Then, do I still admire Canelo? Like every innocent, he didn’t know he was innocent. Is it because he’s the sacrifice? As if by defying death, he could kill it. His freedom made destiny. Who speaks of victory? To endure is all. And there were women who went through the same terrifying place I did, or even worse places, which of course existed. Today those women prevail with rocklike dignity because they remained in one piece. When they came out, testifying gave them a purpose. That was the case for my friend Claudia, to mention just one. And there were many others like her.
An instant, every instant of the present, is a scar made into a window. Here in Stockholm, I still sometimes wish someone would shoot me. It could happen. Maybe they’re looking for me, to kill me. But no, no one is looking for me. I reproach myself. Then I feel an urge to kill someone, some stranger passing by me in the street. So I would matter to someone. If no one is to love me, may someone at least fear me. Frustration, I tell myself, I contradict myself. This lasts.
You don’t understand this Lorena you’re listening to: I drink from the chalice of my own abjection. It’s sweet and bitter, my chalice, like a vice. A long resentment can protect and sustain. It can become a religion. Ha! I want to laugh, but the laughter dries up in my mouth.
I have to leave behind this thing that is freezing me. How? I will, but not yet. I will. Am I doing it already? Suffering has not purified me. I’m a prisoner. I’m a wretch. If only I could drag myself to the wretched door. If I could turn the lock on that door. If I could. If I had the key. I would have had to reach the door. There would have to be a door. But I survived. I became a worm, but I survived. I’m alive. I’ve become shit, I’m dying, but I’m still alive here in Stockholm.
FIFTY-FIVE
I’ve come only to see him, as a surprise. And as soon as I get to Charles de Gaulle Airport, my spirits rise. I call Giuseppe that same afternoon. I’ve kept his number for years and years, written in my personal code. I don’t dare leave my name on the machine. What if he’s not in Paris? The next day I call again. A sleepy voice that could belong to anyone answers. Suddenly, I recognize my name in his shout. He can’t believe it’s real, he tells me. He’s tried to find me so many times, he tells me. We agree to meet at five in a café.
I got there early so I could see him go in. I waited for him, trembling, on the other side of the street. I recognized him and my heart gave a jump. His hair was completely white, but he still had a thick mane. He walked with resolve, but a little bent over. He sat at a table close to the entrance. I kept watching through the window. In no time, a bottle of white wine and two glasses appeared on the table. He had arrived early.
I decided to stay in the street a while. I was sweating. I remembered his smile as he opened the door to his apartment: Voilà la plus belle! I went into the bathroom of another café nearby, and I spritzed myself with perfume, touched up my makeup, and brushed my hair. I crossed the threshold five minutes late. My heart was in my throat. I stood for a moment with the revolving door behind me. Was I waiting for him to give a shout and run to embrace me? I passed slowly among the tables and I recognized his same cologne as always: Giuseppe, I thought. But I said nothing to him, and I sat down at the end of the bar on a stool. I ordered a whiskey. Then I looked at him: his elegant nose now held up a pair of glasses, and his face was a full net of wrinkles. Giuseppe was still a very attractive man. The glass shook in my hand. I started to feel the same fire as before, l’antica fiamma.
He picked up his glass and took a long sip. He smoothed his hair with his hand. He turned his white head, and his eyes took in the tables. They finally landed on the bar. There were three men and me sitting on the stools. I felt his eyes scanning my body. He lowered them and took another sip of wine. That was it.
As I passed very slowly by his table, I smelled his cologne again.
Sometimes I still ask myself: What if I had stayed a few seconds longer? And if I had spoken to him?
Anita’s devotion to her father lasted some ten months. Then she announced in a letter that she’d gone to live with two friends from the university in an apartment in downtown Santiago. She insinuated in a phone conversation that his wife was too jealous. Now they saw each other every morning because he—the model father—went to pick her up to bring her to the university. And then December came and two days before Christmas, when I opened the door of my apartment, I heard music. I saw a shadow in the hallway and I heard a “Mom?” It was magical. In an instant I went from sadness to utter joy. I’ve never gotten or will get a better Christmas present. Those were wonderful days. We went to the movies, out to eat at our favorite restaurants from before. We went together to H&M to buy a sweater she wanted. She seemed so womanly, so pretty. We found ourselves together in front of the mirror.
“I’m looking gray,” I say, when I see the surprise in her face.
“No,” she tells me. “You are gray.”
The aging process seems to come from outside of me. It’s a disguise, a mask that disfigures me. Youth, on the other hand, sprang from within me. The old, gray-haired woman in the mirror isn’t me. She’s an invader who took over my body. I try to tell Anita something of that.
Anita went out at night with the friends she still has here. But she wanted to be Chilean, she told me. She goes to bed late, when I am already asleep. When I get up every morning I see her closed door. I know she is in there, sleeping. Then slowly, slowly, I run my fingers over her door, caressing the wood, not wanting to wake her.
And, just as she arrived, she left. On the fifteenth of January she took the plane back to Chile. Only then did I realize how little she had told me about herself, about her real life. She was studying business at a new university, a private one that I didn’t know. And her father? Nothing. She never told me anything about him.
