The Neruda Case (42 page)

“We’re building a new Chile here,” the captain said as he escorted him to the gate of the camp. He had brown hair and large hands. “This nation will no longer be a sanctuary for extremists, either native or foreign.”

He never found out why he’d been arrested, or why he was released. Some prisoners murmured that the military had lists of names provided by infiltrators, informers, and the tortured. For a while, he thought Ángela’s father, the powerful businessman, must have helped him. It was safe to assume that he’d supported the coup. He also guessed that help could have come from the United States embassy, since he, as a Cuban exile, had a North American passport. Nor did he rule out the possibility that he owed his freedom to Maia Herzen,
who, through her military ties, could have anonymously given him a hand. By the time he was back out on the highway—the sun stung brutally, stones dazzled, and hawthorns undulated in the distance—he already knew that Allende had died in La Moneda, that Pinochet had headed up the dictatorship, and that the dead, exiled, and imprisoned numbered in the thousands.

The driver of a Sol del Pacífico finally took him to Isla Negra without charge. Once there, he hurried to the poet’s house, feverishly hoping to find him safe and sound.

“They took him to the capital half an hour ago,” the housekeeper said when she opened the door, scared to death. Waves shook the nearby crags and sprayed white mist over the motorboat and old steam engine in the front garden. “He’s in a very bad state, he won’t even get up anymore. The coup destroyed him.”

“I have to see him. I have an urgent message to give him.”

“I don’t think he’ll recognize you.” She dried her hands on her apron. She invited him in for some scrambled eggs and tea, and to see the havoc caused by the military raid. They walked past walls covered with oil paintings and carved prows; past oak furniture, cabinets displaying sailboats and fine glassware, shelves crammed with first editions and collected shells, stones, and colored bottles, until they reached a hall, where broken pottery, piled books, and wall hangings lay strewn on the floor, as though someone had been in too much of a hurry to take them before leaving. “Don Pablo is in an ambulance to Santiago,” the woman said.

“To which hospital?”

“I don’t know. Doña Matilde took him. It was an emergency, they left very fast. There wasn’t time for anything.”

“And Sergio, his driver?”

“The soldiers took him the day of the coup. And my husband, too,” she said, weeping. “We haven’t heard a thing about them.”

Cayetano returned to the highway with the feeling that everything
was lost and that he’d never be able to give the poet his news. He boarded another bus and paid with money the housekeeper had given him. Somehow, he thought, he’d have to find the poet in the capital, in whatever hospital he was in. He hadn’t traveled half the world and solved the mystery only to surrender now, when he was so close to his goal. Though he was fatally ill, Neruda had to be waiting for his news.

What hospital was he in? Santiago had several. And how could he possibly ask around for such a famous man without drawing the attention of the police? Neruda was the needle, Santiago the haystack, he thought, momentarily pleased with his own choice of metaphor. But later, as the bus was driving down a stretch of highway lined with poplars and sweet acacias, and with the Andes rising straight ahead, he thought the poet would have deemed it a tired metaphor.

A truck of prisoners passed them, and he felt a chill of fear and empathy, remembering his days at Puchuncaví. He knew what awaited those men and women. It was rumored that Allende’s sympathizers were being shot in summary proceedings and that many of them, though this was hard to believe, were being thrown from helicopters into the Pacific, tied to chunks of iron so that they’d never resurface.

An hour later, the bus stopped in front of a military checkpoint. A line of vehicles waited to have their trunks and ID cards inspected. It would take a long time, as the soldiers were being painstakingly thorough in their duties. No one on the bus dared say a thing. At that moment, Cayetano glimpsed an ambulance at the front of the line. It had to be the poet, he thought, full of hope. He got off the bus and ran past the waiting cars. From a distance, he thought he recognized Matilde’s thick hair. She was speaking to an officer while soldiers looked into the ambulance through the open back. They were interrogating the poet as he lay in the ambulance, the bastards! he thought
angrily. He sped up and ran with fresh energy because now, at last, he would see Don Pablo again.

“Stop! Stop!” voices shouted at him, but he kept running, deaf to orders. He was meters from the ambulance when a soldier pushed him and made him fall facedown on the pavement. His glasses flew from his face.

“Where are you going, you asshole?” someone shouted. He felt a kick to his kidneys and a rifle butt hitting his right shoulder.

He raised his head and met with the black mouth of a Mauser. He couldn’t make out the soldier’s face. He reached for his glasses, but a boot crushed his hand. He had to stay down with one cheek stuck to the hot asphalt while the soldier kicked him and demanded to know why he was running.

“I want to talk to the sick man in the ambulance,” he explained, sore and bruised.

The boot’s pressure eased slowly, until his fingers could grope the ground and find his glasses. They were intact. Thank God for that, he thought, spitting out pebbles. He put them on clumsily and was able to make out the outline of the ambulance, the faces of the soldiers who surrounded it, and the green shoots of spring in central Chile. Another round of kicks reminded him of the treatment he’d received in the camp at Puchuncaví.

“Wait your turn, asshole. Order rules here now,” an officer shouted, a pistol in his belt. “Why are you so interested in the old man in the ambulance?”

“Because he’s a friend.”

“Do you write a bunch of crap, too?”

“I want to say good-bye. He’s about to die.”

“Well, there’s no running allowed,” the officer replied, looking at the vehicle, which was starting up again. “Anyway, he’s gone. Where’s your luggage?”

