La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  “No. So I’m not named in the investigation?”

  “As far as we’ve been able to find out, no.”

  “Then my case doesn’t exist.”

  “Exactly.”

  “When I left, they made me sign a provisional liberty . . .”

  “A fake document, obviously. Did you get to see anyone?”

  “See, what you could call see, almost no one. But I’m sure they got Chico Escobar, I heard shouts one night and I have no doubt it was him. They also picked up Vladimir Briceño. I passed him in the jail’s corridor, limping along with two guards on him. They’d broken his nose and his shirt was soaked in blood.”

  “So you did see something, and in detail: broken nose, limping, bloody shirt . . . Why did they fall?”

  “I don’t have information about that.”

  The Spartan nodded his head again and he stared into his soup.

  “They didn’t ask you about them?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Tomasa. She says she was already a socialist in grade school, that her father was an ‘entrista,’1 that she had a boyfriend who was ‘eleno,’ and that she got to meet Elmo Catalán himself when she was just a kid. Could that be true? I don’t know when she joined the Red Ax movement. She must be thirty-something. They did bring her face to face with Briceño and Escobar. I don’t know what cell she belongs to.”

  “Anyone else?”

  His eyes looked me up and down. I thought: he’s measuring the chain of denunciations; he’s calculating, like the good chess player he is, which pieces he has to give up for lost.

  “No.”

  He nodded again in silence and looked at me again with intense curiosity. He was a dark, broad-shouldered man; I’ve already told you that, right?

  “And yet you seem fine,” he finally commented. “Thinner though, yes. Tell me, why did they keep you locked up for so long, what did they want from you?”

  “They wanted me to sing, at first.”

  “Obviously. And then?”

  “They wanted to know where Commander Joel was, what he looks like, how he communicates with Bone, what our structure is. They fear and respect us a lot, I’d say. There’s a lot of paranoia about us.”

  A burst of cold, absurd laughter escaped me. The Spartan furrowed his brow.

  “And then?” he asked after a pause.

  “They thought I could still be hiding something,” I said, ashamed of my laughter. And I added: “Those pigs want to get at Bone. That’s it. And they want him alive.”

  “Obviously. But they won’t get to him.”

  “They want to know about the weapons and the cash. They asked about that over and over.”

  He didn’t say anything. It was trivial, and I felt silly.

  “They never brought you face to face with any of our people?”

  I shook my head.

  “I passed Briceño in the hallway, as I told you, and of course, we acted like we’d never seen each other before.”

  “Strange,” he muttered. “Very strange. And those shouts you heard that were Chico Escobar, you say, why did you hear them? Did they want you to hear them?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And you didn’t take the bait?”

  “Of course not!”

  The Spartan swallowed a spoonful of broth.

  “There are some evil guys inside there. They mess with you for a while just to punish you, and you end up like a scalded cat, you know?”

  He didn’t smile with me.

  “Anything in particular to tell me?”

  “Well, it was just like they’d told us it’d be.”

  He smiled slightly. It took a lot for the Spartan to laugh. When a smile did escape, his eyes turned sad and defeated.

  “Nothing else? Any experience or reflection? You were a teacher, an intellectual, always spouting some quotation or other.”

  I let out another peal of strange, out-of-place laughter.

  “Only something which never ceases to cause pain remains in the memory,” I managed to say after a moment, serious again. “Those thugs don’t need to read Nietzsche. They just know that’s how it is. Order, their order, just like the transparent stages they create to show off their fetishes, those public spaces they design in order to usurp—their famous malls—it’s all held together by cruelty. Underneath the banks and the stock exchange, the twenty-story buildings and the factories with huge, smoking chimneys, under the stadiums full of people cheering for goals, beneath the serpent television, there’s the promise of blood.”

  I make air quotation marks with my fingers. I wasn’t lying, not in the slightest; at that moment it was what I felt, what welled up in me; it was the truth.

  “Everything—understand me, anything—the most horrible things, chopping off their legs and arms with an ax—it’s all justified.”

  And I really felt that to be true, as well.

