Pauline, in one of her comings and goings from the kitchen, invited me to talk about Chile. The soupe à l’oignon burned my tongue. I don’t remember what I said. I do remember that Giuseppe proposed an idea to me: I should invite Lech Walesa, the Polish labor leader, to speak in Chile about Solidarity. Everyone loved the idea, including me. But I loved even more Giuseppe’s Italian-accented French and, more than anything, the fact that he’d had the idea for me. Pauline assured me that the European press would all follow behind Walesa, and that of course she wouldn’t miss it. Would the dictatorship let him into the country? Everyone talked at once and I didn’t understand anything. In the hubbub I could only distinguish the donc’s, bon’s, quant meme’s, and voilà’s. Giuseppe let more Bordeaux fall into my glass. His gray eyes flitted around and came to rest on mine like a bird on a branch. The branch trembled, but held him.
Dorel clears away the plates but doesn’t stop talking. He’s telling us about Broken Kilometer by Walter de Maria. He’d seen it before in photos, of course, but to have those rows of bronze rods lined up in front of you is another matter. “The purity,” he says, “of that folded distance.” Afterward he went with Walter, he told us, to a Chinese bar that you had to pass through a sushi restaurant to get to. “Trés New York, tu sais.”
Giuseppe disappears to make coffee. “Brassens is boring!” shouts Clarisse.
“Dorel loves this junk left over from the fifties!” laughs Giuseppe from the other room. Clarisse puts on Paco de Lucía. She starts to dance flamenco. She’s not bad, to tell the truth. You can tell she’s taken classes, but it’s not just that. She has grace. She pulls Giuseppe up by the hand. Giuseppe resists, and finally feints a dance to that soleá, his feet hint at a tapping, it’s just a glimpse and the flame is lit, the stance of his torso, the attitude of his arms and face are exact, the passion and intensity are there, but he practically doesn’t move, it’s just the possibility, the insinuation of a dance. He breaks off, laughing hard, and goes back to serving coffee.
“Giuseppe,” I tell him, “you’ve danced an imaginary dance for us.”
“Did you like it?” he asks me, his mouth full of laughter. The scent of his woody cologne reaches me. He’s just returned from making a documentary in South Africa. “There’s a protest in the streets,” he tells me, “the police come with enclosures that they put up quickly to cage the protestors right there, as if they were animals.” We’re talking now, as we eat a practically liquid Camembert on thin slices of apple. Giuseppe prepares them and hands them to me. Impossible for anything to pair better with the Bordeaux cabernet. No one interrupts us now. He talks to me about Kruger Park, about a lion couple he saw making love like lions, he tells me how he saw gay lions, pour tout dire inattendu, and yes, he tells me laughing, anche tra i leoni ci stanno i culatoni, even among lions there are fags, and he tells me about a program he’s seen on TV, about a she-lion who lives among the rocks with her mate and two cubs. Another male comes along. They fight. The female comes to her mate’s defense. The recently arrived one kills the other male and defeats the female. At some point, she gives in to him. Then he attacks the cubs—the mother gets up and defends them, but in the end she gives up again. The winning lion kills the other’s babies and stays with the mother. She accepts it. He says with perplexed eyes, the eyes of a child: “A drama from Sophocles, n’est-ce pas? Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” he says. “I’m going to the bathroom to have . . . a lovely piss.” We laugh.
I look attentively at the Bordeaux in my glass. Giuseppe, who’s returned, asks me what I see in there. I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I say. “I like it,” I say. His smile makes me hide my gaze in the depths of the wine.
Suddenly, I’m the only one at the dining room table. I look around in alarm. Dorel and Clarisse are leaving, I say to myself. Yes. Did I say good-bye to them? Yes. Giuseppe and Pauline are seeing them to the doorway. I hear Giuseppe’s full, confident laughter. Pauline makes a silly face at me and goes into the kitchen. “Voilà la plus belle!” Giuseppe says and he sits down next to me. He leans in very close. Pauline is in the next room, I think to myself. Giuseppe’s hand on my face, his hand on my hip. I tremble like a child. Pauline will appear any second, I tell myself, and she’ll catch us. But with two fingers I follow his calf upward until his pants stop me. His hand grabs my head and we kiss.
“Why did you take so long?” I murmur in his ear. His smile enters through my eyes and reaches down into my stomach. It’s a vertigo I can’t resist. We kiss again. I jerk away from him roughly.
Pauline comes over to clear the table. Did she see us? I go help her. “Call me a taxi,” I tell him.
