The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  Someone tapped a window behind him. He turned on his heels, tense with terror. The jeep was closer now. They’d see him in a matter of seconds. He let out a sigh of relief. The noise had been made by a mechanical monkey in peasant garb, the size of a real chimp. It struck its wooden baton rhythmically against the window of the shop where Cayetano had sought momentary refuge. It was a hat and turban factory with a curiously Bolivarian name: Sombrerías Americanas Unidas. The jeep had almost arrived. Cayetano kneeled on the ground, crouched against the factory door. The vehicle passed, its motor hoarse, its soldiers distracted by the monkey, who struck the window sadly with his baton.

  He arrived back at his second-floor hotel room bathed in sweat. He’d had to run those final blocks because the curfew was beginning. He peered through the lace curtains at the window. The street was calm, its cobbles damp, its houses shrouded in darkness. A helicopter flew low over the roofs. Cayetano glimpsed the face of the soldier manning the machine gun at the aircraft door. He was scanning the city with his arms around his weapon, frowning, austere. One thing was sure: Simenon’s novels never said a word or knew a thing about circumstances like these, he thought as he lay down in bed with his clothes on, trembling from cold or fear, he no longer knew which, and turned off the small lamp on the nightstand. The Belgian’s plots, however well wrought, belonged to a terrain alien to him; they were literature, fictitious worlds tacked together through the skill and imagination of a famous writer. But he currently faced the cruel, implacable, chaotic reality of Latin America, a world whose plot had no known author or preestablished script that could make all things possible.

  As the night unfolded, its sounds increased: gunshots, shouts of warning on the street, and the screech of tires as cars took off with kidnapped citizens. He couldn’t sleep. He was too scared that the police would come to his room. Suddenly he felt the building shudder. He got up and went to the window. Trucks drove by, packed with prisoners, escorted by military jeeps. He turned on the battery-operated radio he’d borrowed from the reception desk, but all he could find on the stations was the song “Lili Marleen.”

  He went back to bed. The mattress creaked beneath his weight. He covered himself with a stained, smelly blanket. But this was a thousand times better than the cement floor of Puchuncaví. He thought about the prisoners being transported like cattle to the slaughter, about their relatives, about the likelihood that they’d be tortured and killed, about the fact that none of this could possibly be true. In the uncertainty of that night, he longed for three things: for the hotel to be free of raids, for dawn to come quickly, and for his own arrival at the poet’s side.

  A few heavy vehicles pulled up outside his room, making the building groan. Cayetano broke into a sweat. He thought his heart might leap out of his mouth. He crept to the window. Across the street, in front of a house, he saw a truck full of prisoners and two military jeeps. A searchlight suddenly illuminated the house as soldiers started kicking the door, until it was opened by an old woman in her petticoat. They pushed her aside roughly and entered the home. A few minutes later, they reemerged, dragging two youths in undershirts and underpants. They pushed them into the truck with their rifle butts, turned off the searchlight, and drove off. The woman remained on the street, lying on the ground outside the door of her house, moaning with grief. A neighbor came out after a while to guide her back inside. After that, a graveyard silence cloaked the neighborhood.

  The next morning, Cayetano rose, feeling helpless and uneasy. He washed his face, dried it with an old newspaper he found under the bed, and went down to the first floor, where the receptionist was drinking a cup of tea, wrapped in a blanket. The cramped entryway was dim, the shutters still drawn.

  “They took the kids across the street,” the man said. “That poor old lady went out this morning to look for them. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever see them again.”

  Cayetano called Laura Aréstegui, who answered immediately. He asked her how she was doing. She said not bad, though she feared they might come for her at any moment.

  “Why don’t you go somewhere else?”

  “And do what there? Look, why don’t you just tell me what you need from me.”

  “I have to find the poet.”

  “You’ve really gone crazy. Forget about that for now. You’ve got to be very careful.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “They say they buried Salvador Allende in an unmarked tomb in Viña del Mar. They guard the cemetery to prevent protests.”

