All Men Are Liars

by Alberto Manguel

  The following weeks were difficult for me. I wrote a few articles for newspapers, continued to read dry research documents for my book, visited the welcoming reading room at the National Library—but in all these things I felt now like a man who’s lost a limb or an eye. Unconsciously, I was always waiting for the door to open and for that very familiar voice to start recounting some tedious episode from his life.

  Bevilacqua was buried in the Almudena Cemetery, as inappropriate a choice as one can imagine: its ancient grandiosity didn’t suit his character. Have you ever been there? It’s all stone angels and broken urns, a phony decadence standing in for the all-too-real decay of the flesh. “I have walked on the Andes”—that should have been his epitaph. But only his name and dates are there.

  Of course it was Urquieta’s decision that his final resting place should be the Almudena. Beneath a few conventional cypresses, the editor repeated (with some respectful modifications) the speech he had made at the book launch. Flesh remains, the word takes flight. If you were looking for an example on this earth of sic transit, Bevilacqua’s funeral would have provided an unforgettable one.

  Now that I think of it, the ceremony at the Almudena was like a grotesque parody of that other one, a few days earlier, at the Antonio Machado center, a gloomy da capo, as unsettling as a shadow. The same people, the same words, but what had been happy excitement at the success of someone hitherto unknown was now replaced by the terrible sadness of his premature demise. I see them as clearly now as if I had photographed them. Berens and the other comrades from the flat in Prospe, faithful friends, standing beside a great broken urn; Quita and that young journalist, Ordóñez, on the threshold of a lugubrious mausoleum; my poor Andrea, as grief-stricken as one of those stone angels draped over the tombstones. The usual busybodies were there, too, anonymous people drawn by the lure, the pleasure and perversity of someone else’s grief. And among the unknown faces, a couple who looked vaguely familiar: he was short, rough-shaven, with dark glasses prominent beneath a black, broad-brimmed hat; she, tall with a big nose, sporting a green helmet, topped with a pheasant’s feather. I asked Quita, who was talking to Ordóñez, if she knew them.

  Only then did I realize that Quita had turned quite pale. I never would have guessed that Bevilacqua’s death could affect her so greatly. She looked at me as though she didn’t see me at all, distractedly searching among the tombs for the one person who was absent.

  “They’re Cuban,” she said finally, with a sigh. “Recent arrivals. He writes, she reads.”

  A light drizzle began to fall. Nice literary touch, I thought to myself.

  I saw Andrea walk away amid a procession of umbrellas. I hurried to catch up with her.

  “If you need anything . . .” I began to say.

  “If I do, I’ll let you know,” she answered with an abruptness I put down to her sorrow. I squeezed her shoulder and let her go on her way.

  In the following weeks, I tried to see the Martín Fierro gang as little as possible. The time comes when these sorts of relationships—based to a degree on nostalgia and shared politics—draw to a close without us knowing how or why. Something in these exiled communities unravels or comes unstuck, people go their own way, and if I see you in the street, I may not even stop. I knew that my time in Madrid was coming to an end.

  I packed my suitcases, boxed up my books, and paid my outstanding bills. I spent my last morning in the city walking, indulging my nostalgia. As I crossed Calle del Pinar, I heard someone call me. It was Ordóñez. I told him that I was returning to France. Ordóñez made some joking remark about the virtues of French cuisine. We said good-bye cordially, and then he remembered something that he wanted to tell me.

  “Hey, Manguel. Those people in the cemetery you were asking Quita about. The Cubans. Apparently they’re wanted by the police. I’m just telling you because you seemed interested.”

  Then I realized why those two had looked familiar, and I remembered that frightened description that Bevilacqua had given me. I began to understand that something, whether horrible or banal, which had bound the ghostly Argentinian to the fantastic Cuban, had come to an end now that one of them could no longer tell his version of events. It was another one of those stories that belong to the “archive of silence,” as we refer to that infamous period in my country’s history.

