The Neruda Case (10 page)

“You should go to Cuba, live there, soak up the revolution,” Ángela insisted. The wooden floorboards creaked under her moccasins. Next to the still-open suitcase lay a bottle of Chanel No. 5, and a silk Hermès scarf poked out between the zippers.

“What you’re saying shows how much you don’t know me. What I long for most is independence, for God’s sake, to be the way I was in Hialeah and Cayo Hueso. Here I can’t even get a damn job.”

“I’ve already told you, something could show up any moment—”

“That’s ancient history. It’s June of 1973 and I’m still waiting, driving the car your daddy gave you, in the house he pays for, with both of us putting food on the table from his wallet. That dependence is what killed our love.”

“Killed, you said?”

“Yes, killed.”

“So you’re throwing away what we had.”

“You threw it away already.”

“I’m not going to argue with you over nonsense,” she retorted as she tried yet again, and without success, to stuff the Hermès scarf into a corner of the suitcase. “I’m leaving for Cuba tonight, and that’s it. Better that we talk about all this when I return. This is no time for petit bourgeois arguments, Cayetano. It’s the moment of truth!”

11

H
e heard the breaking news flash at Alí Babá, on Radio Magallanes, and heard the musical gunshots in the background. The reporter spoke from the center of the capital, where the Tacna Regiment had risen up against Salvador Allende’s government and was advancing toward the presidential palace, La Moneda. The attempted coup came live and direct over the radio, like in the American movies, turning the country into a passive spectator. Seated next to the window, as though refusing to admit the danger that was taking place outside, Cayetano drank his steaming cup of coffee and waited for the poet to walk down Collado Way toward his house, so that he could say good-bye.

“The rebel is a certain Colonel Souper,” Hadad commented, drying his hands on his apron. “Now everything is really going to shit.”

The reporters shouted over the fray to make themselves heard, describing the tank movement of that primary Chilean regiment as it moved into Santiago toward La Moneda. Another journalist called on the people to remain calm in their factories, rural towns, ports, offices, and universities. President Allende, another reporter said from a mobile post in Barrio Alto, had left his residence on Tomás Moro Street, and was advancing toward La Moneda as quickly as he could,
with his bodyguards in a caravan of blue Fiat 125S. He planned to stop the coup.

“What about the military men on Allende’s side?” Cayetano asked Hadad, who was gazing pensively through the window at the Mauri Theater, where stray dogs were resting. Collado lay before them, dirty and deserted. “Because if the president himself has to go out to face traitors in this country, then we really are screwed, my friend.”

“It seems that not all the military squadrons are backing Souper,” Hadad said.

Cayetano lit a cigarette. “Is that right? How do you know?”

Outside, life continued as though nothing had changed, he thought, worried, exhaling a voluminous column of smoke. That is to say, life continued mutely, without echoes or shrillness, without impassioned people coming out to protest what was happening in Santiago. A thick mist began to obscure the city, and to Cayetano it seemed a terrible omen. He felt a screw come loose in his soul. Where was his wife now? In some safe house in Santiago, prepared to take up arms for her government, or in the sticky heat of Havana already, in an olive-green uniform, crawling through mud with a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder?

A communiqué from the party committee of Unidad Popular announced that the government would shortly give instructions for facing down the coup’s perpetrators, and that for the moment Chileans should stay alert and ready for war in their schools and workplaces. According to the journalists, Allende was still heading downtown through morning traffic, on an interminable, winding journey, after which he would address the nation. What use was this call for calm to an unemployed foreigner like him? Cayetano wondered. Should he run off to the Hucke factory, where he’d stood guard a few nights earlier, and place himself at the disposal of Commander Camilo Prendes? Then what? Go out and face down armed soldiers, armored tanks, and
the officials who’d been conspiring against democracy since Allende had arrived at La Moneda, if Ángela was to be believed? Face them with what? With the bamboo cane he’d been offered at Hucke, or with slingshots, stones, and nunchucks?

Two trucks passed down Alemania Avenue, carrying workers waving red and green flags, sympathizers with the popular government who seemed in a hurry to get somewhere. In Collado Way, however, the dogs were still curled up under the theater marquee, and there were no signs of the poet. Maybe he was still in the hospital? Would the doctors attend to him this week, or would the attempted coup distract them? He felt impotent. The situation scared him: a rebel colonel in the capital, Ángela about to leave for Cuba, their marriage on the rocks, the poet sick, and him charged with the mission of finding the only doctor who could save him. He feared that sedition was spreading through the country like the malignant cells in the poet’s body.

