The Neruda Case (5 page)

“That’s why you came to see me in the library the other Sunday, at the party, right?”

“
École!
Exactly! It was premeditated and calculated.”

Cayetano smiled uncomfortably, his hands sweaty, while the poet kept his feet on the white leather footstool, sheathed in woolen socks. It would be difficult to help him, Cayetano thought, but if he didn’t at least try, he’d let the poet down, and the man would never speak to him again. It wasn’t good to lose a friendship—however nascent it might be—with a poet of such importance. In some ways, the poet, with his melancholy eyes and long sideburns, reminded Cayetano of his own father, a trumpet player in a tropical orchestra, a friend of bohemians who was affectionate with his family, who had died in the fifties after a concert on a snowy night in the Bronx, where he’d played for years with Xavier Cugat and even the one and only Beny Moré, the Barbarian of Rhythm, the one who sang “Today as Yesterday” and danced as if he’d been nursed with conga and bolero instead of milk. After his father’s violent death one night on Canal Street, it had become financially impossible for Cayetano’s mother to return to the island of Cuba, and she had to make ends meet as a seamstress in Union City.

“What’s the Cuban’s name, Don Pablo?”

“If you want to get into the details, you should promise me first that you’ll do the work in utmost secrecy.”

“You can trust me, Don Pablo. I’ll be …I’ll be your own private Maigret.”

“That’s the ticket, young man,” the poet replied with enthusiasm. He turned toward the bar, with its pink walls and bronze bell, and asked, “How about a whiskey on the rocks? I mean a good one, at least eighteen years old. You should know that I’m the best bartender in Chile. Would you prefer a double or a triple?”

He went to the bar without waiting for a reply. Behind the bar, he picked up a glass, threw in a few ice cubes, and poured generously
from a bottle of Chivas Regal. Cayetano thought that this might not be the best way to start his day, since he still had to pick up his canned Chinese pork at the JAP on San Juan de Dios Hill, but he admitted that it wasn’t every day that a Nobel laureate prepared such a distinguished drink for a mere mortal and contracted him as a private investigator.

“I can’t toast with you because of the treatment I’m receiving at Van Buren Hospital,” the poet said, lingering over the whiskey’s scent before handing it over. “Although at night, if I’m in the mood for it, I gulp down a glass or two of Oporto without letting my wife, Matilde, see. She’d raise hell if she caught me, but I know there’s no better medicine than Oporto. A bit of whiskey can’t hurt me, don’t you think?”

With the ice cubes clinking in the glass, Cayetano asked himself how he could ever have been aloof with this man. “As long as you don’t go overboard, Don Pablo, it can’t do you any harm …”

“Don’t worry, young man, at this age I’m no longer seduced by excess.” He scrutinized Cayetano’s face as he drank. Another gull passed the window with its wings extended and its legs tucked in, moving its head from side to side, cawing an alarm. It glided over nearby roofs and returned to the water, as though indicating the way.

Cayetano felt the first sip descend into his core like wildfire. He wasn’t accustomed to drinking in the morning.

“How is it?” asked the poet.

“Superb, Don Pablo,” was all he could say.

“I’ve got the touch. A poet who doesn’t know his drinks or food is no poet.”

Cayetano left the glass on the bar, under a bell that hung on a bronze arm.

“So? What’s the name?”

“Chivas. Chivas Regal. Eighteen years.”

“No, Don Pablo. What’s the name of the Cuban I’m supposed to find?”

“Ángel. Dr. Ángel Bracamonte.” He stroked the bronze bell.

“It doesn’t sound familiar at all,” Cayetano said, looking at the poet. He thought he saw a flinch of disappointment on his face.

But the poet kept on. “I met him in 1940, in Mexico City, when I was consul there. He was an oncologist. He studied the medicinal properties of some plants that the natives of Chiapas used to treat cancer. Bracamonte should be about my age, or maybe older. I lost track of him in 1943, after returning to Chile with Delia del Carril, my wife at the time. He might still live in Mexico.”