  “As long as it’s effective,” he tells me in a cold, firm voice. “Our hate, sister Irene, is also subordinated to our collective goal. Everything we do or don’t do is justified by the cause. Otherwise, it’s better not to fight. To resign ourselves to peace and endless negotiation. Which means tolerating the world’s abuse and injustice. It means having endless patience and getting used to misery and the disgrace of inequality. It would mean adapting, reconciling ourselves to evil. No! We are at war, but it’s not a conventional one. Any armed mission of ours is always a message. The formal retaining walls of the ‘democratic bourgeois’ have given way and class domination is exposed for what it is. The seed is germinating underground. The hour of the great vengeance is approaching. We’re going to win, sister Irene,” he says with a trace of softness, and immediately he hardens his brow. “And if we can’t win we have no right to live.”

  He fell silent, sunk into his thoughts. That’s how the Spartan was. He’d turn somber all of a sudden. He lived completely absorbed, I think now, in his task of revenge. He was disdainful of politicians because they all made concessions, because they were all dirty. He, on the other hand, was going against the current, and he knew himself to be tough and alone and superior.

  “Why were they waiting for us at the currency exchange? What went wrong?”

  “One must lose, sister, if one wants to someday win. This episode has been investigated. Your version of events will be requested and then you will be given a report.”

  I looked at him, but he was stirring sugar into his coffee.

  “You know the procedure,” he concluded after a long pause. “You’ll have to write a report about what happened. It will be processed and then you will be called in to clear up any questions. Remember this number.” And he made me repeat it three times from memory. “Call from a public phone, of course, on Tuesday at 12:10. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Sister Irene ends here, right? As you know, you’ll be disconnected for a while. That means: no stipend. What do you plan to do?”

  “Whatever you, my brothers and sisters, assign me to do. I’m at your disposal.”

  “I’m asking what you would like to do, compañera.”

  “I want revenge, a just revenge. That’s what I want. I want a dangerous mission. This time I won’t fail. I want to show what I’m capable of. I ask you, brother, for that chance. It’s a formal request.”

  “I’ll deliver this request at the appropriate time. The question was, what do you plan to do now?” he said, relaxing his tone.

  “Go back to teaching French, I guess.”

  “And not leave Chile? You’ll stay here and go on giving private French lessons?”

  He looked at me approvingly.

  “Teruca, as you know, sent her son, Francisco, out of Chile. He’s in a children’s home in Havana. There’s a group of kids, the children of militants, living together there. As you know, it’s an indispensable security measure. To avoid blackmail and to protect the children. You already said no once. You wanted to keep your daugh
ter here, you said she was safe in your mother’s house. We respect your decision, sister, though we don’t agree with it. It’s a very serious matter. Serious for you, as the responsible mother that you are, and serious for all your brothers. The time has come for you to send your daughter to that home on the island. Don’t you think?” I lowered my eyes. “It’s a tremendous sacrifice, I know. But it’s necessary. Your safety is at risk, your daughter’s safety, all of ours.”

  I nodded my assent. He took my chin in his hand and met my eyes.

  “Everything for the cause, Irene. Everything.”

  I nodded again.

  The Spartan, when we separated, gave me a Lonsdale Fonseca no. 1 that came wrapped in fine, transparent rice paper. That night, I went out alone in my mother’s yard, and I contemplated its wrapper, as the Spartan called it, like someone staring at the skin of the person they love; I lit it from below, turning it around, slowly, as he had taught me, and I smoked it unhurriedly. Then I went barefoot into Ana’s room. She was asleep. She slept with such trust. The air passed through her half-open lips so serenely. She looked so beautiful to me. With one finger I traced her profile. “Everything for the cause, Irene. Everything.” I didn’t shed a tear.

