The Neruda Case (23 page)

I
was attracted to Delia del Carril from the moment I first saw her. It was in a pub called Correos, in Madrid, in 1934. I was dazzled by her self-assurance, her elegance, and the circle of intellectuals with whom she rubbed elbows. I was thirty years old, and she was fifty. I had just arrived in Spain as a diplomatic consul, accompanied by María Antonieta and poor Malva Marina. The Civil War there was brewing.

Delia gave meaning to my life, made me a communist, disseminated my poetry, and refined my tastes and manners. Back then I was unkempt and poorly dressed, my fingers always stained with ink, my pockets stuffed with scribbled paper instead of money. She turned me into the poet I am today. That afternoon, when we first met, I placed my hand on her shoulder, delicately, and from then on we were never apart. Not ever. Well, that is, until I met Matilde twenty years later and left one woman for another.

Delia was absentminded, sensitive, and forgetful, a curious mix of artist and pragmatist, and a disastrous housewife. She couldn’t even fry an egg, mash potatoes, or organize a dinner for friends, yet at the same time she was an outstanding, tireless worker, well versed in the ways of the world, and skilled at forming friendships. That’s how she got the nickname La Hormiga, the Ant. She succumbed like a marionette without strings the day that, in our house in Los Guindos, Santiago, she found a letter from Matilde in my jacket pocket, confessing that she was carrying my child.

“But it’s you I love, Hormiga,” I mumbled. The letter trembled in her hand, and her face was distorted by shock and suffering. “That was just a passing passion. You have always been and always will be my only queen.”

“Without love, our relationship means nothing,” Delia answered coldly. “We’re not some bourgeois marriage, tied by social conventions, Pablo, but a communist couple bound by nothing but love. If that love has died, we should end it.”

She demanded that I leave the house at once. When I did, Santiago was blurred by rain, the thrushes were silent, and the distant peaks of the Andes were enfolded by snow. I moved into La Chascona, a house at the base of Santa Lucía Hill, the house I’d secretly bought for Matilde years before. She was waiting for me there. I switched houses and women like a rider who changes horses in the middle of a race. I haven’t seen Delia since; she’s never spoken out against me and, according to some trustworthy friends, she still loves me. She’s in her nineties now, surrounded by the same walls and furniture that witnessed our breakup. She’s received some recognition as a painter and engraver, and as far as I know, she’s never had another partner. By now, some comrade has probably told her that I’m sick. When I die, her hope of our reuniting will die with me.

In Madrid, she introduced me to Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, Paul Éluard, and Pablo Picasso. She was the one who published
Canto General
secretly in Chile, and fought to end the exile imposed on me by that tyrant, González Videla. Delia was Argentinean, divorced, the daughter of a fallen aristocratic family, and she had arrived in Europe to study under the painter Fernand Léger, which was how she came to frequent the Continent’s communist intellectual circles. When we were first living together, she persuaded me not to keep writing hermetic poems like
Residence on Earth,
and to instead write about love and the political causes that shake the world. Without her, I would not have been a communist, nor would my verses ever have reached millions of readers.

But the truth is the truth: despite the fact that I was married to María Antonieta and responsible for Malva Marina, Delia surreptitiously slid
into my life, and seduced me. I admit that it wasn’t hard for me to leave my wife and daughter to move into la Casa de las Flores, my lover’s house in the Hilarión Eslava section, near the Ciudad Universitaria district of Madrid. In that house, we enjoyed salons with García Lorca, Bergamín, Altolaguirre, Acario Cotapos, and Miguel Hernández. We drank red wine and anisette from Chichón, and then we’d go to the Correos pub, or a nightclub called Satán, which was run by Mario Carreño at 60 Atocha Street, where half-naked women performed “the dance of cocaine” to the rhythm of the Lecuona Orchestra. We drank Montserrat champagne, La Guita sherry, and Sorracina cider, and we’d come home late, quite drunk. I separated from María Antonieta and Malva Marina in 1936, and washed my hands of them in 1943, when they were living in Nazi-occupied Holland.

Delia helped me give refuge in Chile to thousands of Republican Spaniards fleeing the Civil War. We saved them from thick-walled prisons by sending them to Valparaíso on a ship called
Winnipeg.
They made Chile their second homeland, and made their mark on our culture. How could I be so altruistic for the anonymous masses, yet at the same time be so cruel and heartless toward a person I’d loved and another person who carried my blood in her veins? It was Delia who bought, with her own money, the land where we built the house in Isla Negra, which despite its name is neither black nor an island, and which I love and many consider to be my favorite house. Dramas, terrible dramas, surround my homes: the ones in the Orient were devastated by typhoons; the one in Las Flores by pro-Franco gunfire; the one in Los Guindos witnessed the epilogue of our love; the house in Isla Negra was purchased by the woman who shaped me and whom I left for a much younger woman; the home in Santiago, in the Bellavista neighborhood, was acquired so that I could hide that very same younger lover. Only La Sebastiana, this opus of air that levitates over Valparaíso, with its aviary and landing strip, was conceived without stains.

I wish I could have had a daughter with Delia, a healthy and joyful girl who could have helped me forget the melancholy smile that would glimmer on Malva Marina’s monstrous face. But Delia was already barren
when I met her, and could not give me what I longed for. Perhaps I’m confused by my own memories. The fact is, I couldn’t have borne another disaster, another Malva Marina. Which is exactly why I escaped from Beatriz when, years later, at Xochimilco Lagoon, she told me she was bearing my child. I refused to believe it. I lacked the courage to cast aside my literary career with Delia and face the uncertainty of new fatherhood. And much less could I risk a change of such proportions in July 1943, when I had just symbolically married Delia in Tetecala, in the state of Morelos. She was fifty-nine at the time, and I was thirty-nine. She was beautiful and still desirable, no matter what my enemies might whisper to the contrary. The Tetecala night brimmed with mosquitoes. Under the full moon, I gave her a silver necklace made by the indigenous people of Oaxaca, and promised her that we’d be together until death did us part.

