All Men Are Liars (6 page)

“Thanks for your support,
compañero,
” said the old man.

“I'm with her,” answered Bevilacqua, evasively.

“With Graciela?” The old man laughed. “God help you!”

They waited a bit, hoping to see their ranks swell, but no one else came. Then Graciela gave the order to advance.

Bevilacqua felt intensely uncomfortable, marching with the others along Diagonal, while from the pavements pedestrians paused to watch them and to shout out crude remarks or words of encouragement. Bevilacqua tried to keep his eyes fixed on Graciela, who was now at the head of the marchers, leading them in some pointless chant. When they arrived at the town hall, a battalion of mounted police emerged from a side street, blocking their way. The group came to a halt, but Graciela strode on. For a moment she alone confronted the horsemen; straightaway the others followed her.

Bevilacqua did not feel afraid. This was his first demonstration, the first time he had ever been a part of something greater than himself, mingling with others, singing with them, moving with them. He was doing what the group did, without having to answer to anyone, without having to feel any responsibility for his actions. And he felt happy, anonymous, and free—do you understand? For he had been chosen by the woman who was leading them all, his Graciela.

The first blow came simply as noise, with no immediate source or explanation. There followed a confusion of flying batons, kicks, shouting and neighing, a police car's siren. He saw the banner fall, the vast flank of a horse, a hand covered in blood. He heard a distant cry and felt a shooting pain in his ear. He saw Graciela slip away between two mounted police officers, and followed her.

All at once someone grabbed him by the arm and dragged him toward a café. He let himself be dragged. Graciela made him sit down, then pressed a clutch of paper napkins to his left ear. When the waiter approached with an expression of concern, she calmly asked for two coffees and a glass of water. The waiter brought their order, and Graciela thrust another handful of napkins into the glass.

“This isn't a hospital,” the waiter said.

“Up yours!” answered Graciela. “And bring the gentleman another glass of water.” She drank her coffee in one gulp and slapped some money on the table.

“Congratulations,” she said to Bevilacqua. “Not bad for a first time.”

And with that, she stood up and left. Bevilacqua never saw her again.

It strikes me now that there is something sketchy about Bevilacqua's life. In literary terms, it amounts to nothing more than a collections of fragments, snippets, and unfinished episodes. Any one of them could serve as the start of a great novel, one thousand pages long, profound and ambitious. My version of his life is closer to the style of the man himself: indecisive, undefined, inept. As I warned you at the start: I'm not the person best suited to tell you about him.

But a promise is a promise. After Graciela's disappearance, Bevilacqua lived alone in the flat in Boedo, teaching during the day and writing scripts at night. He saw Babar from time to time, and both realized that they no longer had anything in common. The last time they ran into each other in the street, neither of them even said hello, but walked on without stopping.

One afternoon, Bevilacqua bumped into one of the Uruguayans at the corner café, and they had no choice but to share a table. They struck up a halfhearted conversation about soccer, about the price of a cup of coffee, and then—under the guise of discussing a sick friend—about the vague rumors concerning what had happened to Graciela after the demonstration.

“Doctors have a hand in everything. You can't even die in peace.”

“It's the nurses you can't trust. People who say they're going to give you an aspirin, then stick a scalpel in your back.”

“Do you know the nurse in question?” asked Bevilacqua. “Are you sure there was one?”

“I'm not sure of anything, brother. Except of the grave, and even then I don't know if it will be in earth or water. But yes, there was one.”

They parted without shaking hands, eyes cast down. In those days, you walked around Buenos Aires with your head bowed, trying neither to see nor hear, not saying anything. Above all, you tried not to think, because you began to believe that others could read your thoughts. (Later, in Madrid, Bevilacqua would discover that he could indeed think, but in the midst of such an overwhelming silence that he felt as though he were speaking on the moon, where the lack of air transmits no sound.)

Without Graciela, the passing of days seemed crushingly slow, with no progress or change. Everything seemed to happen at a remove. Bevilacqua realized now that she, with her rather brutal manner, her uninhibited sensuality, her many infidelities, had been behind all his actions, all his words. I'm not exaggerating. I'm simply telling you what I was able to glean from him. Graciela was his center. Without her everything crumbled. He lost interest in the world. He stopped caring.

