The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  Adelman arrived moments later, walking quickly, wrapped in a long coat. A waiter’s flashlight led them through a dark and noisy room to a table with a small red lamp. People chatted, drank, and laughed heartily at tables arranged around a thrust stage, where a man in a suit and tie sang a bolero, accompanied by two guitarists. They ordered pisco with Coca-Cola.

  “What’s going on?” Adelman asked gravely. He was wearing the same suit jacket as he had that afternoon, and the collar of his shirt was unbuttoned.

  “It’s about Tamara Sunkel. You haven’t told me everything you know.”

  “You’re wrong. I told you all of it. I have no reason to hide anything.”

  “In that case, you wouldn’t have agreed to meet me here.”

  Lethargic applause swirled through the shadows. The bolero singer began to croon “Nosotros” with the melancholy of an exile.

  “Are you a detective?” Adelman asked.

  Cayetano thought of the novel he was reading. An older Maigret, with gray hair and a few extra pounds, went on vacation, but ended up entangled in a case making headlines in Paris. He felt like that European detective, dragged against his will into a matter that, strictly speaking, was none of his business.

  “I’m not a detective, but I sense that you know more about Tamara,” he said, lighting a cigarette. The small flame of his match danced in the lawyer’s pupils. “She must have been part of the German community, and that couldn’t have escaped your notice.”

  “I’ve already told you everything I know.”

  “You must have found out more. You frequented the German Club, you must have met Tamara Sunkel and the colonel. They’re exactly the kind of people who awaken your interest as an investigator.”

  “I told you all of that this afternoon.”

  “All of that, but not something that surely must have caught your attention: the sudden disappearance of Tamara Sunkel after the colonel’s death.”

  “That’s a matter for the police.”

  “Adelman, I need your help,” said Cayetano. “I came to Bolivia because I need help. It’s a humanitarian issue.”

  The bolero players left the stage, and the indifference of the audience upset Cayetano, since those men probably had wives and children, rented modest homes at the outskirts of La Paz, bought their outfits on installment, and had once dreamed of capturing that slippery creature called fame. But the room burst into loud applause when a blonde in a tight dress and high heels appeared onstage, swinging her hips to the rhythm of “The Pink Panther Theme” as her painted lips smiled into empty space.

  “I’ve already told you what I know.” Adelman followed the stripper’s steps with hungry eyes.

  Cayetano paused a moment for the woman to remove her blouse and expose her breasts, which were scarcely covered by a skimpy black bra, but when he realized the whole procedure would take a while, he said, “I don’t need to know what Tamara was involved in. I only need to see her on behalf of someone she was very close to a long time ago.”

  “Who is that person?”

  “I can’t reveal his identity, except to say that he’s terminally ill and wants to speak to her. That’s why I came to La Paz, Simón. I mean it: this person is dying.”

  “I’ve already said I don’t know where she is, or how to get in touch with her.” Adelman drank his pisco and Coke, his eyes glued to the blonde. Now she was dancing in nothing but a bra and panties.

  “I don’t believe you. If you know of a way of getting in touch with her, you wouldn’t have asked me who was trying to reach her.”

  Adelman kept silent, watching the dancer, stroking his glass with the back of his hand. The blonde shook her hips furiously, proving the firmness of her flesh and stirring murmurs and whistles of approval in the audience.

  “They just need to see each other briefly,” Cayetano insisted. “Tamara will be grateful. She probably thinks my client died years ago, taking their shared secret to his grave.”

  The blonde circled the stage and turned her back to the spectators as her hands slowly unclasped the bra. She let it fall and faced the audience again, her arms over her breasts, moving to the rhythm of a sad cumbia, until she finally bared her fruits, which were remarkable and slightly drooped, and took off her panties. It was a kind of magic trick that made the whole place go silent. She stood completely naked, center stage, smiling, arms high, legs crossed, as the spotlight caressed her perfect body. The public gave her a long ovation, peppered with shouts and whistles. She wasn’t a real blonde, Cayetano observed as he put out his cigarette and sipped his drink.

