All Men Are Liars (18 page)

The crowd begins to walk along Diagonal toward the Plaza de Mayo. On the pavements, spectators. At the end, the mounted police, their sabers still sheathed. I walk along among the onlookers, with an absent expression. Outside the Boston Bank, I spot Chartier's agents, unmistakable now. I make a slight gesture, and they join the procession.

When the marchers reach the Plaza de Mayo, the mounted police charge, as planned. Then I see her, shining in the dark crowd. I look for the agents, but they have disappeared in a tangle of legs, sabers, people's heads, and horses' heads. The clamor is deafening. Clouds of tear gas explode on the pavement opposite. The crowd is herded toward Calle Florida. Then I suddenly see her, leading the thin man by the arm. He's covering his face with his hand, and his face is covered in blood. And she is tending to him.

Dust, fog, mud, water, dense, indeterminate moods, fathomless, formless seas, a world suspended between solid and liquid, viscosities, globules of spit, blood. Myself, trapped forever; her, forever cleaning his wound, diluting his blood in water, an obscene and economical Eucharist. My state condemns me to this vision, it's a professional obligation, an occupational hazard. But I don't resign myself to it. This is also torture.

I see the agents, and point out the couple to them, sitting in a café window emblazoned with the words C
ERVEZA
Q
UILMES.
Take away the noise, gunfire, screaming, the smoke, the people running, the water, the blood, the agitated waiter—and what's left? Two lovers at a café, hand in hand, one head bowed toward the other, a man and his sweetheart.

How dare she exclude me? That paradise is mine. I see her stand up to go; he stays behind. I signal to the agents to follow her. We'll see about him later. She (I run through the practical exercises that Chartier insists are essential) will suffer all the interrogations, all the punishments, all the deaths. One alone is not enough for me.

I don't know where they took her. I never wanted to know it, because I preferred to imagine the whole lot. I never tried to find anything out, even though everything is recorded in the folders (C56908, C99812), every raid, every prisoner, every building, every procedure, every conclusion.
This has to be run like a bank,
says Colonel Chartier.
We should be able to account for every last centavo
.

Weeks went by, months. I moved, within the same department, from informing to gathering information. The first job entailed observing. The second required questions. A friend of my father, an amateur botanist, used to claim that all he did was to classify, in great ledgers, whatever he happened to find in nature; he left the whys and wherefores to academic luminaries. I, on the other hand, did not regard the move from lookout to inquisitor as a step up. It was simply another aspect of the same job—using the tongue instead of the eyes.
Now you can give your eyes a rest,
joked the colonel.

One can get used to anything (except for this, except for what comes after, except for nothingness). One gets used to the sight of a person deprived of all hope, to tears, to screams, to deliberately inflicted wounds, to vomiting and blood, to picturing another's pain as though it were being drawn for you with colored chalks. The hours go by, and afterward one forgets, or pretends to forget. One has to make an effort not to forget.

I remember.

There he was, calmly walking down the street, he who had hijacked her affections, robbed me of her skin, trespassed on my territory. There he was, poor bastard, oblivious to my existence. For the sake of my own honor, I had to convince myself and convince the others that he was not merely a fool, a nonentity in the enemy army, but on the contrary, a glorious captain, a paladin, someone we must use all our cunning and might to overthrow. After his hell, his purgatory, I was generous enough to allow him a new life in Europe, a way to prolong my pleasure in dreaming of his end. No one ever extended such consideration to me.

I would venture to say that I worked well. Without the distraction of feelings or literature, I threw myself entirely into my duty. Noblesse oblige
.

I'm invited to an official ceremony at the Military Circle—I no longer recall in whose honor—a party with medals and sabers beneath crystal chandeliers and the inevitable gilded moldings. Colonel Chartier makes a speech; others follow. Applause. In the room sit various rows of decorated military men and their wives. An enormous, mountain-shaped woman occupies one or more seats in the front row, her blue silk dress spread over her stomach like a giant sail, at the stern of a swell of uniforms. After the ceremony, the colonel introduces me to a little man with a mustache and bushy eyebrows.
General, this is the boy I told you about. Colonel Gorostiza's son.
The little man looks me up and down and says nothing.