So the rumors were true: The poet had cancer. At last he could see how the puzzle pieces fit together. Don Pablo, suffering from cancer, was sending him to find the Cuban oncologist for a cure, Cayetano thought as he polished off the whiskey to embolden himself. The disease explained the poet’s exhaustion, his ragged breath, his protuberant ears, and ashen face. Perhaps, Cayetano imagined, he’d never return to his post as ambassador in Paris, and would die in his homeland, in Allende’s revolutionary nation. He looked out the window in the direction of his own neighborhood, Marina Mercante; his house rose in full view on a hill riddled with yellow walls beneath a washed-out winter sky.

“Pardon me, Don Pablo, but don’t you think an ad in the
Excelsior
would be enough to get Bracamonte on the phone the next day? You shouldn’t gamble with your health.”

“Who said this was a health issue?” Don Pablo asked, failing to mask the tension on his face.

“Well, since the man’s a doctor …” It occurred to him that the poet might want to save face by hiding the motive of the search. He was young but not naive. There was no such thing as a naive person in Cuba. Idiots and opportunists, certainly, by the thousands, but not
naive people. It was clear that the poet needed the oncologist and his plants to win the battle against cancer.

“I’m not looking for him because of my health. He’s probably in Mexico. I need you to find him and inform me, but listen closely now,” he said gravely, pointing at Cayetano with his index finger, “you can’t mention a single word of this to anyone. Not to anyone! Not even to the man himself! When you find out where he is, you should tell only me. Then I’ll tell you how to proceed. Understand?”

“Absolutely.”

“You should know that it’s not easy to trick a poet. Much less an ill poet.”

“So should I begin my investigation at the Mexican embassy, Don Pablo?”

“Why go snooping around embassies like some librarian, Cayetano! What you should do is board a plane for Mexico City and start your investigation there. I need you to find Dr. Ángel Bracamonte as soon as possible!”

5

H
e couldn’t fly to Mexico immediately, because there were no available seats. He decided to kill time by leafing through Simenon’s novels, which gripped him immediately, with characters who wandered the alleys, bistros, and markets of Paris. He also looked around for people who could tell him a little about the poet, something that went beyond what everybody knew about him, his travels and his loves. If he knew the man better, he’d feel more comfortable, as Neruda had begun to seem like a pretty mysterious guy, concealing facets of his life the way the thick spring fog hid some of Valparaíso’s heights. He was cautious about investigating his client’s life. Nobody could begin to suspect that he was on assignment. The flame of distrust that burned in his chest made him feel contemptible, but he needed to know the artist through others, using the same method employed by the diligent Maigret, who spied without qualms, but in great secrecy, even on his most trustworthy informants and closest colleagues.

Two days later, while eating a remarkable seafood dish at Los Porteños in the Cardonal Market near the port, he received an encouraging tip from Pete Castillo, who happened to come into the restaurant for some clams in parsley sauce. A fisherman had just brought
those “poor man’s oysters” in a wicker basket. Their elongated shells gleamed like sand on the beach on a clear morning. Pete was a labor union leader who lived in a wooden stilt house in a ravine of Monjas Hill, near Cayetano’s home. He had quit the university in his third year, after the triumph of Salvador Allende, to devote himself completely to local political activism, but he still devoured Latin American novels and was a great admirer of Julio Cortázar, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Ernesto Sábato, as well as Jorge Luis Borges, whom he considered a despicable reactionary who just happened to be graced with a magnificent pen.

“Neruda isn’t among my saints,” Pete said in a deep voice as he squeezed lemon with his coarse, dark hands, its juice sprinkling over an open clam, its pink tongue shrinking into the shell in pain. “His cantos to Stalin in
The Grapes and the Wind
and his rejection of the armed approach to building socialism in Chile make him suspect. That poet has gotten too bourgeois.”

“Stop calling the kettle black and tell me, who can give me more information about him? I mean, about his personal life.”