  The encounter with Ordóñez depressed me even more. I wandered off through the streets of the Prospe, with its ocher facades and broken paving stones. Almost without thinking, I arrived at the door of the Martín Fierro. I climbed the stairs. Quita was on her own, going through files at the reception desk, which had now been cleared of Andrea’s things, of her little plants, her toys, her framed photograph of Bevilacqua. I was shocked to see how tired she looked, her bronzed skin tinged by a whitish lichen, a lock of gray hair falling over her forehead. Quita, who felt about grooming the same way Poles feel about Mass . . . We waffled on about this and that, and then I asked her to please come and visit me if she was ever passing through France. I dared not speak the name of our absent friend.

  She was the one who mentioned it. I was almost at the door when Quita put a hand on my arm.

  “Albertito, don’t forget me,” she said, with that despicable habit of shrinking her friends with diminutives. “Now that our Alejandrucho’s no longer here . . . And Titito’s gone . . .”

  The ellipsis called for some words of consolation, but I had not been informed about Gorostiza’s departure and so I didn’t know what to say. I confess that the news hardly surprised me. I always considered the relationship between Quita and that uptight Argentinian to be a little unsavory. Love affairs between patrons and their protégés never last. Just think of poor Tchaikovsky with his widowed millionairess, Nadezhda von Meck.

  I covered Quita’s hand with my own, to console her, but Quita instantly whipped it away, as if scorched by my touch.

  “Has an Inspector Mendieta come to see you?” she suddenly asked.

  I said that he had.

  “And what did you tell him?”

  I made a brief summary of our somewhat uninspiring conversation.

  “Did he ask you about me?”

  “You?” I said, surprised. “No, of course not. We talked about balconies.”

  “You swear that you didn’t say anything about me, or poor Tito, or anyone else?”

  I swore that I didn’t.

  Then she told me something which I am going to tell you and which I must ask remain entre nous. I don’t want to harm such an honorable woman needlessly. Quita was at my house the night that Bevilacqua died. It seems that his behavior had alarmed her, as it had the rest of us. And you know what it’s like with women who are a bit older: the slightest upset triggers their maternal instinct, and they feel they need to gather their chicks under their ample wings. Knowing that he was staying at my house (because in the literary world, everyone knows everything), Quita went to see him, to ask if there was anything she could do to help. The Bevilacqua who greeted her had grown even paler beneath his sallow skin, and his eyes, which were already naturally very dark, looked now (so said Quita) like hollows in a skull. Quita clutched him to her bosom, stroking his brow. But after a few minutes she began to feel that Bevilacqua wasn’t happy to see her; in fact, he seemed to want her to leave, given that he hadn’t even opened the door that led from the hall to the sitting room. Quita asked if any friends had come to see how he was. Bevilacqua said nothing. Well, I mean, what can you do? Quita may have the patience of a Griselda, but she has her self-respect, too. She didn’t push things. But before leaving, she thought she heard someone move behind the door leading from the hall. Of course, she thought that it was another woman and, with characteristic generosity, decided to leave the field clear. The last thing she ever said to Bevilacqua was that if he needed to speak to someone, he could always come to her.

  “They were my last words,” she repeated, “I swear.”

  I reassured her that nobody could have prevented what was
about to happen, and that knowing that a woman like her cared about his fate must surely have been a great consolation to him, when the moment came to make his terrible decision.

  On the train back to Poitiers, I started thinking about the sad story to which I had been an unwilling witness those last three months. Who was the man that I had known by the name of Alejandro Bevilacqua? Who had been that strange character who was at different times explicit and evasive, luminous and opaque? You’re a writer, Terradillos (a journalist, I know, but that also counts), so you know how difficult it is to make the artist coincide imaginatively with his work. On one side is the literary creation, endlessly transformed through our readings and rereadings; on the other, the author, a human being with his own physical characteristics, his inherited delusions and weaknesses, his failings. Think of one-armed Cervantes, shortsighted Joyce, syphilitic Stendhal . . . you know what I mean.