  “Nobody will find out that you told me her whereabouts,” he said when the applause had abated.

  “I have no idea where she lives.”

  “If Tamara was a businesswoman, I can believe that she disappeared from Bolivia overnight, but not that she could liquidate her assets with the same speed.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  Cayetano crossed his arms on the table, adjusted his glasses, and looked solemnly at the lawyer. “You must know who kept her books.”

  When the false blonde disappeared behind the curtain, a bald, scrawny old man emerged and reluctantly gathered her clothes from the floor.

  “They say that’s her father,” Adelman said, watching the guy skeptically. “I don’t buy that nonsense.”

  “Don’t change the subject on me, Simón. Tamara Sunkel’s accountant has got to know where she is,” Cayetano replied, a new cigarette between his lips, though he couldn’t light it because the club’s stuffy air barely filled his lungs. “And don’t even try telling me you don’t know how to get in touch with that accountant.”

  54

  Thank goodness you called!” the poet exclaimed with impatience. “The curiosity is making me restless. I’m headed for another sleepless night. It happens to us when we’re old. It must be so we can better say good-bye to the realm of the living. Matilde is in Isla Negra, so we can talk freely. How’s it going in La Paz?”

  Though it was late, Cayetano had called La Sebastiana because he sensed the poet needed to hear from him. He didn’t expect to find him in such a good mood. All the better: he hurried to catch him up.

  “I’ve got good news: the woman we’re looking for lived here.”

  “So where is she now?”

  Fortunately, Neruda seemed to have recovered his optimism. Cayetano explained what he’d found in a day’s work, though he didn’t mention the new change to Beatriz’s identity. Now the poet almost seemed to enjoy hearing about his adventures, as though he were reading a crime novel with Cayetano as the protagonist.

  “The East German embassy sent me a brochure for the Berliner Ensemble,” he said. “It includes photos of the actors in Galileo, with Tina playing Virginia, but she isn’t clearly visible. And what a stage name she picked for herself! Well, those grandiloquent ways ease up with time. Did you know that in my youth I once named a book The Attempt of the Infinite Man?”

  It pleased him to find the poet in better spirits, but his frivolous humor also shocked him. Saddened, he let Neruda talk without listening to him. He tried not to think. Then, as he bent to untie his shoes, he felt blood suddenly rush to his head and his chest tighten terribly, while an immense fatigue swept over him, as though he’d aged from one moment to the next. He lay down on the bed, still holding the receiver. A buzzing sound bore into his brain.

  “Are you listening, young man?”

  “Yes, I’m listening, Don Pablo.” He closed his eyes. His ears felt clogged, as though he were diving deep inside the warm waters of Havana’s Malecón.

  “In any case, we needed to talk, because this afternoon, as the sun was setting over Playa Ancha and making pearly sparkles in the water, I fell asleep like one of those shitty old people who start snoring the minute they hit an armchair. And do you know what I dreamed?”

  “No, Don Pablo.”

  The room spun around him like a mad carousel. He felt chills and nausea. He opened his eyes
and counted the water stains that hovered on the ceiling like dirty clouds. Beyond them he saw faded curtains and a frameless mirror over the chest of drawers that reflected the crucified Christ above Cayetano’s head. Everything spun without cease.

  “Of course, I’m such an idiot. How would you know? I’ve been lost in the clouds lately.”

  After the intense confidence he’d just exhibited, this new conciliatory tone impelled Cayetano to speak. “It’s normal, Don Pablo. Don’t worry. There’s been so much going on, and it’s taken a toll on your nerves, and mine. How’s the treatment going?”

  But Don Pablo, deep down, had to be doing very badly.

  “Don’t treat me like a child.” He took a deep breath, clearly annoyed, and added, “You know very well this can’t be fixed. So there’s no use in your coming at me with dumb-ass questions or white lies. We’re lucky to be mortal.”

