La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  He convinced me to try them when he brought a cigar that was smooth and light—the best of the light cigars, he insisted—a Le Hoyo du Prince petit corona. I loved it. And like that, by his hand, I started to become an aficionado myself, gaining in tolerance. And Cuyano stuck his nose in and shouted, “Coño! How I love a woman with a Havana between her lips. The smoke billowing around her, the aroma . . .” I tried a Ramón Allones, a Partagás, a Montecristo, a Rey del Mundo. The Spartan loved to smoke a Rey del Mundo. He promised me that one day he would get a Sancho Panza gran corona, a Sanchos, which had a rough texture, and would last him over two hours. That promise was never kept.

  For us, who didn’t understand anything, like I say, the smoke from each cigar the Spartan lit was an invisible thread connecting us to Pinar del Río, to the meadows of Vuelta Abajo, and its aroma had us smelling with our own noses the omnipresent power of the revolution, of Havana, and of the Spartan within the apparatus. Faith is transmitted by witnesses. That smoke was our incense rising up to the heavens. That’s why I didn’t like something Canelo told me in sworn secrecy—it lodged a doubt in my head. The Spartan had left a lover in Cuba, Canelo told me, a girl who worked as a cigar roller in the gallery of the Fonseca cigar factory in Quivicán. What if she was the one who arranged things so she could send him those export-quality cigars, the kind a common Cuban would get only, maybe, if he was invited to the Convention Palace? But the question didn’t last long in my mind: even if it were true that they came from Quivicán to Santiago de Chile, into his clandestine hands with their alibi and legend, it was proof that he possessed some truly influential friends within the apparatus.

  I’m telling you about him because without him, you can’t understand what we were. In these times of skeptical hypocrisy it’s hard for someone to believe me. But the Spartan really was as I’m describing. His mold is incomprehensible to the weaklings and egotists of today. His complete devotion to the cause, his abnegation, gave him an unquestioned moral authority over us. “We are violent Christs,” he repeated. But he didn’t remind you of Christ. He was too machinelike for that. Maybe Canelo did. And Canelo was his brother. That’s what he always called him as soon as he saw him: Brother, in English. An old friendship, from their time in Cuba. I know how much Canelo’s death hurt him. Even though when we met at the restaurant in the Central Market he stayed cold, almost.

  SIXTEEN

  I always wanted a Paris love. I’m talking now about some years before that fateful day I was captured. I was twenty-four. When I had landed for the third time at Charles de Gaulle, I’d told myself: this is it, third time’s the charm. Nothing happened. I completed the mission I’d been given, returned to Chile, and that was it. And now, as I said, I was twenty-four and I was in Paris again, at a table at the back of La Closerie des Lilas, telling Pelao Cuyano: “I always wanted a Paris love.” And he almost died laughing at my petit bourgeois romanticism, my bovarism. He had devoured over a hundred pages of Sartre’s essay about Flaubert before reading a line of Flaubert himself. He told me that while we were killing time in that café. We talked about Hemingway—we saw his bronze plaque—who came here to write in a notebook with a pencil. He brought a sharpener with him. Zola, I told him, was a habitué, as well as Cézanne, and, in the twenties of the twentieth century, Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Picasso, Modigliani . . . He knew all that. What he didn’t know was that Lenin used to play chess here. We guessed at whether, among the people around us, so comme il faut, there could be some Tzara, some Hemingway, some contemporary Picasso. We decided not.

  “Lots of them must be tourists,” said Pelao.

  “Maybe there’s a future Lenin,” I said, laughing.

  We had left Santiago traveling over land to Buenos Aires, and we entered France as husband and wife, which obliged us to sleep in the same hotel room though not in the same bed, of course. Even so, our compartmentalization kept me from knowing what Pelao’s task was in Paris, and him from knowing mine. The two-star hotel we’d been recommended was close to the Lafayette Galleries. Most important, there were two public telephones in the lobby. There were no phones in the room. A fat woman who was surely Moroccan checked us in. She handed Cuyano the key with what seemed like disgust. She demanded payment up front. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, she said. We squeezed into a wooden elevator. We had to put one suitcase on top of the other. On the way up, the machinery let out an exasperated noise as it trembled from the effort like an old, worn-out horse. The bedspread didn’t look clean. I pulled down the covers: used sheets. Cuyano went down and came back with the fat Moroccan. She didn’t show the slightest surprise and she changed the sheets and the bedspread. At least the shared bathroom looked clean. After a shower I eagerly persuaded Cuyano that we should go out to eat at a nice restaurant.

