All Men Are Liars (5 page)

When Vila-Matas found out about Bevilacqua's death, he wrote to me, suggesting that the crime had intellectual roots. “What better solution for a pseudo Bartleby, for the author of an evasive
*
book, than to make himself an evasive author. Now both of them, author and work, share the same empty shelf.”

Empty
may not be the best word to describe Bevilacqua at that time. Apprehensive, awkward, listless, yes; suspicious and distrustful, I would have to agree. That fear he had learned during his last years in Argentina, which caused him to jump out of his skin every five minutes, to mistrust kindness, to keep secrets and opinions to himself, did not entirely disappear when he arrived in Spain.

An example. Soon after his arrival, Bevilacqua was taken by Andrea to one of those cafés on the Paseo Castellana that serve bad coffee at an exorbitant price, a favorite meeting place for the flocks of newly arrived South Americans. Tito Gorostiza, may he rest in peace, was ferreting around in that bag he always carried with him, a memento from Mendoza, searching for some quote he wanted to read to the others. Among the books he stacked up on the table was an anthology of stories published in Havana. When he saw it, Bevilacqua glanced over his shoulder, then picked up his jacket and quickly covered the book with it. He had gone quite pale. It took me a moment to understand why.

I don't think Bevilacqua regretted his exile in Madrid. On the contrary—he was enchanted by all that he
imagined
Spain to be. His good fortune in falling under the protection of Quita and Andrea meant that, rather than braving some downtown hostel, he had, from day one, been able to lodge in a flat in the Prospe area, not far from the Martín Fierro. There were already five other Argentine exiles living in the flat, among them Cornelio Berens, dubbed the “Flying Dutchman” because of his swift passage through so many countries.

Bevilacqua's room in the flat was small but full of light. Quita gave him a little money, and Andrea—who was well acquainted with Latino survival methods—suggested that he go with one of the others to sell craftwork on the Calle Goya. You wouldn't believe how many famous names started off laying out their wares on that pavement! I have a dried-bean bracelet made by a gentleman who tops the bestseller list in his country now, Terradillos. Anyway, it was on the wide pavement of the Calle Goya that the Spanish chapter of Alejandro Bevilacqua's life began.

But, Terradillos, forgive me, I'm getting ahead of myself: I see now that we had not quite finished the Argentine chapter. Let's go back for a moment, if you don't mind.

After he finished school, Bevilacqua had opted not to go to university, rejecting it as too systematic and authoritarian. At first, despite rumblings of protest from Señora Bevilacqua, he tried to make a living as a puppeteer. Later he found that he could make a little money by writing the text for those
fotonovelas
I mentioned earlier.

He came to this almost by accident, on one particularly uneventful day, by imagining a script which told the unhappy, romantic tale (it would be an act of exorcism for him) of his love for Loredana. If you think about it, the subject lends itself to theater: there's the infatuated adolescent, the indifferent beauty, the paternal and ineffectual old man, the hot pursuit through mountains and valleys, and the final disillusionment. He showed his script to Babar, who was working as a journalist on a financial newspaper, and far from pouring scorn on the idea, Babar suggested he send it to Editorial Jotagé, which specialized in soft pornography, sentimental magazines, and
fotonovelas
. Thus began the literary career of Alejandro Bevilacqua. So much for that proverb, “The eagle doesn't catch flies.”

Meanwhile, his grandmother, now old and frail, was increasingly prone to mental confusion and unreliable memories. Less intransigent, less determined, Señora Bevilacqua had become preoccupied and distracted. Little things slipped her mind: she forgot to order more olives or to check on the quality of the cold cuts. She made mistakes in the accounts, or left the kettle to boil dry on the stove. Once, Alejandro found her sitting in the kitchen, as though sleeping with her eyes open, black smoke swirling around her as a beef
matambre
burned to a crisp in the oven. Another time, Señora Bevilacqua rose before dawn, dressed in her Sunday best, and woke up her grandson to tell him that she was going to the cemetery, “because they're waiting for me there.” Alejandro felt obliged to spend more and more time with her, and watched her deteriorate day by day: her skin became transparent, her posture more stooped, her voice weaker; her gaze was unsteady, her hands shook.