  “I heard that on the news. But I have to see the poet …”

  “It seems they checked him into Santa María Clinic, in Santiago. Be very careful: they interrogate everyone who visits him.”

  64

  Soldiers with machine guns guarded the clinic door. A spring breeze scented with eucalyptus blew down from nearby hills, and the sun shone with determination. At the information desk, he discreetly asked for the poet’s room.

  “Third floor,” the receptionist said as she wrote the number down on a piece of paper.

  He went up to the third floor and walked down the hall, looking for the room. A short-haired man in a dark suit and sunglasses asked him what he was looking for. Cayetano feared he might be police, and gave him a different room number.

  “Keep going as you are. You’ll find it on the right.”

  He pretended to follow the man’s instructions, but returned as soon as he thought no one was looking. He found the poet’s room and stopped. Should he knock or go right in? He knocked and stood waiting to hear an “Enter,” but heard nothing from inside. The poet must be alone, he thought, which would be ideal. That way he could immediately tell him, in private, everything he’d learned about Beatriz and her daughter. When he heard Tina’s middle name, he’d deduce the truth, become happy, and perhaps even gather some strength with which to weather these painful weeks.

  He knocked again. The hall was still deserted. Perhaps the poet was sleeping. He pressed the door gently, and it ceded smoothly. The bed was empty, the sheets tangled, and no one was in the room. But he smelled the poet’s French lotion. He entered and closed the door at his back. Perhaps he was in the bathroom. But the door to it was open, and it was dark inside. He thought it best to wait; they might have taken him for radiation.

  A nurse entered the room. “Who are you looking for?” she asked, her face unfriendly.

  “The poet.”

  “He’s on the first floor now.”

  “Which room?”

  “You’d better ask in the hall,” she answered as she unhooked a bottle of serum from the metal rod beside the bed.

  He went downstairs and came to a hall where several patients in hospital gowns waited in silence in front of a door. They looked at him as though he were an intruder.

  “Where can I find Mr. Neruda?” he asked a nurse. From the city, he heard gunshots and police sirens.

  She pointed toward the end of the hall. “They’ve got him one floor down.”

  The underground floor smelled of moisture, and shadows floated down the hall. The signs on the doors were illegible. He tried to open a few, but they were locked. He breathed the rancid air, struggling to contain his frustration. It occurred to him that the closed doors, icy shadows, and chilling echo of his heels on the concrete were a metaphor for what Chile had become. He walked on. The poet couldn’t be far away. Radiotherapy was conducted on this floor. After a few more paces, he stumbled onto a bed against the wall. Someone was lying in it. Once again, distant bangs tore at the morning. Then silence.

  “Excuse me,” he whispered to the prone patient. “Do you know where I can find Don Pablo Neruda?”

  The patient didn’t respond. He was sleeping. He slept on his back, placidly, not caring about where he’d been placed. Cayetano decided to keep looking—but then he caught the scent of the poet’s lotion.

  “Don Pablo! But …what the devil are you doing here?”

  The poet went on sleeping.

  “Don
Pablo, why have they put you here? It’s me, Cayetano. I’ve come back. I’ve got news for you. The best news you can imagine. Are you awake, Don Pablo?”

  The poet slept. It seemed that he’d just finished radiotherapy. It always happened the same way, he recalled. After a treatment, he’d be exhausted, and would sleep for hours, so deeply that nothing could wake him. The poet himself used to say it: Don’t disturb me after my sessions. This time, he’d have to bear the interruption, because Cayetano was eager to give him the news immediately. But when he touched the back of the poet’s hand, fear gripped him. Like an electric shock. He touched the hand again. It was cold. Completely cold. Like marble. He searched for a pulse. In vain. He found nothing. He looked at Neruda’s ashen face, his inert chest.

