The Neruda Case

by Roberto Ampuero

  Now the city unfolded before him, rife with honking cars, the shouts of street vendors, the songs of beggars, and raucous buses passing by. In today’s Valparaíso, boutique hotels, sophisticated restaurants, and attractive cafés abounded, ready for tourists. The streets featured clean, painted buildings, menus printed in several languages, and a mix of agitated bohemians who danced hip-hop and rap but also nostalgically listened to the Beatles, Gitano Rodríguez, and the Blue Splendor, as well as Inti Illimani, Los Jaivas, and Congreso. And Neruda’s house was now a beautiful museum enjoyed by visitors from all over the world. Hope seemed to newly infuse the people of Valparaíso, as their city revived and reinvented itself on the rubble of failed strategies and political corruption. He left a tip on the table for the goth girl, and left the Café del Poeta for Errázuriz Avenue, anxious about how late he was now for his appointment.

  Luckily, a taxi driver with suicidal tendencies got him to his destination in fifteen minutes, dropping him off in front of the imposing office building at 8 North Avenue, in Viña del Mar. It was 1:20 p.m. The subsidiary of Almagro, Ruggiero & Associates was on the eighteenth floor. He took the elevator up, opened a heavy larch door, and entered a spacious, well-lit room decorated with oil paintings by Matta and Cienfuegos. Through the windows, he glimpsed the Pacific, the casino, and beaches filled with vacationers from Reñaca.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Almagro and Mr. Ruggiero,” he said. “I’m Cayetano Brulé, they were expecting me at noon.”

  “Of course.” The secretary swiftly picked up the phone. “Don Pedro Pablo? Mr. Brulé has just arrived.”

  She escorted him through a bronze-handled door into an air-conditioned office with minimalist flair: parquet flooring made with mañio wood, a table flanked with erect chairs, a desk with a flat-screen computer, and leather armchairs. Next to the table stood two smiling men in their sixties, in white shirts and silk ties. From the elegance of their office and attire, Cayetano surmised that they led a highly privileged life, and no doubt downstairs a uniformed chauffeur was waiting for them in their Mercedes-Benzes or BMWs. The secretary left, closing the door.

  The bearded man seemed vaguely familiar.

  “You’ve made no mistake, Cayetano,” the man said, shaking his hand effusively. “I’m Pedro Diego Almagro. We met one night, a long time ago, in the days of Unidad Popular, at the Hucke factory, when you were guarding it. Remember?”

  He recalled the trembling old machines at the factory, the sweep of an army jeep’s searchlights over the cold, damp paving, the echo of faraway gunshots, a hammer he was supposed to bang on the floor in case of alarm. But this man, Pedro Diego, who was he?

  “I was studying architecture,” Almagro went on. He stroked his beard, giving Cayetano the chance to admire the impeccable white face of his Patek Phillippe. “You were looking for someone who knew about Pablo Neruda. I suggested you speak to a cousin of mine.”

  “With Laura Aréstegui?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you’re Prendes? Comandante Camilo Prendes?” he exclaimed, unable to hide his amazement.

  “One and the same, in the flesh, Cayetano! You have no idea how glad I am to see you again. You look good, with a few pounds more and less hair, of course, but you’re the same man. Those were crazy years!” Almagro said, fingering his gold cuff links. “Back then I was Prendes, fancying myself a guerrilla fighter, overseeing the takeover of a factory. Of course, then the coup came and we went into exile. You know how it goes. Please, sit down. I went back to the Sorbonne, naturally, where I’d studied in the sixties. Remember?”

  “So what happened to Laura?” Cayetano did not sit down. Instead, he gazed at the oil painting of Old Havana, by René Portocarrero, that hung on a white wall. “I never heard any more news of her.”

  “Well, she’s doing quite well, with a little restaurant in a neighborhood of Warsaw. She ended up exiled in Poland, poor thing. After the fall of Jaruzelski, she stayed on. She’s not doing badly for herself at all, though she never returned to literature. That’s how life is. But how wonderful to see you, Cayetano!” Almagro insisted, stroking his beard again.

  “You and I also know each other,” the second man stated in a serious tone. His long hair was tied back in a ponytail, and his damask tie was held in place with a gold pin. He seemed to be playing up his undeniable resemblance to Richard Branson, the blond owner of Virgin Airlines. “I’m Anselmo Ruggiero Manfredi. I remember you perfectly, because it was the first time in my life I ever spoke to a Cuban. I’ve been following your professional career in the local paper.” He revealed his impeccably white teeth. “It’s a pleasure to shake the hand of such a distinguished sleuth. Do you remember me?”

