All Men Are Liars (13 page)

For years, as one government was succeeded by the next, I served as Charon for these high-ranking gentlemen, carrying, for a modest commission, sums that were invisible to the public eye, from a safe in La Plata or Córdoba to the near-anonymous coffers of certain European banks. I was efficient, punctual, modest, and reliable. Superstitious, too: my bee talisman was always in my pocket, just in case. I never made a mistake: I never arrived late, I never opened my mouth, I never forgot anything. I carried out my duties with the same rigor I applied to writing. There are no real synonyms in business or literature. Nothing is “as if.”

At the start of the new decade, a new, unprecedented source began to swell the contents of my saddlebags, or rather the saddlebags in my care. The “subversives” (as they were known to my clients) were now using kidnapping and holding up banks as a way to procure funds; with increasing regularity, these funds ended up in the gloved hands of a colonel, an admiral, or a general. My job was to channel the funds. I did so with my—by now proverbial—diligence. Only, this time, I decided that greater danger deserved greater recompense. Without wishing to bother the gentlemen with a trivial inquiry, I took what (in my opinion) I was entitled to and, having a knack for the craft of fiction, spun a story to justify the figures. Three or four times, everything worked wonderfully. The fifth time was different. An overscrupulous colonel did a few sums. At the airport, on the way back from Geneva, an immigration officer asked me to accompany him. All night they beat the soul out of me, demanding to know the number of the secret bank account. At dawn I gave it to them. It never occurred to them that there were two accounts. I spent several weeks in that place—I don't want to remember its name—hooded and shackled, naked on the floor as lurid folk music resounded incessantly around the four windowless walls. Before going to sleep, I put paper in my ears to keep the cockroaches out. Those days left me with a fear of bright lights: that is why I always wear dark glasses.

During my abduction (the word
detention
does not do justice to the physical violation I suffered), it crossed my mind that perhaps some literary angel would notice my absence. Nobody did. The list of supposed friends who took my disappearance as proof of my nonexistence is long. It had been years since I had last had links with the embassy, where ruffles had been replaced with beards and the portrait of Batista with one of the heroes of the revolution—with no sign of a slowdown in the consumption of oysters and champagne. My editor (because I had one, Gastón Asín Hajal, a pornographer by vocation and a usurer by practice—I wish him a painful death) gave the order for my books to be pulped on the sly so as to leave no trace of my presence in his catalog.

Treachery has its artists. Polybius, in one of the few surviving pages of a work which has been lost for the most part, says that it is not easy to establish who can properly be considered a traitor. According to him, the name cannot be applied to a man who freely puts himself at the service of certain monarchs or regents in order to do their bidding, nor to him who, in extreme circumstances, incites his fellow citizens to break old alliances or friendships in order to forge new ones. Polybius seems to reserve this opprobrious title for the man who benefits from his own actions: the person who denounces a friend in order to save himself, or who hands over the keys to a city to advance personal ambitions. My traitors (with one exception, but I'll talk about him later) were more subtle. They simply did nothing. Hajal denied knowing me. This flaccid cocaine addict for whom Apelles's motto
nulla dies sine linea
—not a day without a line—could have been justly written, presented himself now as a virtuous prude. He came over all forgetful, claiming that my grotesque figure had been erased from his literary memory and that, in any case, an editor such as he had neither the obligation nor the resources to help every pen pusher who had, at some time, borne his imprimatur.

Theology teaches us that of all sins, those of omission are the most interesting and complex. Having always written in secret and been almost obsessively discreet, I handed to my friends the justification for their own treachery. They were all able to claim that my disappearance was nothing out of the ordinary, but the obvious and predictable result, by now of common knowledge, of my ill-defined presence.