Somebody must have appreciated my efforts, because the colonel calls me to his office one Sunday, soon after the party.
Do you go to Mass? No? Quite right; church is for sissies. I'm going to give you some good news, you deserve it.
And he announces that the General (the most recent one) wants to send me to Spain.
A new broom,
says the colonel.
But I think the changes are good. All that scum we've been trying to clean up here is getting away from us—to the Yanks, the Frogs, the Italians. But especially to the Spanish, would you believe? Our General over here doesn't want their generals over there to get annoyed about the deluge, so we're going to go over and keep an eye on what our riffraff is getting up to in the mother country. You're going to carry out the same little job you've been doing for me here, but in Madrid. Pay attention, learn to recognize the signs, be discreet, raise the alarm. You'll have to listen hard, because I don't know what they speak over there, but it isn't Spanish.
And he roars with laughter.

Madrid was the ideal place for me, being both hard and welcoming at the same time, like a sort of boarding school. The prevailing atmosphere of suspicion suited me. Somehow the work was easier. My boss, in the company where I was supposedly working (and where I passed myself off as an impecunious exile, like the others), was an absentminded old man who spent his nights watching Sarita Montiel films. The true authority was a spare and silent Murcian, from the Ministry of the Interior, who had been with the Generalíssimo in Africa. I saw him only half a dozen times, and on each occasion he made the same observation.
Everything's going well, very well. Keep it up.

That banal belief in time healing all wounds is wrongheaded: we grow accustomed to our wounds, which is not the same thing. So it was that at an earthy fortysomething, I felt able to accept the advances of the refined Quita, without fearing that she would usurp that other person, both absent and irreplaceable. Quita found me amusing, intriguing, I was her
gentleman,
she would say, when we were together.
My Dark Blanca,
I would reply. I would never have made the first move. It was she who approached me, her glasses shining, her mouth always on the point of a smile, a tremulous down on her lips. She was generous, more than she ought to have been to me, the false victim, the lying lover, impostor in everything.

Now there is a sort of phosphoresence in the fog, a vaguely luminous darkness, a dirty light. I move forward. I hear the voice of Quita, cajoling, begging me to stay with her, not to leave her. There is something obscene, grotesque, in hearing loving words from someone we do not love. We suddenly notice the spittle in the corners of their mouth, a broken vein on their nose, sleep on the lashes they are so coquettishly seeking to flutter. Quita's voice goes on and on, and I move farther and farther.

I want it to disappear: her, her voice, her face, her hands. But she continues to whine in this mist, her whining becomes mingled with the yelping of the bitches, her teeth with their fangs, her red fingernails with their claws. I would like to set them on him, this pack of animals and women. On him I would like to set loose all these piebald creatures with their flaming eyes. On him I unleash my furies, but to no avail. All I can do is advance, without feeling that I am moving. As though I were walking in a circle which is growing ever tighter, a spiral in the center of which I am doomed not to find the other, but myself, the man I once was, patiently waiting for the person I am now.

Forward.

Few of the refugees passing through the Martín Fierro center really interested us. Most of them were poor bastards who had grudgingly taken flight, in the manner of a cat shooed from its home with a broom. Others, who had once been fighters, now appeared dull and sterile, incapable of the slightest protest. A few had been transformed, or were in the process of transforming themselves into obedient members of the bourgeoisie, regretting their youthful ethos, willing to put all that behind them. These got transferred to the credit column. But there were also some in debit. The ones who were still raging. The ones who demanded reparation, public vengeance, future justice. The ones who gathered testimonials, confessions, private statistics. The ones who probed memories. Those who ascribed to themselves the role of recording angels. They were the ones who had to be watched, whose names were kept on file.

