La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  Iris, haggard, sat down on the bed without looking at me. We could hear the murmur of people talking. The bullets had stopped suddenly. We kept quiet. How good, how blessed that silence was.

  “You know?” Iris says to me, suddenly calm. “There were two of them, two pit bulls. How could they not give us that information?”

  “They had them in the house next door,” I tell her. “That’s what I heard Indio say. They had a backup team there.”

  “Those dogs attack without warning, silently. They were inches away from Macha.” She looked at me with cold eyes and a vague, feline smile: “I took them down at the last second.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  Voices. I peeked over the banister of the second-floor hallway. They were inside the house. Iris stayed in the room with the old woman. Downstairs in the living room was a man in a wheelchair. A gentleman with disheveled white hair and a distinguished nose who was wearing pajamas. His hands were cuffed behind him. In front of him, Macha, his CZ drawn and his head full of dirt and half white from fallen plaster, asking where was Commander Joel, was he in Chile or not, show him a current photograph . . . Macha wasn’t shouting. The other man was shaking his head no.

  In a piece of the gold-framed mirror that was inexplicably still hanging on the wall I could see, as if it were an insect squashed on the windshield of a car, what was left of one of the pit bulls. And I saw a piece of human head next to the leg of the sofa I had hidden behind. There was no blood in its hair. The rest was a vomit of body. Suddenly I understood that that poor white-haired gentleman handcuffed and in a wheelchair was Bone. None other. But was it really him? His pajama shirt was unbuttoned and open, and I could see the tangle of white hair on his chest. His stomach was swelling up. A dark pool was accumulating and spreading out under the wheel-chair.

  “You’re going to die,” Macha was telling him. “You’re bleeding out. You’re a doctor, so you know.” He brought his hand to his waist, above his hip. “I can still take you to the hospital. Talk. Who is Commander Joel? Who? Who gives you your orders? Who do you give them to?”

  “Let’s go, Macha,” said Great Dane, rushing over to push the wheelchair. “This is over.”

  His blond hair was turning red in the back from blood. He must have gotten cut on his head, I guess. As it flowed out it stained the back of his dusty jean jacket.

  “Let’s get him out of here now. They could come back for him. Let’s not waste time!”

  Macha didn’t let go of the chair. The man went on shaking his head no.

  “Macha!” A spot of dirt or a bruise, I wasn’t sure which, prolonged Macha’s eye downward over his cheek. “We have to stop this cock-sucker’s bleeding and turn him over to Gato! He’ll give up everything then. His belly is swelling up from the blood, man. Let’s go!”

  The sound of a siren coming closer knifed through the night. It must have been less than a couple blocks away. I looked around. The others had come downstairs. All except Iris, who was guarding the gagged and bound mother. I heard the punch. Bone’s face lurched. A thread of blood ran down from his nose to his lips. His head lolled backward, but he straightened it again. The man passed his tongue over his lips. He was pallid. He was in bad shape.

  “Feeling pretty thirsty, huh?” Macha said to him, changing his tone. “That’s because you’re losing blood, man. Nothing matters now. Talk, and we’ll save you. Does Commander Joel exist? He doesn’t exist, fuck, he died in ’73, drowned in the Pillanleufú River, and you lied and said he survived . . . Answer me, shit! Or you’d rather we bring you in to Central? We’ll save your life. It was all theater, all a big set-up of yours, wasn’t it? A cripple like you could never be the leader, isn’t that right? And so . . . Tell me! Or they’ll take care of you in Analysis and you’ll end up singing just like they all do. You want that humiliation? You’ll give us every last fucker left in the organization. You think we’ll let you die here? No way. We’re not that stupid . . . You’re fucked. We got you alive. Talk. Better to do it here. In there, you know how it is . . .”

  “You got me alive and I’m dying, fuck . . .” Bone said. “But I got a bullet in you, Macha. You’re bleeding, too, you son of a bitch.”

  “OK. Let’s get him out of here, Macha,” Great Dane repeated. “This guy’s gonna go before we hand him over to Gato, he’s bleeding like a motherfucker.”

