The Neruda Case by Roberto Ampuero Read Free Book Online Page A

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:
    I built the house.
    First I made it out of air.
    Then I raised the flag
    and left it hanging
    from the firmament, from the star, from
    light and darkness.
    “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