The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  He ran down Diego Rivera, through the warm Pacific air. If it weren’t for the disaster taking place, he thought, this would have been a gorgeous day. He reached a small plaza called Ecuador, where the news had already interrupted daily routines. People were walking back home, quickly, their faces full of terror and amazement, while pairs of soldiers stood on every corner. Cayetano continued on to Errázuriz Avenue, hoping he could find a ride to Isla Negra. It wouldn’t be easy, but he had to try. Perhaps this September 11 would only be another June 29, he thought, and Allende would crush the coup attempt and call the people into the nation’s streets and plazas that very night to celebrate their victory.

  Much later, a Sol del Pacífico bus pulled up half a block away to let out passengers, and he managed to board. It was headed to Quinteros, which suited him, as Isla Negra would be close by. The passengers traveled in silence, tense and overwhelmed, as the vehicle drove along the shores of an unkempt ocean. In the south, in Valparaíso Bay, he could still see the precise outlines of the navy warships.

  As soon as he turned into Quinteros, the bus driver stopped and would go no further, because he lived there. The people disembarked in resignation, without a word. Cayetano found an open soda fountain beside a dense old grapevine. He ordered coffee and waited for someone to pass down the highway. The soda fountain’s radio announced that Hawker Hunters from the armed forces would bomb La Moneda if the president didn’t surrender. He felt his mouth go dry. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It wasn’t possible that, while he was struggling to get to the poet’s house, Chilean warplanes were about to bomb the government’s headquarters with the president still inside it. This was no new June 29, he realized; it was a tragedy of horrendous proportions. But Allende wouldn’t surrender. A Chilean president never surrenders.

  Once again he recalled Allende and Neruda’s parting embrace beside the helicopter, and the way people had leaned out of windows and flooded streets and alleys to celebrate the aircraft’s takeoff. Now the radio crackled with agitated voices, bursts of shots and shrapnel, the wail of bombs, police and ambulance sirens, and the roar of low-flying jets. It was war.

  He asked for a beer, or whatever alcoholic drink they had on hand. He would have liked to have done something, something brave and heroic, but circumstances once again condemned him to passivity. The waitress brought him a glass of pisco, which he drank straight up, with trembling hands and a sense of unreality as he looked out at the sparkling Pacific Ocean. A flock of pelicans pressed elegantly through the sky; meanwhile, bombs were raining down on the capital. Now the radio called on leaders of Unidad Popular to report to their closest police stations. He listened to a long list of names: ministers, governors, senators, local leaders, and officials who must surrender or else be annihilated without mercy. His fear grew when he heard that subversive foreigners should also report to police stations or military barracks. What was he? he wondered. A mere innocent foreigner, or a subversive one?

  He paid and left. Now more than ever, he urgently needed a ride to Isla Negra. He couldn’t stay on the street, out in the open. As he walked, he heard chilling news through the open windows of country houses scattered along the highway: tanks and troops had surrounded La Moneda, the president’s police officers were leaving Allende alone with a handful of bodyguards, an unequal gun battle was intensifying between soldiers and civil defenders of the government, and Hawker Hunters flew over Santiago carrying deadly explosives. A nightmare.

  Just the night before, he’d seen La Moneda brandishing its flag against the night. Now Allende and his allies battled for survival behind its old walls. He sat down in the shade of a hawthorn tree. He felt shattered. An hour later, a battered pickup truck pulled up beside him, crammed with pots, pans, and enormous copper plates that shone like suns.

  “Where are you headed, my friend?” said the driver, an old Gypsy, traveling alone in the cab.

  61

  Before he parted ways with the Gypsy, he felt obligated to buy a copper frying pan with black rivets. Then he disembarked in front of a green kiosk where bread, drinks, and vegetables were sold. He’d lost track of events because the pickup truck had no radio. At the kiosk, he exchanged the gleaming pan for two bottles of Bilz soda and sat down to wait by the road. Military marches poured out of the store’s radio, tuned to the junta’s station.