  Macha let go of the chair handle and he looked at his hand with its bloody Rolex. He lowered it to his side and then looked at it again. We heard the insistent siren of the ambulance. It was parked right there, apparently. Outside, voices.

  “See? You’re wounded, Macha. But it’s not a serious wound, I’m afraid. I feel sorry for you, man. Nothing will be left of your brave deeds. They’ll all be erased. You’ll end up alone and you’ll die alone. Your own bosses will toss you out on your ass. The moment will come when they’ll wipe their asses with you, man, they’ll pin everything on you for being a damn foolish asshole, you’ll be up to your ears in shit for the rest of your life! That moment will come.” The bag of his stomach continued to swell. “You’ll understand then that you spent your life in the service of a cause that wasn’t worth it and that didn’t need you. It’ll be the last mission they give you: act as the toilet where your big bosses can dump their shit and piss and stay clean themselves. Cristóbal, your son, will find out some day what you are. He’ll distance himself from you. He’ll go through life branded by the shame of being your son . . .”

  Another blow convulsed his head. He shook it and put out his tongue to lick the blood from his lips.

  “There are things, Macha, that you’ll never be able to understand: defeats that are worth more . . . Sacrifice is, sometimes, more human and more beautiful than triumph.”

  I was sure: it was him. I recognized his voice. It was the voice of Commander Iñaqui, who had talked to us about the color red: krasnyi. Everything changed for me in that instant. It was his suggestive voice, intimate and serene. It was his voice that brought me back, the way an aroma can do after years have passed, to my place in that community of dreamers who sang along to a couple of guitars next to a bonfire in the Nahuelbuta Mountains. It seemed as if I could hear the crackling of that red fire: krasnyi.

  He wanted to add something else, but a vomit of black blood stopped him. His belly was still swelling up like a pregnant woman’s.

  “Macha!” shouted Great Dane, beside himself . . .

  “MIR, the Front, they all have real leaders,” Macha was saying to him, calm now and ignoring the shout. “But in Red Ax the leader didn’t exist, right, Bone? Commander Joel was you. Right?”

  “You win, Macha Carrasco, but without honor. A man like you . . . ,” he spit a little more blood. And, facing him: “Take your victory, you fucking murderer, take it back to your putrid den. The glory stays here, with us.”

  Macha stood there looking at him, unmoved.

  “Pretty words, Bone, but . . . only words.”

  Reflections of the ambulance siren colored the old living room with red beams. Macha gave a signal and Indio Galdámez came up behind him. I saw the medical technicians coming over with a cot and saline bags. They didn’t have much time. I saw Great Dane’s enormous, denim-sheathed back, dirty and bloodied, covering Macha. Suddenly, Bone’s balding head bounced forward violently, emptied over the wall like a smashed cup. I moved away immediately from the railing, hiding my weapon. Although I managed to catch sight of the suctioning black of Macha’s eyes. It seemed like he would swallow my eyes up.

  “Who fired?” shouted Indio Galdámez. “Who was it?” And the rage suffocated his curses.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  I escaped through the hole of the broken skylight, and after clambering and slipping over the roofs, I managed to climb down to Calle Maturana. I arrived before dawn at the house of the Swedish cultural attaché, the one who used to invite Clementina and me for lunch. Hours later, in the consul’s car, we went into the Swedish embassy. Anita was with me, wearing her school uniform.

/>   And I see myself now in the plane telling her about Sweden, land of the Vikings in search of amber, the “tears of sea-birds,” I tell her. I told her it was the only precious stone of organic matter, and it came from the fossilized resin of ancient conifers that existed forty million years ago, and had gone extinct over ten million years ago, when the ocean rose and swallowed those forests up. “There are insects from that time, ones that are extinct now,” I tell her, “that were preserved in a piece of amber. They’re still there.”

  “Alive?” she asks me, her eyes very wide.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  When the situation finally changed, when the damned dictatorship finally came to an end and the country recovered democracy, a couple of lawyers showed up unannounced at my apartment in Stockholm. They were Chilean. I let them in, resigned. Just like that time when a white Mazda pulled up and I recognized Ronco’s voice, I sat down with them obedient as a worn-out ox. They knew my story. I was a victim, they insisted, and I needed to give my complete testimony. They convinced me. Roberto—I was still with him then—really encouraged me to do it. He thought it was my duty, he thought it would do me good.

