All Men Are Liars (8 page)

I'm not insensitive to the suffering of others. I saw that Andrea was still anxious. She clearly wanted to leave. Without saying good-bye to anyone, I took her arm and led her out into the street. She didn't put up much resistance. We found a café a few blocks away. When she had calmed down, I asked her what had happened. The poor thing said she didn't know, that Bevilacqua seemed suddenly to have taken fright, that it must have been her fault for not consulting him, that she had thought the publication would make him happy, that she had only done it for him, so that his genius would be recognized.

I told her that that would still be the case. I was in no doubt that
In Praise of Lying
was an important work.

“If you say so,” she said, in a tone of voice which—given that I am easily moved—suddenly made her seem like a little girl. Isn't there something touching about the absolute faith of people in love? All these years later, it still makes me shiver to remember Andrea's voice.

I answered that of course I thought so, that this was my professional opinion. “Without a doubt,” I assured her. “The critics will be on your side. And you know how harsh they usually are. But in this case they'll be kinder—I'm sure of it.”

I paid, and we left. Freezing fog was making the bad driving conditions worse, and it was a halting journey to her house. After leaving her, I went home, in a pensive mood.

There he was. Bevilacqua was standing outside my front door, the tip of his cigarette glowing like lamplight in the fog. The nightwatchman was watching him charily. I seemed to be tasked with calming people's nerves that night. You know me, Terradillos. You know what I'm like. I was already that way in my youth. I tried to soothe them both.

We were scarcely through the door when Bevilacqua began to tell me everything. Andrea's discovery had upset him very much, and to see, all of a sudden, the printed book had plunged him into a nightmare in which he felt utterly powerless. I reminded him of Freud's discovery that nothing is accidental, that all events are prompted by something within us. But Bevilacqua was neither offended nor annoyed. He merely felt lost, stunned, incapable of expressing himself (he used an endless stream of words to make this point, of course). Up there on the platform, before that avid audience, hemmed in on the right by Urquieta, who terrified him, and on the left by Andrea, whom he loved, but who also scared him, the poor man had not known what to do or say. Then he caught sight of them. Him and her. The two of them. Right there in the audience. Sitting with everyone else. Smiling. He with his horrible dark glasses. She with her little hat.

“Who?” I asked, pointlessly.

“El Chancho and La Pájara,” he answered. “El Chancho Olivares and La Pájara Pinta.”

“Not your zoological phantoms again, Bevilacqua,” I said, to mollify him. “Wasn't La Pájara dead? Wasn't El Chancho, as you call him, in prison for conning a military man? They're hardly going to let him take a leave of absence!”

“I can't explain it,” he said, “but they were there.”

“All right,” I said hurriedly, because my train was leaving in a couple of hours. “Let's see. Suppose it was them. Suppose the grave could not hold her and prison bars were not enough for him. What does it matter to you? It's not as though they blame Alejandro Bevilacqua for their woes.”

Bevilacqua shot me a look of terror, wringing his long yellow fingers as though he were washing them. “Brother,” he entreated me, “you're about to go to France for a few days. Would you let me stay here, in your house, just for the weekend? I promise not to touch anything. I just don't have the courage to deal with the journalists, with Andrea, with Urquieta, with . . .” He let the sentence hang.

What can I say—I'm a bit softhearted, as you know. Someone asks me for something and I can't say no. Also, if I'm honest, I didn't like the idea of leaving the house unoccupied for more than a few hours. I'd heard of several robberies taking place in the neighborhood, invariably when the occupiers were away. I had a hunch that the nightwatchman was passing on information, but of course it was impossible to prove this. And to be fair, Bevilacqua was a very tidy man. So I agreed. I swear that he embraced me with tears in his eyes; he would have kissed me if I'd let him. I picked up my suitcase, gave him a copy of my key, and let him walk me to the door.

