The Neruda Case (7 page)

H
e knocked on the door of 237 Collado Way and waited with his hands in his jacket pockets. The cold snuck up the hills from the Pacific, which at that hour was submerged in a fog pierced by the siren of the Punta de Ángeles lighthouse, its moan like a dying bull. He walked back the way he’d come, while above him a goldfinch sang numbly on a balcony studded with potted carnations. At Alí Babá, the Turk Hadad prepared him coffee with a dash of milk and a gyro on hallulla bread, and Cayetano settled in, combing through the daily papers. A column by Mario Gómez López announced that the right was planning a coup d’état against Salvador Allende with the support of the United States embassy, but he warned that the attempted takeover would meet with stalwart resistance from the people. He read the column twice; he liked the way the reporter wrote. The radio played the song “Todos Juntos,” by Los Jaivas, and at the grocery store across the street people waited in line for oil.

Maybe the poet was at Van Buren Hospital, he thought. He needed to obtain final approval for his trip. He was haunted by the possibility that he might fail in his mission. The lessons from Maigret’s novels were not enough to guarantee success. There the poet was guilty of naïveté. How was Cayetano supposed to find an old doctor,
with the last name of Bracamonte, in a metropolis with millions of inhabitants that he had never visited before? He tried to bolster his own confidence. Perhaps with the help of the Mexican Medical Association and the guidance of Laura Aréstegui (who in the end hadn’t known a soul in Mexico City) he could get his bearings in the capital. He would tell his wife he was off to fulfill a secret mission, which she would love, since she adored revolutionary political conspiracies. But the mission in Mexico was a secret between him and the Nobel laureate, something nobody else could ever know about, he thought, and then he whispered to himself, from memory, the verses that Neruda had written in honor of La Sebastiana:

“Talking to yourself?” Hadad stood beside him with a brimming cup of coffee. His black eyes glittered with sarcasm, and the naked bulb from the soda fountain shone on his bald Buddha head like a phantom reflection. “If you start raving about political parties in days like these, who knows how it’ll end? Better you just sit back and enjoy my coffee: no one else makes one like it in Valparaíso.”

Cayetano watched the strands of foam turn in the cup, lit a Lucky Strike, and let the liquid warm his insides. It tasted just passable, but it was better not to mention that to Hadad, who was intently chopping meat behind the bar with a big, sharp knife. Through the window, he saw some dogs sleeping curled up in the foyer of the Mauri, next to a sign for
Valparaíso, Mi Amor.
He thought that at times he himself had felt like a stray dog, lost in the south of the continent,
without a woman, or, more accurately, with a woman he couldn’t get along with, which was worse than having no woman at all. None of this would happen to Maigret—he and his wife enjoyed a honeymoon as perpetual as it was dispassionate; the wife cooked for him and seasoned his favorite dishes with angelic hands and didn’t meddle in politics, and still less in feverish Caribbean guerrilla adventures. What was more, Maigret had his own apartment in Paris and dependable work at the police department, while he, Cayetano, rented a house at 6204 Alemania Avenue and was unemployed, and (too embarrassing to mention) he aspired to become a detective by reading novels. All because the poet, who placed far too much hope in the power of literature, believed that reading the crime genre could turn a young man like him into an actual private investigator.

“You read a couple of Georges Simenon novels, you enroll in some investigation course, and you’re there!” the poet had said to him at the bar in La Sebastiana as he threw ice cubes into a whiskey glass.

Sipping his coffee, he recalled that, decades earlier, the poet had married a woman twenty years his senior, as Laura had described. Delia del Carril must have been an extraordinarily seductive woman back then, he thought, while Hadad served him a steaming, greasy platter of gyros. Was it possible that the poet had never asked himself what would occur in his bed when he turned fifty? Had he never imagined it or, intuiting it, had he opted to marry that woman out of sheer opportunism? What would it be like to go to bed with a fifty-year-old woman? How would her flesh feel and her mouth taste? An illustrious domino player at the Bar Inglés had once told him that though young women’s firm flesh might seem more exciting at first glance, older and more experienced women outpaced them by far in the pleasure they could provide in bed. The devil knows more from being old than from being the devil, the domino player had affirmed, winking as he recommended that Cayetano seduce a fifty-year-old
woman in Victoria Plaza. It was easier to seduce them on spring and summer mornings, because the heat, the blue sky, and the birdsong were on your side, he had said, eyeing his dominoes. One day, he’d go to Victoria Plaza to confirm the theory, Cayetano told himself, but not now, when he was attracted to young women with smooth faces, taut bellies, and firm calves. So the poet with the monotonous nasal voice, the thick body, and the melancholy gaze, whom he could almost consider a friend, had actually been a kind of gigolo in his youth? Had he conned a mature woman so that she’d open doors for him to the salons of European intellectuals, editors, and politicians? And had he then left her for a singer who was thirty years younger?

He sampled the gyro and nodded approvingly at Hadad, who waited behind the bar for his verdict, hands on his hips and an intimidating look on his face. If he wanted to work for the poet, it was imperative to know him intimately, he thought. If he was to travel to Mexico on his orders, he should at least know with whom he was dealing. The fact that Neruda had received the Nobel Prize implied only that he was a phenomenal writer but not, necessarily, a good person. What would it be like to love a woman twenty years your senior? he asked himself again. Could there be desire between two people so distant in age? And what had become of Delia del Carril? According to Laura, she lived in the capital, old, poor, and alone, her family fortune squandered; she spent her time painting energetic, indomitable horses, and was still in love with Neruda.

