All Men Are Liars (9 page)

She was the one who mentioned it. I was almost at the door when Quita put a hand on my arm.

“Albertito, don't forget me,” she said, with that despicable habit of shrinking her friends with diminutives. “Now that our Alejandrucho's no longer here . . . And Titito's gone . . .”

The ellipsis called for some words of consolation, but I had not been informed about Gorostiza's departure and so I didn't know what to say. I confess that the news hardly surprised me. I always considered the relationship between Quita and that uptight Argentinian to be a little unsavory. Love affairs between patrons and their protégés never last. Just think of poor Tchaikovsky with his widowed millionairess, Nadezhda von Meck.

I covered Quita's hand with my own, to console her, but Quita instantly whipped it away, as if scorched by my touch.

“Has an Inspector Mendieta come to see you?” she suddenly asked.

I said that he had.

“And what did you tell him?”

I made a brief summary of our somewhat uninspiring conversation.

“Did he ask you about me?”

“You?” I said, surprised. “No, of course not. We talked about balconies.”

“You swear that you didn't say anything about me, or poor Tito, or anyone else?”

I swore that I didn't.

Then she told me something which I am going to tell you and which I must ask remain
entre nous
. I don't want to harm such an honorable woman needlessly. Quita was at my house the night that Bevilacqua died. It seems that his behavior had alarmed her, as it had the rest of us. And you know what it's like with women who are a bit older: the slightest upset triggers their maternal instinct, and they feel they need to gather their chicks under their ample wings. Knowing that he was staying at my house (because in the literary world, everyone knows everything), Quita went to see him, to ask if there was anything she could do to help. The Bevilacqua who greeted her had grown even paler beneath his sallow skin, and his eyes, which were already naturally very dark, looked now (so said Quita) like hollows in a skull. Quita clutched him to her bosom, stroking his brow. But after a few minutes she began to feel that Bevilacqua wasn't happy to see her; in fact, he seemed to want her to leave, given that he hadn't even opened the door that led from the hall to the sitting room. Quita asked if any friends had come to see how he was. Bevilacqua said nothing. Well, I mean, what can you do? Quita may have the patience of a Griselda, but she has her self-respect, too. She didn't push things. But before leaving, she thought she heard someone move behind the door leading from the hall. Of course, she thought that it was another woman and, with characteristic generosity, decided to leave the field clear. The last thing she ever said to Bevilacqua was that if he needed to speak to someone, he could always come to her.

“They were my last words,” she repeated, “I swear.”

I reassured her that nobody could have prevented what was about to happen, and that knowing that a woman like her cared about his fate must surely have been a great consolation to him, when the moment came to make his terrible decision.

On the train back to Poitiers, I started thinking about the sad story to which I had been an unwilling witness those last three months. Who was the man that I had known by the name of Alejandro Bevilacqua? Who had been that strange character who was at different times explicit and evasive, luminous and opaque? You're a writer, Terradillos (a journalist, I know, but that also counts), so you know how difficult it is to make the artist coincide imaginatively with his work. On one side is the literary creation, endlessly transformed through our readings and rereadings; on the other, the author, a human being with his own physical characteristics, his inherited delusions and weaknesses, his failings. Think of one-armed Cervantes, shortsighted Joyce, syphilitic Stendhal . . . you know what I mean.

But, just suppose we had never come to know of Bevilacqua? Suppose he had died an anonymous death in that military prison in Argentina?
In Praise of Lying
would still be considered a masterpiece, but in a different way, perhaps more perfect, more complete—at the risk of repeating myself. I mean: if it had no identified author, we would have read the novel like some lost text by a Latin Thomas Mann, an enlightened Unamuno, but with a sense of humor. We would have brought to his flow of words our own versions of that universe, our most subtle intuitions, and our most secret experiences. Because, even if you know that that innocent, gray, rather doltish character was behind such a clever portrait of our times and its passions,
In Praise of Lying
is a book to which you can return time and time again. One reader will see the book as comedy, another as lyrical tragedy, a third as a ferocious political satire, a fourth as a melancholic elegy to a vanished past. There will even be (as I was telling you there were), readers who are blind to the work's genius, readers who, through lack of feeling or jealousy, are incapable of recognizing its unique mastery. In my opinion,
In Praise of Lying
succeeds in capturing the world that we knew (no mean feat) through the eyes of a perceptive and discreet witness capable of putting it into words, warts and all. It will be interesting to see if future readers one day speak of Unamuno as a philosophical incarnation of Bevilacqua, or of Thomas Mann as the Bevilacqua of Lübeck.

