At a quarter past one in the morning, the silence was broken by the motor of a car stopping, the slam of a door, and then footsteps coming closer. I ducked down in the back seat as Indio and Iris embraced like lovers. The man was walking on Calle Grajales. On the southeast corner of the plaza, he stopped and observed the solitude of the place and the calm of the adjacent streets. From that corner, close to the palm tree, he had the best view of the scene. But because of the curve of the street that bordered the plaza, the Daihatsu on Abdón Cifuentes was out of his visual field. The same was true of a Toyota parked south of the plaza on Almirante Latorre. None of them could see him, either. As I said: only we, in the old Peugeot taxi in the alleyway Teresa Clark, were in a position to observe the “illicit activity” that the man in the plaza was about to initiate. Did he notice our Peugeot?
Iris said to me: “If that’s really him, he’s having trouble making up his mind.” And a second later: “OK, he’s walking through the plaza, make sure it’s him.” I sat up just enough to see, and I recognized him. I didn’t need binoculars. That way of walking, of leaning back and dragging his feet a little, was Rafa’s and no one else’s. He walked along the gravel walkway toward the cedar tree, which must have been no more than fifty yards from us. He sat down on the bench with the gum, looked at the stars for a while, turned to scan the plaza, and then languidly let a hand fall, feeling his way along the iron leg. From that position he could have noticed our Peugeot. He would have had to turn his head to his left. He didn’t. He looked at the stars again, pensive; he got up slowly and headed back at a relaxed pace toward the southeast corner.
Iris communicated over the radio that the Subject was headed toward his car parked on Calle Grajales. A motor started up, and a white Chevy moved at a normal speed eastward along Grajales, along the south edge of the plaza. The Toyota on Almirante Latorre started up, turned right on Grajales, eastward, and casually began to tail the Chevy. At night, the small amount of traffic made it difficult to tail without being noticed. The Toyota, which Pancha was driving with Great Dane beside her, let Rafa get ahead. Great Dane communicated that the Toyota had the Subject under control. Was that when Rafa noticed the headlights of the Toyota behind him and the Nissan parked to the right, close to the corner of Almirante Latorre? Who knows. Rafa’s Chevy continued eastward on Calle Grajales, and three blocks past Almirante Latorre, when he reached Ejército, he turned suddenly and sped southward. Great Dane reported that they had lost the control, and they kept going straight to avoid raising suspicion. Mono Lepe’s Nissan, which was farther back on Grajales, took Ejército southward and became the control car. Rafa’s Chevy sped some five blocks farther, crossed Blanco Encalada, and turned, wheels skidding, onto Tupper. He went straight along O’Higgins Park, crossed the highway, and catapulted onto Avenida Matta, heading east. Mono Lepe informed us of these movements and assured us that the Subject remained under control, that his Nissan was keeping up though the Subject was performing countersurveillance maneuvers. Then Macha gave the order for the blue Daihatsu to take the lead as the control car. But Rafa had already turned right again onto San Ignacio, and then he wrenched the car eastward to double back on Rondizzoni, where it dovetailed with the highway going southward, and he floored it. The Daihatsu was left behind, and it lost the control. Macha gave the order to disperse. Rafa had detected the tail. Nothing could be done . . .
A couple days later I went back alone to Plaza Manuel Rodríguez. It was cold and the night was very dark. I took a couple of turns around the adjacent streets to be sure that there were no suspicious people or vehicles. My steps echoed on the pavement. I started at the sound of my own footsteps. Just as Rafa had, I arrived on Grajales and stopped on the southwest corner of the plaza, next to the palm tree; I made sure the place was empty and then I set off down the gravel path toward the bench under the bluish cedar tree. I could smell the dampness of the grass. The sound of leaves in a thicket startled me, and I stood there paralyzed. I touched my gun. A pigeon darted out and flew away. Once I was under the roof of the enormous cedar, I sat down on the bench just as I had seen Rafa do. I looked at the dark sky, across which even darker clouds were gliding. The plaza was intimate, secret. I reached my hand down until I touched the leg of the bench, and I made sure to affix the paper firmly with the gum.