  I don’t know why, as we were drinking a Sancerre de Bué that seemed marvelous to me—although for us, very expensive—we started to talk about the famous preface to the Critique of Political Economy, about its idea that was central to our “historical materialism”—the idea that ethics and aesthetics, religion and rights, culture and politics, are all just expressions of the reigning mode of production in any historical moment, and they are consequences of that basic material, economics. They make up, then, merely the “ideological superstructure” of the system. Cuyano was intrigued by the role of technology within the “infrastructure,” that’s to say, the economic base. He wondered about its exact function in the assemblage of productive forces and production relationships that configured, magister dixit, every one of the modes of production—feudalism, for example, or capitalism. I lost the thread of the conversation, but regained it when I saw Cuyano’s shining eyes. We were young and committed and we took ourselves so seriously . . . “It’s a complicated issue, don’t you think?” Cuyano was saying to me, animatedly, talking quickly. And it sure was. But he dove zealously into those complexities. He moved in those deep waters not with the weight and scrupulousness of an academic but with the natural agility of a swift and nimble fish.

  On the Closerie’s piano, “Good Morning Heartache.” On the plate, an exquisitely delicate house pâté. The travel allowance, of course, didn’t cover a meal in that brasserie. Cuyano asked me if, in my opinion, technology might actually be part of the “superstructure,” and not the “economic infrastructure,” as the Preface had taught us. “Because technology,” Cuyano conjectured, venturing out into the mined terrain of heresy, “depends on science, and on practices that are tied to ethics, and it emerges from a framework of a group of institutions, among them the protection of the right to intellectual and industrial property.”

  If so, Cuyano maintained, it would dilute the primacy of the material base in respect to supposedly “superstructural” or “ideological” elements like ethics and rights. Because a mere right—the institution of industrial property—would then become a determining factor for the development of productive power. This posed thorny and disturbing questions of doctrine for us. To doubt “historical materialism” was to doubt everything. There was silence: “The Spartan would have had us playing chess a long time ago,” I said, and we burst out laughing.

  The streetlights of Paris had come on and the streets were calling to me.

  It was strange to get into bed and see Cuyano’s head beside me. I had trouble falling asleep.

  It had rained and the dead leaves in the streets were wet. I wasn’t nervous. There was no danger in Paris. My first “meet” was at nine thirty at the Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens, next to Leda and the Swan. A young man with a Chilean accent and the look of a college student gave the countersign. While we walked along the rue de Médicis he offered me a cigarette, which, as instructed, I put into my pocket. I opened it in the hotel and read my next “meet,” which was written in invisible ink.

  I got out one metro station early, took the rue de la Gaîté, turned right along boulevard Edgar Quinet and went into the Montparnasse cemetery through the main entrance. It was
ten to twelve on that cold, gray morning when I stopped in front of Brancusi’s sculpture. The stone lovers kiss with their entire bodies. The legs are bent and they touch from the knee down. Their intermingled feet moved me, their tenderness. As if they wanted to belong to the other’s body, I thought to myself.

  Someone coughed close by. A short young woman, with dark hair, moved decisively toward me. She gave the countersign, and in a Chilean accent she asked me if I could tell her how to get to Baudelaire’s grave. I answered as planned: “Avenue du Nord until you get to avenue de L’Ouest and there you turn left.” She took a package from her backpack that I immediately shoved into my leather bag. She said good-bye and left. I looked at the time: two minutes past twelve.

  On the hotel bed I opened the package and went through the ten blank Chilean passports—they were impeccable—and hid them among the clothes in my suitcase, which I secured with a lock. Where were they forged? My nose told me: Berlin, GDR.

