudencio Aguilar, my old Caribbean friend who was killed by a spear in the Colombian tropics. After death, he’s continued to age, and still bleeds from the same wound that took him from the world. I can tell he’s waiting for me in all the rooms I enter, hoping the next one will be different. And just as I once lost Delia on a train in Italy because she exited at the wrong stop, absentminded as she always was, I then dream I’ve lost Matilde on the Paris metro, where we’ve agreed to meet at an uncertain time and at an unnamed station. And I also see the day when Matilde and I, strolling by the Charles River in north Boston, came upon a couple on a bench, and they were us, only thirty years older. From the path, without taking my gaze from the water, I gather the courage to ask them how they’ve spent their lives. As we approach them, we see something horrific: they are skeletons, perfect and complete, with hands entwined and macabre smiles sculpted to their skulls.

  Existence is nothing more than a damn succession of disguises and good-byes, a journey brimming with traps and disappointments that impels you to make mistakes and then boasts an elephant’s memory, not forgiving a single slip. I’ve said it so many times to that hardworking young man called Cayetano. Matilde entered my life in Mexico, when I was married to Delia and sick with phlebitis. She was a young Chilean woman, succulent and desirable, devoted to popular music and to the Party. She offered to take care of me. My naive wife accepted the offer, another ambush of life. What happened next was what tends to happen when a man and a woman find themselves alone beside a bed. Although Matilde likes to propagate the version in which we met long before, in 1946, in Forestal Park in Santiago, I don’t remember that. That’s a tall tale. A ruse of hers to give our love a dignified prehistory. The truth is that this love grew from a betrayal of Delia, from the contemptible way we took advantage of the time and trust she’d given us, busy as she was with the work I’d assigned to her, disseminating my poems and striving to undo my exile.

  Matilde put my home life in order, since Delia had neglected it in her hard work with my translations, tours, and editors. At that stage, I needed a housewife, not an intellectual. The truth is that Matilde cooks the way she reads. She neither makes elaborate dishes nor reads sophisticated books, but she has good instincts, which means her literary tastes are closer to those of my readers than to those of so many bitter critics.

  She did away with my friends’ longtime habit of coming by my house whenever they felt like it, and created rules and protocols: without invitation there was no access to La Chascona, Isla Negra, or La Sebastiana. And, most important, when I met her, she resuscitated my lethargic desire. I’m grateful that she was already an experienced lover. Her artistic tours throughout Latin America had also served as torrid lessons in love. By the time Matilde arrived at my sickbed in Mexico City, on tiptoe, smiling in her makeup, with her tight blouse and fiery gaze, I was tied to Delia only by a sense of friendship and compassion. The night that I escaped with Matilde to the Island of Capri and left Delia preparing my return to Chile and the clandestine publication of Canto General, the die had been cast: Matilde was forty-one, Delia sixty-eight.

  I ask the victims of my happiness for forgiveness. I ask it of Josie Bliss and María Antonieta, of Delia and Beatriz, and also of Matilde: all the women who were shipwrecked in an ocean of hopes nourished by my verses. They didn’t know that words cobbled together by a poet are simulacra, artifices, not the actual truth. When was my behavior most despicable? When I left María Antonieta and Malva Marina in Holland? Or when I anonymously published The Captain’s Verses, inspired by Matilde, even though I was still married to Delia? It was an homage to my lover, to her tenderness and intoxicating body, and a cruel slap in the face of loyal Delia. All of Chile guessed those poems were mine and that they couldn’t have been inspired by an old woman. When I returned to the country, Delia suspected it as well.

  Matilde miscarried three babies that we conceived together. Now, with the bay stretching out before me, mute, gray, and still as one of those melancholy Carlitos Hermosilla engravings, I try to imagine what my life would be like today if those children had been born. It’s too late to think about these things now, late and futile. One day I asked her if we could stop trying, and said that we should forget about children, that our love could endure without them. Instead of children, we’d have friends; instead of procreating, we’d travel all over the world; instead of telling fairy tales, we’d read Baudelaire, Whitman, and Dostoevsky; and instead of buying toys, we’d collect the most exotic objects imaginable—telescopes, bottles, shells, starfish, pottery, metal irons, and the figureheads of prows.

  “Let’s forget about children, Matilde,” I proposed. “I can only be father to my poems, my true progeny.”

  48

  Alicia? She said her name was Alicia?” exclaimed Laura Aréstegui. They were in the Vienés, a traditional café in Valparaíso that hadn’t lost its old-time splendor and that, despite the shortages that racked the country, still served fresh coffee and first-class pastries.

  “That’s right,” answered Cayetano as he lit a cigarette. “She said her name was Alicia, and that the poet was in Santiago, correcting the galleys of a new book.”