  “I’d be lying if I said yes.” Ruggiero was shaking his hand again, this time with the zeal of a weight lifter. “No matter how long I look at you, I still can’t associate you with anyone I know.”

  “A few years ago it would have been most inconvenient to remember the circumstances in which we met, but things have changed a great deal …and just as well.”

  “I still don’t recognize you. Please give me a hint.”

  “September 1973. The highway between Valparaíso and Isla Negra. Does that ring a bell?”

  Cayetano could see the highway oscillating into the distance, under the sun, the roadside kiosk, the woman listening to the bombing of La Moneda on her radio. Then he recalled the truck crammed with prisoners, coming toward him. He bit his lips, still unable to place Ruggiero, who now pressed his index finger against Cayetano’s green-and-purple guanaco tie, and smiled.

  “A friend of mine pushed you into that truck,” he said. “They took you to Puchuncaví. You stayed there, under my orders, in a cool room, with a window through which you could see boldo plants, flowering blackwoods, and the clean, clear September sky.”

  “Dante?” Cayetano whispered in astonishment. Now he began to connect this man with the young official who had interrogated him at Puchuncaví. He had played the part of the understanding interrogator. He hadn’t mistreated him, unlike the soldier called Salinas, who had beaten him to make him confess where he was hiding weapons. He recalled, out loud, the quotation from Inferno written on gray cardboard that had hung at his office door. Lasciate ogni speranza …

  “… ‘voi ch’entrate …’ But who among us wasn’t a poet in his youth, Cayetano?” Ruggiero exclaimed, laughing loudly, eyes wide, face red with emotion. “Anyone who wasn’t a poet in his youth simply has no soul.”

  “Of course, now I know who you are, damn it! Dante! The twists and turns of life, for God’s sake. We meet again, and once again in your office. But this time, in your office, under democracy, Dante,” Cayetano added thoughtfully. “Damn it, how things change in this country.”

  “In the end, you were only with us for a few days,” Ruggiero added, glancing sidelong at Almagro. “It was for your own good. The highway was dangerous. People were getting killed at the drop of a hat. And you see, our intervention gave you something. Today you’re here, in a renovated, reconciled nation, modern and prosperous, transformed into a peerless, irreplaceable private investigator.”

  “Don’t flatter me, Dante.”

  “Of course, back then you had an enviable godfather …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After a few days, we received an order to release you. The order came from Santiago. We weren’t the only ones who were lucky, Cayetano,” Ruggiero said, letting out another booming laugh.

  “Who gave that order?”

  “We never found out. But it came from high up. Very high up. You’re a sharp one, Cayetano, a sharp one.”

  Almagro and Ruggiero smiled, hands in their pockets, ties flashing, teeth brilliantly white.

  “Now I recall you both perfectly,” Cayetano said uncomfortably, wondering bitterly who might have interceded on his behalf all that time ago. “I hadn’t forgotten anything that happened, only your faces. We’ve all changed quite a bit in thirty-three years.”<
br />
  “Well, I think it’s fantastic that we can keep working together after, let’s say, this long parenthesis, Cayetano,” Almagro said, to summarize. “It’s a sign the nation has reconciled. With my associate here, who’s long retired from the military, I cofounded this international consulting firm some time ago. And we’re doing splendidly. We say with pride”—he placed a hand on his chest—“that we’re almost as old as the democracy itself, and enjoy the very best connections with government and business, with ministries and the opposition party. We represent our clients in a loyal and responsible way. You understand. And we can’t complain. Anyone who wants something from the government, no matter their professed political beliefs, knows to come first to AR and A. We have the keys they’re looking for …”

  “Forgive me, but I still don’t see what I have to do with all this.”

  “I’ll explain immediately,” Almagro said. “Listen, we recently started a new company. We’ve begun negotiations with your island, and we’re about to do the same with the rest of the former communist world. In that regard, we also can’t complain.”

  “But tell him in clear terms why we’ve invited him here,” Ruggiero put in with impatience.

  “In that case, let’s get down to details,” Almagro said, crossing his arms. “We’d like to contract you for a top-secret mission. Don’t worry about the fees: we’re extremely generous with our people. AR and A is always loyal to its central motto: ‘For a world without exclusions.’ Sit down, please—make yourself comfortable, relax, and listen. But Cayetano, before we start, how about a good Chivas Regal on the rocks?”