  He said it with an anger that seemed to suggest the opposite, but Cayetano replied that he was right; in any case, he could barely hear him. He turned off the light. The room now spun like the carousel in a Hitchcock film he’d seen at the Mauri Theater. His throat was dry, and he was shaken by chills. Altitude sickness, for fuck’s sake, that damn altitude sickness was getting the best of him. He recalled the warnings of the Quechua man at the airport. Now not even coca tea could save him!

  “So I dreamed that I was on a theater stage, that I was an actor, like Tina, only I was playing Aeneas,” the poet continued, with the same desperate arrogance. “Do you remember Aeneas, Cayetano?”

  “More or less, Don Pablo.” He thought of Tina. He had seen her only once, but as he recalled her, she seemed marked by a definitive, irreparable solitude.

  “You can’t just read Simenon, young man. Aeneas was the Trojan who left his homeland because Jupiter ordered him to go to Italy and founded Rome. On the journey, he passed through Carthage, where he fell in love with Queen Dido, a woman who risked everything to be his lover. When he left, she killed herself. That’s in the Aeneid, Cayetano. As soon as you finish Simenon, at least read Virgil and Homer.”

  “As soon as this passes, I will.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, Don Pablo.” His bones hurt, his teeth chattered, and his body was bathed in cold and sticky sweat. Neruda was no detective, he thought; he made no attempt to find out more.

  “So I was Aeneas, walking through the world of the dead, and I saw the ghost of my former lover, Dido. Without knowing why, I started reciting Aeneas’s words from memory, words I just found in the Aeneid: ‘Oh, tragic Dido: was it true, what the messenger said, when he came to tell me you were dead and gone from us? And was I—such pain!—the cause of your death? I swear on the stars and the gods, I swear on faith itself, if faith exists here in the depths of the earth, that I was forced to leave your shores, oh Queen.’ Are you listening, Cayetano, do you realize what was happening in my dream?”

  “Of course, Don Pablo. Go on.”

  “‘With their ineluctable laws, the commandments of the gods impelled me, as they impel me now, to travel through these shadows, through these places covered in mold and through this deep night: nor could I ever have believed that my departure would have caused you such fierce pain. Wait, don’t go, don’t leave my sight. Where are you fleeing to? What I am telling you is final, it’s the will of fate …’”

  He heard his own glasses crash to the floor, and the sound returned him to his hotel room in La Paz, to this exhausting conversation with the poet, and to the complicated text being read or recited to him from La Sebastiana.

  “Do you see?” asked Neruda. “Aeneas is me, and Dido is Beatriz. This means that my story was already told by Virgil two thousand years ago. But there’s more: if I was Aeneas, then I took advantage of Dido, when she was young and happy with a decent man. I arrived in her country, seduced her with my cosmopolitan air and a whirlwind of words, and I turned her into an unfaithful wife, only to leave her to face her destiny alone. Beatriz may no longer be alive, Cayetano, and I have to get used to the idea of dying with the horrible feeling that I used her and that I’ll never be able to know the truth.”

  At last the mask was falling, though the voice, as had occurred at other times, remained dramatic, playing its part in The Tragedy of Pablo Neruda, with its unmistakable sole protagonist. But by now Cayetano had learned to see behind the curtain.

  “Don Pablo, it’s nighttime, and you’re tired. Try to sleep, if you can. You’ll see that tomorrow, when the sun rises over the Andes, everything will have a different color.”

  “I now see myself as that person Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz talked about: a being who ‘is a corpse, is dust, is shadow, is nothing …’”

  It was too much, almost pathetic. He had never heard him in such a state, not at such an extreme. Nor did he want to hear it. “Don Pablo. Stop.”

  “Beatriz isn’t my only Dido, Cayetano. Josie Bliss was one, too, the malignant one with her visceral jealousies and gleaming dagger. And so was María Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang, the mother of the daughter I renounced.”

  There were no more boundaries. Impossible to tell confessions from recital of text.

  “Don Pablo, whom are you trying to scare?”