  After a while, the woman working at the kiosk quickly turned the radio dial. Cayetano recognized the calm, grave voice of Salvador Allende, shrapnel sounding in the background. Allende was alive! Had the bombings stopped? Could this be another June 29, after all—could he be announcing a return to normalcy? All too soon he realized his mistake. Allende was resisting from inside the presidential palace. It gave him chills just to imagine him there, in La Moneda, besieged by tanks and planes. He was speaking to the country. He promised to stay loyal to his constitutional duties, declared the rebel generals traitors, and called police chief César Mendoza despicable. But there was something disturbing in his words: he urged the people not to make sacrifices, and said he’d pay for his loyalty to them with his life, that “the seed we’ve planted in the worthy conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans cannot be entirely destroyed.” It seemed like a message of hope, the hopes for the future of a defeated man.

  From Quinteros came the echo of isolated gunshots and machine gun bursts, and then a devastating silence as the voice of Salvador Allende—after affirming that sooner or later the great avenues would reopen and a new man would travel down them again to build a better society, and after he finally shouted, “Long live Chile, long live the workers!”—vanished into thin air. The woman at the kiosk turned the radio’s knobs in desperation, trying to recover the president’s voice, but found only a shrill, sharp whistle, followed by a military march. She didn’t give up. She kept searching the dial insistently, coming across more and more stations playing edicts and marches. The woman began to sob, huddled close to the radio, wiping her tears with a handkerchief.

  Cayetano watched it all from the other side of the highway, mechanically drinking his soda, at a loss for words, sitting under the hot morning sun. Suddenly the woman at the kiosk fixed her gaze on him, and he pretended to be looking at the sky, the same sky in which, at that moment, seventy kilometers to the east, jets were flying in their attack of La Moneda. Now the highway gleamed in silence, interrupted only by occasional gunshots and the rattle of a distant helicopter. He thought that the Pacific seemed inflamed.

  “Mister, you’d better go home,” the woman shouted. She started to close down her kiosk. “The curfew is about to start. They’ll shoot you if they catch you on the road.”

  Cayetano looked at his watch, and then at the empty highway. He drank the last sip of his second bottle. There was no way for him to go anywhere. It wasn’t feasible for him to carry out her advice. “Is there any kind of lodging in Quinteros?” he asked.

  “Only in the summer. Not in this season.”

  He remembered Margaretchen. She’d answered similarly weeks earlier when he’d asked about hotels in Bernau. He couldn’t ask this woman for a place to stay. Under the new circumstances, she wouldn’t dare open her home to a stranger.

  He crossed the street, bought a bottle of Cachatún, and started walking, hoping someone would take him to Isla Negra before he ran into soldiers. Who the hell had made him come live in this far-flung corner of the earth? Didn’t Cubans have enough problems at home and abroad? How could he have gotten embroiled in another country’s mess?

  As he walked, he thought of Ángela, and pictured her listening to news from Chile with incredulous frustration. She’ll certainly come to the confrontation well prepared, he thought sardonically. He also thought of Laura Aréstegui, the Ph.D. student who worked at DIRINCO and dreamed of publishing a book about Neruda. And he thought of the poet, who must be at his Isla Negra house, listening to events, overwhelmed and impotent; waiting hungrily for the news he needed to die in peace.

  He was still walking on th
e highway when he heard a vehicle in the distance. His face lit up with enthusiasm. At last! It had to be the last Sol del Pacífico bus before the curfew, he thought, turning happily toward a stretch of road that curved away into the hills. Surely it was that bus, the final one to travel that arid, rocky land studded with cacti, hawthorns, and boldo plants; flanked on the west by a coast that shuddered with waves.

  But when the vehicle approached, a chill ran down his back and petrified him. It was a military truck. Cayetano pressed his hands against the water bottle, helpless to do anything else. The truck pulled up beside him, shaking the very earth. It was full of prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs. He knew what awaited him.

  A couple of soldiers with Mausers ordered him to climb into the back. He threw down the bottle, which shattered against a rock, and raised his hands into the air. As he climbed in, he saw that the top of the truck was crammed with men, women, and children. No one spoke to him. The kiosk had long been closed, and the truck sounded a death rattle as it started up its engine and began to speed down the highway. On their left, hills rose and glittered, while on their right, it now seemed to him, the Pacific Ocean was definitely writhing with fury.

