The Neruda Case (15 page)

“Why are you looking for Beatriz?” asked Mrs. Delmira as the waiter placed a basket of corn tortillas and guacamole on the table.

“I’m actually looking for her husband.” He tried a tortilla. It was as soft and supple as a nun’s hand.

“He died a long time ago.”

“Are you sure?”

“Completely. She worked here as a widow. Then she disappeared.”

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” he asked, taking another tortilla, this time adding guacamole. The local cuisine was not bad at all, he thought. “Do you mean that she died?”

“She taught German and manners at the institute for a time, but when she became a widow, she left. He died in 1958 or 1959, and she left in 1960. They had a daughter.”

“A daughter? What was her name?”

“Tina.”

“Did she study at the institute?”

“No. I don’t know where she went to school.”

“Where do you think they went?”

“That’s a mystery. Her colleagues are long retired. They were all older. Four Roses is known for hiring experienced people. Beatriz was the exception.”

The waiter brought their food and drinks to the table, then left them in peace. The teacher dived into the tacos and began to devour them with relish. The street stretched before them with its closed doors and windows, as the sun warmed the pavement and their table.

“So you can’t imagine where Beatriz might have gone?”

“That’s something nobody knows. But if I were pressed, I’d say Havana.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps because she met a Cuban,” she said, smiling with her mouth full. Cayetano clung stoically to his coffee.

“You know this, or you’re guessing?”

“I’m guessing.”

He envisioned his native city, the way it looked from the sea, the buildings of the Malecón pushing into the blue sky, the stone fortresses guarding the bay as sunlight blazed against the tiles of colonial houses. He could taste the breeze that rustled the dresses of women with swaying hips and swirled in the afternoons with tropical opacity through the hallways. He imagined Beatriz making love behind the undulating lace curtains of a bedroom, attracted by a revolution freshly arrived from the Sierra Maestra. If Beatriz was in her forties in the 1960s, then she should be over fifty now, he calculated. But why was he so concerned with this woman, when it was Ángel whom he needed, and that man had already turned to dust?

The coffee tasted reasonably good, better than Hadad’s, at least. He brushed his mustache, which made him feel at home in Mexico, but foreign in Chile. If in Mexico all men sported mustaches, in Chile all the revolutionaries grew beards, while the enemies of Allende’s government had well-shaven cheeks and hair slicked back with gel.

“And that’s all you know about Beatriz?”

“I’ve already told you. I think she went to Havana.” She pulled another piece off the pork taco. Those damn tacos certainly smelled good, Cayetano thought, but he stuck to his coffee.

“Did she ever talk to you about any Cuban men?” he asked.

“Never. But once I saw her having a meal at Café Tacuba with a Cuban, to whom she introduced me. One can imagine the rest. She was extremely beautiful.”

“Is it true that Ángel was a doctor?”

“I believe so. He was convinced that the Indians had been treating cancer since before the Spaniards arrived, using medicinal plants that they kept secret. Beatriz mentioned it to me one day. She was worried.”

“Worried?”

“She was afraid. She said the plants were dangerous, that just as they could save human lives, they could also end them.”

“And how did Bracamonte die?”

“He was poisoned.”

“By one of his concoctions?”

“That was never discovered. But his death was a sign that he’d made a deal with the devil, sir,” Mrs. Delmira affirmed, crossing herself with her mouth full of meat.

20

H
e found the poet dozing in La Nube, wrapped in a blanket. A manuscript rested in his lap, and his feet were propped on the white leather footstool, which was stained with green ink. Hawthorn logs burned in the fireplace, and below, the city faded into morning mist. Sergio had told him that the poet had just arrived home from radiotherapy. Cayetano studied Neruda from the bar, his rhythmic breath, his hands folded over his abdomen, his cap tilted over his forehead.

“Did you find him?” the poet asked suddenly, opening his eyes.

“He’s dead, Don Pablo.”

“What?”

“Dr. Ángel Bracamonte is dead,” Cayetano replied. He didn’t want to become one more person feeding him daily white lies, as though the poet were a child, and death an inconceivable topic.

“Are you sure?” He threw the manuscript onto the day’s newspapers. He appeared to have received confirmation of his suspicions.

Cayetano slowly crossed the living room. “Completely.”

With a deep sigh, the poet interlaced his hands again and stared in silence at the white ceiling. An Andean melody rose from the lower floors of La Sebastiana, sad, rather depressing, performed on
charango
and
trutruca
by a folk group that was currently popular. It was the theme music for the governmental television station.

“When did he die?” he asked, looking down.

“At least fifteen years ago.”

