The Neruda Case (31 page)

“If you return, you know I’ll be waiting,” she said as she let go of his hand.

“Good luck, Margaretchen,” he mumbled before diving into the crowds of Alexanderplatz. He didn’t dare turn around for one last look.

MATILDE

46

O
nce he’d safely crossed the Wall, Cayetano took the subway to the Tempelhof Airport, his mouth bitter and dry, his exhaustion steadily becoming intolerable as the empty, clattering train sought refuge from the tunnels’ darkness in brightly lit stations. As the train sped through the bowels of Berlin, Cayetano glimpsed his reflection in the window. He saw himself, but something else far more important: his own eyes, behind their glasses, fixing their gaze on him.

Had he killed the flat-nosed man in the dark suit? he wondered as he tried to break the stare of his own eyes. There they were. They examined him severely, fiercely. He turned his gaze to the reflection of his hands, resting on his knees. Had he done it? Had he actually murdered someone? He, the son of a melancholy Cuban musician, whose fine, large hands knew only how to caress his brass instrument, his wife, and his little son, Cayetano? Did this make him a criminal? The train pulled into a new station. He had always believed that murderers chose to become what they were, that their souls had rotted early in life, that their destinies were forged with every step they took. Now, however, he realized that destiny could play tricks on you, that it could wait around any corner, in the middle of the night, ready to expose you to an enemy, put a weapon in your hand, and give you a
reason to kill. Because Cayetano could have chosen not to strike the man. He hadn’t been entirely sure the man was following him, or that he would definitely have discovered Cayetano behind the door. He hid his hands in his pant pockets as the train picked up speed again. Destiny—at least his own, he thought—was a train that ran madly on its rails, destroying everything in its path and rattling its passengers before reaching a moment of peace.

He was a different man, now. He was no longer that person whose clean hands had shyly knocked on the wooden door of the poet’s house in Valparaíso. No, his hands were no longer the ones that had gently traced the curve of his wife’s throat; or the ones that had reached for his glasses, buttoned his shirt, and tied his shoes in the morning; or the ones that on sleepless nights, full of anxiety, had pulled the covers over his own face in the vague hope that the sun would soon rise and bring clear light. He would never be the same again. He was not a violent man. He didn’t believe in violence. In fact, he feared it. All he could do was imagine that the flat-nosed man, who surely had a wife and children, had only lain unconscious for a while and then risen with nothing more than a terrible headache. Oh, our Father, Cayetano whispered as the train approached the station, make that man rise to his feet again.

At Tempelhof, he took the first available flight to Frankfurt am Main, and checked into a hotel normally reserved for romantic trysts near the central station, on Kaiserstrasse, where prostitutes in miniskirts and low-cut blouses waited on corners. Pimps smoked and watched from the shadows, while drug addicts, pale as death, with bloodshot eyes, rummaged through trash cans. Despite all that, Cayetano felt safe now. He figured that once Markus discovered the dirty trick he’d played, he would free the Chilean army officers to go after him. He’d have to be careful. At night, after enjoying lamb and beer from Munich at a Kurdish restaurant, he called Merluza, the diplomat.

“Thank you for everything. I’m going back to Santiago,” he informed Merluza. He could hear that, at his apartment in Pankow, Merluza had the television turned on to the news show
Aktuelle Kamera
, which described the record-breaking production of state businesses and farming cooperatives in the German Democratic Republic. At that breakneck pace, socialism would annihilate the West before the end of the millennium, Cayetano thought sarcastically.

“Don’t worry about it,” Merluza replied. “It was a pleasure. Where are you?”

“In the West.” He preferred to keep the details vague. “About to board a plane.”

“Did Comrade Valentina help you?”

“Everything turned out swimmingly.”

“Well, as you know, if you need any more help, I’m here. And send my expressions of solidarity to Unidad Popular. Tell them I’m part of the struggle here in these trenches. The fascists will not win.”

“They won’t, Merluza,” Cayetano said without conviction.

“Before you go,” Merluza added, “did you hear the truck drivers in Chile are starting their national strike and saying they’ll keep it up until the current government falls? Hunger and chaos await us, Cayetano.”

He kept his own commentary to himself and hung up. He immediately asked the operator to put him in touch with the poet, in Valparaíso. He was in luck. He didn’t have to wait very long.