  1. Faction of the Socialist Party of Chile.

  THIRTEEN

  Some days later I went to a “meet” on Calle Placer. Evening was falling and the storekeepers were starting to close up shop. I spent a few minutes looking at tennis shoes outside the Danny and Robert shoe stores, until I saw the sign of recognition, heard the question we had prearranged, and I got into a Fiat with a couple in the front seat. He was muscular and very dark. The woman, a redhead, was driving. They asked me to lie down on the floor. I figure it was on Gran Avenida, around stop number 9, more or less, that we turned west, turned around, and crossed Gran Avenida again, heading eastward. After a couple of turns to disorient me, we stopped at a house that must have been on Calle Curinanca, or around there, maybe actually on Olavarrieta, which is what I thought then. The bell sounded twice in short bursts, and four big boxer dogs came out, plus a small mutt, black with a curved tail, which seemed to be the fiercest. The door was opened by a scrawny, jumpy, big-nosed kid they greeted with the name “Piscola Face.” He calmed his dogs with a whistle and let us in. After walking a stretch along some paving stones in disrepair, we went into a garage next to an old, two-story mansion. It was a large space, cold, with unpainted brick walls and high ceilings, closed off at one end with chicken wire that had ivy growing on it. There was a carpenter’s bench with tools, cans of paint on the floor, boxes, bottles of gas, paraffin drums. We were lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. We sat down in mismatched chairs. On the cement floor, old oil spots.

  They listened to my story in silence and then began to ask about details. They weren’t too interested in why I had crawled under the truck but rather in what I knew about Tomasa, about Chico Escobar and Vladimir Briceño, about their functions. They also wanted to find out exactly what the brothers who made the plan had told us about the woman with glasses and the Bic pen, the one who’d put the money in my purse. I told them. Just that she was fixed, that she would cooperate. Nothing more. They asked me to describe her.

  Half an hour later Puma came into the garage, and just behind him was Rafa. My eyes filled with tears when I saw him and I ran to hug him. He seemed distant. So, the next day I went to his mother’s house on Calle Los Gladiolos and left a message with her: “I want to see you. It’s been too long.” My mother’s phone number was below in invisible ink. He never called.

  They accepted my version with a certain reticence, I think, but they didn’t accuse me of anything. I was left in peace and disconnected. I hoped to be reincorporated after a few days. Above all, I needed a new identity. I requested one. I needed it for security reasons, I said. And I waited.

  The red chalk mark I saw on the corner two weeks later meant I should call the number they’d given me. I did, and I met up with the Spartan in a dive bar on Prince of Wales Avenue. I told him I wanted to infiltrate Central Intelligence, to pass on firsthand information, to climb the ladder in Central; I wanted to plan with him a master stroke that would lift Red Ax to new heights and light the fuse of the revolution. I’m thinking of the Red Orchestra. I believe that every intellectual learns to split in two by interpreting texts that throw them into an arcane world full of trompe l’oeils and mirages. When they’re thirsting for action, they want to be a double agent. Rimbaud: Je est un autre, I am an Other.

  “I want to be a Kim Philby,” I tell him, “a John Cairncross. You should be my Arnold Deutsch,” I laughed. He listened to me attentively while we ate some Spanish omelets. He told me, “I’m not some intellectual recruiting students at Cambridge, like Deutsch. Even less if we’re talking about sexual matters . . .”

  But we agreed he would explore my idea. “Nothing else?” he asked as we said good-bye. “Nothing else?” I never found out what happened to my infiltration plan. It became clear to me, little by little, that my brothers and sisters were starting to phase me out. They didn’t trust me. It happened sometimes with people who’d been detained. It hurt me more than I realized at the time. Inside, deep inside, I felt wronged. Canelo had died protecting me, I had withstood my hours, and I wanted revenge. I wanted action. I deserved another chance. I couldn’t quit. But the Spartan had decreed distance.

  FOURTEEN

  I rented an apartment in the Carlos Antúnez Towers. Just one room, plenty of light, and thin walls that let the constant murmur of my neighbor’s TV filter in. Without my stipend I had no other choice. My daughter went on living as before, with my mother. I went to pick her up early in the morning to bring her to school. And I often brought her to stay with me on weekends. “I have to send her to Havana,” I told myself sometimes, and my heart would skip a beat and the sweat would run down my back and soak my blouse. The Spartan leaving the restaurant on Prince of Wales: “Nothing else?” I had to do it; there wasn’t the slightest doubt. I had to get in touch with him to make it happen. And the sooner the better. I promised myself I would talk to her on Friday night at my apartment. Friday, without fail. It wasn’t easy, of course. But hell, it was my duty. In the long run she would understand. I resumed my classes and I reconnected with my friend Clementina. Like me, she taught classes at the Chilean-French Cultural Institute. She also wrote catalogs for art installations. She showed me the latest one she was working on—a text that emphasized, of course, the politics of the work. My life returned to its course, only now at the sidelines of any real mission.

