His Own Man

by Edgard Telles Ribeiro

  “I asked Nancy to fax the letter to Vaz’s daughter. And Betty sent us the translation by e-mail a few days later. In the message addressed to my daughter, she said that her father had been moved by what you’d written. João always was very emotional. And he must have gotten worse with age. That’s how —”

  “That’s how …?”

  “That’s how the Eric you met at the consulate, and took to La Strada, isn’t the same one hosting you today. Just as, in my view, you’re not the friendly diplomat I had lunch with three weeks ago. Not that you’re no longer friendly … or a diplomat. It’s just that … you’re not quite you, are you? Do you follow?”

  “Yes … and no,” I replied. They were rhetorical questions, at any rate. What were the chances I had anything in common with the young man who had written that letter? That was the only question that mattered. Let my host resolve his own existential problems — if he had any.

  From the bar, Eric offered me one last drink (“for the road”), which I thanked him for yet turned down. He had set the box on the counter. I went over and picked it up. To my surprise, it was light. Curious though I was, I hesitated to take it. It didn’t seem advisable to accept anything, of any kind, from that man — under any circumstances. I hadn’t come on anyone’s behalf. Not the dead, not the disappeared, not my friends, ministry colleagues, or peers. Were I to accept his gift, wouldn’t I be absolving Eric of a portion of his sins?

  Reeling from these doubts and still recovering from the exhaustion that had come over me, I decided to buy time and asked a question. “But, Eric, how did you come by this material? And why did you feel the need to …?” It was the best I could do. Leave the question hanging.

  56

  He seemed more relaxed, lighter even, as if he’d just unburdened himself. After all, thanks to me, there were now only four hundred seventy-seven boxes left in his garage — other than those hidden in his conscience. Seated on one of his sofas, he held his glass loosely in his right hand as if still grappling with my question. I settled into a chair facing him, firmly determined to leave in five more minutes.

  “We photographed everything,” he murmured, after a swig of bourbon.

  “Photographed?” I repeated in a low voice. “Max’s things?”

  I wasn’t feigning surprise. Eric, for his part, seemed unaware of my bewilderment. Or pretended he hadn’t noticed. But he needed a second swig to proceed.

  “Max and his wife lived in an apartment near the center of Montevideo,” he said at last. “A duplex. Every time they went away for the weekend, to Uruguayan friends’ haciendas or to Rio, hitching a ride on the air force jet, they’d give the servants the time off. Unlike MI6, I didn’t trust him. Or the information he passed off to Ray, vague or useless more often than not. This, of course, was before he led us to Ali Baba’s cave. Without even realizing it …” The recollection didn’t bring him quite the same pleasure as before.

  “The building was secure, with bars on the windows, solid locks, and armed guards at the entry. But with our contacts at the Uruguayan police running interference, it wasn’t hard to spend a night in the apartment going through papers and photographing whatever seemed useful to us.”

  Suddenly he laughed, struck by a memory that lit his face with a childlike expression. He hesitated to share it with me, though. Afraid, perhaps, of entering dangerous territory. But the story seemed too good to die with him and be buried with his bones in San Diego. “One of the agents opened a drawer in her nightstand and immediately closed it. He was a young guy and turned completely red. I went over to see.”

  This time, however, I got ahead of him. And before he could go on, I cut him off. “She died two years ago. In a plane crash.”

  His eyes widened. “She died?”

  “Two years ago,” I repeated. “In a plane crash. Into the ocean. Near the Greek coast.”

  He hesitated for a moment. Was he thinking, as I was, of the two deceased, one at the bottom of a Bolivian lake, the other lost in the depths of the Aegean Sea? Was he thinking of everything hurtful — and demeaning — that he’d revealed to me about both, just earlier, in his garage? Was he thinking of the photos he’d spoken of as if he’d just developed them in his secret lab — and hung them with clothespins to dry? They were images that should have been respected, regardless of their nature. And that he had helped defile.

  They were stories that didn’t even belong to him, pathetic as they might have been. The two deceased watched us, wide-eyed, from the depths of their respective bodies of water, as if all that remained of them was the ability to show indignation — an ability now projected with the intensity of headlights cutting through the darkness. The sensation was so strong that Eric closed his eyes, while I kept mine fixed on him. Two human beings who had intended no evil awaited an explanation that would never come.

  “I’m really sorry to hear that,” he finally said, as though returning to his senses. After another long pause, he struggled to regain his lecturing tone, albeit in a wearier voice. “Once the film had been processed, we sorted through the material and got rid of what seemed superfluous. Your letter, although long and unclear to my agents, ended up staying on the stack. Simple carelessness, if you ask me.”

  It was obvious he wanted to be done with the subject. Although he’d had no hand in Marina’s death, the same couldn’t be said with respect to poor Paolo.

  “I was half drunk when I wrote that letter,” I admitted.

  With relief, he grabbed the life jacket I’d tossed him. “One of my agents said something to that effect. Before giving up on his reading, he even added, ‘This guy must have been loaded, he went on for pages writing about a brother and a sister on a bus.’ ”

  A brother and a sister on a bus … An initial image slowly emerged from the past, but it came from so far away that it seemed to belong to another world, not just another time. A fleeting image, which a flame might illuminate before giving way to darkness.

