Distant Star (12 page)

The story, as Romero told it to me years later, went like this: Pizarro, the victim, had dealings of some kind with his landlady’s son, a certain Enrique Martínez Corrales, also known as Enriquito or Henry, who was often to be seen at the Viña del Mar racecourse, a place which, according to Romero, inevitably attracted the local low-life and those afflicted with
“the black vein of destiny,” as Victor Hugo wrote in
Les Misérables
, the only “masterpiece of world literature” that Romero admitted to having read in his youth, although unfortunately with the passing of the years he had forgotten it completely except for Javert’s suicide (I will return to
Les Misérables
shortly). Enriquito, who was apparently deep in debt, somehow got Pizarro involved in his business dealings. For as long as Enriquito’s run of bad luck lasted, the pair stuck together and their adventures were unwittingly financed by the victim’s parents. But one day fortune began to smile on the landlady’s son and he gave his friend the slip. Pizarro felt he had been hard done by. They argued, exchanged threats, and one day at noon Enriquito came to Pizarro’s room armed with a pistol. He only meant to frighten him, but at the climactic moment, as he was pointing the gun at Pizarro’s head, it accidentally went off. What could he do? In the midst of this nightmare come true, Enriquito had his one and only brilliant idea. He knew that if he simply disappeared, he would soon be the prime suspect. He knew that if Pizarro’s murder was left unembellished, they would soon be on his trail. He needed, therefore, to clothe it in mystery and strangeness. He closed the door from the inside, used a chair to jam it shut, put the pistol in the dead man’s hand, checked the windows, and as soon as he was satisfied with this suicide scene, he got into the wardrobe and waited. He knew his mother and the other boarders would be eating or watching television in the living room; he was confident they would break down the door without waiting for the police. And sure enough, they came
bursting in, and Enriquito, who had not even closed the wardrobe door, slipped quietly out and joined the group of boarders gaping in horror at Pizarro’s body. A very straight forward case, said Romero, but it made me famous, undeservedly, and I had to pay for it dearly later on.

The case that really made him a household name, however, was a kidnapping at Las Cármenes, an estate near Rancagua, a few months before the military coup. It involved Cristóbal Sánchez Grande, one of the country’s richest businessmen, who had disappeared, kidnapped, it seemed, by a leftist organization, which had contacted the government demanding an exorbitant sum for the release of the hostage. For weeks the police didn’t know what to do. Romero was in charge of one of three teams conducting the search, and it occurred to him that Sánchez Grande might have simulated his own kidnapping. They tailed a young man from the right-wing group Patria y Libertad for several days, and in the end he lowered his guard and led them to the Las Cármenes estate. While half the men surrounded the house, Romero had three officers take up positions as snipers; then, with a pistol in each hand and accompanied by a youngster called Contreras, who was the bravest of the lot, he went in and arrested Sánchez Grande. In the shoot-out, two of the Patria y Libertad thugs protecting the businessman were killed and Romero was wounded along with one of the policemen covering the back of the house. This operation earned Romero the Medal of Valor, awarded by Allende in person. Professionally, it was the high point of his life, a life that had been, as he put it himself, richer in disappointment than in happiness.

Naturally I remembered who he was. He had been a celebrity. His name used to appear in the crime reports (were they before or after the sports section?) in connection with places we considered shameful (but what did we know about shame back then?), settings for third-world crime in the ’60s and ’70s: shacks, vacant lots, dimly-lit country houses. And Allende had personally awarded him the Medal of Valor. I lost the medal, he told me sadly, and now I don’t even have a photo to prove it, but I remember the ceremony as if it was yesterday. He still looked like a policeman.

After the coup he was imprisoned for three years and when he got out he went to Paris, where he took any work he could find. From the little he said about those first years in France, I gathered he had done everything from bill posting to waxing office floors at night, when the buildings are closed, a job that gives you plenty of time to think. The mysterious bureaux of Paris. That’s how he referred to the night-bound office buildings, when all the floors are dark except for one, and then the lights go off, before another floor lights up, and so on. From time to time, if a nocturnal passer-by or a bill poster stopped to watch, he would see a figure at the window of one of those empty buildings, smoking or gazing out over the city, hands on hips: one of the night cleaners.