The characters from the drama have vanished now. Quita was consumed by cancer in the final days of last millennium. I never heard anything more from Andrea. As for Berens, who considered himself an immortal poet, nobody recites him now, least of all himself: he was committed some time ago to a psychiatric clinic in Santander. Gorostiza, as I discovered much later, chose his own fate. I don't know about the others.

Only one of them did not disappear altogether. From my house, here in France, I can still see a tall figure striding along the pavement of Calle del Prado. I see it stop at my door and climb the stairs to my apartment, I hear his hoarse voice greeting me, embarking on the familiar stories, while his eyes fix on mine and his fingers grip my arm to keep me from escaping or keeling over with boredom and fatigue. I can see him from here. And, Terradillos, even if, as I have often said, I am the least qualified person to talk about this character, there are days when I suddenly find myself, for no particular reason, thinking about him and his curious literary fate, or about the calumnies that were later heaped upon him, and about the wages of envy and sin.

And I say to myself,
Fancy that. You once knew Alejandro Bevilacqua.

2

Much Ado
About Nothing

DON PEDRO:
Officers, what offence have these men done?

DOGBERRY:
Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and to conclude they are lying knaves.

 

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, V, 1

Alberto Manguel is an asshole. Whatever he told you about Alejandro, I'll bet my right arm it's wrong, Terradillos. Manguel is one of those types who see an orange and then swear it's an egg. “What, and
orange-colored
?” you say. Yes. “And
round
?” Yes. “Does it smell of
blossom
?” Yes. “So,
like an orange
?” Yes, but it's definitely an egg. No, nothing is true for Manguel unless he's read it in a book. As for everything else, he'll concede only what he wants. The slightest insinuation, the smallest detail, sets him off on a wild-goose chase.

I'll tell you something, Terradillos—and you're not going to believe this: there was a time when he thought I had the hots for him. Can you imagine? Me? For Manguel! In those days, the poor man was as indecisive as a swinging gate. During the weeks that he pursued me, he persuaded himself that I was interested in him, and all because I had asked him some stuff about an Argentinian writer I was reading. It was pathetic to see him traipsing round to the Martín Fierro, looking for me in the café, offering to walk me home—though less so for me, because I grew absolutely sick of him. Quita wiped the floor with him. Did you know she called him “Manganese” behind his back? “There's Manganese,” she would say to me, “filling two chairs in the waiting room. See if you can shift him.” But it was hopeless. Only after Alejandro and I moved in together did he stop following me around like a lapdog.

I don't know why Alejandro liked talking to him so much. You probably know more about such things, being a journalist. Alejandro talked about his life partly to relive it and partly to show off. Perhaps it amused him to entertain Manguel, the way it can be amusing to entertain a rather stupid dachshund. Or perhaps Alejandro went to see him precisely because Manguel didn't listen to what he was saying, but extrapolated outlandish literary stories from what he was hearing. Manguel would tell me something that he swore Alejandro had said to him, and I would just stare at him thinking,
This fool, what planet's he on?

I think Manguel's inability to pay attention comes from too much reading. All that fantasy, all that invention—it has to end up softening a person's brain. I must have been barely twenty-five at that time, and Manguel was under thirty, but I felt a thousand times more experienced, more real than him. I used to listen to him and think to myself:
At his age, and still playing with toy soldiers.

I bet Manguel painted you a picture of Alejandro as a man defeated and morose. Am I right? A victim finished off by years of suffering and persecution or whatever. Well, it's true, of course, about the prison, and that can't have been a bundle of laughs. But apart from that, Alejandro was the opposite of a broken man. His setbacks galvanized him and made him stronger. Even as a boy.

I'm the one you should listen to, Terradillos. Because I'm from the land of your ancestors. Because Alejandro told me his whole life story in all its intimate, dirty details. You know, of course, that he was brought up by his grandmother, a woman who must have been tough, having to struggle alone throughout her life. I feel sorry for her, poor soul, because I also have some experience of these things. Alone and in charge of a crafty fox like Alejandro. She only had to look away for a moment and Alejandro would be going through her handbag, or nipping into the back room with some girl or playing hooky from school to go to the adult cinema down by the port. The poor woman found herself in a terrible pickle once, when her darling grandson got the pharmacist's daughter pregnant. Alejandro could scarcely have been fifteen at the time, and the girl nearly twenty. Can you imagine Doña Bevilacqua willing herself to stand, firm as an oak, in the face of gossiping neighbors?