  But, just suppose we had never come to know of Bevilacqua? Suppose he had died an anonymous death in that military prison in Argentina? In Praise of Lying would still be considered a masterpiece, but in a different way, perhaps more perfect, more complete—at the risk of repeating myself. I mean: if it had no identified author, we would have read the novel like some lost text by a Latin Thomas Mann, an enlightened Unamuno, but with a sense of humor. We would have brought to his flow of words our own versions of that universe, our most subtle intuitions, and our most secret experiences. Because, even if you know that that innocent, gray, rather doltish character was behind such a clever portrait of our times and its passions, In Praise of Lying is a book to which you can return time and time again. One reader will see the book as comedy, another as lyrical tragedy, a third as a ferocious political satire, a fourth as a melancholic elegy to a vanished past. There will even be (as I was telling you there were), readers who are blind to the work’s genius, readers who, through lack of feeling or jealousy, are incapable of recognizing its unique mastery. In my opinion, In Praise of Lying succeeds in capturing the world that we knew (no mean feat) through the eyes of a perceptive and discreet witness capable of putting it into words, warts and all. It will be interesting to see if future readers one day speak of Unamuno as a philosophical incarnation of Bevilacqua, or of Thomas Mann as the Bevilacqua of Lübeck.

  The characters from the drama have vanished now. Quita was consumed by cancer in the final days of last millennium. I never heard anything more from Andrea. As for Berens, who considered himself an immortal poet, nobody recites him now, least of all himself: he was committed some time ago to a psychiatric clinic in Santander. Gorostiza, as I discovered much later, chose his own fate. I don’t know about the others.

  Only one of them did not disappear altogether. From my house, here in France, I can still see a tall figure striding along the pavement of Calle del Prado. I see it stop at my door and climb the stairs to my apartment, I hear his hoarse voice greeting me, embarking on the familiar stories, while his eyes fix on mine and his fingers grip my arm to keep me from escaping or keeling over with boredom and fatigue. I can see him from here. And, Terradillos, even if, as I have often said, I am the least qualified person to talk about this character, there are days when I suddenly find myself, for no particular reason, thinking about him and his curious literary fate, or about the calumnies that were later heaped upon him, and about the wages of envy and sin.

  And I say to myself, Fancy that. You once knew Alejandro Bevilacqua.

  2

  Much Ado

  About Nothing

  DON PEDRO: Officers, what offence have these men done?

  DOGBERRY: Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and to conclude they are lying knaves.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, V, 1

  Alberto Manguel is an asshole. Whatever he told you about Alejandro, I’ll bet my right arm it’s wrong, Terradillos. Manguel is one of those types who see an orange and then swear it’s an egg. “What, and orange-colored?” you say. Yes. “And round?” Yes. “Does it smell of blossom?” Yes. “So, like an orange?” Yes, but it’s definitely an egg. No, nothing is true for Manguel unless he’s read it in a book. As for everything else, he’ll concede only what he wants. The slightest insinuation, the smallest detail, sets him off on a wild-goose chase.

  I’ll tell you something, Terradillos—and you’re not going to believe this: there was a time when he thought I had the hots for him. Can you imagine? Me? For Manguel! In those days, the poor man was as indecisive as a swinging gate. During the weeks that he pursued me, he persuaded himself that I was interested in him, and all because I had asked him some stuff about an Argentinian writer I was reading. It was pathetic to see him traipsing round to the Martín Fierro, looking for me in the café, offering to walk me home—though less so for me, because I grew absolutely sick of him. Quita wiped the floor with him. Did you know she called him “Manganese” behind his back? “There’s Manganese,” she would say to me, “filling two chairs in the waiting room. See if you can shift him.” But it was hopeless. Only after Alejandro and I moved in together did he stop following me around like a lapdog.

