The Neruda Case by Roberto Ampuero Read Free Book Online

consul in Rangoon, Batavia, and Singapore—the worst years of his life. He didn’t understand Asia, he didn’t know anybody there. He had only brief affairs with lovers, many of them whores, and a woman who was half British and half Javanese by the name of Josie Bliss, who tried to stab him. Then he married a Dutchwoman and had a daughter with her, Malva Marina Trinidad.”
    “It seems you know all about Neruda’s life and miracles.”
    “He arrived in Mexico on the arm of Delia del Carril, his second wife, a rich and cultured Argentinean who played a key role in his life,” Laura went on, glad to be escaping, if even for a few hours, thegreat headache of Valparaíso’s supply shortage. “In Europe, she’d introduced him to the intellectuals of the left, and convinced him to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. She was the one who made him a communist. Without Delia, Neruda would have kept on writing hermetic poems like those in
Residence on Earth,
and he wouldn’t have joined the left or become the poet we now know.”
    “She was older than him, right?”
    “When they met, he was thirty, she was fifty.”
    “It was obvious that would last less time than a cake in front of a school—”
    “You’re thinking of writing about Neruda and you didn’t know about that?” Laura exclaimed, suspicious. “He took advantage of her social contacts, her wealth, her ideology, and her need for company. Then he abandoned her in 1955 for Matilde Urrutia, his current wife, who at the time was a young cabaret singer with an amazing body, a woman who’s an intellectual dwarf compared to Delia.”
    Several couples danced between the tables to the tango “Volver,” and were reflected in Cinzano’s beveled mirror, while others conversed passionately over their wineglasses, boiled blood sausage, and french fries, about the revolution and the counterrevolution, about Allende, Altamirano and Jarpa, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and MIR, about the lessons of Sierra Maestra, the Vietnamese resistance and the October Revolution. Through the lace curtains at the window, Cayetano watched a military jeep drive down Esmeralda Street. He sipped his wine with his gaze lowered and a sense of helplessness creeping up his spine.
    “That’s my frank opinion of Neruda after prying into his life,” Laura said.
    “Let’s just say he’s not the saint you want to pray to.” He recalled the poet at the top of the stairs, watching him in silence as he descended the steps of La Sebastiana with the envelope full of dollars in his hand.
    “I have nothing against him as an artist. He deserved the Nobel. What I don’t like is the representation of women in his poetry, nor do I like the way he treats us. It weighs on me, that whole issue of ‘I like it when you’re silent because it’s as if you were absent.’ Pure machismo. A guy’s dream: for women to be docile, passive animals.”
    Cayetano stayed silent. Who was he to argue with Laura about poetry? He popped an olive into his mouth and said, “But listen, I’m looking for something different. In Mexico, I’m interested in the places he used to frequent, the friends he rubbed elbows with. Do you know any Mexicans over there who are well informed, and could help me?”

7
    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