I don't care what people say—I like the woman, even if we are separated by oceans and decades. I feel that both of us have had to deal with situations that were forced on us, and both of us have been prepared to fight tooth and nail to have something of our own in this life. She had to do it year after year. I did it every day. It's okay. God gives beans to the toothless.

I suppose, at the beginning, Alejandro must have won her over the way he did me. With the same allure, the same charm. She watched him grow, whereas I knew him as a grown man; but I'm sure both of us were captivated by his poise, his presence, that gift for warmth that came to him from somewhere deep inside. In my case, I don't know if it was the eyes, so deep you could drown in them, or those hands, which could make you shiver if you imagined them running over your skin, under your skirt . . . or the smooth neck into which you would love to sink your teeth . . . I'd better not go on.

I've always had a thing for older men. I mean, you're really sweet, Terradillos, but a bit too green for my taste. Come back to see me when you're riper. Alejandro was about fifteen years older than me—which, considering how young I was at the time, was quite some gap. The most handsome man I've ever known was my father, may he rest in peace. Look, there he is, in his silver frame, as befits a man like him. Did I tell you that my father was a bullfighter? I adored him.

On the evenings when there was a corrida, he, my mother, and I would go to my paternal grandmother's house, because there was hot water there, and he could get ready more comfortably. My grandmother lived with two of her sisters, and these three old ladies would busy themselves with my mother, preparing his costume and laying out freshly laundered towels on the side of the bathtub, together with a perfumed soap that was kept for his exclusive use. My father would go into the bathroom and emerge after a while no longer himself but transformed into some magical creature, an enchanted being resplendent in pink silk embroidered with gold thread and sequins, and as handsome as the blessed Saint Stephen. We said good-bye to him (“never wish him luck,” my mother warned me, when I was barely old enough to say anything), and I went to sit on the balcony between the geranium pots, with my legs hanging down either side of a post, to watch him as he left the house, and went, gleaming, down the cobbled street. Immediately my mother and her sisters put on their mantillas and took down from her niche Our Lady of Perpetual Help; my mother lit the candles, and the four of them set to reciting Hail Marys until his safe return.

They never went to see him
torear,
and they never dared turn on the radio during his absences. The hours passed, and I would either watch them pray or entertain myself looking at picture books until the moment came to return to my place on the balcony to witness his arrival at the end of our street, where the car left him, looking more real, more earthly now, but still as handsome as a count, perhaps with a trace of blood on his cheek, perhaps with a tear in his clothes, but never, thank God—as we had secretly feared—borne home on a stretcher, mortally wounded. He died when I was ten, from a pulmonary embolism, would you believe, of a tiny clot that had formed in some secret place in his veins, and not, as I always imagined, losing streams of blood before his public. That's life. Look at him and tell me if you've ever seen anyone more handsome.

Don't imagine that Alejandro was like him. He wasn't, either in looks or temperament. The mere suspicion of blood made Alejandro queasy. He couldn't bring himself to step on an ant or shoo away a horsefly. I could never talk to him about bullfighting; he went to pieces just at the idea of it. The mere thought of any action that might induce pain made him ill. He could never understand why anyone would want to fight. My father, on the other hand, understood it very well. My father was slender and graceful as a reed. Alejandro, too, was skinny, but he had flesh where it mattered. The first time I saw him at the Martín Fierro, I thought,
Jesus, I'd gobble him up under the sheets,
and I noticed that Quita wasn't exactly indifferent to him either. Because although she may have seemed very refined, the señora wasn't above singling out some refugee or other for her personal consumption. That Tito Gorostiza, for example, with his flowing hair and his black leather shoulder bag—“an Andean hippie,” Berens called him. And that Peruvian—I can't remember what he was called—who ended up living for a time in the cottage Quita had rented near Cáceres. Listen—I'm not accusing her of anything, all right? I think it's good for a woman to enjoy herself while she can.

But Alejandro was all mine. I told her that, right at the start, and Quita laughed and said of course, go for it. First we got him settled into Gorostiza's flat. Because Quita had put the flat in her boyfriend's name—a neat way of using the other tenants' rent to keep him, since selling trinkets on Calle Goya never appealed much to our Tito.