  Pauline, the journalist from Le Monde, arranged to meet me at the Café Hugo in the Place des Vosges. It’s going to be full of tourists, I thought. I arrived half an hour early. I sat down at a table and ordered a cafè au lait. An Argentine accent made me turn my head toward the table to my right. Cortázar! I recognized him immediately. His beard, his giant body, his youthful face. He was gesticulating with outstretched arms as he talked. There were two women—one of them very attractive in whom I wanted to see la Maga—and the rest were mature men in their forties or maybe fifties, with long hair and casual, stylish clothes.

  I thought about running to a bookstore to buy Hopscotch and asking him to sign it. And what if they were gone when I got back? I thought about going over, introducing myself, and asking him to sign a napkin. I thought I should let him know I was a clandestine combatant fighting the military dictatorship. That would get him interested. I looked down at my coffee. I imagined myself in a spacious apartment overflowing with books, his friends scattered on chairs and armchairs and me seated among them on a cushion, on the floor, listening to old jazz records and talking with him.

  Just then I glanced at the table: it was empty.

  I paid as fast as I could and went out to the square. They were walking slowly and their conversation was still animated. I checked the time. Six minutes until my appointment. I was bringing a dossier for Pauline with documentation of the repression. She was a person of great political importance for Red Ax, I’d been told. They didn’t explain why. Apparently she’d been in contact with our apparatus for years, but she only knew that we wanted to bring down the military. She was very anti-Soviet, I’d been warned, and didn’t care too much for Cuba, either. A “Menshevik,” they told me. I had to be careful answering her questions. A tremendously intelligent and well-informed woman, I’d been told. In the photo they gave me she looked attractive and severe.

  But however important Pauline was, I still had six minutes. Without thinking, I started to follow them. They went into an art gallery where there was an exhibition of Japanese prints. They stopped in front of one with a wave in the foreground that curved over and seemed to trap a boat, allowing a glimpse, far away, of Mount Fuji. Horacio Oliveira lit a Gauloises. He said something enthusiastically—or whenthusiastically, to continue with Hopscotch—about those “images of the floating world.” La Maga looked on disinterestedly, as if the charm of his intelligence was foreign to her. One of his friends—presumably Etienne, who was a painter—pointed to the trunk of a flowering cherry tree up above, said that this print had greatly influenced Van Gogh. Horacio then set off on a speculation about the close-up, the perspective of those Japanese prints, photography, impressionism, the fiction of representation. “It’s painting,” he said, “that has taught us how to photograph; never the other way around, never ever.”

  And they left. I followed close behind. It was raining, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They went into another shop and I followed them in. It was an antique shop full of musical instruments. They spent a good while examining clarinets, bassoons, a tuba . . . Until all of a sudden Horacio started playing an old trumpet. A second later, they were gone. When I stepped back over the threshold, they weren’t there. I looked disconsolately to the right, then left—nothing. I considered taking a taxi to scour the rue du Cherche-Midi, where Horacio’s apartment was.

  I went running back to the Café Hugo. When I went in, an elegant woman of some thirty-five years, alone at a table, was looking anxiously at the time. It could only be Pauline. I was twenty minutes late.

  To excuse my lateness I told her the truth. She enjoyed my story about Cortázar, and we became friends immediately. She was a woman with sharp features, distant when she was serious, warm when she laughed and showed her large teeth, and seductive when she only smiled. A few errant grays shone in her light brown hair. She was wearing a simple, navy blue silk blouse and a Cartier watch. She accepted my documents and asked general, cautious questions. She didn’t want to pressure me. I started to suspect, though, that her interest in Chile was perhaps instrumental. Maybe her heart needed to attack a monster of the right in order to make her attack on the monsters of the left credible. What was really important to her, I think, was to unmask those who gave orders from “behind the Wall” and who, with their tanks, had put an end to the “Prague Spring.” She was interested in the uprising of the unions that was starting in Poland. “It’s our greatest hope,” she told me.

