The Neruda Case (14 page)

“In a newspaper from the time when you were here, they appear together in a photo. Her name is Beatriz. You’re right, an amazing woman, Don Pablo. What was her maiden name?”

“I don’t remember. I met her as his wife. All I clearly remember is her face. She was from Germany. And incomparably beautiful. This is coming from someone who’s always looked at women with great interest.”

“And not only looked.”

“And not only looked,” the worn-out voice admitted, changing tone. “So as soon as you find the doctor, call me for your exact instructions. I repeat: don’t even think of speaking to him before calling me. Don’t go inside his house if we haven’t talked. Promise me you’ll do everything exactly as I say. That doctor is a capricious, reserved man. There’s only one way to approach him, and I’ll reveal it to you when the time comes.”

He thought Don Pablo was being overly dramatic again, with all this mystery. He tried to calm him.

“Don’t worry. I’ll do as you say.” Then he attempted to bring the poet back to reality. “How’s your health?”

“Do you want the truth?”

He feigned composure. “Of course, Don Pablo.”

Don Pablo was conclusive. “I can’t be fixed.”

“What?”

“Just that. The people around me, including my wife, want to make me believe I’ll recover. They think I’m naive, that I don’t know what’s wrong with me. A look in the mirror each morning is enough to know the truth. Mirrors don’t lie. Matilde says that it’s a bone condition, but I know I’m screwed, Cayetano. There’s no cure. Not for me, and not for Chile. Salvador suffers from a double cancer: one from reactionaries who won’t let him build socialism democratically, and another from allies who want to impose socialism through armed force. His commitment to the people is to create socialism through peaceful means, but these people are going to screw him. It’s sad to be an old man, and worse to be a sick old man in a sick country, Cayetano.”

In the end, he thought, Don Pablo’s dramatics were justified. His words were resonant with meaning, touching many layers at once. Those were his metaphors, the turns of phrase he said he’d learned from that bearded Whitman, or whatever the name was of that guy whose disguise he loved to wear. Cayetano had to respond with something, and he chose politics.

“Is there still a food shortage?”

“You think that sort of thing resolves itself from one day to the next?”

He felt clumsy and chastened.

“Of course not, Don Pablo.”

“The lack of food and the black market are undermining the confidence of the middle class. You know that confidence can’t
last much longer. Nixon blocks us from selling copper abroad, and the right boycotts our economy from within. We’re a silent Vietnam, Cayetano.”

Perhaps it was the war reference that restored Cayetano’s fighting spirit. He seized the opportunity. “We’ll win this battle, Don Pablo. I’m going to find the doctor. Now you rest, and I’ll have news for you soon. Have faith, Don Pablo, have faith.”

18

Á
ngel Bracamonte died ages ago,” said the elderly lady in the wheelchair.

Cayetano Brulé was crushed, since he’d hoped the distinguished millionaire would guide him to the Cuban who held the poet’s cure. The years may have perforated Sarah Middleton’s memory, but she had no doubt that Bracamonte had died a long time ago. Seated on an armchair, Cayetano thought the widow would soon only remain in photographs, oil painting portraits, the memories of children and grandchildren who visited her on Sundays after Mass, in that neocolonial Polanco mansion, with its thick walls, French tiles, and corridors flanked by wooden pillars. Nothing more.

“Are we talking about the same Ángel Bracamonte?” Cayetano insisted.

The elderly lady folded her hands in the lap of her black dress, looked at him with irritation, and asked, “Aren’t we speaking about the man who worked with medicinal plants?”

“Exactly—the doctor.”

“No, he was no doctor,” she corrected him. Her dentures made a rattling sound, like bones shaken in a bag. “He worked with medicinal plants, but he wasn’t a doctor.”

“And he died in Mexico City?”

“I don’t know where he died. It’s all the same. You think it matters where a person dies? What matters is where you go after you die. He was a good person, in any case, that man. A biologist or something like that. He had a salary. At some point he devoted himself entirely to the struggle against cancer, and then he disappeared from the social circles of Mexico City,” the woman said. At her side, a maid in cap and apron stood as impassive as a statue. “I think he died of the same disease he was researching.”

“And you never met any of Bracamonte’s relatives?”

“Listen, young man, strictly speaking, we were never friends. We saw each other at a reception here, a ceremony there. That was all. I don’t even know where he came from.” She gestured with her right hand, which bore a diamond-encrusted ring.

In that case, if Bracamonte was dead, he was at a dead end, Cayetano thought with dismay. He wondered how he would tell the poet. Immediately, by phone, or in person once he arrived in Valparaíso? His dark brown eyes roamed from Sarah’s blue eyes to the Gobelin tapestries embroidered with fox hunt scenes that hung on either side of the fireplace, and then at the furniture, upholstered with leather in the
frailero
style, which shone in the light of the chandelier. What would be the least demoralizing way to break the news to the poet? If the everyday news in Chile depressed him, the fact that Bracamonte had died—and taken all the healing plants’ secrets with him—would surely speed up his decline.

