The Neruda Case (26 page)

“Why not?”

“Because she was incapable of loving someone. She was too pragmatic.”

Cayetano sensed the warm caress of morning sun on his forehead as a soporific languor took over his body. He closed his eyes. Margaretchen’s legs were soft and firm. He inhaled her wine-scented breath.

“She’s a hard woman to locate,” she whispered in his ear.

“Where did she go when she left the school?”

“She’s too influential for you to reach her.”

“At least tell me who can help me.”

Margaretchen began to gently rock her hips. Over her shoulder, Cayetano glimpsed a group of cyclists pedaling beneath the apple trees of Eberswalder Allee. The air still brimmed with birdsong and the Soviet chorus.

“You won’t be able to find her. She’s part of a powerful institution,” she said, her hips still moving.

“Who does she work for?”

“I can’t tell you. It would be the end of me.”

“Then who can help us?”

“Maybe no one, except her daughter.”

“But we don’t even know where she is.”

“You’re determined, but not sly enough, stupid,” she murmured.

“What do you mean?”

“That, at some point, the daughter must have graduated from the high school in Bernau.”

37

M
argaretchen was radiant when she returned from the secondary school, in her wide green dress with white polka dots, which made her look like a student. Cayetano was waiting for her in Mitropa Restaurant, in the S-Bahn station, leafing through a magazine and nursing a bottle of Dresden Pilsner. The principal had found a Tina Schall in the school’s files who had taught theater there on Saturday afternoons during the sixties, despite the fact that her weekdays were devoted to studying theater at the Karl-Marx-Universität, in Leipzig. The school in Bernau had accepted transfer units for her middle school education, which had taken place in Mexico. But then they had lost touch.

“You’re a doll! That Tina is, without a single doubt, the daughter of Beatriz,” Cayetano exclaimed, kissing her on the mouth. “What would you care for?”

“A schnapps would be lovely.”

He immediately returned to the table with a glass of
Doppelkorn
for her. A fan blended the scent of barley into the heat sliding in through the open door.

“I have to find Tina and speak to her,” he said, knocking back his beer.

“In that case, you’ll have to travel to Leipzig.” Margaretchen shook her head, her expression sour after sipping the schnapps. “I have a friend there who’s a dramaturge and may be able to advise us.”

The next day, sporting the tie with small green guanacos that the poet had given him, Cayetano boarded the D-Zug headed south with Margaretchen. Five hours later they took a room at the central Hesperia Hotel. When they went out to stretch their legs on the cobbled city streets lined with peeling façades, they walked past wooden trams that screeched as they turned, through the penetrating smell of coal.

They dined at Auerbachs Keller, located in the vault of a central building, where they were to meet with Karl von Westphalen, Margaretchen’s friend, who ran the workers’ theater at Halle-Neustadt. He arrived as they were finishing a trout cooked in white wine. He was tall, with black eyes and thick eyebrows, and wore his hair in a ponytail. From the way they looked at each other, Cayetano gathered they’d been lovers. Karl vaguely remembered having had a student named Tina in a diction class in the theater department of Karl-Marx Universität, in the city.

“That must have been in 1963, but I don’t remember her face very well. Only that she spoke German with an accent.”

“The woman I’m looking for lived in Latin America before moving here.”

“That could be her. She spoke very good German,” Westphalen emphasized, stroking his hair.

Drunken students at a nearby table were making a racket. Cayetano was intrigued that Beatriz would go by Lederer in Cuba, and by Schall in the German Democratic Republic. Was Schall a nom de guerre at the school on the lake? He should establish Beatriz’s true identity for the investigation to move ahead. Now he envied Maigret, who always had access to official files, could count on the government’s support, and received condensed information from registries
that could confirm people’s identity. There was no challenge, he thought, in investigating that way.

“The young woman I’m speaking of would be about thirty today,” Von Westphalen said over the students’ revelry. There was one guy among them who was slim, with a pale face and a harsh voice, dressed in black clothes that made him resemble a magician. Every once in a while, the magician pretended to fill jars at a stream of beer that poured from the wall, or at least to Cayetano seemed to pour from the wall, as in that scene from
Faust
. Cayetano didn’t take the situation too seriously, as he’d drunk more than his share that night, too. He preferred to ask Karl about the usual path taken by theater graduates in East Germany.

“The best ones find work in Berlin or Weimar,” Von Westphalen explained. “Others go to Rostock or Dresden, or they stay here in Leipzig. And the ones who don’t have connections end up in some provincial theater, as happened to this humble servant.”

“Do you think anyone at the theater department might know something about this former student?”