At that moment he saw the man in question coming down Collado Way with his chauffeur. He walked slowly, slouched. Cayetano polished off his gyro in a hurry, finished his coffee, put a crumpled bill on the table, and left Alí Babá, releasing a small but satisfied burp.

8

P
lease, have a seat!” The poet had settled into his favorite armchair, which he had named La Nube, and was examining the pearly surface of a large conch with a magnifying glass while his chauffeur, Sergio, arranged hawthorn logs under the copper hood of the fireplace. “When do you go?”

“If you write a check for this amount to the money exchange office, I can leave next week,” Cayetano replied, handing him a bill.

The poet gave the document a cursory glance and let it fall on the top of the newspaper
El Siglo
, which lay on the floor beside La Nube. He waited for his chauffeur to leave the room, then said, “Better yet, you tell me how much you need and I’ll write you a check for the whole thing. I’m no good with numbers. Matilde is off in Isla Negra. I just got back from the doctor, and I’m exhausted. But I trust you won’t let me down with your business in Mexico, my friend.”

“I’ll find your doctor, Don Pablo, you’ll see. Don’t worry.” His first steps as an investigator had made him feel a bit more sure of himself.

“I trust you. You’re a bright young guy, you’ve lived in three countries, and nobody will be surprised that you’re looking for a
fellow Cuban.” He sighed and looked out at the cloudy Valparaíso sky. “I’m lucky to have met you.”

Cayetano felt honored by the remark. And, confident in his new role, he proceeded with his questioning. “What’s the story behind that shell?”

It was a good question. It drew a light smile out of Don Pablo.

“I bought it a half-century ago in Rangoon, Burma, where I held my first diplomatic post, thanks to some friends with contacts in the State Department.” He turned his face upward, giving himself an air of importance. “Of course, it was only later that I figured out why nobody else wanted the job: it paid next to nothing. I ended up paying the bills by writing columns for Santiago newspapers. There wasn’t much to do in Rangoon, so I wrote poems. Well, to be frank, my verses from that period were hermetic, indecipherable; to this day even I can’t fully penetrate them. The academics of Europe and North America, on the other hand, enjoy them as though they were a naked woman on a bed, or a naked man, perhaps, because all things can be found on God’s green earth, Cayetano.”

He thought again of their first meeting, the day of the party by the shores of Playa Ancha, and thought that the poet, on occasion, could still be quite hermetic. But he kept his opinions to himself and stayed focused on the poet’s reminiscence.

“I suppose the climate in Rangoon must be like Havana, no?”

“Rangoon is as humid, hot, and exotic as your city, Cayetano. The air is so thick it won’t fit in your mouth. The plants and trees are identical to those of your island, and the fruits are the same, too. At midday, you’re forced to lie down in a hammock for siesta. I lived by the sea, between coconut palms, on a beach with sand as white and fine as flour …and now, my friend, there isn’t even enough flour here to make
sopaipillas
. My house was modest, made of wood, with a pitched tin roof. I didn’t manage to learn the language of the people,
who were descended from typhoons. At night I’d drink at the bar of the Grand Hotel, on the river, where I’d go on the prowl for women.”

“Beautiful?” he dared to say.

“Gorgeous.” To judge from his smile, the poet hadn’t forgotten them. “But I never knew what they were thinking. When they made love they were as silent as iguanas,” he added, lowering his voice. “They had sturdy thighs, girlish waists, an ass that could fit in your palms, light and timid breasts, and there was something gymnastic about the way they did it within the confines of those mosquito nets. Cayetano, those women are nothing like ours.”

The poet invited him to the top floor of the house to see his studio, up a few concrete stairs. It was a wood-paneled room with shelves full of books and a mirrored wardrobe. The city and bay struggled to slide in through the windows. Cayetano was intrigued by an old black Underwood typewriter on a worn desk between two windows.

“Do you write poems on that machine?”

“Are you crazy? Nobody writes decent poems on keys. Poetry is written by hand, with a pen, my friend. Verses descend from the brain like the tide on the Chiloé coast; they flow through the body to your hands and pour out on the page,” he explained as Cayetano examined a door hidden behind a large sepia photograph of a slim man with a long white beard.

“What’s behind that door?” he asked.

“A heliport designed by Sebastián Collado. This room was going to be a giant aviary, open to the city, but as you see, it’s become my studio.”

“Excuse me. Did you say heliport?” Cayetano repeated, astonished.

“Exactly.” The poet calmly half closed his eyes.

A heliport. Sebastián was a great dreamer, a visionary. And now
they’d moved from spaceships to heliports. Poets truly left no stone unturned. He was determined to keep up. “And the man in that photograph. Is he your father?”

“In a way,” Don Pablo said, amused. “He was my poetic father. One of my greatest teachers. Look, I even have an outfit in his image.” He opened the wardrobe by the door. “That’s Walt Whitman, a marvelous poet from the United States.”

“Is he alive?”

“Let’s say that he continues to live. Great poets never die, Cayetano.”

He took a hanger out of the wardrobe, from which hung a white beard, a cloak, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He tied the beard around his neck with a cord and donned the hat and cloak. He took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses out of the cloak’s pocket, along with a long, straight pipe.