“I’m speaking to you from Frankfurt am Main, Don Pablo. How are you?” He imagined him wrapped in his poncho, weathering his autumnal days, waiting for this call.

“Better, now that I hear your voice. I’m going over my memoirs, and Matilde is downstairs, making me a chicken casserole. One of those healthy ones, with lots of oregano. Afterward I’ll drink my secret Oporto, you know how it is. What news have you got for me?”

His nasal voice sounded exhausted, his breathing somewhat
ragged. But he also sounded distant, as though he knew someone else was listening and had to pretend the news in question pertained to some everyday matter, a foreign first edition, perhaps, or one of those rare objects he collected.

“I found the current whereabouts of the Mexican woman.”

“That’s great news,” he said in the same tone. “Have you spoken with her?”

“Not yet, Don Pablo, but at least I know where she is. That’s why I’m coming back to Valparaíso. We need to talk.”

“Did you or didn’t you find her?” At least now he was conveying impatience.

“I’ve located her. I know where she lives.”

“Where?”

“In a nearby country, Don Pablo.”

“In another country?” He sounded irritated. “What’s she doing there? Is she with her daughter?”

“I don’t know, Don Pablo. My plane for Chile leaves tomorrow. We’ll talk more when I’m back. I want you to decide whether or not you want me to continue this search. It’s up to you. I’ll come see you as soon as I arrive. In the meantime, Don Pablo, please prepare me a Coquetelón. And make it a double.”

47

N
ow that the crab of this disease bores silently through my insides with such painstaking devotion, my old nightmares have returned to haunt me. They appear between sleep and waking, between the metallic echoes of these interminable, leaden winter afternoons in Valparaíso. I cross thresholds and more thresholds, but I always end up in a dark room. No matter where I roam, I always end up in that cool, dim dream space, where I sense that the woman and daughter I abandoned are crouched in wait. Their eyes study me with the same inclemency with which the crab digs corridors through my body.

At times, I glimpse María Antonieta and Malva Marina, my deformed little daughter, bathed in a vortex of light. They let out wrenching screams as they try to climb the Dutch dikes, hand in hand. When they’re about to reach the safety of the dam’s top platform, they slip and roll down the concrete ramp, covered with sand and algae. They’re being hunted by a pack of soldiers in Nazi helmets and uniforms, and their faces are grotesque, like those painted by George Grosz. Malva Marina screams, “Papaíto, don’t leave me, Papaíto,” while I, with resolve, but my soul torn in shreds, board a boat and row away as fast as I can to save my own life, listening to the girl’s sobs until they are finally swallowed by the wind.

In that darkness, I also see Prudencio Aguilar, my old Caribbean
friend who was killed by a spear in the Colombian tropics. After death, he’s continued to age, and still bleeds from the same wound that took him from the world. I can tell he’s waiting for me in all the rooms I enter, hoping the next one will be different. And just as I once lost Delia on a train in Italy because she exited at the wrong stop, absentminded as she always was, I then dream I’ve lost Matilde on the Paris metro, where we’ve agreed to meet at an uncertain time and at an unnamed station. And I also see the day when Matilde and I, strolling by the Charles River in north Boston, came upon a couple on a bench, and they were us, only thirty years older. From the path, without taking my gaze from the water, I gather the courage to ask them how they’ve spent their lives. As we approach them, we see something horrific: they are skeletons, perfect and complete, with hands entwined and macabre smiles sculpted to their skulls.

Existence is nothing more than a damn succession of disguises and good-byes, a journey brimming with traps and disappointments that impels you to make mistakes and then boasts an elephant’s memory, not forgiving a single slip. I’ve said it so many times to that hardworking young man called Cayetano. Matilde entered my life in Mexico, when I was married to Delia and sick with phlebitis. She was a young Chilean woman, succulent and desirable, devoted to popular music and to the Party. She offered to take care of me. My naive wife accepted the offer, another ambush of life. What happened next was what tends to happen when a man and a woman find themselves alone beside a bed. Although Matilde likes to propagate the version in which we met long before, in 1946, in Forestal Park in Santiago, I don’t remember that. That’s a tall tale. A ruse of hers to give our love a dignified prehistory. The truth is that this love grew from a betrayal of Delia, from the contemptible way we took advantage of the time and trust she’d given us, busy as she was with the work I’d assigned to her, disseminating my poems and striving to undo my exile.