  “That’s Alicia Urrutia, no doubt about it.”

  “Who is Alicia Urrutia?”

  “A niece of Matilde’s. A young woman with big boobs and a pretty face. They say she’s the poet’s lover.”

  Cayetano put down his coffee in astonishment and looked out the window at Esmeralda Street, where Patria y Libertad nationalists were marching in their black pants and white shirts, armed with clubs and helmets. They waved Chilean flags, as well as white ones with a large black geometric spider at the center that resembled the Nazi swastika. Shouting anti-Allende slogans, they demanded the country be saved from communism. From the
sidewalk, some onlookers applauded enthusiastically, while others watched in silence.

  “That girl is the poet’s lover,” Laura insisted.

  Could the poet really have a new lover? At his age, sick as he was? He wasn’t some puritan who needed to police Pablo’s fly, but still, this news hit him like a deluge of water that burst the pitcher of his patience. And why the devil was he scheming to send a detective all over the world to heal past wounds if he was also in the thick of a new affair? The nation suffocated in a climate of hatred and political division, about to capsize into civil war—and here the poet kept stoking the flames of his personal conflagration. If Matilde found out, she’d cut his balls off. Yes, with cancer and all, she would still cut them off and throw them in the fireplace at La Sebastiana, to heat the house in that implacable and interminable winter, because, Cayetano thought, she was a woman to be reckoned with. He loosened the knot of his tie, the one with the small guanacos, and sipped his coffee in disappointment.

  “You’re going to tell me that the poet has a lover, at his age and in his condition?” he asked Laura, not hiding his surprise.

  “Why not? Let’s face it, men can get it up even after they’re dead.”

  “It’s just hard for me to imagine …”

  “It’s because of Alicia Urrutia that Neruda ended up at the Paris embassy,” Laura Aréstegui added.

  “Now I really don’t understand.” He tore off another piece of his pastry. Vanilla cream clung to his mustache; he wiped it with a paper napkin. “Please explain how the poet went to Paris because of Alicia.”

  “A few years ago, Matilde took Alicia, her niece, to live with them as an employee.”

  “That much I know.”

  “Well, Matilde was out a lot, doing work for her husband, while Alicia attended to him at home. And the situation, a pair of impressive boobs, fear of aging, well, in the end, you know …”

  “I know what?”

  “Please, Cayetano. Don’t try that with me.”

  “So how did Matilde find out?”

  “In flagrante. One day she pretended to be traveling to the capital, but turned back and came home. She surprised them in bed. She immediately told him they had to leave Chile to get away from her niece.”

  “The same thing happened to her that she’d done to Delia del Carril in the forties, in Mexico City.”

  “And what Delia did to María Antonieta, in Madrid. We women are our own worst enemies,” added Laura. The Vienés had filled with people fleeing the tumult outside.

  “So that’s why they became ambassadors to Paris?”

  “The poet had no choice but to give in. He begged Allende to assign him to Paris. Who could do the job better than him? And so they went.”

  “But now he’s back, though officially he’s still the ambassador to France. He’s back, sick as a dog, with Alicia Urrutia by his side.”

  “And I’ll bet that if Matilde isn’t careful, he’ll end up marrying the niece. Are you going to include this aspect of his life in your article?”

  Cayetano wondered whether he should continue the farce of preparing a piece on the poet for a Cuban magazine. Lies always have the shortest legs, as the saying went. The protest outside was growing: the new arrivals brought helmets, nunchucks, canes, and red and black flags bearing the image of Che Guevara. The chorus of slogans shook Esmeralda Street, nunchucks whirled furiously, makeshift spears jabbed at the sky, and stones flashed on swinging bolas. Cayetano thought of June’s failed coup, when he’d been a simple spectator of events from Alí Babá. He felt that things were repeating themselves with astounding precision: he, Cayetano, sat at a table before a large window, while history flowed vertiginously outside; here he sat, doing nothing, passive and helpless, simply watching events as they occurred, without the strength or conviction to stand, run out to the street, and speak or act.

  “I’m not going to write a single line about the poet’s love life,” he replied, keeping up the farce. “That’s something private, and nobody’s concern.”

  “I’m disappointed in you.”

  “Why?” Outside, a fight was breaking out between MIR and the nationalists. More people sought refuge from flying fists in the café. Vaccarezza, the owner, ordered the door to be closed and the metal curtains drawn just as riot police began to chase down the revolutionaries. “Why do I disappoint you, Laura?”