One morning, at dawn, he was picked up from the street by two silent men. Inside the car, which was taking him to prison, there were stickers on the doors, threatening anyone who tried to open them. They emptied his pockets while an enormous, asthmatic woman noted down every object—watch, pen, handkerchief, wallet—in an exercise book. After that they left him for hours in a windowless cell. It was a few days later that the sessions began. I'll spare you the details.

I don't want to describe the horrors that followed—and not because I am ignorant of them. Bevilacqua told me everything, or everything that can be told—which, in these cases, is not very much. Beneath the surface of all that we are able to put into words lies that profound and obscure mass of the unspeakable, an ocean without light, swimming with blind, unimaginable creatures. It was a world I glimpsed only fleetingly during our many meetings, charting the course of his extremely sad story. Because Bevilacqua's account skipped chapters, beginning at the end and then jumping back to the prologue. He started his story in Paradise, continued into the Inferno and finished up in Purgatory. And when he arrived there, neither I, nor Andrea, Quita, or any of the others who later claimed to have been loyal friends, was a Virgil for him. Feel free to condemn me for it.

It must have been nearly a year after his arrival in Madrid when Bevilacqua rang the bell of my apartment, as he used to do two or three times a week. It was late. I had promised to hand in an article the next day (at the time I was writing for a French magazine that paid more than the stingy Spanish ones), and I had thus far written only one or two paragraphs. He didn't give me a chance to say anything. With an even more sorrowful expression than usual, he came in, sat on the only comfortable armchair, and told me what had happened.

He said that even from a distance, in the weary half-light of a winter afternoon in Madrid, he had known it was her. I assumed that he meant Graciela, but the woman he began to describe to me was quite different: a tiny body on top of extraordinarily long legs and a ridiculous hat that looked like a disproportionately large beak. Bevilacqua said that, in Buenos Aires, they had called her La Pájara, the Painted Bird, after that Spanish rhyme which you may know:

There was once a Painted Bird

On the green lemon made her room.

With her beak she cut the bough,

With her beak she cut the bloom.

Bevilacqua had met her during his stint in prison, when she had come, wearing the very same hat, to visit one of his cellmates, Marcelino “El Chancho”—“The Pig”—Olivares. I expect you're wondering how, in one of those terrible prisons, anyone was allowed special privileges. I'll tell you how: local custom.
Primus inter pares
translates in my country as “There'll always be a favorite.” El Chancho was one such. He was a Cuban exile who had arrived in Argentina at the end of the 1950s, before Fidel's revolution. This curious hybrid of intellectual and businessman had managed to persuade various members of the military to let him invest their savings in Switzerland. He did make the investments—no one questions that—but it seems that as the tray was passing, he helped himself to a few tidbits.

Unfortunately, the military men found him out and swore revenge; they went looking for him one dark night, and El Chancho was invited to change address. Let it never be said that the army doesn't reward services rendered, however, because even in prison El Chanco enjoyed certain privileges: visits from La Pájara, books, cookies, cigarettes . . .

How this animal ended up in the same cell as our Bevilacqua, I shall never know. The sick methodology of those times defies comprehension, I'm sure you'll agree, Terradillos. Because Bevilacqua wasn't given to explanations. He never even showed any emotion when he was telling me these things. Doubtless there were dark currents flowing beneath the surface, but I swear that the impression given to a disinterested listener such as myself was of a tranquil lake into which one yearns to lob a stone, to cause a ripple or some sort of movement . . . I asked him why it was so strange to run into a woman he had known years before in Buenos Aires, in Madrid.

“Not strange, impossible,” he answered. “La Pájara is dead. They killed her a few weeks before they let me out. I was in the cell when they came to break the news to El Chancho. We were blindfolded. But I remember it because one of the men went up to him and said, ‘Sincere condolences.'”

The significance of Bevilacqua's words still eluded me. I told him, in what I hoped was a conclusive tone, that he simply couldn't be sure of having seen her, at that distance and in that poor light.

