The Neruda Case (21 page)

“I’m sure, my friend. So what nationality is she?”

“German.”

“German?” Cayetano repeated, incredulous. The Leyland had resumed its route, snorting like a bull in heat, leaving behind the passengers who were still waiting for their taste of coffee. Outside, as the three of them walked back toward Paseo, they were assailed by a sea breeze that rose from the Malecón, its scent blended with the odor of asphalt from the street.

“German,” Remigio said again.

“And she’s in Cuba?”

“Beatriz, widow of Bracamonte, whose maiden name is Beatriz Lederer, spent only two years here with her daughter.”

“What was her daughter’s name?”

“Tina Bracamonte.”

“And what did Beatriz do here?”

“She worked as a translator in a department of the East German embassy, here in El Vedado, near the Hotel Nacional. And Tina studied at a school in Marianao. They left the island eleven years ago.”

“In 1962? Where did they go?”

“To Berlin, my friend. To the German Democratic Republic. To live behind the anti-fascist wall, as they call it.”

“What for?”

“How do I know!”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing, man. One morning in 1962, at the José Martí Airport, by the steps to an Aeroflot plane, the footprints of Beatriz Lederer and Tina Bracamonte disappeared forever from the island of Cuba. Now, what’s that Paquito’s number?”

29

T
he night was as fragile as a Swarovski statuette when Cayetano saw his wife below the hibiscus trees of Zapata Plaza, in Miramar. Along Quinta Avenue a Zil of the Youth Workers’ Brigade passed, heading east, laden with singing troops, as well as a Leyland packed with passengers down to its stairwells. His wife—whom he still considered as such, since they were, after all, still legally married—had just disembarked from a blue Lada, which was waiting for her nearby, its lights off. She was wearing the olive-green uniform of the Armed Revolutionary Forces, or FAR, which disturbed him.

“What are you doing in Cuba?” she asked after kissing his cheek.

“I’m on a mission. What’s with the uniform?”

“I’m doing what I told you about before. I’m a woman who lives by her word.”

Cayetano gazed at the thick trunks of the hibiscus trees, which resembled twisted anacondas, then returned his attention to Ángela. With her hair pulled back under her soldier’s hat, her uniform fitted to her curves, her face tanned by days spent out in the sun, she looked more beautiful than ever.

“You look great,” he managed, and stroked his mustache, feeling insecure.

“And you’re on a mission? Here?”

“As you see.”

“It makes you seem more mature. How long will you be on the island?”

“Two or three more days,” he replied, giving himself an air of importance and aloofness. In reality he would have liked to propose that they give it another shot, that as soon as she finished her training at Punto Cero, they should try to get back together in Valparaíso. If there was still love between them, they should give it another chance. Things could change when they returned to Chile; one day the country would regain its stability, and he also held out hope that the poet might recover his health and help him find work among his legion of contacts. Perhaps it was just a matter of trying, he thought, of giving it one more chance. But he said nothing, and only her voice was heard.

“I’m going to stay here a few months. The situation in Chile is getting worse. We’re approaching the hour of truth—or, as they say here, the hour of the mamey fruit, that Caribbean mango.”

“So what are your plans?”

“If you’re on a mission, then you know they can’t be discussed.”

He had to admit she was right. They sat down on a marble bench, still warm from the sun, and looked at each other in silence. He was captivated by Ángela’s fine features and full, delicate lips. The night was turning into jet-black linen, warm, fragrant, and impenetrable.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” Ángela said, looking at her hands, the nails now chipped and dirty.

“Really? In what way?”

“I’ve been thinking about how I still don’t understand why you don’t return here for good.”

“So we can be close?”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Cayetano, but I honestly feel that what
we had can’t be salvaged. You should go back to your own life. There’s nothing like the land where you were born.”

“Is there someone else?” He felt as though he’d plagiarized the question right out of the soap opera
An Italian Girl Comes to Get Married
.

“No, nothing like that. You think I’m in any mood to start another relationship? The best thing for you would be to go home to your roots. This is where you’re from, not Miami or Valparaíso.”

Exiles should never return to their homeland, he thought. Nostalgia laid traps and played tricks. Nobody was built for the strain of return. Disappointment was always waiting on the arrivals platform. People were made to remain in the place where they were born; that was the only way of living without nostalgia. And one should never return, one should always leave for good. Nostalgia fed the illusion that returns were possible, that lost paradise itself could be regained.