  I don’t know why Alejandro liked talking to him so much. You probably know more about such things, being a journalist. Alejandro talked about his life partly to relive it and partly to show off. Perhaps it amused him to entertain Manguel, the way it can be amusing to entertain a rather stupid dachshund. Or perhaps Alejandro went to see him precisely because Manguel didn’t listen to what he was saying, but extrapolated outlandish literary stories from what he was hearing. Manguel would tell me something that he swore Alejandro had said to him, and I would just stare at him thinking, This fool, what planet’s he on?

  I think Manguel’s inability to pay attention comes from too much reading. All that fantasy, all that invention—it has to end up softening a person’s brain. I must have been barely twenty-five at that time, and Manguel was under thirty, but I felt a thousand times more experienced, more real than him. I used to listen to him and think to myself: At his age, and still playing with toy soldiers.

  I bet Manguel painted you a picture of Alejandro as a man defeated and morose. Am I right? A victim finished off by years of suffering and persecution or whatever. Well, it’s true, of course, about the prison, and that can’t have been a bundle of laughs. But apart from that, Alejandro was the opposite of a broken man. His setbacks galvanized him and made him stronger. Even as a boy.

  I’m the one you should listen to, Terradillos. Because I’m from the land of your ancestors. Because Alejandro told me his whole life story in all its intimate, dirty details. You know, of course, that he was brought up by his grandmother, a woman who must have been tough, having to struggle alone throughout her life. I feel sorry for her, poor soul, because I also have some experience of these things. Alone and in charge of a crafty fox like Alejandro. She only had to look away for a moment and Alejandro would be going through her handbag, or nipping into the back room with some girl or playing hooky from school to go to the adult cinema down by the port. The poor woman found herself in a terrible pickle once, when her darling grandson got the pharmacist’s daughter pregnant. Alejandro could scarcely have been fifteen at the time, and the girl nearly twenty. Can you imagine Doña Bevilacqua willing herself to stand, firm as an oak, in the face of gossiping neighbors?

  I don’t care what people say—I like the woman, even if we are separated by oceans and decades. I feel that both of us have had to deal with situations that were forced on us, and both of us have been prepared to fight tooth and nail to have something of our own in this life. She had to do it year after year. I did it every day. It’s okay. God gives beans to the toothless.

  I suppose, at the beginning, Alejandro must have won her over the way he did me. With the same allure, the same charm. She watched him grow, whereas I knew him as a grown man; but I’m
sure both of us were captivated by his poise, his presence, that gift for warmth that came to him from somewhere deep inside. In my case, I don’t know if it was the eyes, so deep you could drown in them, or those hands, which could make you shiver if you imagined them running over your skin, under your skirt . . . or the smooth neck into which you would love to sink your teeth . . . I’d better not go on.

  I’ve always had a thing for older men. I mean, you’re really sweet, Terradillos, but a bit too green for my taste. Come back to see me when you’re riper. Alejandro was about fifteen years older than me—which, considering how young I was at the time, was quite some gap. The most handsome man I’ve ever known was my father, may he rest in peace. Look, there he is, in his silver frame, as befits a man like him. Did I tell you that my father was a bullfighter? I adored him.

  On the evenings when there was a corrida, he, my mother, and I would go to my paternal grandmother’s house, because there was hot water there, and he could get ready more comfortably. My grandmother lived with two of her sisters, and these three old ladies would busy themselves with my mother, preparing his costume and laying out freshly laundered towels on the side of the bathtub, together with a perfumed soap that was kept for his exclusive use. My father would go into the bathroom and emerge after a while no longer himself but transformed into some magical creature, an enchanted being resplendent in pink silk embroidered with gold thread and sequins, and as handsome as the blessed Saint Stephen. We said good-bye to him (“never wish him luck,” my mother warned me, when I was barely old enough to say anything), and I went to sit on the balcony between the geranium pots, with my legs hanging down either side of a post, to watch him as he left the house, and went, gleaming, down the cobbled street. Immediately my mother and her sisters put on their mantillas and took down from her niche Our Lady of Perpetual Help; my mother lit the candles, and the four of them set to reciting Hail Marys until his safe return.