The Neruda Case (34 page)

The poet thanked him solemnly for the visit, and said the manuscript was about to be delivered to the publisher Quimantú. He wanted the leader to be the first to experience it.

“Well, that’s why I came,” said Allende. “And how’s your health? Remember, you can’t lie to a doctor. Much less a doctor-president.”

“I’m in a bad way, Salvador, but I’m getting by. You know what’s happening, let’s not fool ourselves. But you didn’t come here to listen to my complaints, you came to hear my newest poems. Whiskey?”

Cayetano hurried over with the full glasses. His hand was shaking as he extended the tray toward the head of state, who met him with a warm gaze and a relaxed hello. His hand still shook as he offered the second glass to the poet, who winked conspiratorially, enthused by his protégé’s skill in playing the role of waiter. Neruda was right, Cayetano thought; life was a parade of disguises.

“Could you pass me the manuscript that’s on my bed, please?” the poet asked him.

He picked it up quickly and glanced at the cover. The title was typed, and read “Incitement to Nixoncide and Praise for the Chilean Revolution.” He gave it to the poet and returned to the bar. Neruda swilled a sip of whiskey through his mouth in preparation, then began to read the verses, which were handwritten in green ink. Although he pretended to be busy washing glasses, wiping down the bar, and pouring water from the faucet, Cayetano spied every moment of that unusual recital. Neruda read the verses in an exhausted and monotonous voice, in a nasal tone that lengthened his vowels and turned his reading into a kind of despaired lament, an orphan’s song, while the president listened with his gaze fixed on the bay, legs crossed, chin resting on one fist. He remained immobile for a good while, then uncrossed his legs, scratched his temple, and elegantly pulled on the sleeves of
his jacket, keeping his full attention on the poet, who kept reciting, sometimes reading, sometimes speaking from memory, occasionally refreshing his mouth with whiskey. Cayetano thought he must be dreaming. Now not only was he working as a private investigator for the world’s most important living poet, but he was also the sole witness to an encounter that in the future would surely be considered historic. Was he dreaming? What was certain was that both men were here, a few paces from him, the poet and the revolutionary president, making history. Was it really happening, or was it possible that he was imagining the scene back in his old Florida life and that none of this was real, not Allende or Neruda or La Sebastiana or his own prolonged stay in Valparaíso?

“What an incredible political epic poem, Pablo,” the president exclaimed from his armchair, still motionless, though deeply moved, when the poet had finished. “Never before has anyone written something so true about a revolution and its enemies. It has resounding strength and beauty. It should be known all over the world. An accurate artistic report of the brutal aggression aimed at us by the empire.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” the poet answered, closing his large saurian eyelids.

“I’m just plagued by one question, my dear Pablo,” the president said after a little while, draining his glass.

“What’s that, Salvador?”

Cayetano listened with attentive silence.

“How am I to keep a man as my ambassador when he incites his colleagues throughout the world to murder the head of the empire, even if only with poems?”

For Neruda, that question was already resolved.

“Don’t worry,” he replied, resting his palms on the last page of the open manuscript. “Right this moment, face-to-face with you, I’m stepping down from my post in Paris. It’s time to defend the
revolution in Chile. I can’t be absent from this battle. As an ambassador, I can’t say everything I want to say as a poet. Your hands are free, Salvador.”

Allende stood, and the poet did the same. Then Cayetano saw them melt into a wordless embrace in front of the window, the bay shining behind them under a clear sky, ringed with faraway mountains. As he dried glasses he’d already washed several times, he sensed that it was a good-bye, that they would never see each other again.

The president began to slowly climb the steps toward the roof. The poet followed him. Cayetano came behind them, in his waiter’s disguise. They paused in the studio, where the president examined the old Underwood and the shelf brimming with crime novels. Allende picked up
The Mask of Dimitrios
, by Eric Ambler, and asked the poet if he could borrow it, as his defense secretary, Orlando Letelier, had just recommended it. Then they went out to the breezy roof, where Sergio was chatting with the pilot.

Cayetano watched them say good-bye with one last embrace as the blades began to turn with a deafening whir. The president boarded the helicopter, closed the hatch, and sat down beside the pilot. He had returned to his bubble.

With his hands in his pockets, the poet smiled at the president as the wind disheveled the little hair he had left. The helicopter rose from the terrace and began to fly, swinging over the roofs of Florida Hill as Allende waved and gesticulated at the world below. From Collado Way, Alemania Avenue, and plazas lined with palm trees, from windows and wooden balconies, neighbors responded by waving flags and chanting his name. It was as though Valparaíso had burst into a carnival. Pablo Neruda and Cayetano Brulé kept their arms high in the air until the helicopter became as a minuscule golden dragonfly and disappeared with a remote whistle into the ponchos of snow draped over the Andes.

They went back inside, silent, gazes lowered, and after some
time Cayetano felt compelled to reopen their conversation. Not to break the tension, but out of loyalty to the matter still at hand.

“We’ve got to investigate in Bolivia, Don Pablo.”

Don Pablo didn’t answer, nor did he look up. He seemed to be turning it over and over in his mind.

After a while, he said, with difficulty breathing, “I see that the readings I’ve recommended have been effective, young man. To that end, I’ve got another novel for you,
Twenty-three Instants of a Spring
, by Konstantin Simonov. You should read it. Soviet espionage in Nazi Berlin.”