  I traveled incognito to Chile, with bodyguards and a new fake identity, and I testified for hours and hours in front of a judge. I testified for several days. I denounced them. I told what I saw, what they did to me, something, the minimum, about what I did myself. They brought me face to face with some of the thugs, the ones related to that particular judge’s cases. I gave blow-by-blow accounts in those trials. I omitted what they didn’t ask about, I omitted everything related to other crimes, I omitted my own participation in those events. When they brought in a tall man, very bald, with the little hair he had completely white over his ears and the nape of his neck, thin but with a paunch by now, deep wrinkles on his face, and I recognized Flaco Artaza’s smile, I felt pity. He entered in handcuffs. Only then did I find out his real name.

  He had spent a long time as a defendant and a prisoner. He greeted me with dignity and a trace of affection. He was upright. He was quiet while I answered the judge’s questions. He shrank into himself little by little. But he never lost his calm. He bore it all nobly. “I never thought you would want to destroy my life,” he told me on his way out. He wasn’t angry but rather sad and disappointed, it seemed to me. “Why me? Why like this?” he said. When he was about to disappear, surrounded by guards, he turned his head and threw me one last, solitary look.

  I wavered: Shouldn’t I tell them everything and turn myself over to Justice once and for all? There were other cases in which they could be looking for me, though they may not know it exactly, or in which I could provide information. Wasn’t it only fair that I should also pay in jail for what I did, though it would mean being away from Anita, away from the Baltic Sea, from my freedom?

  At that moment, someone spoke to me and I gave a terrified jump. A scrawny old man had sat down next to me, his matted hair somewhere between white and red, long ears. He was wearing a dark brown suit, dandruff on his narrow little shoulders, a yellow shirt, and a tie with a gold sheen.

  “I’m Rat,” he told me, “Rat Osorio. You remember me?”

  And of course I remembered and would always remember.

  “I knew you at Central, remember?”

  And when he saw my frightened, surprised face:

  “I’m Inspector Pedro Ortiz, of Investigative Police.”

  He slid a card between my fingers. I was overcome with a shame I had never felt before. Shame of having been subjected by this rat, this thug, shame that his insults had been able to wound me. Disgrace. That’s what it was. Not shame: disgrace. I barely contained the feeling.

  “I was always a detective with Investigations; during that ‘black’ time I was only at Central in commissioned service. I was assigned there, that’s all. Now I’m in charge of several criminal cases in which ex-agents of Central are directly implicated, get it? My duty is for justice to be carried out.”

  Quick lights flashed across Rat’s restless, astute eyes. There was a slight vibration in his nostrils. Was he smelling me? Again on the side of the victors, a snitch just like me, I was thinking: this wretch, my double, my brother, I was thinking.

  I wonder why I am there, why I have informed on Flaco and the others I used to know. Am I hoping for forgiveness? And who could forgive me? He goes on watching me, waiting, he wants to decipher any sign I give. I lower my gaze.

  And I’m telling myself again that there’s no justification for what I did. Can one ask forgiveness, then, for the unjustifiable? And if so, on what grounds? It would be asking for a gift. Because that’s what forgiveness is: a gift. Why should that gift be asked for and not others, which are simply received? And if I did ask for it, what would happen if it wasn’t granted?

  “Iris, you remember Iris? She killed herself.” He put two fingers in his mouth to simulate a gun. “With her own CZ, it was. But they can’t fool me that easy, no way . . . I wasn’t born yesterday, y’know?” He purses his lips in a disdainful gesture. “If you ask me . . . she got smoked. That chick knew too much, wouldn’t you say?”

  “And what about Macha, and Gato?” I asked him.