  Cayetano wept; he wept disconsolately beside the poet’s body. He’d arrived too late, and Neruda had left without learning the results of the mission he’d launched. He brought his own trembling face close to Neruda’s, felt a horrible tightness in his heart, and told himself he could be mistaking another man for the poet. He wiped his tears with his guanaco tie, and studied the corpse’s face again through the shadows. His large, closed eyelids; broad, smooth forehead; cheeks with their moles and sideburns; a grimace of relief at the corners of his lips; hands clasped over his belly; that beloved checkered jacket; those thick-soled shoes. It was him.

  “Don Pablo, Don Pablo, what the hell—why didn’t you wait for me? Because, see, you were right. Your poet’s intuition didn’t trick you. Why didn’t you wait? Can you imagine how things would have gone if you’d waited just a little longer? Damn it, Don Pablo, why the hell did you go?”

  Suddenly, between his own sobs, he heard steps echoing down a staircase. Soldiers, he thought with fear.

  “It’s this way,” a man’s voice said.

  He placed both his palms over the poet’s hands, kissed his forehead, and tucked the photograph of Tina Trinidad, the one Beatriz had given him in Valparaíso, into the upper pocket of his jacket. Then he rushed down the corridor in the dark, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  65

  The next morning, when he arrived in Bellavista, where the poet had his Santiago home, Cayetano Brulé immediately saw crowds on the winding streets and soldiers in combat gear on every corner. So it was true, then, what Pete Castillo—who was still in Valparaíso, beardless, short-haired, and wearing a suit and tie—had told him the night before: the funeral would take place that very Monday.

  It hadn’t been easy to catch an Andesmar bus back into Santiago. The day before, after leaving the clinic, he’d tried to talk to Maia Herzen, but her telephone went unanswered. He decided to return to Valparaíso. The city breathed tensely, quietly, and shots rang out through the night. Laura Aréstegui had become impossible to find, the blinds of Hadad’s soda fountain were closed, and warships hovered close to the breakwater.

  He’d run into Pete by chance in a small café in La Pérgola de las Flores. He was pale and frightened, barely recognizable. As they drank coffee, he told Cayetano that he planned to seek asylum at the Finnish embassy, and he’d given him the information on Neruda’s burial. Then they’d parted ways. The next day, Cayetano Brulé left his house early and headed to the city center. He stopped for a bite at Bosanka, where he perused the permitted newspapers—the leftist ones had been closed down—and then he boarded a bus by the greenish-yellow walls of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company. He wore his best suit, a white shirt, and the violet tie covered in small green guanacos.

  As soon as he disembarked at Mapocho Station, he crossed the river at the law school and entered the neighborhood of Bellavista. It was a cool Santiago morning, the sky tinged with gray. A few youths were whitewashing the revolutionary walls of the Ramona Parra Brigade under the keen gaze of soldiers. They were erasing the city’s memory, Cayetano thought, embarrassed to find that he was speaking like Neruda, and wondering if poetry might be contagious, after all. From the inner patio of Quimantú, the publisher, a black cloud of smoke ascended toward the sky. They were burning books published under the Unidad Popular government that had been popular. The flames weren’t devouring only Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, and Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, but also novels by Julio Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, and Jack London.

  If the city’s gray restlessness had intimidated him that morning, in Bellavista a moderate optimism cheered his soul. The neighborhood’s melancholy tipped toward a mad, barely concealed solidarity among those who’d come to say their last good-byes to the poet. He was moved by the presence of men and women, workers and students, who, despite the fear and insomnia etched on their faces, held carnations and books by Neruda in their hands. A helicopter flew low over their heads.

  When he turned onto Fernando Márquez de la Plata, he realized that he wouldn’t be able to reach the poet’s residence because a dense throng already filled the street. People gazed toward the cement house, smoking and murmuring, scanning their surroundings and the sky. Murky, viscous water poured over the paving. Someone behind him said the army had diverted a canal to flood Neruda’s house. They hadn’t looted the houses only in Santiago and Isla Negra, but in La Sebastiana too, another said. And a third murmured that soldiers had entered the residence of President Allende, on Tomás Moro Street, and had been vile enough to show footage on television of the closet where he kept his suits and the small cellar where he stored his wine. Cayetano put his hands in his jacket, feeling that something serious, vague, and bloody could take place that morning. There seemed to be more and more soldiers and police officers appearing at the demonstration, which was the largest since the coup.