FIFTY-SIX
Returning: the old woman, the liaison who was waiting for “Viollier” the day they killed him, goes a few days later into a currency exchange in Calle Monjitas. She does it twice in the same month. Pancha, who is following her, has the temerity to follow her in the second time. She watches as they let the old woman into an interior office. She soon comes back out again. She looks tense. Pancha tries to find out which office she went into. It isn’t possible. She goes back to Central to report.
I run into her in the hallway. She keeps walking almost without acknowledging me. Her black shirt that fits her so well. “They called me in,” I say. She shrugs her shoulders. I follow her in. I see Chico Marín, who gives me a forced smile. His lizard eyes. He goes on talking at half volume with Mono Lepe. Only the television makes any noise. Iris goes over and turns it off.
The door to Macha’s office opens and Great Dane appears. He’s wearing a dark suit. His blond hair falls frothy and shining over his shoulders. I’ve never seen him in a tie before. He slowly takes off a pair of Ray-Bans that are just like Macha’s. He looks at us one by one from left to right. No one says a word. When his eyes leave those of Indio Galdámez and fall on mine, they try to get inside me, to tell me, “I know you, kid,” and then they go back. Suddenly, he looks at the ceiling and says: “Macha has been detained. Counterintelligence. I ask—I demand,” he corrects himself, “absolute confidentiality. They’ve opened a case against him. I’m the one in charge of this team now. Until new orders come down. I’m the interim. Any questions?” Silence. “OK then, go on with your work.”
He goes back into the office and closes the door. But he thinks better of it and calls to Pancha. He ushers her in. She throws me a look just before the door closes. We disperse without talking. Macha has fallen, fait accompli. The king is dead, long live the king.
Great Dane orders a tail put on everyone who works in that currency exchange. They take photos of people going in and out. They don’t get much. Great Dane sends in two fake technicians from the phone company: Mono Lepe and Indio Galdámez. They go into the inner offices. They see an old woman come out of the manager’s office. They report to Great Dane. He orders them to go in and
check the lines. They’re not allowed in. They wait. When they’re finally let in no one is there. Seems like someone escaped, right? They report. Outside, agents are waiting to take a photo. No one shows.
Great Dane has them call me in. I’m summoned urgently to his new office, the one that used to be Macha’s. Something smells off to me. I meet Gato in the hallway. He’s just arriving. It’s six in the evening. He doesn’t know anything, he tells me, his head hanging down. The new C3.1 doesn’t like him too much, he tells me. “He’s not like Flaco,” he tells me with a complicit little smile that I can’t stand. “But soon he’ll realize what I’m worth. It’s always the same . . . Macha, they’ve got him fucked good,” he tells me. “At night,” he tells me mysteriously, “I hear sounds, like this building is creaking . . .” And in a whisper, mischievously, “Careful with Great Dane. That blondie has a really big one . . . If you don’t believe me, ask Pancha. She told me herself.” And he bursts out laughing.
I open the office door: it’s not Great Dane, it’s Macha. He’s looking at me with his long-lashed eyes. He has me sit down. His desk is between us.
“You’re here? But I saw you leave the parking lot with an escort and in cuffs,” I tell him straight off, and I laugh.
He lets out a contemptuous sigh:
“It’s just a disciplinary action. That’s all. Another one . . .”
Often, as now, his eyes didn’t shine, they were opaque. I felt it as a challenge, that tragic veil. He turns and opens the safe. Hanging on the corner, his holster and CZ.
“I received this file,” he says in a short, brusque tone. “Classified information about the currency exchange on Monjitas. The owner and manager is named Juan Isidoro Zañartu Cortínez. But Juan Isidoro Zañartu Cortínez died fifty-nine years ago when he was five months old. They used that name to falsify his ID card and get a national tax number. Because the number is valid. Do you know anything about this?”
“No,” I say.
“Nothing?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“You have to get to him. You have to find him.”
“How?”
“Your problem,” he tells me.
“You photographed everyone who came to work there in the morning, right?”
“Affirmative,” he answers reluctantly.
“And also everyone who leaves at night?”
“What makes you think we’re such stupid motherfuckers?” He laughs.
“It has to be one of them. Find the ID that corresponds with those photos. The one who doesn’t have a registered ID, that’s him.”
“Already done, woman.” And he laughs in short, low bursts. “The Department of Identification informed me that everyone there has a valid ID and none of them is Juan Isidoro Zañartu Cortínez. Look.”
He shows me some pages with photocopied IDs and the photos that were taken of people going in and out of the currency exchange. “One of those women works for us,” he says, bored. “She infiltrated a few days ago. She’s a ‘cleaning lady.’ But she hasn’t gotten anything.” I look at the faces. I recognize the woman with glasses who lent me a black Bic pen to sign the receipt at the currency exchange we held up. She was “fixed,” they told us then.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Do you have the blueprints of the building? There could be a private elevator and an underground parking lot.”
He hits his forehead. In his smile, I see the shine of his white, even teeth.
“I’ll call you.”
The day they showed me the photo, I couldn’t believe it.
“He’s in a wheelchair,” Macha told me. “You can just see the backrest there, see?”
