The Neruda Case (40 page)

“That sounds nice, but you’re not answering my question.”

“A good listener requires few words.”

“What work are you doing here in socialist Chile?” he pressed. “Construction is at a standstill. Nobody’s building so much as a shack, or making investments. How do you make your living here?”

They watched a caravan of jeeps and trucks full of marine troops pass by. They were headed in the opposite direction: away from Valparaíso, toward the capital. Who was ruling the country now? Cayetano wondered. Was it really Allende, with his Chilean flag raised high over La Moneda, or was power already in someone else’s hands?

“Luckily I have some means available to me,” she said. “I don’t need to work. Does that satisfy you?”

“Your daughter lives in East Berlin under a surname different from any of yours. In Bolivia, you had connections with a military officer involved in Che’s assassination. I don’t think you would have been able to be Colonel Sacher’s friend if he had known your daughter lived in an East German neighborhood reserved for the political elite.”

She kept driving in silence, to Curacaví, where she pulled up in front of an empty restaurant. The night was a cold cup of coffee.

“Listen, Cayetano. There’s nothing left to do here,” she said as she turned off the engine. “The government exists only on paper. The military holds all the power. It’s just a matter of time before the coup.”

“How do you know? And why don’t you do something to stop it if you’re so sure?”

“Don’t you understand that history has its own logic, and nobody can violate it without getting burned? What’s been taking place here for the past three years should never have happened. In today’s global situation, this socialist experiment of Allende’s, with its red wine and empanada flavor, can’t prosper. Who will support Chile? Moscow is far away, Cuba’s too poor, Nixon has crossed over and gone on the offensive. I know things from the inside. Understand? Also, for you, as a Cuban, things are only going to get worse. Listen to me. You have to leave Chile.”

“I’m struck by your certainty. Where does it come from? And who told you I was looking for you? Was it the Bolivian military, or the Chilean? Who?”

They got out of the car and entered the restaurant’s pale atmosphere. A fire burned in the corner, and from a radio, the voice of Víctor Jara sang “Plegaria a un Labrador.” They sat down at a table and ordered coffee.

“Be happy with what I’m able to tell you, Cayetano,” she warned. The flames from the fireplace glimmered on her cheeks. “It should be enough to know there’s nobody who can attempt to forge a peaceful road to socialism.”

“Let’s not be apocalyptic. Instead, why don’t you tell me whether Don Pablo’s suspicions are well founded.”

Beatriz paused as the waiter poured hot water over the powdered coffee in their cups, and walked away. Then, with a light smile and uncertain tone, she said, “Knowing that won’t change history. What can Pablo get out of learning the truth after all this time? A peaceful death? So how would that affect Tina?” She fingered her spoon for a
few moments. “It would turn her life upside down. For what? And what would it change for me? What would be different?”

She fell into a deep silence, and nothing he did could pull her out of it. They finished their coffee, left the restaurant, and started driving again. The hot drink had comforted Cayetano and brought him back to earth. Being in the car with Beatriz immersed him in a vague, surreal realm that flowed slowly before his eyes and felt like a dream or, more precisely, like a nightmare. When they entered Valparaíso through Santos Ossa, she took Colón, heading south, driving along Francia Avenue until, a few minutes later, they were on Alemania Avenue, winding through shadows.

“Pablo’s house is here, right?” She stopped the car in front of the Mauri Theater. Alí Babá was closed, and Collado Way stretched out desolately, its yellow flagstones lit gently under a single streetlamp. Beneath the theater marquee, a dog was scratching his fleas.

“When he comes to Valparaíso, he stays at La Sebastiana,” Cayetano said. “Today he’s in Isla Negra, due to his health …”

“Let’s walk.”

They got out and went up Collado Way; before them, the bay city unfolded like an immense accordion of lights. In the distance, the ships of the Chilean navy glided out to meet the United States Marines. It was the month of Unitas, an annual joint naval operation. Cayetano and Beatriz gazed at Valparaíso in silence. At their backs, behind the garden, Neruda’s house rose up, ghostly and robust.

“There’s one more thing I don’t understand,” Cayetano said after a while.

“What’s bothering you now, detective?” She scrutinized him harshly, though without aggression.

“How did you, the naive wife of Dr. Bracamonte, become …well …what you seem to be?”

The woman sat down on the steps that descended into lower Valparaíso, let out a sigh of what seemed like annoyance, and said,
“As it turns out, Pablo’s political causes won me over. I was very young. I needed to believe in something that transcended me, in a utopia.”

“And he gave you that.”

“In a way, you could say he created me.”

“After everything that …well, he did?”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said, and lowered her gaze with a smile. “But to a certain extent, he created me because he shared his political beliefs with me when I was young and inexperienced, and above all because his poems encouraged me in times of fear, uncertainty, exhaustion, and despair. Also, in a way, we’re all born from our own loves. The fulfilled ones, and the ones that fail.”

Cayetano stroked his mustache, absorbed. So she, like himself, was simply a character born and molded out of the poet’s fantasies, he thought, his gaze still on that splendid, mysterious woman, who stared out at the bay as though it held a hidden message in its waters. And so the poet created not just verses, but also flesh-and-blood people, even though he erroneously believed that he could be a father only to himself and his poems. Perhaps this woman, and he himself, and the bay and everything happening in this divided, hate-filled country as well as his investigations in Mexico City, Havana, East Berlin, and La Paz were nothing more than verses in Neruda’s sweeping final poem, he thought with a chill.

After a while, Beatriz stood up. “I have to go back to Santiago.”

They returned to Alemania Avenue. Cayetano told her he preferred to walk home. Beatriz got into her Opel.