Von Westphalen replied that he knew a journalist from Berlin who worked for
Die Weltbühne
, an old cultural magazine, and kept abreast of the theater world. Perhaps he was the person to talk to. He wasn’t a certain informant, as the journalist Hannes Würtz occasionally went through hard times, but he’d give him a call the following day. If he should learn anything, he’d leave them a message at the Hesperia. Then he ordered more beer and schnapps.

After barhopping in downtown Liepzig and stopping by a students’ party in a building on Strasse des 18 Oktober, Cayetano and Margaretchen said good-bye to Von Westphalen and returned to their hotel room, staggering, arms around each other.

“What are you thinking about?” Margaretchen asked through the open door of the bathroom, where she was removing her makeup in front of the mirror.

Cayetano placed his glasses on the nightstand and said melancholically, “I’d love to show you Valparaíso. It’s just like life: sometimes you’re high up, sometimes down low, but there are always stairs and passages through which you can rise or descend or break your neck. And there, though you may not believe it, the dead come to life. Would you come?”

“You still don’t understand this world, Cayetano. I can’t leave here until I turn sixty. You’d have to wait a long time.”

He said nothing, irritated by his own clumsiness. Light from the green Hesperia sign pulsed on the ceiling. He suddenly thought of Ángela under the hibiscus trees of Miramar Park, her hurried steps back to the Lada waiting for her in the distance, the loneliness that had overcome him. He also recalled the morning they first met, on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, where retirees killed time in doorways, waiting for death. He saw her again in her olive-green uniform, dissolving into the soft shadows of Havana. He couldn’t deny that he desperately longed for a companion he could fall asleep with every night and share breakfast with the following day, looking out over the sea in Valparaíso. At that moment, the phone rang.

“Cayetano, is that you?” Karl von Westphalen asked through the phone line. “My friend says the person you’re looking for works in the Berliner Ensemble.”

38

H
er name was Tina Feuerbach. Or at least that was the name she used at the Berliner Ensemble, a theater founded in 1949 by Bertolt Brecht. This time the name change didn’t surprise him, since many artists go by pseudonyms. Wasn’t Pablo Neruda called Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto? And wasn’t Gabriela Mistral really Lucíla Godoy Alcayaga? Von Westphalen’s voice filled him with hope: Tina Feuerbach was Tina Lederer, the daughter of Beatriz Schall, born in Mexico in the forties! He wondered whether she was the poet’s daughter. How could he find out for sure? And would she have any idea that her father might not be a Cuban-Mexican doctor, but a Chilean poet? Where was her mother now, the woman whom Neruda had loved when she was young, and the only person in the world who knew the secret truth the poet was so desperate to learn?

The next morning, they went to a tourist office and obtained a copy of the Berliner Ensemble’s current schedule. It informed them that Tina Feuerbach was currently playing Virginia, the astronomer’s daughter, in
Life of Galileo
, a piece written by Brecht during the Nazi era. Cayetano invited Margaretchen to have a drink at a café called Kaffeebaum, where they sat at an outdoor table under the white morning sun. He felt hopeful. If Margaretchen could recognize Tina
as Virginia, he would devise a way to approach the actress and then reach her mother.

They returned to Berlin on the afternoon’s first express train and made their way toward the Berliner Ensemble, where they bought the last two seats available for the weekend show. They were relegated to the last row, but could still count themselves lucky, as
Life of Galileo
was always a box-office hit in the German Democratic Republic, the vendor assured them. Even more so now that Wolfgang Heinz was playing Galileo, and no less than under the direction of Fritz Bennewitz. The poet was right, Cayetano thought. As they’d strolled through Valparaíso, he’d said that only under socialism would art and literature acquire real importance; it was the only context in which people paid devoted attention to writers and artists, which was why governments kept a close watch on intellectuals. Under capitalism, on the other hand, artists could say anything they wanted, because very few people listened.

In the few days before the show, Cayetano and Margaretchen made mad passionate love in his small room at the Stadt Berlin Hotel, while a cold, persistent rain fell heavily over the city, soaking its roofs and trams and cobbled streets with sadness. When the rain gave way to streaks of clear blue cracking open the dirty sky, they went for walks, hand in hand or with their arms around each other, trying to forget that their romance was condemned to die as soon as he passed through the Wall into the West. During those days, they ate at the Ganymedes, an exclusive restaurant near Friedrichstrasse Station, and at Café Flair, on Schönhauser Allee. They went up to the revolving platform at the top of the Television Tower, from which they glimpsed the edges of the divided city, and they visited the Brecht Museum in the writer’s former home.