Cayetano followed his drift. The visit must have left him too excited to immediately discuss action. “Is it better than Simenon?” he asked.

“As a disciplined activist, I should say yes. But between us: Nobody beats the French in matters of food or culture. You’ve got to read that novel. I have no patience for people who read only good books. It’s a sign they don’t know the world.”

“What about the trip to Bolivia, Don Pablo?”

Again Neruda was slow to respond. And his words were a surprise. “No, young man, never mind that. The case is over.”

Now it was he, Cayetano, who was left speechless. But his inner detective rose up bravely, to do the talking.

“What do you mean, it’s over?”

Don Pablo paced the room slowly, hands behind his back.

“I made a mistake,” he replied without looking at him. “I’ve been wrong many times in my life, but this time Salvador’s visit really opened my eyes. I have no right to spend my energies on a personal obsession, a ghost of my own past, when the destiny of Chile, of socialism, of all the things I believe in and have defended all my life are in jeopardy. When I was young, I lived like a sleepwalker, immersed in my own dreams and speculations, far away from real people, and if I woke up, it was thanks to communism and the Spanish Civil War.
‘No, the time has come, so flee, / shadows of blood, / stars of ice, retreat to the path of human steps / and take the black shadow from my feet!’” he recited, as though seeking the strength he needed in those verses he’d written years before. “Now history is repeating itself, it’s the same, the same. There’s too much to do here for me to gaze at my navel and hunt ghosts, Cayetano.”

He stopped but did not look up. Cayetano, however, didn’t take his eyes off Neruda.

“That ghost is made of flesh and blood, Don Pablo. And you’ve already let it escape once before.”

The poet changed his tone. “You’re not the first detective I’ve hired, Cayetano. This situation has been eating at me for a long time. I’ve spent several thousand dollars on professional investigators who didn’t find anything, and some of them even tried to trick me. With photographs and everything. At the end of the day, Matilde was right to chase them off. It wasn’t only jealousy. It wasn’t only me she didn’t trust.” Now he looked at Cayetano, but his eyes had changed. Something cold and distant gleamed in them. “That’s why I came to you in secret, Cayetano. I needed someone I could trust, and your youth made me trust you. But you yourself are another of my fictions.”

He felt the need to defend himself. “I’m not a fiction anymore, Don Pablo. I’ve found some answers and convincing proofs.”

“Answers to what? And proof of what?” He frowned at Cayetano, standing in the center of the living room. “Here Chile is suffering through the worst abyss imaginable, and we’re lost in conjectures over my resemblance to a German actress. I send you out to investigate something that happened thirty years ago, when we should both have our five senses in the here and now!”

Don Pablo was fleeing, as he had so many times before. Perhaps he was fooling himself, but despite the undeniable urgency of the political situation, he wasn’t fooling Cayetano. Like Galileo Galilei, the poet feared pain; and the deepest pain, the one for which he was
least prepared, didn’t threaten him from current circumstances, but from the past, from the heart, from the depths of his own memory.

“Thirty years ago you renounced your daughter. You’ve just renounced your post, and now you want to renounce more things. It’s the easy way out. Anyone can live like that.”

The former ambassador took no offense. As a recidivist fugitive, he’d likely heard such reproaches more than once in his life.

“You don’t understand me, Cayetano,” he said, as if surfacing in a lake after a long dive. “Didn’t you hear what I said to Salvador? If being an ambassador means censoring what I say as a poet, then I need to stop being an ambassador. My poems are what will survive when I am gone!”

“That’s not what you said before you sent me to Cuba, Don Pablo.”

The poet remembered perfectly. He didn’t deny it, but could no longer stand by his own words. “I was caught up in my hopes, Cayetano. I needed them to keep on living. Now that whole undertaking seems like another facet of my egoism. What need could that young woman have for me, if as you say she’s an actress with the Berliner Ensemble, living in the best neighborhood of East Berlin, known and admired? You have your whole life ahead of you, Cayetano. Keep being a detective if you wish, you’ve proven that you have the nose and persistence of a bloodhound.” The poet couldn’t hide the irritation in his voice, though he maintained his sad nasal tone. “But it’s time for me to drop the nonsense and false hopes and to face reality. If my destiny is not to leave any descendants other than my books, then I should accept it with dignity and without protest.”

In addition to being a poet, he was still a diplomat. Under the surface, he’d offered a pact: he would leave Cayetano with the identity he’d created for him if, in return, Cayetano would leave him in peace. In that case, they should make a pact, but the agreement should be different.

“Don Pablo, you’re Chilean. I’m Cuban. You’ve given your word to Chile. I’m here because I followed a woman who has since left me. Let me go to Bolivia. That way each person can remain in his place: you as a poet, and I as a detective. It’s the best thing for each of us.”

He felt that he’d never been so eloquent in his life. He must have learned something about diplomacy from the poet, and from the books he’d recommended. After a silence, the poet resumed his pacing, making the floorboards creak, and said, “Go to La Paz first thing tomorrow. I know a comrade there who may be able to help you. And now, my Maigret del Caribe, I think it’s best if you leave me alone. There are times when I simply tire of being human.”

51

T
he first night Cayetano Brulé suffered through the altitude of La Paz, Bolivia, he wondered whether he’d survive the agony. As soon as he got off the two-engine aircraft at Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano and tried to rush to the terminal, a steely weight pressed into his chest and kept the thin mountain air, cold as spring water, from reaching his lungs. He sat on a bench to recover his breath.