Alejandro, on the other hand, never complained about his lot. On the contrary, I would almost say that getting up every morning, gathering up his bracelets and rings, walking to his usual spot, and spreading his wares out on the pavement gave him a certain security, I don't know—a fixed point in that nomadic life. After all, Alejandro was rather conservative. He liked good bed, good board, all that which can be savored and stroked—indulgences that are hard to come by with your butt in the saddle. Ideally, he would have liked his mornings to follow a routine and his nights to be more adventurous. He would have made a good politician, my Alejandro.

But, what can I say, I'm nothing if not ambitious. To his other qualities I wanted him to add that of “artist.” He may not have been keen to admit it, but Alejandro was so obviously a man of letters. I have a solid knowledge of South American writing—I don't know if you knew that. Ever since I was little, while my mother was devouring books by Gironella and Casona (come to think of it, Carmen Laforet's
Nada
was on her bedside table, too), I sought out authors from the other side of the Atlantic, whose books were sold under the counter by a few dedicated booksellers. Now, I wanted Alejandro to be one of them; I imagined him, undisputed and acclaimed, under one of those pastel-colored covers with daring black letters which were produced at that time in Buenos Aires, standing alphabetically proud between Mario Benedetti and Julio Cortázar.

You know what? I wanted to be a part of that transformation which was slowly beginning to make itself felt throughout Spain, like a change of season, like the end of a long illness. Each one of us, I mean in my generation, experienced it in a different way, at different times. I can tell you that, for me, it was one day at school, at the end of class. I was about to leave the room when the headmistress, a very strict, formal woman, came in and told me to help her. She took one of the gray plastic wastepaper baskets that were in every classroom, and placed it in my hands. Then she lifted a chair onto the platform, pushed it over to the blackboard, unhooked the crucifix that had been hanging on the wall, and put it into the wastepaper basket. We filled two baskets this way. Then we left them in a corner of the school chapel, under the astonished gaze of one of the priests who taught religious education. Sitting at my desk the next day, I felt for the first time freer, less stifled.

I wanted Alejandro to be a part of that wind of change, to be a dazzling new voice, a new discovery. Yes, yes, my Terradillos, I know what you're thinking: those
fotonovelas
of his were hardly literature. We had a laugh when he showed me three or four that he had discovered in a pile of old magazines in the Rastro flea market. Worse than soap operas—don't think I didn't realize that. I'm not stupid. But Alejandro knew the art of spinning stories. There was something about his tongue (I can see that you have a dirty mind from the way you're smiling), something in the way he measured words so well, with exactly the right nuances and shading, with more wisdom and delicacy than he ever showed stringing colored beans together. People say that there used to be sorcerers in Andalusia who could make flowers and birds burst forth from the sky simply by naming them. Believe me, it was the same with Alejandro. When he told you something, you found yourself following his stories as if they were taking place in front of your own eyes; you could
see
it all happening. That was why it came as no surprise to me to learn that he had written a masterpiece.

Look, Terradillos. Compare him to anyone else. To Berens, let's say. Have you read any Berens, did you ever hear him reciting his stuff—before he went crazy, I mean? A prize for his first book, some other prize for the second. Here in Spain they loved him, because he was like a modern Bécquer. Even before the days when it became fashionable to award prizes to friends or because of publishing politics, everyone knew that the autumn wouldn't go by without Berens getting an award. But he was nothing compared to Alejandro.

I let him stay at Gorostiza's flat just for a couple of months, to get him acclimatized to Madrid. Because this was still, for the most part, a fearful city, cloaked, mute, drawn in on itself, not wanting to see anyone. When I was a young girl, I found it hard to believe that anything could ever bring down the great mountain of filth, of fetid candles and rotten vegetables, bestowed on us by that dwarf, our Franco. I told myself that if Alejandro could cope with all that in a shared flat, my house was going to seem like paradise to him. That was how, one holiday weekend, I brought him back to live with me.

No doubt you've heard about how I found the manuscript. On several occasions I'd asked Alejandro to show me something that he had written, for I knew he
must
have written something; he had poetry in his blood. He always said no, that he wasn't a writer and I should leave him alone. I bought him a typewriter, hoping to tempt him. I left him on his own, gave him space, to see if solitude would stoke his inspiration. Nothing. He didn't take the typewriter out even once, and solitude seemed not to inspire him—at least not to write. In fact I once came home earlier than I had said I would and found him in bed with the geisha from the flat next door (who I knew was a slut the day I saw her open the door with her kimono undone and her tits hanging out). Obviously I forgave him.