After I finished my Sunday seminar (the turnout was disappointing; from December to March the French show little interest in anything), I took the train back to Madrid. The Ávila landscape was visible through my window as, yawning and with my
café con leche
slopping cheerfully onto its saucer, I opened a newspaper the waiter had brought and read the terrible news that Bevilacqua had died. It was Tuesday. The newspaper said that on Sunday morning an early riser had come across the body in a pool of congealed blood. A photograph showed the nightwatchman pointing an accusing finger at my balcony. The article gave no further details, but lingered instead on the irony of this feted author having found fame such a short time before his tragic end. It quoted Urquieta, for whom the new literature had just lost one of its best voices. On the same page there was an ad in which the Sulphur publishing house reminded the public of the merits of
In Praise of Lying
. I reread the article several times. A death in one's immediate circle is particularly hard to take in.

When I got home, the nightwatchman advised me, with evident satisfaction, that the police wanted to question me. Not many people like the police. The Swiss, the English maybe. Not me. With a growing sense of unease, I started looking around this flat which no longer felt like mine. Violent acts render familiar things alien, and besides, in this case, there were traces of Bevilacqua in every room, on all the furniture. On the dining-room table were the remains of a frugal supper. On the sofa (and I usually keep everything so tidy) there was a waistcoat, several shirts, and a towel. The bed was unmade. I swear that I felt I could never again sleep on that mattress, on that pillow, as if Bevilacqua had died there, between my sheets. After a while I went out onto the balcony, whose balustrade now struck me as dangerously low. For the first time in my life, I felt vertigo.

I resigned myself to the worst: discomfort, uncertainty, insomnia. I unpacked my suitcase, put Bevilacqua's things away in his (which sat in a corner of the room, like a loyal dog awaiting its master's return), and spent the rest of the day cleaning the flat from ceiling to floor with Ajax. I slept badly that night.

It must have been eight o'clock in the morning when the doorbell rang. Not finding my glasses on the bedside table, I groped my way toward the front door. I could just make out two hazy shapes. One, small and bald, belonged to the nightwatchman. The other introduced itself as Inspector Mendieta, from the Investigation Squad. Apologizing for the fact that I was still in pajamas, I invited the inspector in, then closed the door in the nightwatchman's face.

You have good eyesight, Terradillos, and I bet you can't imagine how awkward it is to talk to someone whose features are a blur. My discomfort was exacerbated by the paradoxical character of Inspector Mendieta. Even without glasses, I could tell that he was both cordial and menacing, paunchy and mustachioed, like a Mexican Father Christmas. He asked me to sit down as though we were in his house, not mine.

In a way I was almost disappointed that he didn't treat me more severely. He asked a few obvious questions (why Bevilacqua had been in my house, how long we had known each other, what his state of mind had been when I left him, if anything unusual had happened in the last days of his life), and he wondered if I would be staying in Madrid in the following weeks. Then he took a look around the flat, pausing for several minutes on the balcony without saying anything. He sat down again.

“The rail is very low, isn't it?” he suddenly said.

“Not just mine,” I protested. “All the balconies are the same. It's part of the design. Art Nouveau,” I explained. My fuzzy vision was really annoying me, and when I noticed how bothered I was, it made me feel even more bothered. I began to talk about Madrid's Art Nouveau, comparing it to Barcelona's. Apparently not listening, Mendieta got to his feet and went back out to the balcony. I stopped talking. When we said good-bye, I felt accused, without knowing why.

I said before, Terradillos, that the death of someone close has something unreal about it. That's true, but there's a solidity and a substance to it as well. Those deaths that take place out there in the world, those hundreds of thousands of deaths that swamp us every day—they're insubstantial in their vast anonymity. That of a friend, on the other hand, wrenches from our very core something that belongs to us, and to which we belong. I think I've been clear on this point: I didn't love Bevilacqua. And yet, the fact that he had died there, in my house, under my momentarily absent nose, hurt like a pulled tooth, like a cut finger. Something was missing, now, from my life's routine, something regular, albeit a bit insipid, a bit boring and annoying: the tall, thin, pale, and tormented shadow of Alejandro Bevilacqua.

The following weeks were difficult for me. I wrote a few articles for newspapers, continued to read dry research documents for my book, visited the welcoming reading room at the National Library—but in all these things I felt now like a man who's lost a limb or an eye. Unconsciously, I was always waiting for the door to open and for that very familiar voice to start recounting some tedious episode from his life.