Pete thought for a moment. “Perhaps Commander Camilo Prendes could help you.” He sucked the clam’s tongue into his mouth, leaving the smooth shell impeccably clean, then washed the delicacy down with a gulp of house white wine. “The commander oversees a brigade of the most radical students from the School of Architecture at the University of Chile, and if memory serves, he has a cousin who’s an expert in poetry, an encyclopedia on two marvelous legs, they say. She should know something about Neruda, and anyway it’s never a waste of time to meet a woman like that.”

“So where can I find this guy?”

“At the Hucke cookie factory.”

“His job is to make cookies for afternoon tea? In times like these?” Cayetano fished a chunk of sea bass out of his soup. It was as
white and smooth as the cheeks of princesses in stories by the Brothers Grimm.

“Don’t make fun of the commander, Cayetano. Prendes means business. Hucke is in the hands of workers who are fighting for its expropriation, and he’s leading the charge. He’s succeeded in expropriating several factories and some country estates under one hundred twenty acres in size, despite the opposition of the government. Prendes participated in the Paris uprisings of ’sixty-eight, where he met Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and he also studied in Havana. He’s a real threat to the reformists who infest the presidential palace, La Moneda. He’s a little bourgeois, too, but he knows his stuff.”

Cayetano headed over to Hucke that same night. With its illuminated windows and cacophonous machinery, the factory resembled an ocean liner navigating a dense, calm sea, or so it seemed to Cayetano as he approached it through the misty industrial zone. Flags of the Socialist Party hung from the walls, of MAPU and MIR, parties that described themselves as true revolutionaries and dismissed Allende as a mere reformer, as well as canvas signs demanding the expansion of the state’s economic power and an end to capitalism. Despite the takeover, the factory continued to operate, although, according to Pete, the shortage of supplies was beginning to take its toll. Cayetano approached the large front door, where a few guards wearing helmets and armed with nightsticks smoked in silence.

“I’m here on behalf of Comrade Pete Castillo,” he said, showing them the safe-conduct note Pete had scribbled on a paper napkin at the Los Porteños table. “I need to speak with Camilo Prendes.”

One of the guards examined the document, jotted Cayetano’s information down in a notebook, and after consulting with a superior by phone, allowed him to enter. He felt like something of an orphan as he crossed the empty patio of the factory and approached the office, where another guard handed him a long, flexible bamboo cane.

“Join the group over at the northern access door. Or do you prefer a nunchuck?”

“I’ve never held one.”

“In that case, keep the cane. Carry it like a spear.” He cast him an unfriendly glance. “And go to the left. They’ll give you more instructions at the end of the hall.”

At the end of the hall he encountered a few men with helmets and nunchucks, seated next to a large metal door. They told him that if he saw any suspicious movements, he should knock on the door with a hammer that lay on the floor.

“In case of emergency, everybody knows what to do. Don’t worry about finding Commander Prendes. He visits all the sentry posts every night, and speaks with all the comrades. Good luck.”

They left, taking their makeshift weapons with them, and Cayetano sat down on a stack of boxes and lit a Lucky Strike. Its aroma gave him solace in the midst of this uncertain night. He was lucky to have gotten these cigarettes from Sergio Puratic, a trader in the port neighborhood, since there weren’t any left publicly and a carton cost an arm and a leg on the black market. He inhaled the smoke slowly, letting it warm his body, and he thought about the poet, the curious mission he’d been charged with, and the stories of Inspector Maigret. His life was taking on a surreal slant, yoked to a strange secret that separated him from others. Could he possibly be dreaming? Could this be a dream in which he was waiting, cane in hand, for a revolutionary in a country threatened by the phantom of civil war? Could he be dreaming that he lived in Valparaíso, while actually sleeping a thousand miles from there, in his old house in Hialeah, near Miami, or perhaps even in Havana itself? His fingers brushed against the Simenon volume he carried in his jacket. He had read a few of the novels in the last few days, not because he thought they could teach him how to be a detective, but because Simenon knew how to tell an entertaining story, and Inspector Maigret struck him as both honest
and convincing. The book, with its transparent plastic cover folded neatly at the edges, was proof that he’d spoken with Neruda, and wasn’t dreaming after all.