THIRTY-SIX
He called me right on time at my student’s house, interrupting my class as I’d wanted. I arranged to meet him without giving any explanations. My tone, firm and decisive, was enough. Address, day, time. Nothing else. I don’t know why I was so sure he would listen to me, in spite of the irregular way I went about it. The “meet point,” the shadowy Plaza Concha y Toro in the old part of downtown Santiago, had escape routes on three narrow streets: Erasmo de Escala, Maturana, and Concha y Toro. That, I thought, would give him confidence. At one thirty on the dot I heard his footsteps on the cobblestones, breaking the silence of the night. And then he was there. He’d entered from the south on Concha y Toro. His way of walking was the same as always: hesitant and slightly tilted backward. His open parka couldn’t hide his belly. His right hand in his pocket made me think he had a small weapon. He was suspicious.
He made no sign when he saw me. Close to the fountain, as soon as he could check the little street that ends at Maturana, he stopped. Rafa looked and listened carefully. I didn’t move. I watched his legs. I didn’t dare look at his face. Then he rounded the fountain and came closer to me with short, measured steps. When he was very close I reached out my arms to hug him, but he didn’t take his right hand from his pocket. I kissed a cold cheek. Right then, I wavered. I was afraid to do it. I felt a wrenching in my guts. Could I still save him? Yes, I thought, it’s still possible. And in that fleeting moment I wanted to, I swear I wanted to. “They’re following me,” I told him anxiously.
He looked at me with an attentive, cold intensity. I was desperate, I withdrew into myself. “Inform the Spartan that they’re following me,” I told him, dazed. “He won’t answer my messages. I need help.” He looked at me, disconcerted and annoyed. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t know who else to turn to.”
“Why don’t you get in touch with your contact?” he reproached me. “Why don’t you follow procedure?”
Something, a flash, passed over his tense eyes. I wavered then, just barely, but I wavered. I couldn’t stand the situation one second more. I still wanted to save him, still . . . I looked over his shoulder. “They’re coming!” I told him. “Run, run!” And without waiting for his reaction I took off running desperately toward Maturana. He ran northward to Erasmo de Escala.
I swear, of all that I did, that was the worst.
I fell to the ground. I was running, I heard footsteps and gunfire, a Browning, I thought, and I fell, and then I heard more gunfire. Rafa? Then I heard the first CZ. Now there was machine-gun fire. The narrow streets made the noise echo. I didn’t feel any pain, but when I brought my hand to my calf I felt something warm. I brought my fingers to my mouth: blood. Shouts, but far off. Now there was Macha’s grave voice. He was telling me no, don’t move. The light from a flashlight, a penknife or pocket knife, something cutting my pant leg. “It’s not serious,” Macha was saying to me. “It’s not serious. This will hurt a little.” He lifted me in his arms and carried me as he walked. Pancha supported my leg, which was starting to hurt. Macha laid me in the back seat of a car. He took off his belt and made a tourniquet that almost strangled my leg. “Let’s go,” he said to Pancha. “Let’s go.”
I wanted to know if Rafa had shot me. But no, it hadn’t been him, Pancha explained to me as I was rolled on a cot through the hallways of the Military Hospital. “He had someone with him,” she told me. “Rafa ran toward Erasmo de Escala, with his bodyguard following. He was the one who shot you. When he got to the plaza, he shot toward Erasmo de Escala to cover Rafa’s retreat, but he saw you running to his left, toward Maturana, and he fired. I’m sure he wanted to protect you from me, because he must have seen me n
ext to the car, waiting for you on Calle Maturana. He was aiming at me or at Macha, and he hit you. That’s what I think.”
“And what happened to him, Pancha? What happened to him?” She tightens her mouth.
“He was eliminated.”
I ask: “And what did he look like?”
She tells me: “There wasn’t much left of his face. Macha and I emptied our cartridges. He was, how to put it, all over the paving stones. He was a big guy, I can tell you that. I noticed a piece of skull that was left and his hair was really blond. He was wearing cowboy boots. Great Dane took those off him. He wanted to save them from the blood, he said, and he kept them. He said they’d fit him well.”