  New York / Iowa City

  June 6, 2008

  Author’s Note

  Don Pablo, my neighbor

  Every day of my childhood, when I woke up for school, I’d glimpse Pablo Neruda’s house through my bedroom window, high up on one of Valparaíso’s fifty hills. Today, that house has become a museum, named after the poet, that attracts tourists from all over the world. When I was growing up near his home, it was mysterious and solitary, and no one was ever seen to exit. It has five narrow floors of different sizes, each one smaller the higher it is, which make it resemble a tower as it ascends toward the sky. The first two floors—occupied by a married couple, artists befriended by Neruda—are made of concrete, while the rest is constructed from wood and large picture windows, contributing to its ethereal feel and to its stylistic echo of the other houses that riddle those hillsides, battling for the best angle from which to gaze out over the Pacific. I must confess that on those childhood mornings, when I looked out (I am speaking of the 1960s), Don Pablo’s house seemed to me like a white boat with its sails unfurled to the wind, on the brink of gliding off through the translucent air of Valparaíso.

  I’d admire that fanciful edifice from afar and imagine its owner, the most important living poet of the Spanish language. Although his presence was sporadic and invisible, just the thought of his proximity delighted and intimidated me. The truth is, we almost never saw him. The reason? Although Don Pablo was a disciplined member of Chile’s Communist Party, he lived like a true bourgeois: he owned two more houses. One stood on San Cristóbal Hill, in the heart of Santiago, the capital city, and its dining room featured a hidden door through which the poet liked to surprise his dinner guests, disguised in one of the exotic costumes he liked to collect; the other house was on the sea in Isla Negra, on the coast of central Chile, where he kept his collections of shells, bottles, and antique iron, and where his remains now rest beside those of Matilde, his last wife. But La Sebastiana—as he’d named his Valparaíso house, in honor of its first owner, the Spaniard Sebastián Collado—was unique because it had been built out of air and blended into the city’s crazed architecture. In Valparaíso, that house was like a fish in water, or a star in the sky. On three separate occasions, I went to La Sebastiana, in my school uniform and carrying my briefcase full of notebooks, and stood at the door to the poet’s garden, which held a papaya tree, bushes, roses, medicinal herbs, and birdsong. All I wanted to do was talk to the poet. But all three times, I was petrified, my fist raised just centimeters from the door, not daring to knock and ask to enter the realm where Neruda dwelt with his secrets. Half a century after these frustrated attempts, which I’ll regret for the rest of my life, my detective Cayetano Brulé has dared to enter, in this novel, the space that boyhood shyness kept closed to me.

  On two occasions, I saw the Nobel laureate on the curves of Alemania Avenue. Chile was a stable, democratic nation then, neither rich nor poor (though with deep social inequalities), peaceful, safe, where few people could imagine that we would soon have a socialist government under President Salvador Allende (1970–1973), which would be ended by the bloody coup d’état and repressive dictatorship (1973–1990) of General Augusto Pinochet. When he went out for a walk through Valparaíso, the poet was invariably surrounded by a swarm of admirers who seemed to buzz like bees around their queen. He walked with the air of a cardinal, emitting words with a nasal tone and melancholy gestures. Sometimes he wore a blue peaked cap at an angle, and a finely woven wool poncho on his shoulders. He enjoyed the stir he caused whenever he passed. Another time, at dusk on a windy Sunday, as I was walking through the neighborhood with my father, we saw him sitting in the backseat of a car driven by a woman. Beside her sat a man wearing glasses with thick black frames. “Don’t forget those gentlemen,” my father said. “One of them will receive the Nobel Prize one day, and the other will be president of Chile.” And he was right. The man riding in front was Allende.

  But in those days—as I strolled the heights of Alemania Avenue with my father, gazing out over roofs and belfries, the city’s steep streets and twisted stairs, and the vastness of the Pacific Ocean—Chile was a calm country, and even, to a certain extent, a happy one, or so it seemed to me, a middle-class boy attending private school. Years later, on September 4, 1970, Allende took power in free elections, and began implementing a popular socialist agenda that became a symbol of Latin American people’s demands for a more just world. That agenda included the nationalization of businesses, radical agrarian reform, and international policies that broke from those of the United States. I was politically initiated at the university, where I supported Allende’s revolutionary agenda. The dream ended abruptly on September 11, 1973, when Pinochet led a coup and Allende killed himself in the presidential palace, La Moneda. The Chile I had known in my childhood as an oasis of peace and stability sank like the Titanic amid the polarizing forces of Allende’s supporters and adversaries, and amid an enormous economic crisis. The military coup established a dictatorship that lasted seventeen years, and left thousands dead, disappeared, or exiled; it propelled me to leave my parents and my nation on December 30, 1973, to join a diaspora that continues to this day.