  He didn’t listen. “And then I was Aeneas with Delia, whom I dispensed with when she was old, too old to start a new life with another man. I betrayed her while she was secretly carrying my manuscripts from one place to another, risking her life for my sake. And I repaid her by leaving her for a woman thirty years younger, with whom she couldn’t compete in age or beauty. I’ve been an Aeneas, Cayetano, an unscrupulous bastard. I’ve been a master of the art of escape, and I’ve just now come to understand it in my hour of twilight. I’m condemned to die remembering all the suffering I caused in my pursuit of happiness. There’s no one more thoughtless than the man who seeks only his own contentment. Are you listening, Cayetano? Cayetano?”

  55

  Are you referring to Mrs. Tamara Sunkel, of Santa Cruz, Dr. Adelman?” the accountant asked. He was an older man, with brown eyes besieged by deep wrinkles.

  “Precisely. The one who acquired the Antofagasta.”

  The office of Elmer Soto Ebensberger, CPA, was on the mezzanine of a downtown building, not far from the Palacio Quemado. The neighborhood teemed with food stalls and street vendors, most of them indigenous, who displayed their wares on blankets spread over the sidewalk.

  The most sought-after accountant in the German community of La Paz stood up from his desk, which was cluttered with files, and went to an adjacent room, where his employees processed invoices. Cayetano and Adelman waited in silence, staring out at the buildings across the street, which were still under construction but already inhabited on the first floor.

  The accountant returned to his office with an array of black notebooks. “You’re referring to Tamara Sunkel Bauer, the German woman, right?” he asked, leafing though pages.

  “I’m talking about the wife of Colonel Sacher.”

  “May he rest in peace. In that case, we’re referring to the same woman.”

  “Mr. Brulé wishes to find her on behalf of an old friend of hers.”

  “She was my client for a while, Dr. Adelman. But I don’t know that I’ll be of much use to you now,” Soto Ebensberger murmured as his index finger roved the notebook. “A charming woman, of course, refined and reserved. Extraordinarily punctual with her payments.”

  “We’re speaking of this woman, right?” Cayetano showed him the photo of Beatriz in Santa Cruz.

  The accountant studied it for a moment, then said, with a pompous air, “That’s certainly her. And there she is with the colonel.”

  “Her husband.”

  “Not by law,” Soto Ebensberger corrected. He interlaced his hands. A bleeding Bakelite Christ hung on the wall behind him. “They weren’t married in the manner God intended. I know, because I prepared her tax returns, and hers alone.”

  Cayetano returned the photo to his jacket pocket. “She left
the country a while ago, didn’t she?”

  “That’s right.”

  “In a surprising, mysterious way …”

  “From one day to the next, really. But I wouldn’t say it was illegal.” He unfurled a condescending smile. “She was doing very well here. High income, low profile, rubbing elbows with the elite. The death of the colonel must have devastated her.”

  “That’s why she left?”

  “I imagine so. And since she was a foreigner, she preferred to go abroad.”

  “So the accident led to the disappearance of Mrs. Sunkel?”

  “I suppose so, because it was a strange accident. The officer’s Dodge Dart ran off a cliff in El Alto. The steering failed. We’re talking about a brand-new car, the latest model. Several rumors circulated afterward.”

  “For example?”

  “That it was an act of political revenge.” He stared hard at Cayetano.

  “Revenge for what?”

  “Well, the rumors held the colonel responsible for catching Che. He specialized in collecting information. Understand?”

  “Yes, I know a little about Sacher. So where is Mrs. Sunkel now?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question, Mr. Brulé.”

  Cayetano stroked the tips of his mustache. “But if she owned property, she couldn’t have disappeared from Bolivia overnight.”

  “You’ve missed a detail: like a good German, she prepared her affairs very calmly and in detail.” Soto Ebensberger became solemn. “She liquidated all her properties before she left.”

  Cayetano lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and exhaled the smoke toward the window. “Didn’t she leave you an address before she left? If you were her accountant, then she must have. There are always follow-up details in tax matters.”