  “At that time, in Brazil, we had no one to vent to,” I continued. “At least, I didn’t. And Max … Max was my best friend. I was worried about him … the rumors that were starting to go around. The letter might have had to do with that too. The news of his transfer to Santiago hadn’t gone over well at the ministry. In the minds of many, he’d sealed his fate once and for all.”

  Eric nodded in agreement. This time without giving me the sense that he was being critical or feeling uncomfortable. I’d even say he smiled in a fatherly sort of way. You’ll see, his eyes suggested. Except that, like me, he was exhausted. It had been a very long day.

  We both stood and walked toward the door, Eric with my box in hand. When we got there, he opened a closet and handed me my blazer. Then he gave me the box and shook my hand. We exchanged one last look. End of chapter. La guerre est finie. He remained standing on his front stoop while I negotiated the steps down to the sidewalk.

  “What store did you buy your crystal ball at?” he shouted from above, once he saw me opening the car door.

  “Crystal ball?” I yelled back, not knowing what he was talking about, while I set my gift on the backseat.

  “The one that allowed you to see so far ahead, in 1973. The one that led you to write your letter …”

  “Oh, that crystal ball,” I joked back. “At an antiques shop in Brasilia. It was called the Nightstand. But it closed years ago. Went bankrupt. It dealt with the past. And the past, back then, had no future.”

  “It was good to see you again,” he said with one last wave.

  “Give me a call one of these days,” I replied, before shutting the door. “When you come to LA for lunch with your friends.”

  But he never did.

  57

  Back at my apartment in Santa Monica, after three hours on the San Diego Freeway, I flung open the living room windows to take in the sea breeze I thought I needed to pull myself together, and set my trophy on the dining room table. I kept pacing around it, like someone circling the cage of an unfamiliar animal.
For a while, I limited myself to weighing the pros and cons of opening the box that same evening. I strategically chose to put off the decision and took a shower. Then I made some tea and turned on the television.

  Having reached my sixties, I was no longer so sure I wanted to meet the young man who had addressed Max all those years ago, just before heading — full of hopes and dreams — to the city where he now found himself once more, only tired and old and approaching the end of his career. The idea that a cycle of this magnitude could open and close around me was distressing. Far more than the difficult hours I’d spent with Eric — or with Max three years earlier, at my daughter’s graduation. The two men, moreover, had slipped away from me like water running between my fingers. It was in the nature of these characters to forever elude us. Wasn’t that the story of my country — and the entire region — only on a larger scale?

  What would I say to the young man waiting inside that box? That the individuals responsible for the disasters that had befallen our generation were still alive and kicking, as if nothing had happened — and that, to add insult to injury, many remained in power? More than once, in the hours following my visit to La Jolla, I caught myself glancing over at the table, as if the package sitting there had a life of its own and, mindful of my indecisiveness, was patiently biding its time. The reflections coming off the TV screen were coloring the box with successive hues.

  I remembered a scene Max had described to me years earlier, during one of our late-night conversations, a prehistoric vision of sorts, which occurred right after the coup of ’64. He was lying on his bed in the old apartment he shared with his mother in Humaitá, thinking of the possibilities that had suddenly and unexpectedly opened before him. Minutes earlier, he had received a phone call from the secretary to the Cardinal Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro concerning his future. What had given the scene its added dimension had been the Coca-Cola sign blinking on and off at the bakery shop across the way. The red light had lit up his face every two to three seconds, leaving him alternately immersed in shadows, which, as a good reader of Stendhal, he had deemed “appropriate to the historical moment.”

  Now it was his cardboard box that was undergoing a similar effect. Except that the target was no longer Max’s face, but his past. Or what was left of it in this Californian version that I’d come into by chance.

  When I finally decided to open my treasure, I found that the box contained copies of the telegrams Raymond Thurston had passed on to MI6 — the kind of communications now declassified by the US government. And my own letter, from another era … The rest basically consisted of Max and Marina’s phone bills and bank statements, correspondence between Max and his mother, and memos on work matters unrelated to my former friend’s covert activities.

  Some of Ray’s telegrams are excerpted in this manuscript, sprinkled amid its chapters. As for the photocopy of my letter, it was indeed perfectly legible, as Eric indicated. It even faithfully reproduced the perforations certain characters had made on the original sheets of paper, as if specific keys on my typewriter had been struck in anger. In the transcription that follows, I’ve italicized a few words that I’d underlined by hand at the time, markings the microfilm captured less clearly. On rereading its content — which I did only after moving from tea to whiskey — I recalled that, at the time, I’d considered eliminating the P.S. inserted by hand just below my signature, thinking it too long and kind of corny. But omitting it would have meant retyping close to twenty lines on the last page — and at that point I was dead tired. So I kept it.