  62

  They set him free about two weeks later, exhausted, bruised, and hungry. But he considered himself lucky, because others had had a far worse time. He suspected that they were releasing him by mistake. It was September 23, a warm Sunday morning, when he left the Puchuncaví camp. Dante, the young official who’d played the role of good cop during interrogations, during which he’d been accused of colluding with the Cuban embassy, advised him to leave the country as soon as possible.

  “We’re building a new Chile here,” the captain said as he escorted him to the gate of the camp. He had brown hair and large hands. “This nation will no longer be a sanctuary for extremists, either native or foreign.”

  He never found out why he’d been arrested, or why he was released. Some prisoners murmured that the military had lists of names provided by infiltrators, informers, and the tortured. For a while, he thought Ángela’s father, the powerful businessman, must have helped him. It was safe to assume that he’d supported the coup. He also guessed that help could have come from the United States embassy, since he, as a Cuban exile, had a North American passport. Nor did he rule out the possibility that he owed his freedom to Maia Herzen, who, through her military ties, could have anonymously given him a hand. By the time he was back out on the highway—the sun stung brutally, stones dazzled, and hawthorns undulated in the distance—he already knew that Allende had died in La Moneda, that Pinochet had headed up the dictatorship, and that the dead, exiled, and imprisoned numbered in the thousands.

  The driver of a Sol del Pacífico finally took him to Isla Negra without charge. Once there, he hurried to the poet’s house, feverishly hoping to find him safe and sound.

  “They took him to the capital half an hour ago,” the housekeeper said when she opened the door, scared to death. Waves shook the nearby crags and sprayed white mist over the motorboat and old steam engine in the front garden. “He’s in a very bad state, he won’t even get up anymore. The coup destroyed him.”

  “I have to see him. I have an urgent message to give him.”

  “I don’t think he’ll recognize you.” She dried her hands on her apron. She invited him in for some scrambled eggs and tea, and to see the havoc caused by the military raid. They walked past walls covered with oil paintings and carved prows; past oak furniture, cabinets displaying sailboats and fine glassware, shelves crammed with first editions and collected shells, stones, and colored bottles, until they reached a hall, where broken pottery, piled books, and wall hangings lay strewn on the floor, as though someone had been in too much of a hurry to take them before leaving. “Don Pablo is in an ambulance to Santiago,” the woman said.

  “To which hospital?”

  “I don’t know. Doña Matilde took him. It was an emergency, they left very fast. There wasn’t time for anything.”

  “And Sergio, his driver?”

  “The soldiers took him the day of the coup. And my husband, too,” she said, weeping. “We haven’t heard a thing about them.”

  Cayetano returned to the highway with the feeling that everything was lost and that he’d never be able to give the poet his news. He boarded another bus and paid with money the housekeeper had given him. Somehow, he thought, he’d have to find the poet in the capital, in whatever hospital he was in. He hadn’t traveled half the world and solved the mystery only to surrender now, when he was so close to his goal. Though he was fatally ill, Neruda had to be waiting for his news.

  What hospital was he in? Santiago had several. And how could he possibly ask around for such a famous man without drawing the attention of the police? Neruda was the needle, Santiago the haystack, he thought, momentarily pleased with his own choice of metaphor. But later, as the bus was driving down a stretch of highway lined with poplars and sweet acacias, and with the Andes rising straight ahead, he thought the poet would have deemed it a tired metaphor.

  A truck of prisoners passed them, and he felt a chill of fear and empathy, remembering his days at Puchuncaví. He knew what awaited those men and women. It was rumored that Allende’s sympathizers were being shot in summary proceedings and that many of them, though this was hard to believe, were being thrown from helicopters into the Pacific, tied to chunks of iron so that they’d never resurface.