Bevilacqua was buried in the Almudena Cemetery, as inappropriate a choice as one can imagine: its ancient grandiosity didn't suit his character. Have you ever been there? It's all stone angels and broken urns, a phony decadence standing in for the all-too-real decay of the flesh. “I have walked on the Andes”—that should have been his epitaph. But only his name and dates are there.

Of course it was Urquieta's decision that his final resting place should be the Almudena. Beneath a few conventional cypresses, the editor repeated (with some respectful modifications) the speech he had made at the book launch. Flesh remains, the word takes flight. If you were looking for an example on this earth of
sic transit,
Bevilacqua's funeral would have provided an unforgettable one.

Now that I think of it, the ceremony at the Almudena was like a grotesque parody of that other one, a few days earlier, at the Antonio Machado center, a gloomy da capo, as unsettling as a shadow. The same people, the same words, but what had been happy excitement at the success of someone hitherto unknown was now replaced by the terrible sadness of his premature demise. I see them as clearly now as if I had photographed them. Berens and the other comrades from the flat in Prospe, faithful friends, standing beside a great broken urn; Quita and that young journalist, Ordóñez, on the threshold of a lugubrious mausoleum; my poor Andrea, as grief-stricken as one of those stone angels draped over the tombstones. The usual busybodies were there, too, anonymous people drawn by the lure, the pleasure and perversity of someone else's grief. And among the unknown faces, a couple who looked vaguely familiar: he was short, rough-shaven, with dark glasses prominent beneath a black, broad-brimmed hat; she, tall with a big nose, sporting a green helmet, topped with a pheasant's feather. I asked Quita, who was talking to Ordóñez, if she knew them.

Only then did I realize that Quita had turned quite pale. I never would have guessed that Bevilacqua's death could affect her so greatly. She looked at me as though she didn't see me at all, distractedly searching among the tombs for the one person who was absent.

“They're Cuban,” she said finally, with a sigh. “Recent arrivals. He writes, she reads.”

A light drizzle began to fall.
Nice literary touch,
I thought to myself.

I saw Andrea walk away amid a procession of umbrellas. I hurried to catch up with her.

“If you need anything . . .” I began to say.

“If I do, I'll let you know,” she answered with an abruptness I put down to her sorrow. I squeezed her shoulder and let her go on her way.

In the following weeks, I tried to see the Martín Fierro gang as little as possible. The time comes when these sorts of relationships—based to a degree on nostalgia and shared politics—draw to a close without us knowing how or why. Something in these exiled communities unravels or comes unstuck, people go their own way, and if I see you in the street, I may not even stop. I knew that my time in Madrid was coming to an end.

I packed my suitcases, boxed up my books, and paid my outstanding bills. I spent my last morning in the city walking, indulging my nostalgia. As I crossed Calle del Pinar, I heard someone call me. It was Ordóñez. I told him that I was returning to France. Ordóñez made some joking remark about the virtues of French cuisine. We said good-bye cordially, and then he remembered something that he wanted to tell me.

“Hey, Manguel. Those people in the cemetery you were asking Quita about. The Cubans. Apparently they're wanted by the police. I'm just telling you because you seemed interested.”

Then I realized why those two had looked familiar, and I remembered that frightened description that Bevilacqua had given me. I began to understand that something, whether horrible or banal, which had bound the ghostly Argentinian to the fantastic Cuban, had come to an end now that one of them could no longer tell his version of events. It was another one of those stories that belong to the “archive of silence,” as we refer to that infamous period in my country's history.

The encounter with Ordóñez depressed me even more. I wandered off through the streets of the Prospe, with its ocher facades and broken paving stones. Almost without thinking, I arrived at the door of the Martín Fierro. I climbed the stairs. Quita was on her own, going through files at the reception desk, which had now been cleared of Andrea's things, of her little plants, her toys, her framed photograph of Bevilacqua. I was shocked to see how tired she looked, her bronzed skin tinged by a whitish lichen, a lock of gray hair falling over her forehead. Quita, who felt about grooming the same way Poles feel about Mass . . . We waffled on about this and that, and then I asked her to please come and visit me if she was ever passing through France. I dared not speak the name of our absent friend.