“I have no luggage, my captain,” he replied, imitating the
Chilean twang. If they found out he was Cuban, he’d be behind bars again. A prisoner at Puchuncaví, an actor at the Theater Institute at the University of Chile, had taught him how to hide his Cuban accent. He had also told him he should shave his mustache, something Cayetano could never do, as he considered it a non-negotiable part of his identity. “I’m traveling on the bus at the end of this line, my captain.”

“Well, get back there and wait your turn like you’re supposed to, you faggot. You can look for the poet in Santiago.”

“The capital is very big, my captain. If I lose him now, I’ll never find him again.”

“I thought the poet was oh so famous! If that’s true, how hard can it be to find him? Go on, get back to your bus, you worthless son of a bitch!”

63

H
e arrived in Santiago thirty minutes before curfew, and found a room in a hotel for romantic trysts near Mapocho Station. At a nearby soda fountain he had a Barros Luco with a lot of avocado, and two beers. Then he walked out, concealing his burp from the prostitutes sitting outside. They were offering to spend the entire curfew period with one man for a sale price. Business seemed bad for them, as people were going home early and very few could afford the cost of a whole night.

The shop windows were packed with merchandise again, thanks to the free-market pricing decreed by the new regime. There was no more black market. Everything was back, but at astronomical prices: bread, butter, rice, flour, oil, noodles, chicken, even meat. Whoever could pay the new prices was able to eat, and for this reason the city now wore a worn face, as though its will to live had been scraped away. As the afternoon waned, military troops began to fill the corners, plazas, and alleys, taking cover behind sacks of flour piled up like walls. As soon as darkness overtook the capital, he heard machine-gun bursts, the whir of helicopters, and occasional gunshots.

They’re shooting people point-blank, the housekeeper at the poet’s house had told him. They prefer to do it at night so that the
sound will intimidate the populace. He walked a few blocks, wanting to return to his hotel without encountering military posts, until he reached Veintiuno de Mayo, a street that stretched out gray and desolate, as though painted with coal by a dejected artist. All of a sudden, a military jeep turned a corner. It was headed his way. He shuddered at the thought of being arrested again, this time without identification. He pressed against a wall, ears pricked, with no idea how he would escape.

Someone tapped a window behind him. He turned on his heels, tense with terror. The jeep was closer now. They’d see him in a matter of seconds. He let out a sigh of relief. The noise had been made by a mechanical monkey in peasant garb, the size of a real chimp. It struck its wooden baton rhythmically against the window of the shop where Cayetano had sought momentary refuge. It was a hat and turban factory with a curiously Bolivarian name: Sombrerías Americanas Unidas. The jeep had almost arrived. Cayetano kneeled on the ground, crouched against the factory door. The vehicle passed, its motor hoarse, its soldiers distracted by the monkey, who struck the window sadly with his baton.

He arrived back at his second-floor hotel room bathed in sweat. He’d had to run those final blocks because the curfew was beginning. He peered through the lace curtains at the window. The street was calm, its cobbles damp, its houses shrouded in darkness. A helicopter flew low over the roofs. Cayetano glimpsed the face of the soldier manning the machine gun at the aircraft door. He was scanning the city with his arms around his weapon, frowning, austere. One thing was sure: Simenon’s novels never said a word or knew a thing about circumstances like these, he thought as he lay down in bed with his clothes on, trembling from cold or fear, he no longer knew which, and turned off the small lamp on the nightstand. The Belgian’s plots, however well wrought, belonged to a terrain alien to him; they were literature, fictitious worlds tacked together through the skill and
imagination of a famous writer. But he currently faced the cruel, implacable, chaotic reality of Latin America, a world whose plot had no known author or preestablished script that could make all things possible.

As the night unfolded, its sounds increased: gunshots, shouts of warning on the street, and the screech of tires as cars took off with kidnapped citizens. He couldn’t sleep. He was too scared that the police would come to his room. Suddenly he felt the building shudder. He got up and went to the window. Trucks drove by, packed with prisoners, escorted by military jeeps. He turned on the battery-operated radio he’d borrowed from the reception desk, but all he could find on the stations was the song “Lili Marleen.”

He went back to bed. The mattress creaked beneath his weight. He covered himself with a stained, smelly blanket. But this was a thousand times better than the cement floor of Puchuncaví. He thought about the prisoners being transported like cattle to the slaughter, about their relatives, about the likelihood that they’d be tortured and killed, about the fact that none of this could possibly be true. In the uncertainty of that night, he longed for three things: for the hotel to be free of raids, for dawn to come quickly, and for his own arrival at the poet’s side.

A few heavy vehicles pulled up outside his room, making the building groan. Cayetano broke into a sweat. He thought his heart might leap out of his mouth. He crept to the window. Across the street, in front of a house, he saw a truck full of prisoners and two military jeeps. A searchlight suddenly illuminated the house as soldiers started kicking the door, until it was opened by an old woman in her petticoat. They pushed her aside roughly and entered the home. A few minutes later, they reemerged, dragging two youths in undershirts and underpants. They pushed them into the truck with their rifle butts, turned off the searchlight, and drove off. The woman remained on the street, lying on the ground outside the door of her
house, moaning with grief. A neighbor came out after a while to guide her back inside. After that, a graveyard silence cloaked the neighborhood.