He had no choice but to stay in Alí Babá, with the disheartening sense that he was a mere spectator. His wife was right. Being a foreigner was the worst. Better to suffer misfortune in your homeland than to have only a passable time overseas. He ordered another coffee from Hadad, and as the man filled the small coffeemaker with grounds and grumbled to himself behind the bar, a new radio dispatch began. This time, the reporter announced, in a hoarse, truculent voice like those sometimes heard on afternoon radio theater, that now General Carlos Prats, the army chief, was marching, pistol in hand, into the center of the capital to quash the rebellion. Whom would the rest of the armed forces support? the alarmed journalist asked himself amid shouts and blaring horns. Three coffees later, the tension waned. Souper surrendered, the radio now announced. Order and tranquillity were restored, the pro-government station celebrated Prats as a hero, and it was said that Allende was back in his office at La Moneda, in command of the nation from Arica to Magallanes,
including the Easter Islands and Robinson Crusoe Island. The leftist parties immediately called a rally in front of the presidential palace for that afternoon, and “La Batea,” the catchy song by the band Quilapayún, began to cheer up the day with its Caribbean rhythm. People walked on Alemania Avenue once more, cars and buses reappeared, Alí Babá filled up with happy patrons, and the city was bursting with life.

According to the people who sat at the soda fountain, drinking the smelly wine Hadad diluted with water every night, Allende had ordered the armed forces to crush the uprising and defend democracy. If they didn’t, he’d made it clear from the radio in his Fiat 125, he’d do it himself with gun in hand and the backing of both his bodyguards and the people, and the men in uniforms would be responsible in the eyes of history for whatever happened. Faced with this threat, even the generals who had conspired against Allende stepped up to support him, and the loyal Prats was able to reach the street and, with his back covered, disarm the insubordinates. The story quickly spun into a legend: alone and with his gun at the ready, the general stopped the deafening advance of rebel tanks, while the people chanted his name from the sidewalks. Souper had stuck his head out of the top of his tank like a rat peering from its lair, and the crowd had frantically applauded the victory of democracy.

That night, all the plazas of Chile filled with rallies organized by the Single Center for Chilean Workers and Unidad Popular. In Santiago, thousands of citizens celebrated in front of La Moneda, where Salvador Allende stood on a balcony and thanked Prats, the armed forces, and the people themselves for their defense of the Constitution. In Valparaíso, Cayetano joined the festivities in the Plaza del Pueblo, where he danced cumbias and boleros with a young woman who had black curly hair, eyes the color of olives, and
café con leche
skin, and wore an amaranth-colored blouse, baring large, straight teeth when she smiled. He returned home at dawn, having drunk
pisco sours with the girl at a restaurant called Jota Cruz, which was crammed with customers eating
chorrillana
over french fries, drinking beer and wine, and belting out “Bandera Rossa” and “La Internacional.”

He was reading Maigret alone in his bedroom when the phone rang.

“Don’t ask where I’m calling from,” his wife said in a tone that sounded as if she were calling from another world. “This was only a practice coup, a test run. Now they know the people don’t have weapons with which to defend themselves. They’ve got us now. Don’t tell me you were one of those fools who went out to celebrate?”

12

T
he Mexico City sky was dense and gray, like the warships docked at the Valparaíso port, Cayetano Brulé thought. He rode in the backseat of a green taxi known as a “crocodile,” which was taking him from the airport to his hotel in Zona Rosa. The Chrysler made its way slowly through traffic thick with buses, trucks, taxis, motorcycles, and the shouting street vendors flooding the city’s central arteries, hawking needles, combs, drinks, and newspapers. New buildings of concrete and glass replaced mansions with pillars, balconies, and gardens, changing the character of the streets. Enormous billboards hid undeveloped areas studded with shabby hovels, while numerous Cadillacs with chrome accents and uniformed chauffeurs revealed the fortunes being made in Mexico. An enormous number of restaurants, with tables out on the sidewalk, for the benefit of the cheerful, boisterous crowds enjoying the benign climate of the capital, infected the city with an optimism born of the belief that the path of progress had been found. Cayetano sadly thought of the city of Santiago, which at this very moment was submerged in cold and darkness, the clamor of street chaos, and the threat of tear gas.

He still didn’t understand the poet’s need for discretion in searching for the man who could save his life. For a person who felt
death close at hand, his reaction seemed inexplicable. Was it true that he was keeping his illness secret to keep from feeding the right’s campaign against Allende? So many unanswered questions, he thought as he rolled down the window, inhaled the street’s smell of gasoline and tar, and listened to the murmur of the motor and the entreaties of women running alongside the taxis, selling matches and candles. In all honesty, Neruda was an icon of the global left as an acclaimed poet, communist activist, and friend of Allende’s. Was that why, despite the fact that Bracamonte was his last hope, he wouldn’t look for him by crying out his name to the four winds?