As if in a bad dream, I saw then what was left of the Gringo, who had wanted to save me, I saw him emptied out over the cobblestones. All that had lain behind his eyes, all that was inside him, I saw spread out now over the ground. I felt nauseous, and I vomited in the cot.
When I woke up from the anesthesia, they’d removed the bullet and given me stitches. That was it. I would have a small scar. And, of course, the indelible and burning memory of Rafa next to the fountain, looking at me with those eyes that were suddenly suspicious. He had managed to make it almost to the corner of Erasmo Escala, I found out later. There, after the curve, Mono Lepe and Iris blocked his path. They aimed their guns at him and ordered him to stop. He fired and missed. Great Dane appeared behind him and with one kick to his head knocked him down and overpowered him. Three seconds later he was in cuffs. They lifted him up and brought him struggling to the van.
They made me interrogate Rafa. My Cuban voice. And he, Rafa, with his eyes blindfolded . . . Don’t ask me for details.
We don’t know what we want to talk about when we want to talk about this. I still rebel. I know it’s a rebellion that’s doomed from the start, just like the Devil’s. And nonetheless I rebel. I’m an apostate. They broke my being and I apostatized. But I can’t change or erase my past; I can hate it. The past is what I am, though I cannot live it. It hurts. You see, I’m crying now. I don’t want to trivialize what happened to me. But you, you’ve convinced me to talk. What for? Now I think the sadistic part of you has been unleashed. I didn’t want to talk. You are morbid, you’re sick. That’s why you’re interested in me. Admit it! You convinced me, little by little. But I was right: I’m sinking, alone, down into the same pit as before.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Laughing, he repeated: “My Malinche, thanks to you the empire will fall, my Malinche.” And he laughed, smelling of garlic. Gato never made any advances toward me, but he created an atmosphere of intimacy between us. And I listened to him, bound up in my impossibilities with my insides contorting. And he talked to me in his viscous, sticky voice.
He told me about his trips three times a week to the sauna, about the massages he got from a woman there, she was skinny but her hands and fingers were strong enough for all the different maneuvers—the pinching, drumming, the sweeping—and how the smell of camphor in the paraffin cream relaxed him, of the osmotic film they wrapped his belly in to dissolve the accumulated fat under the heat of the electric blanket, the massage for his always-tired feet, of the cranial draining, which always put him to sleep . . . Or he would talk about some show on TV. Or about his darling mother who loved him so, so much, about his father and the tangos he used to sing in the shower, about the highway accident on a curve close to San Fernando in which the two had died together, about the few friends he’d had as a child and whom he had stopped seeing and now could never see again, about a tall girlfriend, almost a head taller than him, thin and blond, of Polish parents, whom he’d loved and lost. “Because of the schedule of this damned job,” he said, “because of this shitty schedule.” And then he would yawn, and the mouthful of garlic breath would wash over me. And putting one elbow on the table, he’d rest his head on his hand. He was nostalgic, that damned Gato.
He told me once about an infection he’d had not long before. I don’t know what it was, some kind of venereal disease, obviously. He didn’t say which one. The nurse had led him to a bathroom and explained how to give himself the test. He couldn’t believe it. She left him alone with two rods in his hand. He lowered his pants and underwear. He looked at the cotton-covered end of the metal rod. “The whole cotton part has to go in,” she had told him. “It’s only an inch,” she said, and she closed the door. His eyes found his face in the mirror. He looked very pale. He thought about asking for a cot. He looked at his member and it had shrunk to almost nothing. He was ashamed, then. He imagined the nurse’s disdainful gesture if she were to help him. He took hold of his little-boy member and started to force the rod into it. It bent completely, poor thing, to escape that penetration that went against nature; it hurt terribly and the little devil slipped away like a worm feeling the hook. He panted desperately. It was impossible to get it in; it was a basic problem of circumference and diameter.
“Do you need help?” it was the nurse.