“No, I don’t know. It could be a spot, or a shadow on the wall . . .”
“Here, you can see it better in this enlargement.”
And, now yes, I can make out the metal of a wheelchair. As for him, he’s a distinguished gentleman with gray hair receding on the sides, a streamlined nose, fine lips. He must be some sixty years old.
Seeing the photo made a strong impression on me. I held back. Macha must have noticed. He looked at his Rolex.
“Come with me,” he said, putting on his Ray-Bans and sliding the CZ under his belt.
A couple of minutes later we were going around seventy-five miles an hour on his ’76 Harley-Davidson, under the oriental plane trees in Forestal Park. I smelled his scent and the scent of his black leather jacket, and I felt the hard triangle of his back against my breasts. I wasn’t thinking about anything. The afternoon air blowing on my face, his smell and the smell of his jacket in my nostrils, and my breasts against his back. That was being alive, period. How old was I then? Twenty-seven? And him? Thirty-two, thirty-three? Does that explain anything? I see his CZ without its holster, held only by his belt. Vertigo: What if I grabbed it and pointed it at his head? If I made him stop the motorcycle and then I killed him and took off on it?
We stopped on Calle Agustinas. Macha offered me a cigarette. We each smoked two, and then he handed me a Minolta.
“You have a very pretty neck,” he told me suddenly.
I laughed, surprised.
“Long and thin,” he said.
A white Volkswagen van came out of the underground parking lot. I took my first picture. Macha stepped on the kick start lever and we followed it. The van went up one block, turned and went several blocks on Monjitas, and then turned right and we followed it up Compañía. Another two or three photos. The license. Half a block after Plaza Brasil it disappeared behind a metallic door. Compañía, street of old houses with a single continuous facade. We drove past it slowly. Another photo. A big, grayish house from the end of the nineteenth century, balconies, stucco ornamentation, thick bars on the windows, the door to the street in the middle of the house’s front.
“There,” Macha says to me. “Have you ever been there?”
“Never,” I tell him. “Notice it has an alarm.”
We shot away when the light turned green. We went fast. We went down the Costanera highway along the edge of the park, leaving the cars behind. The way the motorcycle leaned into the curves. The violent air in my mouth.
FIFTY-SEVEN
“What are you thinking about?” he says.
He’s sitting on the floor, his back against my black leather sofa.
“Cheers,” he says, raising his glass.
“Cheers,” I say, and I feel his eyes looking for mine and I don’t look at him.
I look at the foam on my beer. He wanders around the room. He looks out the windows. It’s dark and he’s looking out from the twelfth floor. Below, the restless lights of the cars and the immobile street-lights along the Costanera.
“You can see San Cristóbal Hill during the day, right?”
“Yes.”
“Smell the pine trees?”
“Yes.”
“The sun comes up over there, right?”
“Yes.”
He sits down at the dining room table. It’s small, for four people. He gets up and goes on pacing.
“I’d like to take pictures of you,” he tells me.
His straight nose, his prominent eyebrows, bushy and intense. On his forehead, a small scar. Small, but ugly. That shard of glass the night he went into the Spartan’s pension and tried to take him alive.
“It’s not smart,” I tell him. “In the life we lead it’s not a good idea for photos to be floating around out there.”
“Correct. We’ll tear them up.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Of course not.”
He smiles under his moustache.
“You’re used to this,” I say.
“To what?”
“To this life where nothing is what it is.”
“There are some things a person never gets used to.”
“Like what?”
“Like the feeling of coagulated blood under the soles of your shoes when you take a step.”
And, as if that were nothing: “Years ago I saw a movie, it had a French agent who was taking pictures of a woman. It was an old movie, black and white. It was a video we found in a raid. It was in French. I didn’t understand much. I don’t remember what it was called. I remembered it when I came into this apartment. The woman was beautiful, beautiful, naturally beautiful.”
“So you like movies about spies and detectives, then?”
“No. About naturally beautiful women.”
We laughed.
“Why don’t you like spy movies?”
“If they had a smell, no one would go see them.” And, as if that were nothing: “Tomorrow, Saturday, at four o’clock, come meet me at number 86 Calle Libertad. It’s an aikido academy. Go in and ask for Luis José Calvo. OK? We’re going to take some pictures of you.”
“I never knew you were a samurai,” I laughed. “How long have you done aikido?”
“About eleven years.”
“And? Are you any good?”
“That’s the problem: no.”
“Black belt?”
“No; I haven’t been able to pass. But Cristóbal will be a sixth dan before he’s out of school. I promise you that.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
And there I was. AKIKAI–CHILE AIKIDO CULTURAL CENTER. The sign was small. The house, big, old, and run-down. I rang the bell, the door opened, and I went in through a dark hallway. At the end, a refrigerator with drinks, and beyond that, a spacious light well. I was greeted by a fat woman with round arms and her hair pulled back in a bun, who must have been over seventy years old. She was behind a big table, and she put down her knitting to come and talk to me. I explained I was looking for Luis José Calvo. She told me to go through the gallery, turn left, and go up the stairs. Señor Calvo was watching a competition that his son was in, she explained.
La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 26