  “Because his love life exactly reflects his whole being, and best reveals what he thinks of women.” The lamps of Café Vienés lit up, radiating opalescent light as the metal curtains lowered and turned the place into a capsule. “He escaped from Josie Bliss; he abandoned María Antonieta and his daughter; he threw Delia away like a rag. Now that the years have caught up to Matilde and she’s not the woman she used to be, he’s sleeping with her niece. What do you think of the poet now? What do you call these dirty tricks? Sonnets, eclogues, free verse? If you don’t describe it, who will?”

  “You yourself, sweetheart. Aren’t you writing your thesis for Patrice Lumumba University?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Cayetano. You know that if I include that in my graduate work, they’ll deny me a degree. When have you ever seen the church defrock its own saints?”

  49

  From the soda fountain at Alí Babá, Cayetano saw the poet turn onto Collado Way. He walked slowly, slightly stooped, in a poncho and cap, assisted by his chauffeur. Cayetano polished off his coffee, put some coins on the table, and left the restaurant with the sense that Neruda’s health was deteriorating at the same pace as the health of the nation.

  As soon as Sergio opened the garden door, he informed Cayetano that the poet was resting in his bed, which was now down in the living room because he lacked the strength to go up to the second floor. Cayetano ran up the front steps and found the poet lying beside the window, his legs covered with a blanket. The green carousel horse, which had struck him so vividly on his first visit, no longer galloped through the living room.

  “Where is she?” the poet asked after he sat up against the pillows and, in a gesture that both surprised and moved Cayetano, embraced him in silence, half closing his large saurian eyelids.

  “I suspect she’s in Bolivia, Don Pablo,” Cayetano answered.

  “In Bolivia? What’s she doing there, young man?”

  Cayetano told him what he’d managed to find out, though for the moment he omitted Tina from the story. He didn’t want to raise excessive hopes.

  “So you’re sure this is the same Beatriz I knew in Mexico City in 1941?” he asked after listening without interruption.

  “As sure as two plus two is four, Don Pablo.”

  “It’s just that I don’t understand what role the apartment on Leipziger Strasse has in all this. If Beatriz currently lives in Bolivia, why would her photograph appear in East Berlin? Show me the photo right now.”

  Cayetano took an envelope from his jacket and pulled out the photograph. “Do you recognize anyone here?”

  The poet picked up the picture and examined it with his magnifying glass.

  “This woman is Beatriz,” he exclaimed, voice shaking, eyes wide. “That’s how she was. It’s her! And here is Ángel, a good man, unfortunate victim of our passion. In that era, Beatriz and I were lovers, Cayetano. So it’s probable that after this reception, we saw each other in secret, and I kissed her lips, pressed her girlish form against me, and made love to her.”

  He was moved by his own past. Cayetano tried to bring him back to reality. “You two had just met then, Don Pablo.”

  In vain.

  “October of 1941. The photo doesn’t do justice to her beauty, but it’s enough for me to recognize her. I am the cause of that joy, Cayetano. Do you know what that means? Here she is La Gioconda, and only you and I know why she’s smiling. In that moment we shared a reckless and clandestine passion, and didn’t know that only two years later we’d part forever, and that less than three years later a girl would be born …” He looked at his detective with damp eyes. “Our gir
l, Cayetano.”

  He sat down at the edge of the bed, oppressed by the realization that the poet, despite his lectures on the hopes of youth and the certainties of age, actually lived on conjectures, on a romantic and idealized vision of his own past. In the distance, the Pacific rose toward the city, whipped by the wind, and to the north the coastal hills loomed and blended into the snowy peaks of the Andes.

  “I can tell you’ve become a true detective, young man,” the poet said in satisfaction. “You see that crime novels aren’t only here for entertainment.”

  “Could be, Don Pablo. But if you’ll forgive my saying so, I don’t think Maigret is always a very useful guide for me.”

  “Of course not. I told you that long ago. He’s a Parisian, Cayetano, like Monsieur Dupin, not a born and bred Latin American like you. You’re different, authentic, ours, a detective with the flavor of empanadas and red wine, as Salvador would say, or of tacos and tequila, or congrí and rum. But …”

  “But what?”

  “Why do you think Beatriz is in Bolivia?”

  “Because of this other photograph, Don Pablo.”

  The poet picked up the picture and stared at it anxiously. His breath quickened. He used the magnifying glass.

  “It’s her! Years later, but that’s her! No doubt about it,” he murmured, trying to contain his excitement. “This woman is Beatriz Bracamonte, my sweet Mexican love. Those are her eyes, that’s her face, her high, pale forehead, the soft undulation of her lips, only years later …”

  “The mid-sixties, Don Pablo.”

  “Here she’s less than fifty, then, young man. Still a girl.”

  Best to get right to the facts, Cayetano thought. “This was taken in front of a social club in Santa Cruz, in the tropical region of Bolivia, Don Pablo.”

  “And him? Who is he? Her husband?”