One afternoon, on his way home after handing in a script and without knowing precisely why, Bevilacqua went a few stops farther than usual on the bus. It was dark by the time he had walked back and, at home, he found the door to the street ajar. He went upstairs without putting on the light. The scent of eucalyptus and of something else, both sweet and rancid, held him at the doorway to his grandmother's room. He heard a hoarse noise. In her bed, watched over by the orchestra of bewigged monkeys, the old lady's body had shrunk to the size of a puppet. Her curls fanned out extravagantly on the pillow, while everything else about her seemed almost impossibly small. Her penciled eyebrows and pale lips heightened the sense of unreality, of something suspended at the point of undoing. Her grandson called her: the eyes opened, closed, and opened once more. Looking at her, he felt those eyes were accusing him. It was the last time, he told me, that Señora Bevilacqua's reproving gaze fell on her grandson.

Her breathing became labored, measured in long, calculated pauses. After a time, it ceased. Bevilacqua remembered that his grandmother would have wanted the last rites. But where to turn for this? Who would he find at this time of night? Where was the closest church? Eventually, he went to bed. The following morning, he called the undertakers.

A week after the funeral, during the long, inevitable requiem Mass attended by La Bergamota's longest-standing clients, Bevilacqua reflected on his formidable grandmother's life. What remained of all this for him? What would become of him, orphaned and insecure? He was almost thirty, with no family and very few friends (loyal Babar could still be counted on, and some of the photographers from Jotagé). The time had come to define himself, to acquire a set of characteristics and a presence that were entirely his, with no residue of that rigorous woman who had wanted to consign her grandson to a life of cold cuts. He began with a gesture: when the priest came toward him holding out the Communion wafer, Bevilacqua made some slight motion of rejection, and the priest was obliged to move on to the next communicant. Señora Bevilacqua was buried in the Chacarita Cemetery. After the ceremony, Bevilacqua never returned to her grave.

And so on to 1967. Bevilacqua had just turned twenty-nine. He had inherited, without too much paperwork, his grandmother's house and the premises of La Bergamota, along with a respectable nest egg. To cut a long story short, he sold the properties, put the money in the bank, and by the time he was thirty, without asking himself why, he had embarked on a degree at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts. That was where he met Graciela.

As you will have realized by now, a number of women were important in Bevilacqua's brief life. I told you that his adolescence was played out between the magnetic poles of two of them—the cold and austral grandmother and the northern, misty-eyed Loredana. In the second part of his life there were two others, equally opposed. But we shall come to them later.

Allow me an aside. It's strange how the dramas in our lives play out, over the years, with a small cast, which, scene after scene, takes on all the characters. These are always the same: the hero or heroine, the older man, the ingenue, the mother figure, the villain, the loyal friend. In Bevilacqua's case, there were always two female performers: the strong, reserved woman, whom Bevilacqua obeyed while yearning to escape her clutches; the other an unattainable object of desire, capable of wounding him without even a glance in his direction. As for the men in his life, I can see at least a couple: first, the constant friend, as exemplified by Babar, who spoke little but was always there, serving as a bridge to the practical world; second, the educator, the guru, father confessor, such as Don Spengler, whose role, to my chagrin, I ended up inheriting.

There is also a third one, now that I come to think of it: the invisible enemy.

But let's return to Graciela for a moment. She was a little younger than him, dark, slight, aggressive, and intelligent. The first time they ever spoke was in a café opposite his faculty, where Bevilacqua had gone to do some studying for an exam and she was meeting with a group of protesters. I imagine that both of them felt rather old among so many adolescents. Bevilacqua had looked up from his page only to find himself gazing at Graciela's cleavage.

“Hey, you,” he suddenly heard.

He realized that these words were directed at him and, taken aback, he said, “Me?”

“Yes, you. You staring at my tits?”