  An hour later, the bus stopped in front of a military checkpoint. A line of vehicles waited to have their trunks and ID cards inspected. It would take a long time, as the soldiers were being painstakingly thorough in their duties. No one on the bus dared say a thing. At that moment, Cayetano glimpsed an ambulance at the front of the line. It had to be the poet, he thought, full of hope. He got off the bus and ran past the waiting cars. From a distance, he thought he recognized Matilde’s thick hair. She was speaking to an officer while soldiers looked into the ambulance through the open back. They were interrogating the poet as he lay in the ambulance, the bastards! he thought angrily. He sped up and ran with fresh energy because now, at last, he would see Don Pablo again.

  “Stop! Stop!” voices shouted at him, but he kept running, deaf to orders. He was meters from the ambulance when a soldier pushed him and made him fall facedown on the pavement. His glasses flew from his face.

  “Where are you going, you asshole?” someone shouted. He felt a kick to his kidneys and a rifle butt hitting his right shoulder.

  He raised his head and met with the black mouth of a Mauser. He couldn’t make out the soldier’s face. He reached for his glasses, but a boot crushed his hand. He had to stay down with one cheek stuck to the hot asphalt while the soldier kicked him and demanded to know why he was running.

  “I want to talk to the sick man in the ambulance,” he explained, sore and bruised.

  The boot’s pressure eased slowly, until his fingers could grope the ground and find his glasses. They were intact. Thank God for that, he thought, spitting out pebbles. He put them on clumsily and was able to make out the outline of the ambulance, the faces of the soldiers who surrounded it, and the green shoots of spring in central Chile. Another round of kicks reminded him of the treatment he’d received in the camp at Puchuncaví.

  “Wait your turn, asshole. Order rules here now,” an officer shouted, a pistol in his belt. “Why are you so interested in the old man in the ambulance?”

  “Because he’s a friend.”

  “Do you write a bunch of crap, too?”

  “I want to say good-bye. He’s about to die.”

  “Well, there’s no running allowed,” the officer replied, looking at the vehicle, which was starting up again. “Anyway, he’s gone. Where’s your luggage?”

  “I have no luggage, my captain,” he replied, imitating the Chilean twang. If they found out he was Cuban, he’d be behind bars again. A prisoner at Puchuncaví, an actor at the Theater Institute at the University of Chile, had taught him ho
w to hide his Cuban accent. He had also told him he should shave his mustache, something Cayetano could never do, as he considered it a non-negotiable part of his identity. “I’m traveling on the bus at the end of this line, my captain.”

  “Well, get back there and wait your turn like you’re supposed to, you faggot. You can look for the poet in Santiago.”

  “The capital is very big, my captain. If I lose him now, I’ll never find him again.”

  “I thought the poet was oh so famous! If that’s true, how hard can it be to find him? Go on, get back to your bus, you worthless son of a bitch!”

  63

  He arrived in Santiago thirty minutes before curfew, and found a room in a hotel for romantic trysts near Mapocho Station. At a nearby soda fountain he had a Barros Luco with a lot of avocado, and two beers. Then he walked out, concealing his burp from the prostitutes sitting outside. They were offering to spend the entire curfew period with one man for a sale price. Business seemed bad for them, as people were going home early and very few could afford the cost of a whole night.

  The shop windows were packed with merchandise again, thanks to the free-market pricing decreed by the new regime. There was no more black market. Everything was back, but at astronomical prices: bread, butter, rice, flour, oil, noodles, chicken, even meat. Whoever could pay the new prices was able to eat, and for this reason the city now wore a worn face, as though its will to live had been scraped away. As the afternoon waned, military troops began to fill the corners, plazas, and alleys, taking cover behind sacks of flour piled up like walls. As soon as darkness overtook the capital, he heard machine-gun bursts, the whir of helicopters, and occasional gunshots.

  They’re shooting people point-blank, the housekeeper at the poet’s house had told him. They prefer to do it at night so that the sound will intimidate the populace. He walked a few blocks, wanting to return to his hotel without encountering military posts, until he reached Veintiuno de Mayo, a street that stretched out gray and desolate, as though painted with coal by a dejected artist. All of a sudden, a military jeep turned a corner. It was headed his way. He shuddered at the thought of being arrested again, this time without identification. He pressed against a wall, ears pricked, with no idea how he would escape.