“Your dream is a mirage,” he said in a firm, steady voice, as if he were sitting on another bench, spying on the scene from a distance. “If the war you’re preparing for does arrive, you have no chance of winning it. The Chilean army is nothing like that of Fulgencio Batista. Who’s making young idealists like you martyr themselves in the name of a cause that, however just, is impossible to attain?”

“Don’t talk that way, out of respect for this uniform if nothing else, Cayetano. There’s no other way to defend Allende. If we don’t take up arms, the right will stage a coup. And if they did that, more people would die than in a battle of equals.”

“Don’t you realize that you’re dealing with a professional army?”

“What do you want me to do?” she said in a raised, angry voice, and she stood up and tore off her hat. Her hair spilled copiously over her shoulders, and her cheekbones became more prominent under her tanned skin. “Renounce my role as a revolutionary, in the tradition of Manuel Rodríguez and Che, so I can go back to Valparaíso with you to wait for the army to rebel? Or to put down my weapons and take
up yarn and knitting needles so I can make you a scarf while the enemy prepares for a coup?”

“I just don’t want you to risk your life.”

“I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees! And that’s not just a slogan!”

He was about to tell her to calm down a little when the Lada at the edge of the park turned on and flashed its lights a couple of times.

“I should go,” murmured Ángela.

Cayetano stood up, feeling like a man sentenced to death who no longer sees the point in begging for his life or one more minute of time. He approached her and held her tightly to his chest.

“I had to say it, Ángela.” As he kissed her cheeks, he recognized the Coco Chanel she always wore. She was the same bourgeois girl as always.

“I won’t forget you so easily,” she assured him. “I was happy with you. Do you remember the cabin we used to dream about building on some Caribbean beach?”

“And the three children we were going to have, who wouldn’t go to school, but would be free to roam instead?”

She kissed his lips and hurried off through the park, hat in hand, her hair loose around her shoulders like a shawl. Cayetano followed her with his gaze until she disappeared into the car. The Lada drove off down Quinta Avenue, toward Havana, and then he was alone, listening to the muffled, anonymous whispers of the night and the rapid drumming of his heart. He thought it had begun to rain, but then realized there were no drops on the lenses of his glasses; the tears in his eyes had blurred Miramar’s hibiscus trees.

30

I
t all happened just as I’ve told you, Don Pablo. What should I do now?”

Static crackled on the phone line, like a shortwave radio station. Cayetano had the distinct impression that his call to Chile was being tapped, that his words were being listened to by the CIA or Cuban state security in a dismal room somewhere on the planet. He had no choice but to speak in ambiguous terms. It had served him well to read Simenon’s crime novels, after all, those calm, delectable stories about Peter the Lett, Maigret’s first case, or Maigret’s memoirs, which were truly entertaining, and which transformed their author—a man addicted to the pipe, sex, and writing—into a simple fictional character.

“Well, follow her tracks,” he heard the poet say with enthusiasm. Cayetano pictured him with his feet on the leather stool, with its green ink stains.

At the outset of the conversation, Neruda had suggested that he was feeling more energetic and hopeful, as though he were making a recovery, and that for that reason he was diving into verses in the afternoons and dictating his memoirs to Matilde at night. Cayetano
imagined that the memoirs were incomplete, that they would later be filtered through his wife, though he also suspected that the poet said this only to throw off his enemies. His heavy breathing made Cayetano doubt his claims of getting better. He had just arrived home from the hospital and had probably already settled into La Nube, wrapped in his woolen poncho, looking out over the bay as it split into a play of light and shadow under the metallic Valparaíso sky.

“Do you still believe the same thing, Don Pablo?”

“Of course I do. The same as I described it that day on Alemania Avenue, when we sat on the steps. I just need you to confirm my suspicions.”

Fragile as a bird but stubborn as a mule. That was the poet.

He pressed further. “Don’t you think you’re better off just deciding that it’s as you imagine, and letting things be?”

“You don’t know what you’re saying, young man. I can’t just leave things as they are. The fact that you’d even say that makes me think you don’t understand me, that we’ve wasted all this time.”

“I don’t know, Don Pablo. Sometimes hope is better than disappointment. That’s what I say.”

But Neruda said the opposite. Despite the doubts his words described, his voice was firm, convinced, emphatic. “The young are nourished by hopes, the old by certainties, Cayetano. Suspicion has a corrosive effect, and speeds up death. I’d give anything, including my
Canto General
or my
Residence on Earth
, to know the truth. Believe me, I’d give them up gladly, right this moment, to find out.”