  Clementina let me read the essays she wrote for conceptual artists and art actions. Clementina inhabited a world of gestures and words and metaphorical objects, a world I used as camouflage. I was always well aware, though, of the abyss that separated her form of “political activism” from filthy reality. I never lost my mental reserve. “The only interesting artists,” Clementina would repeat, “are those whose gestures call power into question. That’s our parti pris,” she’d say. “Our starting point. It’s not about content, of course. No.” She took me to see works that, according to her commentary, infiltrated the official media culture to counteract it from within using the logic of “hunger for novelty”—an art-news that accused the circuits of production and reproduction of power. “News understood as poiesis,” said Clementina, “as creation.”

  Clementina, with her black hair dye, purple lips, and schoolgirl’s black lace-up shoes, was an intellectual leader. A group of dissident artists and critics circulated around her. At one of their openings I met the attaché culturel of the French embassy. It was she who introduced me to her Swedish counterpart, Gustav Kjellin, a big, friendly man with long, white hair, who imparted calm from the moment you met him. A couple of times Clementina and I went to lunch at his house. His wife was pretty, cordial, and silent.

  “The artist,” Clementina was explaining to them in her whispery voice, a glass of Veuve Clicquot between her purple-tipped fingers, “is the
inventor of destabilizing spectacles.” That’s what she wrote about in her texts, positing that, once they were decoded, of course, they would allow the observer to transform the observed. Gustav saw it all as very political, but at the same time very much in the province of elites. Of course, I agreed with him.

  “Fassbinder’s films won’t overthrow capitalism in Germany,” he said. “It could very well be the opposite that happens: capitalism could leave Fassbinder with no audience . . .” and he started to laugh.

  “But the critic,” she went on, with stubborn missionary conviction, “discerns and creates at the same time; he’s an inventor of inventors. It would be bragging to drop names . . .” she tossed back a good swallow of Veuve Clicquot. “But those who know, know. And the day and the hour will come when we are recognized,” said Clementina. That “we” included her and no more than three critics who followed in her wake. Artists believed themselves to be creators, but really they were mere actors in a film directed by a handful of critics and some gallerists, Clementina maintained with a conviction that I found attractive. Because the power of that select group determined what was art at any moment. “Nothing is natural,” said Clementina. “There is no essential art that we contemplated in our beginnings in the Platonic cave, and that we later recognize in the real world. No.”

  For my brothers and sisters, that world was my cover. Sometimes they congratulated me on it. Because through all this I continued to receive, on occasional afternoons, messages from the Spartan. Coded, of course. And I attended some unimportant meetings, and they gave me some unimportant tasks. I wanted to join a cell, take up arms once again . . .

  Days and weeks passed. I thought nostalgically about the old times. I remembered nights spent in groups in some safe house listening to tapes played with the volume turned low, Quilapayún, Silvio Rodriguez, Los Jaivas, Inti, Serrat, Violeta, while we drank a well-steeped mate, a habit a brother from Cuyo had introduced us to—Pelao Cuyano, we called him—and talking and talking in order to escape our fear, to forget about what we would do as soon as dawn came and the patrol cars watching over the night disappeared from the streets. Then Pelao Cuyano would start telling us stories about the Bolivian ELN; about the Tupamaros’ glory days in Uruguay, details about what the escape from Punta Carretas was really like; about the FMLN in El Salvador; about the great Santucho and the ERP’s heroic fight in Argentina, his collaboration with the Chilean MIR, his attempt to join forces with the Montoneros, and the building custodian who, under threat, knocked on Santucho’s door and told him to open up, about how Santucho, who didn’t have time to get his weapons out of their hiding place, seized the gun the enemy was pointing at his head and killed him with it, and then killed one more enemy before they got him; and then he would talk about the growing forces of the Shining Path in the mountains of Peru; and of FARC in Colombia . . .