Bevilacqua took my arm: “Brother,” he said, “she followed me.”

I resigned myself to hearing him out.

Apparently, Bevilacqua had gone out for a walk around Plaza de Oriente, which in those days was quite a bit shabbier than it is now. It was cold. A chill wind whistled around the bushes, clustering dirty papers around their roots. The occasional hooded figure (I swear that you could still see black capes in Madrid at that time) passed by, hugging the walls of buildings. Bevilacqua suddenly caught sight of her across the square, close by the Campo del Moro. For a long time he stared at her in horror. Then began a game of cat and mouse.

Bevilacqua tried to lose her by running into the alleys around the Church of San Nicolás. On the other side of the Calle Mayor, he crossed various little squares leading to the San Miguel market, negotiating dead ends and hurrying down porticoes. Perhaps because of the weather, the time of the day, or the fact that it was a religious holiday—or perhaps Bevilacqua imagined all this later—it seemed as if everything were closed: shops, cafés, offices. All he could hear was the wind, and La Pájara's heels on the cobblestones. Bevilacqua no longer registered the names of the streets through which he was fleeing. He seemed to cross the same square several times, retracing his steps, going up a hill he was sure he had come down a few minutes earlier. The same scene kept repeating itself in monochrome: the black stones, the ashen fog, the marble-colored lampposts. This flight of his seemed to be taking place in the past, as though, rather than running through spaces, he were running back through time. And every time he turned around, there it was, defined against the dusky light, her ever-present, ornithological silhouette. Finally he emerged into the Plaza de las Cortes and, recognizing the columns and steps, realized that he was close to my house.

I say “my house” because that is what I called it when I lived there, but now that building—with its balconies and long windows, with the imposing front door which, in those days, relied on the services of a nightwatchman, with its pavement forever stained by Bevilacqua's blood—I think of as belonging to him. If I were superstitious, I would call it a case of satanic possession, of the kind you find in medieval chronicles, because that place, which was mine for such a long time, is inhabited now by the memory of his languid, melancholic, persistent figure. I think I even intuited, during his perorations, this inevitable outcome: that Bevilacqua would eventually take over everything that was mine.

Anyway, I managed to calm him down. I said that he should return to Andrea's flat and not worry her with his fantastical stories. “These things,” I said, more out of weariness than conviction, “sort themselves out after a good rest.” I was generous enough to suggest he seek consolation in the arms of that young girl.

Because, you see, Bevilacqua had taken Andrea, too. Andrea, Quita's right hand, must have been about twenty-five then. Her mother, a reader of Spanish literature, had named her after the heroine of Carmen Laforet's
Nada
and, in Andrea, there was certainly something of that novel's rebellious and sensual protagonist. Andrea herself was more into the literature of the New World, and when we first met I don't know if it was my appearance or my passport that seduced her.

Andrea was rather small, with straight, short hair and something of an angora rabbit about her. Her Arabic eyes looked out from behind blue-framed spectacles. At that time my sexuality was more eclectic than nowadays: youth is willing to try anything. I confess that I fell in love with her immediately, as one is attracted to an anonymous traveler on an escalator—a face picked at random among those in the opposite line.

My friend: I've already told you that I met Bevilacqua sometime after moving to Madrid. Andrea and I must have been going out for a couple of months by then. I was not much older than her; Bevilacqua, as I mentioned before, was ten years older than me. He was elegant and slender; I've always been a bit flabby and scruffy. Age and poise won out. Andrea must have felt that Bevilacqua was endowed with more prestige and a better lineage. It's true that along with the habitual expression of a slaughtered ram, a swatch of gray hairs lent him an aristocratic look, giving him the appearance of one of those characters that girls of Andrea's age (if they like Latin American literature) lap up from the likes of Bioy Casares or Carlos Fuentes. On top of her desk, which was tastelessly adorned with little tropical plants and toy animals, I once discovered a framed photograph of a twentysomething Bevilacqua, in a French beret, arms crossed and looking like a prophet who's expecting God knows what. In the face of such competition, I beat an honorable retreat. I believe that Bevilacqua never fully knew how generously I had yielded him my place.