“Yes,” he says, “it’s raining and windy.” It comes right away. I pick up my umbrella. Giuseppe, behind me, is saying to Pauline that no, better not, he has things to do early tomorrow, it’s very late, and he’ll share the taxi with me. They’re in the doorway now and I see them kiss tenderly on the mouth. She closes the door, and he kisses me. We run down the stairs holding hands. We get into the taxi laughing like naughty children. The white hairs of his chest peek from under his shirt and he looks at me with smiling eyes. His happiness, I don’t know why, it moves me. Madam Bovary’s stagecoach, I think to myself, as we kiss and kiss again, borne along by a quick passion.
The light from outside the fogged window of his apartment was enough. The streetlight among the chestnut trees that were losing their leaves in the rain. I left my shoes on the rug. We kissed standing up, we bit each other gently on the ears, we looked into each other’s eyes for a long time. He was almost my height.
“Sei come una pantera,” he said to me, caressing my hair. “What makes you so attractive,” he told me, “is that you don’t realize how attractive you are.” He kissed me. He held me and kissed me lovingly, and I felt his lips playing with my nipples, and I fell backward with him holding my waist and I lost my balance, which was, I suppose, what he wanted, since the bed was right there, and I fell onto it and he fell hungrily on top of me, and I struggled beneath him to take off my pants and also his shirt, and I rolled over and once on top I managed to do it and I felt his muscles that were still firm and I felt his hands on my thighs and more and I felt him and I felt him slide a hand under my elastic and I practically felt a splash, and I was ashamed and I held his hand in mine and still I pushed him in and I was above him and I moved pressing myself tightly to him so I could feel him more, more, and then I came, like an idiot, I came suddenly, I couldn’t stand it anymore, I came, I swear, and I couldn’t hide it, because I came with everything I had.
Then we drank some water, and I took off all his clothes and kissed him from head to foot and he kissed me, and I stopped to kiss him where I thought he would like it most, but I kept changing my mind where that was; he sighed and at times he maybe groaned, or maybe I imagined that. And I got on top of him and I wanted him to come, and I started to feel again and I thought he had come and I got off but he hadn’t, and we went on loving like that until, sticky with sweat, he finally came and we fell asleep and it was already starting to dawn by then.
I got back to my hotel room a little after seven in the morning. Cuyano was waiting up for me and was very worried about me, he said. He asked for an explanation. I started to laugh and he understood. A couple of hours later I flew to Marseille, birthplace of Antonin Artaud. In the doorway of a café I met with an ETA contact. I brought a box with five cigarettes that carried a message. Of course, I never found out what they said. I only knew that there were always Mapuche comrades among us—like Kid of the Day. Many of them also participated in organizations of their people. The contact was close. That was what interested the ETA. And the ETA interested our Mapuches.
I went back to Paris that same day and went straight to Giuseppe’s apartment. “Voilà la plus belle!” He exclaimed when he opened the door. He uncorked a bottle of Moët et Chandon and in his miniscule kitchen he made an omelet with mushrooms that was delicious. “Je n’ai jamais aimé que vous,�
�� he told me.
“You liar!” I shouted.
“It’s a line from that old guy Brassens you liked so much,” he protested, laughing. And as proof he put on the song “Il suffit de passer le pont.”
Let me tell you, that night was the best of my life. We parted at eight in the morning. It hurt my skin to pull my body away from his. And his eyes were full of tears.
Pelao and I flew back to Buenos Aires and traveled by land to Chile. It was safer that way. I never found out what Pelao did during those five days in France. Pauline never wrote her report and contact with her was cut off. I knew nothing more of Giuseppe until many years later.
1. “The ape, leaving his cage / says: “Today I will lose it!” / He meant his virginity / you will have guessed, I hope! / Beware the goril . . . la!”
2. “Bah, sighed the ancient lady, / no one could still want me, / that would really be extraordinary, / and to be honest, unexpected! / The judge thought impassibly: / to be taken for a floozy, me! / it’s entirely impossible . . . / Later, he was proven wrong! / Beware the gorilla!”
3. “To die for ideas, the idea is excellent . . .”
4. “We shall die for ideas, all right, but let it be a slow death . . .”