I suspect that there are many of us spinning in the shadows. My books were not published, with the exception of a few anthologies of other people's work, the odd short story, and an ill-fated novel to which Hajal added an obscene title and one or two anatomically exaggerated descriptions. It enraged me to see the windows of bookshops filled, month after month, with disgusting novelties that oscillated between hyperbolic pretension or documentalist fervor. Hajal, to whom I confided some of my feelings, told me with a smile that the name of that fury was envy. He was right, up to a point. Apparently, during a soiree at which Oscar Wilde was present, one of the topics of conversation was literary jealousy. Wilde told the following story. The Devil sent several demons to tempt a very saintly hermit. The demons tried everything, but not even the most delicious food, the most beautiful women, or the greatest riches were capable of distracting the hermit from his prayers. Impatient, the Devil told his followers: “That's not how you do it—watch and learn.” And, approaching the holy man, he whispered in his ear: “Your brother's been made Archbishop of Alexandria.” Immediately the old man's face contorted with a grimace of furious envy.

So you see that envy, that fury (which, as I said before, was foreign to Bevilacqua), I cultivated patiently. I'm convinced that it is a good cordial for the imagination and, at the end of the day, an excellent remedy for taking revenge on life. I think it's not too far-fetched to say that I kept my fury alive with deliberate elegance—if one can speak of elegance in someone with my appearance.

Perhaps it was this fighting fire with fire that gave me, during those terrible days, the patience and the heart necessary to survive and also, paradoxically, the hope that my situation would change. And so it was. Nothing in my circumstances pointed toward this change except for my burning desire, and I am convinced that desire shapes our reality. If something does not happen, it is because we failed to desire it with sufficient force.

One day, I was moved to the building they called the Cesspit. Torture was practiced there, too, of course, but alongside the dungeons where business was carried out, there were cells that were more or less (I hesitate to use the epithet) comfortable. I was put into one of these. Perhaps as a reward for having given them the bank-account number, perhaps because one of those sinners thought he would salve his conscience by awarding me a stint in limbo, or perhaps (more likely), in the topsy-turvy logic of that system, somebody had judged that a given act of contrition deserved a corresponding privilege. Suddenly I could wash myself, use lavatory paper, eat something recognizable, sleep under a blanket, sit at a table without shackles or a hood, protect my eyes once more with dark glasses, receive books to read and paper to write on. Amazingly, they allowed Margarita to visit me. I asked her to bring my “bee,” just in case, although I knew that I would never succumb to using it. Our understanding of paradise can only be defined by our knowledge of hell.

It was for love of Margarita (who gives her name to everything) that I began to write. I wrote every day, feverishly, from first light until the orders came to go out, to eat, to go to bed. Having Bevilacqua by my side accelerated the pace of my writing: I could confidently try out a line on him, or a chapter, and if it sounded as it ought, I set it down on paper. Bevilacqua was my rough draft. My text grew before my eyes. (Feverishly, confidently, as it ought, before my eyes: these words give me away. Every author discovers himself through his adverbs.)

I said that my feelings sharpen my intuition, they allow me to advance through the tunnels of the future, to see what my circumstances will or could be. I intuit, I guess (except that
guess
suggests improvisation) my destiny. Rubén is my canary in these cases. He senses before I do the lack of oxygen. His disgusting stench increases if there is a danger of asphyxiation, warning me to be prepared. And, of course, I make sure that I am.

Rubén was worried. His smell woke me up in the darkness; it had suddenly grown in intensity. Something was going to happen. Margarita tried to calm me down. During the nights on which they allowed her to stay (some libidinous jailer always came along to spy on us, like someone ogling two copulating beasts), she always begged me to be calm, telling me that they had said it would not be long until everything ended, and that they had assured her father that it wouldn't be long before I'd be free. But Rubén persisted. I must be prepared.

I slept as little and wrote as much as possible. By the time I reached the last word, I was exhausted. Three hundred neatly filled pages. I picked up a plain sheet of paper and wrote the title on it, in capital letters. I was careful not to sign it. One of the many paradoxes of that place was that the few visitors were searched as thoroughly on leaving as they were on arrival, and it was strictly forbidden to take away letters or any material written by the detainees. Those being released, however—their number was even smaller—had the right to take out a bag or a suitcase, which was barely opened at the exit. I have seen (nothing in human nature surprises me now) a boy who had been badly tortured go home taking in his bag the small tweezers used by one of his torturers.