  I chose to leave the postscript in the present manuscript as well, above all because it underscores a sentiment: that the joys of great milestones, such as those of my youth — man’s landing on the moon, for instance, or the widely hailed end of the Vietnam War — rarely compensate for our individual losses. Because the former ultimately leave us indifferent, becoming impersonal fragments of history. Whereas the latter continue to affect us, fatally — and forever. I had been fortunate, however. Unlike so many people in our country and region who had lost friends and relatives — if not their own lives — I’d merely lost an idol from my younger days, as it happened, the one I’d looked up to the most.

  There are deaths that snuff out a single life. And others that, like military coups, finish off an entire generation.

  PART SEVEN

  Brasilia, April 5, 1973

  My dear Max,

  Here I am, in the apartment you’re familiar with, on yet another night in Brazil’s heartland, sitting in the living room that serves as my library, dining area, and guest bedroom. The absolute silence around me is surreal, even though it’s not yet ten p.m. by my watch.

  Any other city in Brazil, or elsewhere in the world, would be alive and hopping at this hour. Brasilia is in a deep slumber, however. How many decades will it take before our capital finally wakes up?

  I feel like a privileged witness to this deserted stage, as I’ve just spent a good long while at the window, smoking and watching a still life in which only the night doormen shuffle by, not even a stray cat honoring us with its presence. A landscape made up of the fronts and backs of low buildings, all identical, which seems to imprison me in an enclosure of cold light and concrete — the perfect urban metaphor for the political system we live under.

  It’s unbelievable how these homogeneous residential areas lend themselves to this role and replicate the Fascist realities we’re all trapped in. Not to mention the monumental Esplanade of Ministries with its glorious structures — which today serves as the setting for parades and other demonstrations of patriotism rooted in oppression. One day, though, this architecture will breathe again, without a single brick having to be moved from its place.

  I’m hoping that you’ve made headway in your translation of Eliot’s quartets. I liked the excerpts I read and have never understood why it’s taken you so long to try your hand at the second quartet. Especially after the fine reception your rendering of the first deserved, in 1970. Or was it 1971? But beware: traduttore traditore, etc., etc. So much for small talk, even though it does have its place in our line of work, doesn’t it?

  I decided to write you this letter for two reasons. The first is that I’ve just been betrayed, which is always disheartening, and am reeling from the pain of having been passed over. To make a long story short, I lost the opportunity to be transferred to Geneva. A shame, because there I could have continued in my areas of interest, which bring me such satisfaction — among other reasons by keeping me away from the thorny world of politics.

  As a consolation prize, I was offered Los Angeles, where I could work in the consulate’s commercial sector. At first, I didn’t know what to do. But after thinking it over, I accepted. It might be interesting to dive headfirst into California during this amazing, tumultuous time the US is going through. Nixon and the Watergate mess, the American debacle in Vietnam, the protest marches, feminism, the Black Power movement … Maybe that will all compensate for the more challenging work in Geneva, and LA will prove to be stimulating. At least I’ll be able to hear a lot of good music there, from Bob Dylan to Joan Baez, not to mention the classics, as well as the movies I’ll have a chance to see after so many years of censorship in Brazil.

  But the second reason I’m writing to you is, by far, the more important. It has to do with things that I never seem to be able to tell you personally when we see one another. Not that you intimidate me. It’s the issues themselves that are unnerving. Something serious happened during our last meeting — and I can no longer keep quiet.

  The rumors about your upcoming transfer from Montevideo to Santiago stunned me. You must have noticed my uneasiness. Max, the likelihood of a military coup in Chile increases every day. Just as it does in Uruguay. Everyone knows this. The two countries’ newspapers cover nothing else — and if ours say little about it, it’s because they’re being censored, not because of lack of interest or concern. I don’t mean to come across as a champion of truth and sacred values, b
ut I’m afraid that you’ll end up confirming the suspicions of everyone, within the ministry and beyond, who believes you’re working for the right. Working for them by choice. And that, willingly or not, you may become part of the intrigue being talked about at the ministry, scheming said to be inspired by your boss in Montevideo.

  Since I have no way of meddling in a decision you might already have made, my only recourse is to relate a certain story to you. A very simple story, which may somehow convey my feelings about what’s happening in Brazil these days. There’s nothing exceptional about my characters: a lower-middle-class brother and sister from São Paulo. The boy was around twenty, the girl eighteen, when they went through their ordeal. The facts were told to me by the boy first. Two weeks later, by his sister. And finally, sometime after — in the presence of their mother, with whom they’ve been living here in Brasilia, ever since they were able to relocate — by both. Each adding to the other’s sentences. A montage! as the boy proclaimed at the end of what seemed more like a theater production. (He’s a film student of mine at the university; we became friends after I showed his class Battleship Potemkin and we got to talking about Eisenstein and Pudovkin during the break.)

  The brother and sister are truly fond of one another. And, from what I gathered in talking with their mother, that’s been the case ever since they were little. It’s unusual to see that explicitly among relatives, even close ones — for me, at least, it was a novelty. In my family circle, we were always more reserved where our feelings were concerned. And that’s what moved me about this story: its emotional undertone.

  The episode they took part in, or found themselves ensnared in, much to their surprise, happened in São Paulo, more than four years ago, right after the military tightened its grip. And that’s what made me think of you, because we met around then — when you elevated me to “lunchable” status.