SEVENTEEN
Our organization functioned as a body fed by “ties” or “meet points.” If the “meet” was with our cell, the Spartan would arrive last of all, and he would always sit with his back to the wall in the spot with the greatest visibility in case of attack. He took orders from Max, his immediate superior, by means of a liaison. Who were they, these intermediaries? Where did they come from? Who recruited them? I never knew. The ones I saw were fragile women between sixty and seventy years old, who wore clothes that were neither luxurious nor poor, and who moved through the streets of Santiago with a dignified slowness. They almost always carried a purse on one arm and a bag with some vegetables, a wedge of cheese, a bottle of oil, a couple of apples, whatever. Many times I had to take from that bag a book or notebook that held an envelope with a coded message from the Spartan. The public telephone was used only in extreme cases. The old women gave the sign of recognition and then they would give the password. Of course, they never gave a name. They were the circulatory system. Most of them had belonged to the old forbidden party, they were retired, widows . . . One might want to avenge her husband, another her brother, or a daughter who had been raped or murdered, another her own defeated dreams.
Who was above Commander Max? I don’t know. There was also Commander Iñaqui. He was important. That’s all I ever knew. At the top of the pyramid, Commander Joel. There was also a man who, as you know, had the job of “general liaison” and whom everyone called “Bone.”
We had instruction and indoctrination meetings, which we went to compartmentalized, for safety. They put us in a car with blindfolds over our eyes and they brought us to a house that we wouldn’t know how to find again. Sometimes, the entire meeting would take place with us blindfolded. In that case, when we came in, the brother who would talk to us was already waiting there. The opposite happened with our other leaders. They would say: Commander Iñaqui is here in the room waiting for you. And he would start talking very quietly, you could barely hear him, and little by little, he raised his voice without ever reaching a full-blown shout. His voice was insinuating, serene, intimate, and full of silence. An intensely personal voice. It had a hypnotic power. After a while it was impossible not to feel complicit. You were caught up and bowled over.
One afternoon he talked to us about the color red. I’ll never forget it. In Saint Petersburg, at the start of the revolution in February 1917, he told us, when people were going out into the streets to protest, the Cossacks were sent to restore the tsarist order. In Nevsky Prospect, not far from the Kazan Cathedral, a squadron held back the fevered crowd. Everyone thought a massacre was about to start. Then a young girl stepped out from the crowd and, dignified, slowly approached the Cossacks. Amid a silence full of expectation, the girl pulled out from under her shawl a stem of red roses, and she offered it to the official. The people looked on, stupefied. The official bent down from his horse and took the flowers. The crowd shouted enthusiastically. For the first time shouts were heard in favor of the “Cossack brothers.” Then they let the protestors pass into the center of Saint Petersburg. It was a decisive moment. That’s how the October Revolution began, with the red color of that bunch of roses, he said. Later, the red of spilled blood would come. The word “red” (krasnyi, in Russian), he told us, is related to the word “beautiful” (krasivyi). The place for icons in a Russian house, the place for sacred objects, was red. “The red-beautiful,” he told us, “has power. Red will always be the color of the revolution: ‘krasnyi.”’
EIGHTEEN
The woman with glasses and the Bic pen examined the fake Argentine passport I handed her. Through the bars and without speaking, she showed me on her calculator the number of pesos I could buy with the two hundred dollars I’d given her. I nodded. She hit the buttons with fingers tipped with blunt, purple-painted nails, and she passed me the receipt through the drawer so I could sign it. Canelo was behind me; I could hear him breathing. I stared at my fingertips, at their transparent layers of dried adhesive, and I checked the time: one thirty. According to our information, every day at that exact time, a man with white hair and dark suit and a halting walk opened the heavy door that led to the two registers and protected them from the public, left the currency exchange with a faux-leather briefcase, and went straight to the Bank of Chile to deposit traveler’s checks and other documents.
At the other register, to my left, an elderly couple with German accents. They were calmly changing their money. A bald clerk about fifty years old was helping them. There were no other customers. The place had been well chosen by those who did the planning.
The German man coughed. “Smoker’s cough,” I thought to myself, and then Canelo’s harsh shout paralyzed me along with everyone else. I saw his ski mask covering his face and I put mine on, too; I imagined my sketch spread out on the kitchen table of the safe house, my bars, my pencil drawing of the door; I saw the white-haired employee drawn with a real pallor now in that real door, and he was looking at the drawn revolver with frightened eyes, eyes that no one would be able to sketch. He wavered for a second with the door shut before opening it and surrendering to Canelo, backing up with his hands raised and never taking his eyes from the barrel of the Smith and Wesson. The cashier followed his example without hesitation.