“And Beatriz, his wife? What do you remember about her?”

A surprising cough, as virulent as an electric shock, shook the woman’s body. It was a hoarse cough, and sounded as hollow as a plaster statue. Her maid offered her a glass of water with a few drops of valerian.

“She was one of the most beautiful women in Mexico City,” the old woman said, eyeing the glass distrustfully. Although she grumbled,
she took the medicine. “And he was a handsome, intelligent guy, with personality. So attractive that, as a widower, despite his age, he married a woman young enough to be his daughter. But she vanished after he died. I have no idea where she is now.”

He would return to Valparaíso with empty hands. The thought overwhelmed him. And the empty hands struck him as more than a mere metaphor. There was nothing left for him to do. The truth was the least that Neruda deserved. He couldn’t join the adulating chorus that insisted he’d recover, that what he had wasn’t so serious, but nor should he transmit the bad news by phone. If Ángel Bracamonte was dead and Beatriz had disappeared, then everything had gone to hell. What a mess! The mission was over, he should raise his anchor, return to Valparaíso, and tell Neruda he would never again see the doctor he needed.

“And what did Beatriz do?” he asked with a scrap of hope. The old woman blinked in her chair, perhaps sedated by the valerian. Was it possible that more than valerian went in Doña Sarah’s glass? “That is, did she do anything in addition to being Ángel’s wife?”

“It’s just …so much time has passed.” The bones in her hand made a macabre, creaking sound, like Caribbean keys. “Now that you mention it, I believe I once heard that, as a widow, she taught at a high school for young ladies. She probably taught the codes of etiquette, that sort of thing.”

“Do you remember the name of the place, Mrs. Middleton?”

“Four Roses. I remember because it sounds like a brand of whiskey. But that was a long time ago, it’s been an eternity since Ángel’s death. Now you tell me, Pancho Villa, why such a fuss over a couple nobody remembers anymore?”

19

B
eatriz de Bracamonte, you say?”

“That’s right. She worked here in the 1940s.”

“María, do you remember a teacher by the name Bracamonte?”

“What did you say her name was?”

“Beatriz de Bracamonte.”

The old woman cleaning the windows of the Four Roses Institute’s secretarial office wrung gray water into a tin bucket, then examined Cayetano Brulé at the table. Her eyes slid over his strange purple tie with small green guanacos. She had never seen such a striking piece of clothing, but that was life, and all kinds of things could be found on God’s green earth, she thought. Nobody had ever asked about Beatriz Bracamonte.

“Maybe Mrs. Delmira could help him,” she suggested.

“Well, please take this gentleman to Mrs. Delmira,” the secretary said before putting her glasses back on and returning to the forms in her typewriter. “I’ll call her and let her know.”

The woman escorted Cayetano across a patio with a pool and palm trees, lined with stone arches. She took him to a cool office with overflowing bookshelves and bars on the window. Mrs. Delmira, diminutive
and fragile, was writing behind a wooden desk in a corner. She was probably around sixty years old. She smiled affably from behind wire-rimmed glasses, which gave her a distracted air.

“Did you know Beatriz de Bracamonte?” he asked her after they had exchanged greetings.

“Of course. Despite the years, it’s not easy to forget a person like her.”

He invited her to talk more at a nearby
taquería
. He needed something hot to drink after reading in the taxi, in the pages of the
Excelsior
, that things were getting worse in Chile. The truck drivers there, terrified that the revolution would expropriate their vehicles, had just agreed to launch a national strike of indefinite length, which would worsen the food shortage and lengthen the lines at grocery stores. The JAPs, neighborhood committees that strove to guarantee equitable distribution of supplies, were not reaching their goals, and the black market was thriving. It was hard to get gasoline, even for fire trucks and ambulances, and the price of kerosene, the fuel of the poor, was exploding through the roof. Yes, he needed a coffee: small, sweet, and strong, like they made it in Versailles or La Carreta, on Eighth Street in Miami.

“I’ve got thirty minutes for you,” Mrs. Delmira warned him from her desk. She seemed convinced that teaching at the prestigious Four Roses of La Condesa, at her age, was a privilege that gave her special status.

They left the cracked walls of the building for the ceiling of clouds that hung over the city. They soon found a table on the street, in the shade of a jacaranda tree. The teacher ordered pork tacos with cheese and beans, as well as a coffee, since she had not eaten breakfast yet. Cayetano restrained himself to a coffee with milk, which he waited for impatiently while cars and pickup trucks drove by. This neighborhood had a village feel, he thought, something pleasant and tranquil, impervious to the immensity of Mexico City.