The following morning I said to Bevilacqua that if by chance he got out of this place before I did (I never wanted to contemplate the possibility of neither of us getting out), I would like him to take my manuscript with him. Surprised and, I think, touched, he promised me that he would.

Bevilacqua was what we once called—in those days before we lost our innocence—an “honest man.” Did you know that sometime in the 1970s, in Argentina, the word
honest
began to acquire a connotation of “fool,” of “dimwit”? I once heard a businessman use it contemptuously of some poor fellow he had tricked.
What can I say—he's an honest man!
It's strange how, during a dictatorship, words become infected by politics, lose their nobility, and start to lie about themselves. The tongue is a sly little muscle, and goes wherever it likes. The nose, on the other hand, is like a loyal dog.

Rubén had warned me that something was up. When the guards came in to blindfold me, I knew that my faithful sniffer dog was not wrong. Then I heard a clear, deep, and agreeable voice announce, in an expression of condolence it took me a while to understand, that Margarita would not be coming anymore. The voice echoed in my head, as though I had received a blow. In schmaltzy, precise terms, the message was repeated. I understood what it was saying, but what infuriated me almost more than this extraordinary piece of news which threatened to destroy my world was the voice itself, sounding so polite, so cheerful and deliberate.
So this is it,
I told myself,
the impossible has come to pass. Margarita isn't here. Margarita is dead.

An immense, cosmic fury overtook me. I realized that nothing that had happened to me up until that point had really mattered—neither the pain, the fear, or the lack of freedom. This voice was awakening me to my first, my only loss. I felt as though I had been broken in two, as if half of my body had been torn away.

I howled, I screeched, I vowed to do terrible things without knowing what they would be. The voice spoke in conciliatory tones, trying to provoke me, like someone putting out fire by throwing gas on the flames.
Give us the number, and we'll let you see her one last time. Give us the second number, after all, it's no use to you anymore, not with her in a pine coffin and you banged up between four walls. Give us the number and we'll let you out to see that she doesn't get slung into a pit, like a bitch.

I tried to stand up and launched myself in the direction of the voice. A punch forced me down again. In the rush of blood to my bandaged eyes, I thought I saw Margarita among pinpricks of light; I saw her dissolve into something liquid and bright, and then I saw her no more. After that, several of them carried me to another cell and put me to sleep with a veterinary anesthetic and a good kicking.

I don't remember the following months too well. Darkness, shouting, meals, some brief interrogation, more darkness . . . They had broken my glasses, so the half-light came as a relief, not as a hardship. Every now and then the voice spoke to me from the shadows.
Give us the number, and we'll take you to where she is, there is still time, the body takes a while to rot.

One day several Cuban diplomats appeared in my cell, accompanied by a frowning general, and I left the Cesspit forever. I arrived in Stockholm in the middle of a blizzard. It was the first time I had seen snow.

My lodgings were somewhere between a hospital and a convent. The sterile whiteness of the place exacerbated my physical problems and hurt my eyes. The Swedes gave me a new pair of dark glasses. In the mornings, a red-haired, freckled nun brought me my breakfast, but I could find no reason to get up. Without Margarita, there was nothing. If I so much as shied a foot out of the blankets, I had the impression of falling into a void. Then I received a letter.

It's strange that no reader ever understood that my only subject is love. Or rather, I should say it
was
love, given that I shall never write again. Because it has taken me so many years to realize that she was enough, that she required no telling. Then time changed, thanks to her, who is in everything. Before, I had little faith, I said that things were impossible, that my world would vanish if I let it, like those faces we struggle to remember in a half-waking state. Now, with her letter in my hand, I didn't need even to breathe. She was alive: therefore everything continued to exist. Nothing was in doubt any longer. The mornings would no longer be a time of waiting for night, nor the night a postponement of the morning. The streets could once more be streets, not maps of meeting places, and the houses houses, not walls concealing an empty bedroom. She, who had always hovered on the edge of what was believable, had returned. She, without whom there would never have been any words, for the ink sprang from her veins, the paper was made from her skin. I was, am, the superfluous, unnecessary element. I am the grotesque redundancy.