  And suddenly, as though obeying some secret order, applause erupted. At first hesitant and inaudible, then strong and determined, and finally thunderous. Cayetano looked at the poet’s house and felt his skin prickle. A group emerged from the door carrying a brown coffin. Behind them walked Matilde, her eyes lowered. The people began to clap and chant the poet’s name, as though attending one of his readings. “Comrade Pablo Nerudaaa!” a tremulous voice shouted from somewhere. “Present! Now and always!” the crowd replied in unison, their faces transfigured with emotion, tears flowing, voices hoarse. “Comrade Pablo Nerudaaa!” someone else repeated, farther away, and the prodigious tide now flooding the streets of Bellavista answered, “Present!” Again Neruda’s name, interspersed with Allende’s, was shouted, and each time it was followed by a reply and applause en masse, and each time someone else, again, would call out, “Comrade Pablo Neruda …” and Cayetano, unable to contain himself, responded with all the strength his lungs could muster: “Present! Now and always!”

  Shouting, applauding, sobbing, pushing his way through the multitude, he approached the coffin. The cheers for Neruda, Allende, and Unidad Popular continued, defying the bewildered soldiers. No one was cowed by their guns or uniforms anymore. Now it was the soldiers’ turn to be afraid. The angered mob shouted and clapped under the spring sky. The helicopter reappeared like a desperate buzzing fly over roofs and chimneys, but headed swiftly away toward Santa Lucía Hill. The chants grew bolder and louder, as though taking place at a political demonstration in the glory days of a democracy now lost.

  Cayetano brushed his fingertips against the poet’s burnished coffin just as it entered the funeral car. Before the crowd resumed its chants, he looked over at Matilde, and could have sworn she held his gaze for a few endless seconds; her look was both kind and sad, as though expressing a final conspiratorial nod toward his detective mission. Did she really know who he was and why her husband had hired him, or was he just imagining that her eyes had locked with his? he wondered, unsure, as he watched her walk unsteadily, absently, surrounded by friends, toward a diplomatic vehicle that waited with open doors. At that moment, suddenly, without a single warning, the human tide parted for the widow and closed behind her like the waters of a biblical sea, making Matilde vanish, and leaving him no choice but to join the procession as
it began to pour down streets that no longer held soldiers or police officers, only civilian men, women, and youths whose songs and slogans brimmed with hope.

  66

  The radio at the Café del Poeta now played the strong, unmistakable voice of Juanes singing “La Camisa Negra,” and Cayetano Brulé quickly polished off his coffee with a dash of milk. His coffee had long gone cold because his memories had plunged him into a devastating, melancholy loneliness.

  The poet’s remains had rested beside Matilde’s since the 1990s, in the garden of their home in Isla Negra, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He never heard from Margaretchen again, even though the Berlin Wall had fallen seventeen years before, and technically he could have gone to visit. Nor had he ever received news of Tina Trinidad. He’d also lost track of Beatriz, who, according to some rumors, had ended her days in a narrow prefabricated apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Zwickau, alone, retired from an institution that had been dissolved in 1989 with the disappearance of East Germany. He occasionally received a little information on Markus, who lived in East Berlin and traveled widely, giving lectures on his extensive experience as a spy. Regarding Ángela Undurraga, his ex-wife, he knew she now resided in Manhattan, was married to a Wall Street magnate, and devoted all her energies to promoting animal rights and vegetarianism. And to think that it had all begun in Valparaíso, he thought, on that cloudy winter morning when his knuckles had knocked on the aged door of La Sebastiana.