The poet bit his lips and passed a nervous hand over his face. They remained silent, pensive, listening to the crackle of the fire and the caw of gulls as they glided around the house. As the birds flew toward the bay, they formed white crosses that slid against the vault of the sky. For a long time the poet watched them, as though they contained the answer to his search, and as though he smelled the intense perfume of distant eucalyptus.

“I feared as much,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Don Pablo. I did everything I could. Would you like the details?”

“What did I hire you for, Cayetano, if not so you could find out and tell me everything?”

“It isn’t much,” he said, adjusting his glasses as he stood in the middle of the living room, which now seemed as large as an ocean. “Some remember him as a romantic. Others as a visionary unable to realize his dream. And there are those who believe he wasted his life’s work by not leaving written evidence of his research.”

“He didn’t even leave disciples?”

“Not a single page of notes, Don Pablo.”

The poet shook his head several times and muttered something unintelligible. Cayetano had the feeling that during his absence Neruda’s cheeks had become bluer. He sat down on the floral-print armchair across from the poet, quietly, without making the floorboards creak.

“I did what I could, Don Pablo.”

“Bracamonte may have been nothing more than an angel who sought to delay death. But it didn’t work. Perhaps it’s better this way,” the poet murmured in resignation. “It would be terrible if we were
immortal. There can’t be anything more boring than eternity. Life would become a torment in later years.” Beneath his philosophical tone lay certain rancor toward the reality of death. “Did you at least find his wife?”

“In a way.”

Now he changed his position and attitude, as though trying to shed his sadness over the news.

“What the hell does ‘in a way’ mean?” he cried in irritation, imitating Cayetano’s tone. “Now you’re going to talk like the doctors and Matilde? You think I’m an idiot who’ll buy anything you say? Did you see her or not?”

Cayetano suddenly felt a cold current seeping in through the window, and he wondered how it felt to the poet, whether the cold of death was different from the cold of winter.

“I couldn’t find her,” he explained. “Her name is Beatriz, but nobody knows her maiden name.”

The poet looked at his hands. “I met her as Bracamonte’s wife, and you know what an old man’s memory is like? Pure fog.”

Was Don Pablo hiding something? Cayetano wasn’t getting paid to play psychologist. He decided to press forward with his own information. “It seems she lives in Cuba …”

The poet frowned in surprise. “In Cuba? Since when?”

“Since around 1960. She left Mexico when she was already a widow, according to an acquaintance.”

“She had children with the doctor, right?”

“A daughter. Tina.”

The poet’s large brown eyes grew more alert, as they always did when he was talking about women. Cayetano already knew this expression, with its fleeting, youthful glow. “A young woman, then. How old?”

“She was a teenager in the early sixties. So today she should be around thirty.”

“Curious,” he said, passing his hand over the moles on his cheek. “In 1960, I was also on the island. I spoke with Fidel. He didn’t like that poem where I say that revolution is made not by leaders but by the people. Some writers and poets, recently converted communists, attacked me for it. They, who’d never once gotten their hands dirty for socialism, accused me, a lifelong communist, of not being a true revolutionary. … In any case, young man, you can’t give up the search for Beatriz Bracamonte.”

Once again he sensed that Don Pablo was acting, as though he were hiding beneath another disguise, one that didn’t hang in the top-floor closet but that he kept inside, under his skin. Could he be even more ill than Cayetano had believed, and hiding his despondency? He needed to tread lightly.

“Beatriz is probably in Cuba, Don Pablo. But I doubt she has the information you need. She taught German and manners at a girls’ school in Mexico.”

“Manners, now that I don’t believe. Who cares about manners these days? German, more likely. She had a lot of German in her. It’s incredible that I can’t remember all her last names, but she was definitely half German.”

“But if she taught German …”

“What?”

“She probably knows very little about plants that cure cancer.”

He had said the cursed word. But the poet was not afraid of words.

“What do you know? Women are the ones who taught me everything, starting with my grandmother Trinidad, who raised me after my biological mother died. Without her, I wouldn’t be who I am, Cayetano,” he affirmed with a sudden spark in his eyes. “If there’s anyone who can help me now, young man, it’s Beatriz, widow of Bracamonte. You have to find her, and now I’m going to tell you why.”

21

T
hey went for a walk on Alemania Avenue, despite the poet’s exhaustion. He was the one who wanted to go out so they could breathe the clear, cold afternoon air and take in the bay as they talked. They walked past Alí Babá and the Mauri Theater, whose marquee read
“The 39 Steps,”
and passed Yerbas Buenas Hill with its Oriental banana trees, still without leaves, and Guillermo Rivera, with its grocers on three corners, and then they arrived at San Juan de Dios Hill, with its English architecture, where Cayetano lived. Echoes of cranes and metal rose from the port, as well as a briny aroma that comforted the poet.