  President Allende fought tirelessly for social justice. He was idealistic, and at the same time full of contradictions, impossible to categorize: he believed it was possible to build socialism while respecting a parliamentary democracy. He died defending that democracy, amid the bombs of a seditious military, the unyielding opposition of the right, and the subversive actions of Richard Nixon’s government, which backed the overthrow with the CIA. In his last days at the helm, Allende was caught between two fires: that of Chile’s right wing and the United States, on the one hand, who labeled him a communist and an ally of Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union; and the influential ultra-left, on the other, who considered him a reformist with revolutionary rhetoric. I believe Allende was a social reformer with radical discourse, someone who believed Chile could overcome social backwardness and inequality through an economy with strong state involvement. He placed too much hope in the construction of a socialist Chile, and didn’t realize that the Soviet Union and its allies no longer had the funds or enthusiasm to finance another revolutionary project in the West after Castro’s Cuba.

  I wrote this novel about Neruda, staying true to the actual history of Chile between 1970 and 1973, because I
admire him as a poet, because I was curious about him as a neighbor, and because his personal life intersected with crucial moments of twentieth-century history. Neruda was a Chilean diplomat in remote countries, and a privileged witness to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). He became a communist in 1946, and during his exile (1948–1952) he sought refuge in Eastern Europe and in Italy. During the Cold War, he aligned himself with the Soviet Union, although he preferred Paris and Rome to Moscow and Bucharest; he criticized the United States for the wars in Korea and Vietnam; and he collaborated faithfully with his friend President Allende.

  But I had another, powerful reason for writing this novel: Sheltered by the license of fiction, I strove to portray the Neruda of flesh and blood, the real human being with his grandeur and meanness, loyalties and betrayals, certainties and doubts, the poet who could love passionately and at the same time leave everything to embark on a new affair, a more feverish and impassioned one, that would allow him to write better poetry. Neruda was a towering poet, a sharp politician, a human being who searched tirelessly for love, and a man who enjoyed the pleasures of bourgeois life. He contradicted himself. It isn’t easy to write a novel that captures the real human being, as Neruda’s fame is so solid and universal that written works about him tend toward the apologetic and adulatory, keeping him on a pedestal. I believe that both his genius as an artist and his authentic side as a man spring from his complex spirit, his light and shadow, and the passion of his human condition.

  Three sources contribute to this novel. First, the inspiring image that Neruda imprinted on my childhood; second, the narrative that his three houses conferred on me; and perhaps most important, the judgment placed on the poet by the women who knew him. With respect to the first source, in my childhood, I discovered that the great poets are not necessarily dead, that one of them, a giant, was even my neighbor. Thanks to this, poetry escaped from dull scholastic texts and came out to stroll along my street, winked at me and sang to me with an everyday substance that was unsuspected by my classmates. Also, thanks to the careful restoration of his houses, and their transformation into museums open to the public, Neruda’s homes still harbor the poet. Anyone who enters them with keen senses and an alert imagination can feel him walking through those rooms. Especially in the Valparaíso house. One day, as I was sketching out the first notes for this novel in the ample living room of La Sebastiana, with its blue fireplace, adjacent dining room, and large picture window overlooking corrugated metal roofs, twisted outdoor staircases, steep streets, and the vast Pacific Ocean beyond, I suddenly felt Neruda begin to tell me unknown aspects of his life. I recall the precise instant that it happened: I was lost in thought, gazing out at a boat gliding into the bay, when I felt a curious call at my back. I turned. I saw a Chinese wardrobe with glass doors; Pablo and Matilde’s robes hung inside, and the poet’s slippers rested on the floor. I sensed that the parts of Neruda’s private life that I was drawn to tell began with that revealing, ordinary detail. Those slippers, with their fuzzy wool and their heels worn unevenly by the poet’s thick, tired feet, allowed me to discern the world I searched for.