“You still haven’t told me who you work for,” Cayetano insisted, smoothing his mustache again, leaning toward the driver’s side window.

“I do it for a good cause, Cayetano,” she answered solemnly. “I believe in something, I’m committed to it, and that’s what I fight for. I’ve always fought for the same cause. My work is like my daughter’s
work: I act, I put on disguises, I pretend to be something I’m not. I’m not what I seem to be, Cayetano, I’m always something else. Have I made myself clear? I believe that now you should understand my migrations, my names, and why I navigate contradictory worlds.”

“So, you’re a …?”

“I can’t tell you what I am, because I’m always something else. I can only tell you that I’m not what I seem. Is that enough?”

“Who told you I was looking for you? Adelman, the lawyer?” He recalled Neruda’s words about life being a parade of disguises.

Beatriz placed her hands on the steering wheel and smiled. Then she answered, in a low voice, “A man in a white raincoat told me.” She looked at him conspiratorially. “When you talk to Pablo, tell him I’m sorry, but we can’t see each other now. Tell him that my daughter was named Tina after a woman he and I both admired greatly, a beautiful Italian photographer.”

“Tina Modotti?”

“That’s right, the companion of Julio Antonio Mella.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“And give him this.” She handed him a small black-and-white photograph. “That’s Tina in front of the Berliner Ensemble, the first day she rehearsed on that stage.”

He took it with deep emotion. “He’ll thank you for it.”

“And one more thing. Something even more important,” she added as she started the car.

“I’m all ears.”

“Please tell him that Tina’s middle name is Trinidad.”

“Trinidad?”

“Yes, like his beloved grandmother. That should give him some peace.”

The Opel slowly pulled away, and Cayetano walked down the middle of the avenue, photo in hand, free of luggage, alone in the Valparaíso night, knowing that nobody awaited him at home and that
he was, at last, his own man. He felt overcome by excitement and sheer joy. The fact that Tina Feuerbach bore Neruda’s grandmother’s name could mean only one thing, he thought with a shudder that clouded his vision for a moment. He hurried down the pavement and, for an instant, as his eyes grazed the Pacific, he had the brief impression that the fleet of warships was returning at full speed to Valparaíso, lights off, in the middle of the night.

60

T
he first thing he did the next morning was turn on the radio on his nightstand for the news. The night before, he’d failed to get in touch with the poet, as his phone went unanswered, and it was too late at night for him to show up in person without raising Matilde’s suspicions. Radio Magallanes announced that it was raining torrentially throughout the central zone and on Easter Island. How anomalous, that it should rain in September. He opened his eyes, and as he looked out the window he caught the high, limpid sky of the Pacific coast as it usually appeared only in early spring, when the city’s façades shone in the clear air as though someone had just polished them with Brasso. He got up, disconcerted. Something wasn’t right about what the speaker on the left-wing station kept saying with such insistence.

The phone rang. He answered. It was Laura Aréstegui, the Ph.D. student, in Playa Ancha.

“Have you seen what’s happening?”

“I just woke up. What’s going on?”

“There’s been a coup—”

“What are you saying?”

“The armed forces rebelled,” she exclaimed in agitation. “A military junta has formed in the capital.”

Now he understood why, the night before, the squadron had returned with its lights off instead of heading out to meet the U.S. fleet. He looked out between the blinds. Chilean warships were stationed throughout the bay. They looked like toys. He was about to tell Laura that he’d witnessed their secret return, but she wasn’t on the line anymore.

He tried her number several times, with no luck. Then he waited, in case she was trying to get through to him. In vain. He tried the number Beatriz had given him in case of emergency, but his effort was fruitless. The telephone system seemed to have collapsed. He tried to contact Pete Castillo, and the same thing happened. Strangely, a woman answered his call to La Sebastiana. He asked for the poet. She told him what he’d already suspected: he wasn’t there.

“Where can I find him? This is urgent.”

“I have no idea.”

“I’m Cayetano Brulé, a friend of Don Pablo’s. I need to talk to him.”

“Don Pablo isn’t here, or in Santiago.”

“Perhaps he’s in Isla Negra?”

“Probably.”

As he was dialing the number for Isla Negra, his phone went dead again. He nervously turned on the radio in the kitchen. Radio Magallanes was saying that the members of the military junta—Generals Pinochet, Merino, Leigh, and Mendoza—had threatened President Allende and ordered him to turn over power, but that he had dug in his heels at the Palacio de la Moneda and refused to comply.

Cayetano dressed hastily, thinking about what balls the president had. Any other Latin American president would have run off to the airport long before to save his own neck and his bank accounts full of U.S. dollars. What now? he thought, gripped with panic. His wife was a contact for the Unidad Popular Party, in case of emergencies
like this one. But now, Ángela Undurraga Cox was probably crawling like an alligator through the swamps of Punto Cero, under the blistering Caribbean sun, rehearsing for a war she would never fight. When they saw each other again, if they ever did, she would say she’d been right to urge the people to take up arms and prepare to fight against sedition. Revolutions without weapons? Only in fairy tales, she’d scoff. He heard the rattle of helicopter blades flying over the city, which brought to mind the day the president had said good-bye to the poet at La Sebastiana. Their embrace. A thought paralyzed him, like a stab wound: that Neruda could fall into the military’s hands. They wouldn’t let him write or go to his radiology sessions; they’d burn his manuscripts; the poet would die of sadness. Somehow he had to get to Isla Negra before the military did, so he could tell Neruda the news about Tina. Perhaps that would help him better survive the end of the popular government, and whatever else he would come to face.