I felt like I was taking too long and I tried to hurry, but I couldn’t, I kept lagging behind like I was in a slow-motion movie, and there was a deceptive silence and I knew I needed to draw my gun right away but I couldn’t because my hand would not obey me. But finally I went in, I went in through the aisle behind the registers, following Canelo, and I found in my hand a trembling Beretta that was already threatening the cashier. She was watching in astonishment, without dropping her Bic pen. The silence was suddenly full of unbearable noise. The out-of-step orders from Canelo and Kid of the Day. And Kid of the Day came past shoving the German couple in front of him. But it wasn’t just that. Everything sounded too loud. The white-haired employee and the bald cashier and the German couple disappeared through the interior hallway, with Canelo pointing his gun at them. The plan was for him to lock them in the bathroom and stand guard. That must be what he was doing, I guessed. That’s what that brutal slam of the door must have been. I looked at my watch: I couldn’t read the time. I looked at the cameras sweeping the place, the red light always on. Kid of the Day passed by me and I saw the horrible scar they’d given him on his forehead as camouflage, and he seemed to jump suddenly. I was in a cloud, with no up or down. What was he doing? Oh, I remember, he was going back to keep watch at the entrance and to lock the front door. That was all according to plan.
And me? I was pointing my gun at the cashier with the Bic pen. Following the orders I barked in a hoarse voice from a throat with no saliva, she was patiently
turning the dials of the Bash safe. In those years, that’s the kind of safes they used in Chilean banks. And I looked and saw the clock on the wall, a big, round clock with a restless, jumpy second hand. Its relentless tick tock was unbearable. We had to hurry. When it opened, the metal door of the Bash safe must have been some twelve centimeters thick. The woman with the Bic was about to empty the bills into my purse. But she was unresolved. In spite of my Beretta, which was still shaking a bit, not a lot, as I tried to keep it steady. Ridiculous, I told myself, a well-trained combatant like me. The layers of adhesive were coming off my fingertips. I must be sweating a lot, I thought. The butt of the gun was sticky. My makeup must be getting smeared, I thought.
“There’s thirty thousand,” she whispered, and she pointed at the rolls of bills. I saw them so clearly. The colors shone, the letters and numbers were of astonishing precision. Those old bills, encircled by their elastic bands, vibrated with a new intensity. But the woman, in spite of my orders, was too slow. She picked up one roll. I suffered through every millisecond of the imprecise journey her chubby hand with its purple nails made to my purse. It was a long and clumsy trip, let me tell you. And there was still another to come. The thought was exasperating, with her sluggishness. And another. And then, the pesos. Several million. More than four, she said. When I heard the sound of my purse’s clasp, I felt my heart beating and beating, marking time with the rhythm of a solitary drum.
But now she was telling me that no, she didn’t have the keys to the closet. And I repeated the order and she was shaking her head and telling me no, that the keys to the closet were only handled by the manager and the manager, of course, wasn’t there. This wasn’t in the plan. She was “fixed.” That’s what we had been told. I looked at the camera on the wall above the door with its red light. We knew what we had to do. There was a reason this place had been chosen. We had to bring the tape with us no matter what. Just as planned. And it had to be done before some customer tried to come in, got suspicious, and called the police. We were in the manager’s office. I hit the woman in the teeth with the butt of my Beretta. It made a loud noise. The sound of teeth. I repeated the order to open up, open it any way she could. The closet door had a small opening where the cable passed through. She had me get a nail file from her purse and she started to pick the lock, holding it with nervous fingers. I leaned over to look at the clock on the wall: the second hand was still moving with fidgety jumps. “Hurry up, shit!” I said. I heard a shout and a thud: the closet was open. Canelo had opened it with a single kick. Now the alarm, we knew, would go off in twenty seconds. And then the police would come. They would be here in six minutes, they would block off the streets and start searching for us. By that time I had already to be in a taxi speeding west on Moneda. She knelt down. I looked at those buttons and the little blue and yellow lights in the darkness of the closet. I searched anxiously for the one that said “Eject.” I was thinking: the seconds are going by even though I don’t feel them, they’re going by and she can’t find the “Eject” button and I can’t find the “Eject” button either. I was thinking: there can’t be more than ten seconds before the alarm goes off, there can’t be more than nine, and I still can’t find the button. I heard the sound of inner gears, dull, tight, and short. A pause. Then another sound, open and dry. I waited. I felt my heart pounding like a second hand. I heard a rough, dragging sound. She made a sudden movement and I brought my Beretta to her head. She turned slowly to face me with her hands up. In her left hand she had the tape, which she gave to me. I held in my hand everything the cameras had filmed. Suddenly, I was discombobulated. Something yanked me out of my head. The howl of the alarm had destroyed that sliver of time we inhabited. It became the only thing happening. It bore into our skulls like a jackhammer. The police. The police would spread out through the city behind us.
La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 11