  “The Law is looking for Macha and its arm, as they say, is loooong. Big things, ugly ones. Both his alibis fell, you know? Jacinto Hermosilla Ruiz is Macha Carrasco’s real name.” He tells me this proudly. “As for Lisandro Pérez Olmedo, he’s named in old files for thirty-four cases: some nasty things, y’know? For example, the death of a young man who fell, according to Macha’s deposition, because he disobeyed the order to stop and he covered the Spartan’s flight with an AKM. Macha shot him down—I mean, Lisandro Pérez Olmedo did—from the roof next door, according to his testimony later that night. And they haven’t found Macha. He left the country. Illegally, of course. But they’ll nab that fucker . . . There are three men, I’m telling you, three experienced agents who used to be in Central and who are looking for him now. We don’t know their real identities. We don’t know if they answer to disconnected groups of ex-agents trying to protect themselves from the law or if Military Intelligence sent them and is secretly giving them help. It’s possible. They deny it, of course. But Military Intelligence must be trying to get rid of evidence and witnesses of what they did at Central. To save the ones at the top, you get me? Those three ex-agents managed to cross the border in spite of the precautions we took, and they left with the order: shoot Macha’s mug full of holes before Investigations gets their hands on him, before we haul him in here in cuffs and get him singing, shit. Macha’s fucked: by next spring he’s either pushing up daisies or behind bars . . .”

  “And Gato?”

  A shine in his small eyes.

  “No one talks about him. He turned, was what I heard.” And now in a whisper and looking at me with narrowed eyes, he makes a gesture indicating money: “He’s protected. He’s collaborating. He’d been doing it for a long time, selling information. He talked about you and gave them your information.”

  On that trip I saw my parents for the last time, in their separate places, both of them sick. My mother received me very calmly, with a new calm that was perhaps the product of her medicines. She was on saline. She asked about Anita, whom she saw rarely, if ever. About me, almost nothing. She didn’t shed a tear when I said goodbye, but she squeezed me tightly. My father, on the other hand, wept from the moment he saw me set foot in his room. The chemotherapy had taken all his hair and his skin was a greenish white. In his arms, the jelly of his old tennis player’s muscles. I wanted to go to El Quisco. He wanted us to go together. His little summerhouse was still there, waiting for me. So was the sea. He repeated that several times. In the end I didn’t go.

  You need to go to the bathroom? Of course! Look, it’s easy: end of the hall to the left. You can’t miss it. Why are you looking at your notebook? You don’t trust me? Take it with you then; here, take it with you if you want. No?

  SIXTY-SIX

  Did you find the bathroom? See? You
can’t miss it . . . and your notebook is still there, see?

  And Anita? She’s good, she has a boyfriend, a Danish guy she met in Chile when she was backpacking in Torres del Paine. For a while they lived in San Francisco, and then they went to Santiago. He works at Santander Bank and she works at EuroAmerica Insurance . . . They seem happy. They work a lot, too much if you ask me. To Anita it’s only natural that I’m dying; I’m old, and old people die. But it’s me who is dying, fucking shit. That’s what changes everything for me. To me, my death is not natural.

  And now you’ve come all the way from Chile to open and shut me, right, mon chéri? A crab has taken over my stomach. It’s growing like a fetus. Now nothing works right in my organism. I’ll give birth to my own death. I was never a crier. Since I was a little girl I hated that old idea that “real men don’t cry,” which means: women do. Well, not me. But I do now. The memories return: Anita has come back from Chile and my hand caresses the closed door of her room while she sleeps. Did I tell you how after the equinox Roberto and I would start going to the ocean? We’d lay back naked on those rocks that had been polished to perfection by primeval ice and that hold the warmth of the sun. We jumped into the water, and no one existed besides us.

  The Baltic sunsets through my window are very long, very gradual. As if the light wanted to hold on just a little longer. For some time now, my eyes will tear up on occasion, and a single tear falls. I brush it away so it doesn’t run down my face. I take the little polished silver mirror that my grandmother left me out of my purse and I use a tissue to dry my face. I put on a little eye shadow, go over my eyelashes with mascara. I look out at the Baltic, some ship is coming in or going out, and that’s it. It’s just a moment. I wouldn’t want the other women in the home to notice. Though I’ll tell you, I’ve see a lot of them quietly crying, who knows why.