Bevilacqua buried his head in his book. When he finally looked up, Graciela had gone. Later they ran into each other in the same class. Inevitably, it was she who made the first move. She wanted to know what he did, what course he was studying, what his political beliefs were. Bevilacqua offered up one or two opinions. Graciela scoffed at them and recommended others. That first exchange set a pattern that varied very little during the many years of their relationship.

Graciela was the younger daughter of a couple of notaries. I think they were Armenians or something—at any rate, their surname was Arraiguran. They lived in Almagro, which says it all. Graciela did not want to be a writer, did not read literary magazines or care about the new French novel. She envisioned her future in some vaguely political post, but her natural vocation, for law, struck her as too close to her parents'. She thought that studying in the Faculty of Arts would give her a useful grounding in history and rhetoric. She was, apparently, an excellent speaker.

Look, Terradillos, I think that Graciela took Bevilacqua under her wing less to protect him than for the sake of having something to protect. People who saw them together said they made an ideal couple, but the more astute observers noticed how she had gotten her claws into him. Bevilacqua was alone in the world; he knew nothing of life's dangers; he lacked experience of human wiles. Graciela prided herself on being an expert in all that. She was amused by Bevilacqua's bewilderment, as one might be amused to see a moth lunging at a pane of glass it cannot see. I would say that she even married him to watch him crash into the glass.

They married, they bought a flat in Boedo, they finished their studies and got jobs—he as a teacher in a local school, she as an assistant in some faculty department or other. I know what you're thinking: how banal! Maybe, but, when one takes a backward look at history, every decision, every move, each step contributes to the grand finale, complete with drums, glockenspiel, and cymbals.

Apparently Graciela began to organize meetings after class, at the university itself. Some union leader, a fellow traveler, a couple of Uruguayan intellectuals, a befuddled provincial writer—these became the founding members of a group predictably named Spartacus. She started coming home late at night, while Bevilacqua went to bed alone, leaving for her, on the kitchen table, half a portion of steak and chips bought at the corner café. During the long summer break, if Bevilacqua proposed a week or two in one of the quieter seaside resorts near Mar del Plata, Graciela would claim that she had to stay in the capital on some union business, and Bevilacqua would take off with a couple of detective novels to Necochea, Los Pinitos, or Miramar without bearing any grudge.

One of those summers, he came home a day earlier than expected and found Graciela in a nightgown, making
café con leche
for one of her Uruguayan stalwarts. Nobody batted an eyelid, and Bevilacqua simply sat down at the table so that Graciela could serve him, too. After that, Graciela's late nights became increasingly frequent. Sometimes Bevilacqua would not see her for a couple of days, then would return from work to find her in bed at six o'clock in the evening, fast asleep.

Bevilacqua had what I would call a “cohesive” vision of reality. By that I mean that he could take a multitude of disparate elements and partial facts and build from them a coherent and plausible scenario, complete with main and minor characters, intrigue and denouement. From the clues that Graciela was planning to leave him (the Uruguayan's breakfast was, I believe, the most compelling), Bevilacqua began to build up a picture of his wife's escapades in all their potentially scabrous detail. Sometimes he imagined her lover as an old trade unionist, with a beer belly and mustache; at other times, as a youth who had barely started shaving. Once it was a leftist priest whose biceps bulged beneath his cassock, and another time a lecturer in law, slicked back and recalcitrant. One of the most persistent ghosts was a certain anonymous writer from Río Gallegos or Rawson, whose book of verse (I'm afraid it was called
Red March
) he found on Graciela's bedside table one day. “But I only love you,” she told him. And Bevilacqua believed her.

One morning he decided to follow her. Graciela had told him that she was going on a demonstration, in the center of town, close to the Obelisk. She was going to set off early in order to meet first with a delegation from the Caribbean—“brothers from the other Americas,” she said, apparently, having been infected by that political argot which taints even the best intentions. The demonstration was due to start at noon. When Bevilacqua arrived, he noticed a small group forming outside the windows of the Casa Gold jewelers. He had thought that he would never find her in what he had imagined would be an enormous throng, like those shown on television. In fact he immediately spotted her, among some twenty or thirty people, helping two youths to lift up a banner. A little old man in a beret came over and shook his hand.