“Are you sure I’m the father?” I asked Beatriz in Xochimilco. We were gliding through canals, holding hands in a canoe adorned with flowers. The lead-colored water smelled like deep roots, and the moon’s patina lit the fireflies.

Beatriz glared at me. “Who else would it be?”

“It could be your husband,” I said quietly, letting go of her hand.

She said nothing. Behind us, the boatman kept rowing through the water with long strokes.

“I don’t have the balls to be a father,” I confessed in a whisper. “You know about the monster that was born to me in Spain. That could happen again. If it’s mine, I’d like you to have an abortion. All I can father is deformed beings—and my poems.”

Beatriz leaped out of the canoe and waded through the dark water to a nearby field. Then her silhouette disappeared among the bushes and tree trunks. I never saw her again. Years later, I found out she’d given birth to a different child, a boy, or perhaps a girl, I didn’t even want to know. I supposed at that point that it must have been the offspring of the good Dr. Bracamonte, since they were still married …

33

W
e have a meeting with Comrade Valentina Altmann,” Merluza informed the
Volkspolizist
, who had emerged from a wooden sentry box hidden among birches, to meet them on the asphalt path. “We’re from the Chilean embassy.”

The JHSWP School was in northeastern Berlin, on the shore of a small lake called Bogensee, surrounded by forests. Across from the Wandlitz, another nearby lake, stood a gated neighborhood, home to leaders of the United Socialist Party of Germany, or USPG, headed up by Erich Honecker.

The crossing gate rose slowly, and Merluza drove down a winding gravel path that ran through the shadows of trees.

“This was Goebbels’s summer refuge,” Merluza said. Through the greenery, they glimpsed a stone mansion with a wooden roof. “After the war, it was transferred into the hands of the Soviets, who gave it to the East German government. First it was a center for denazification. For thirty years now, it’s belonged to the FDJ, the nation’s youth association.”

Cayetano looked at the building with a sense of loneliness and despair. He couldn’t understand why Beatriz had abandoned the vitality
of Mexico City and the luminous exoticism of Havana to settle in such a remote, anonymous place.

“Now it’s a monastery for teaching Marxist Leninism,” Merluza went on. “They say the Stasi recruits foreigners here. Classes start in September and end in June. In the summer, the only people here are teachers and translators, who live at the school or in Bernau, a nearby city.”

“And the Mexican woman we’re talking about?”

“Don’t be so impatient. The comrades here should know.”

He parked the Wartburg beside a rusty Volga, and walked to a plaza surrounded by robust, gray three-story buildings of Stalinist design. Valentina was waiting at the front steps. She was a slim woman with sharp features and blue eyes. Merluza introduced them, and they entered the building together. They crossed a spacious lobby and entered a large, desolate restaurant with imposing bronze lamps.

“I’ll wait for you outside,” Merluza said, and left discreetly.

“Ask me anything you like,” Valentina said as she ordered tea for both of them. “If there’s information I can’t provide, there are experienced people in the administrative office who know the school’s history inside out.”

After explaining that she knew he was an emissary of an Unidad Popular leader, Valentina declared, out of the blue, that she recalled no one at the school by the name of Beatriz Lederer. She warned him that his investigation would be complicated by the fact that the school used pseudonyms, and prohibited taking photographs. When Cayetano showed her the photograph of Beatriz, the translator assured him that she’d never seen the woman. The tea was Russian, and a slice of lemon perched on the lip of every cup. They drank in silence. Cayetano feared the terms of “reasons of state” could be blocking his efforts. If that was the case, not even Neruda could push the investigation forward unless he disclosed his real purpose.

He felt depressed, not only by the bitter tea that smacked of lemonade, but also because he recalled Maigret and envied the faith that man had in his own talent, experience, and skill. Reality, he thought, was much harder on people than any fictional world ever was on its characters. The fates that reigned over the universe were crueler than the flesh-and-blood writers who composed novels. It was easier to be an excellent detective in a crime novel than a mediocre detective in implacable reality. He’d have to discuss this one day with the poet, over drinks, while relaxing in that comfortable floral-print armchair, beholding the gorgeous view out of La Sebastiana’s windows.

“How long have you worked here?” he asked Valentina, who was squeezing her lemon slice into the tea.

She had arrived at the school four years earlier, in 1969, and liked the grounds and the foreign students, though not her colleagues, whom she found dull and lacking in passion. A drop of lemon juice struck her chest and rolled down the triangle of skin revealed by the collar of her blouse. Cayetano pictured small and upright breasts, tanned from sunny afternoons that she surely spent naked by Lake Bogensee. He wondered what it would be like to spread that acidic teardrop over her breasts with his fingertip, and pictured Valentina translating paragraphs of
The Communist Manifesto
, by Marx and Engels, and Lenin’s
The State and Revolution
in classrooms packed with revolutionaries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, who after a few months would be staring at her with eyes full of desire. He saw young men determined to share ideals and study political theories, just like his wife at Punto Cero. He saw the JHSWP full of youths anxious to learn the secrets they needed to topple the bourgeoisie and create socialist societies in Third World nations. He saw them studying revolutionary texts by morning, singing battle hymns and organizing forums in the afternoons, and forging secret alliances over long nights of beer and dialogue, during which they fell in love with German
girls and fornicated with them in the forest. He saw many of them dying in combat, or being tortured or killed by the police back in their own countries. And as for him, Cayetano, to what was he devoted? What utopias drove him? His wife was right to criticize his skepticism, his refusal to embrace any cause, his tendency to watch things from a distance.