“No,” he answered, trying to seem calm. “No, thanks very much.”
And she, coldly: “I’m only asking because you’re taking so long. There are people waiting.” He managed to get the rod in a quarter of an inch. A howl escaped him. “Remember you have to get the whole cotton part in. Otherwise you’ll have to repeat the test,” she told him. Now his little turkey waddle was hanging there pierced through by an arrow. But it wasn’t in far enough, if it didn’t go in farther he would have to repeat the whole torture all over again. That’s the word he used. So he pushed it in and he heard an animal-like whine, he told me. He was feeling unwell. He sat on the lid of the toilet, grabbed his slippery little creature with his left hand, took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and, with his right hand, pushed that cruel arrow farther in. He thought he could feel his innermost, most sensitive fibers being shredded. His heart gave a leap that surely saved him from fainting. There was knocking at the door: “Don’t forget there are two, we need two samples.” When he came out he was so white that the nurse made him lie down on a cot.
That atmosphere of closeness with him made me laugh, it disgusted me and it intrigued me. But once I emerged from that basement of damp odors and into the wind of the street, it weighed on me like a poncho soaked in dirty water.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I found out that a detainee from Red Ax, one I hadn’t seen, had given up an address. By this time I was completely recovered from my injury. They sent a team to check out the information. They went through the garbage and found cigar ash and the end of a smoked cigar. The tobacco was still fresh. It’s hard for me to believe that someone of the Spartan’s caliber could make such a big mistake. It’s enough to make you think he wanted them to catch him.
Once, an urgent mission had come down to our cell: clear out a safe house that had been marked. Two cells met at the house. Ours was in charge of collecting all compromising objects. The other cell was security. They came with small weapons and one large one. Agents of the repression were en route. It could be necessary to shoot. And this very Lorena was there. So you’ll see.
It was a two-story house with a high fence, white, I remember, with a gated driveway and a garage. An old married couple lived there, acting as cover to normalize the house. There was a storage shed in the backyard. I don’t know where the house was because they brought us there on the floor of a car, but from something I heard in passing I think we were in Quinta Normal. We had just a few minutes. If you’d only seen the Spartan’s attention to detail, his precision and speed. The Spartan took care of us. To start with, he made us wear plastic gloves he had brought for us. We went around throwing things into big black plastic trash bags: clocks, rolls of insulating tape, nails and screws and steel bolts, cables, pliers, screwdrivers, a hammer, and some sticks of dynamite. And of course, the ammunition. Then we went over everything with a cloth to erase fingerprints. The agents could arrive at any second. Oh right, I forgot, the first thing we took out was the TNT being stored at the house. It was rare for u
s to have military-grade explosives at our disposal. I don’t remember an order to use it. All this went away immediately in a car with Canelo at the wheel. Then the Spartan looked over everything again with a flashlight to be sure there was no trace left behind. Then he had Teruca and me go over it again. So how he could forget that incriminating cigar butt is something I just can’t understand.
Macha asked me to go with them. I went in disguise, and carrying my service weapon, my 9mm CZ. He asked me, when we were already in the truck, to identify the “Prince of Wales”; the photo was blurry, he said, he didn’t want to make a mistake. It had happened before, more than once. When we were leaving, while we waited for the heavy door that led to Central’s lot to open, I saw Gato—his slow walk, tired and downcast, his hands in his coat pockets—on his way home.
I went with Macha, feeling a fascination that I reproached myself for; there was something in him that attracted and frightened me, moved and terrified me. His brusque sentences. His guttural voice. The innate authority with which he imposed his will. His lonely animal silence. His black eyes in which I saw death.
It was close to midnight when the white Toyota double cab 4×4 parked in Calle Juan Moya, behind a run-down Ford truck with no one in it. Iris was next to Macha. I was in the back seat with the binoculars. I saw them check their cartridges and stuff bits of cloth into their ears. I was pleased to feel my heart pounding again in anticipation of action. I was alive. It was an intense moment. I was consumed by a thirst for enemies and opposition and triumph.
La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 19