  I tried to get back to my subject, my mission: to convince her to come to Chile and write a report on the situation there. We had to show the world that the resistance was real; that, for example, Red Ax was in full operation. We had to increase international solidarity. That could be very meaningful for us. She agreed, but quickly went back to talking about Europe. “You know,” she said, “the Pope being Polish helps. Even though he’s a tireless reactionary when he pontificates about sex. What can you do?” she exclaimed, “Voilà l’homme providential,” that’s a providential man for you.

  I turned on the light and went up the four flights of stairs. When I got there, the light went out. I started knocking blindly at doors. Suddenly, one opened up behind me, and I saw Pauline smiling in a stream of warm light. Now, at night, the silk blouse was raw and natural, dense, with a tasteful cut. A golden ring hung around her neck. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and her breasts made their weight and presence known. Her jeans were black and her high-heeled shoes showed her long toes with their rounded nails. I felt small. My green T-shirt . . . I felt ugly, boring and provincial next to that sophisticated woman and her apartment in the rue de Bourgogne. What the hell was I doing there? I heard voices, peals of laughter. I left my umbrella dripping in the porcelain umbrella stand, smoothed my hair, and went in. The smell of pipe smoke.

  After a quick introduction, I sat down on a big Chesterfield sofa with somewhat worn-out springs, next to Dorel, a Romanian sculptor who was smoking a pipe. Its smell was inviting. His wife, Clarisse, was enthralled as she listened to Giuseppe. Whatever he was telling her must have been very entertaining. His accent was Italian. “My fiancé,” Pauline told me. “Giuseppe is a documentarian,” she said. Dorel lived in Paris and considered himself an exile, though no one had forced him to leave Romania.

  “It was a necessity of the soul,” he explained, blowing smoke toward the ceiling. “The truth is,” he told me, “an artist can’t breathe there.” I myself was feeling a certain agitation that, against my will, turned into a sigh. Not for anything in the world did I want Dorel to think I was bored. Giuseppe’s gaze had me perplexed; that’s what was troubling me. I didn’t notice anything else.

  Dorel got up to change the music. He wanted to hear Brassens, “because there hasn’t been anything better than him in France in decades,” he said in a challenging tone. No one rose to the bait. Pauline had gone to the kitchen. I hid my eyes in the depths of the Bordeaux wine in my glass. I thought I felt her fiancé’s eyes on me: Giuseppe. I looked up and sought him out: he was laughing with Clarisse, who rested one bare
foot on top of the other. The room we were in had high ceilings and the lighting was low and intimate. The Chesterfield sofa with beat-up leather went well with the brand-new Wassily chairs that reminded me of herons. Behind me a white beech shelf full of pocket edition paperbacks went up to the ceiling.

  Brassens: Le singe, en sortant de sa cage / Dit: “C’est aujourd’hui que je le perds!” / Il parlait de son pucelage, / Vous avez deviné, j’espère! / Gare au goril . . . le!1 Giuseppe was looking at me with a half smile. Brassens: Bah! soupirait la centenaire, / Qu’on puisse encore me désirer, / Ce serait extraordinaire, / Et, pour tout dire, inespéré! / Le juge pensait, impassible: / “Qu’on me prenn’ pour une guenon, / C’est complètement impossible . . .” / La suite lui prouva que non! / Gare au gorille!2

  I couldn’t help but laugh, and I covered my mouth with my hand. Giuseppe pointed at me. We all moved to the greenish provincial-style dining table that was at one end of the room. Brassens in another song, sung in a grave and ironic voice: Mourir pour des idées, l’idée est excellente . . .3 Giuseppe, across from me, refills my glass without asking. He doesn’t look at me. I observe his black velvet jacket, his abundant white hair falling over his ears, his forehead that wrinkles as he concentrates on my glass, the fine lines radiating from his eyes, his small mouth with full lips that rest one on top of the other, the protruding nose, audacious, thin, lively—a nose that differentiated itself from the apes billions of years ago. I return to the slight, elegant curvature of that nose that divides into two halves, the same as his chin. I’m twenty-four years old, I think to myself. He must be forty-three. He’s an old man, I think. Brassens: Mourrons pour des idées, d’accord, mais de mort lente . . .4