Like any official job, there is a bureaucracy involved in denunciation. At the top of the tree are the anonymous men who make the initial and final decisions, who have no private lives, the initiators of public action, the masters of history. Their subordinates are the ones who communicate orders, who appear to be important, who have personalities, names, ranks. Beneath them are the ones who execute the orders, who mete out the blows, who pull the trigger. Finally come the underlings, the ones who use their ears, open their eyes, make notes, who live on surveillance and indiscretion. I am one of these last. I watch, listen, and tell. Perhaps that is the reason why I no longer have ears, eyes, a voice. Nothing exists outside my mind. While yours is occupied with dreams of me.

One day, at Blanca's office, I see him. I recognize him. It's his face, his frighteningly fine-featured face. He has the looks of a soap star, of an actor in a commercial, a face at once dreamy and astute, a face that looms over the piles of books at the Martín Fierro like an enormous harvest moon. There it is, implacable, stuck in my eyes like a shard of glass, that face which is also a thousand faces, all the same, all calm and smiling, all the faces the face over which she bent, solicitously, bathing his bloodied ear. There he is, that day when Blanca asked me to drop into her office and pointed to the man standing beside the bookcase, like one of those scabby old statues of Chinese clay. There he was, waiting for me, as I had waited for him since that afternoon. We shook hands. While he introduced himself I was thinking:
How can I make him suffer?

During the months that followed, our paths inevitably crossed many times. Images of him keep repeating themselves: in the café, in the street, at the Martín Fierro, at the exit of a theater, at a gathering of literary friends. We saw each other at meetings, soirees, in the street on summer evenings, in cafés during the winter, a word here, a greeting there, never anything that would give away the secret intimacy we shared, our past history. We are undisclosed rivals—he doesn't know it, and I can't forget it. And while the image of her disappears, his reaffirms itself, multiplying itself, as though in a corridor of crystal-clear mirrors.

Let's get technical. The needle on a lie detector traces onto sheets of rolling paper a zigzag line that seems never to commit itself either way: only in the moment of an absolute truth will the line become firmer, clearer. That unbroken, straight line is also the one made by an encephalogram when a patient dies. You have to keep an eye on both of them during an interrogation: they never both show the same state. To get to the truth without ending the life is our aim—that was my job. My first encounters with him were all about following the line of the lie-detector needle; now I'm after the other kind, the straight line, the inevitable one.

Every scene is acted out with protagonists and minor figures who flit on- and off-stage. The ridiculous Berens, the clown, the rhymester. A certain disgusting Cuban, either a thief or an intellectual, I don't know which is worse. The Cuban's wife—I threatened her once, to get him to talk. The midwife, Camilo Urquieta, who brings inky abortions into the world. Anonymous friends. Indispensable enemies. One or other passionate lady. Little acolytes. Choirboys. Maenads.

Women have always felt sorry for me. That isn't a good basis for passionate love, which is what I, the frustrated poet, have always sought after. The literature I once tried to write betrayed me pitilessly; it's better that way—less embarrassing. Women consoled me when I wanted them to die for me, an asp to the breast. It's cold comfort, like a sick man who knows that the lover sitting at his bedside, she who tenderly moistens his parched lips, will go out at the end of visiting time and throw herself into another man's arms.

He, on the other hand, elicited their love without even trying to win it.
Why?
I ask. Only little Andrea managed to keep him at her side. You should have seen her boasting about it.
He's at my place, we eat lunch together, we share a bathroom, we wake up together.
Andrea, for whom he was like an extremely rare edition of an important and famous book.

I bided my time.

Waiting is an art. You can study it, practice it. I observed, made notes, preparing reports and forecasts. I heard the Murcian say one day:
Gorostiza has an African patience
. I understood what he meant. Like the Sphinx. Like the pyramids. Made of sand.

Then we come to
In Praise of Lying
. It's a pathetic piece of work. I read it, of course. Incredulous at so much idiotic adulation, furious at literature's great priests, and with the futile satisfaction of knowing that my enemy had failed. As a book,
In Praise of Lying
is pompous, colorless, and spent. How can people have said, many times over, that this is a masterpiece? I listened to their ravings without advancing an opinion. Because, who would have paid any attention to me, who would have listened to my criticism, in the midst of that choir of fulsome, stupid angels?