Romero was married; he had a son and was planning to return to Chile and start a new life.

When I asked him why he had come to see me (by this stage I had already invited him in and put on the kettle for a cup of tea), he said he was trying to track down Carlos Wieder.
Bibiano O’Ryan had given him my address in Barcelona. Do you know Bibiano? Not personally, he said. I wrote him a letter and he replied; then we talked on the phone. Just like Bibiano, I said, wondering how long it had been since I’d seen him: almost twenty years. He’s a good man, your friend, said Romero, and although he seems to know a great deal about Mr Wieder, he thinks you know more. That’s not true, I said. There’s money in it, said Romero, if you help me find him. And he looked around the flat as if he were calculating my price. I didn’t think he’d press his luck, so I decided to keep quiet and wait. I poured the tea. He took it with milk and seemed to enjoy it. Sitting there at my table he seemed much smaller and thinner than he really was. I can offer you two hundred thousand pesetas, he said. All right, I replied, but how can I help you?

By advising me on poetic matters, he said. This was his reasoning: Wieder was a poet, I was a poet, he was not. To find a poet, he needed the help of another poet.

I told him that in my opinion Carlos Wieder was a criminal, not a poet. All right, all right, let’s not be intolerant, said Romero. Maybe in Wieder’s opinion, or anyone else’s for that matter,
you’re
not a poet, or you’re a bad one, and he’s the real thing. It all depends on the glass we see through, as Lope de Vega said, don’t you think? Two hundred thousand in cash, right now? I asked. Two hundred thousand pesetas straight up, he said briskly, but remember that from now on, you’re working for me and I want results. How much are
you
getting paid? I asked. Enough, he said. My client isn’t short of money.

The next day, he came to my flat with fifty thousand
pesetas in an envelope and a suitcase full of literary magazines. I’ll give you the rest when my payment comes through, he said. I asked why he thought Carlos Wieder was still alive. Romero smiled to himself (he had a smile like a weasel or a field mouse) and said it was his client who thought Wieder was still alive. And what makes you think he’s in Europe and not in America or Australia? I know his profile, he said. Then he invited me to lunch at a restaurant in the Calle Tallers, the street my flat was in (he was staying in a reasonably priced, respectable boarding-house in the Calle Hospital, a stone’s throw away), and the conversation turned to his years in Chile, the country as we remembered it, and the Chilean police force, which Romero (to my astonishment) regarded as one of the finest in the world. You’re a fanatic and a chauvinist, I said to him over dessert. Not at all, he replied. When I was in Criminal Investigations, there was no such thing as an unsolved murder case. And the boys who went into Investigations were well educated; they’d all finished secondary school with good marks, then they had three years in the academy with excellent teachers. I remember the criminologist González Zavala, Doctor González Zavala, God rest his soul, saying that the two best police forces in the world, at least as far as homicide was concerned, were the British and the Chilean. I told him not to make me laugh.

We left the restaurant at four o’clock in the afternoon, having drunk two bottles of wine with our meal. Good convivial Spanish wine, better than French, said Romero. I asked him if he had something against the French. A shadow seemed to pass
over his face and he said no, he was ready to leave, that was all; he had been living in France for too long.

We had coffee at the Céntrico and talked about
Les Misérables
. For Romero, Jean Valjean, who reappears first as Madeleine, then as Fauchelevent, was an everyday character, the sort of character you might come across in the chaotic cities of Latin America. Javert, by contrast, struck him as exceptional. He’s like a session with a psychoanalyst, Romero said. It was immediately clear to me that he had never undergone psychoanalysis, although it was a form of treatment for which he had the highest regard. He felt compassion and admiration for Hugo’s policeman Javert, and that’s why the character seemed like an indulgence, “a treat to be reserved for special occasions.” I asked him if he had seen the film, the old French version. No, he said. I know there’s a musical playing in London, but I haven’t seen that either; it’s probably like Gilbert and Sullivan. As I said, he didn’t remember the plot at all, except that Javert kills himself. I had my doubts. Maybe in the film he doesn’t. (Trying to remember the film, only two images come back to me: the barricades in 1832 with the student revolutionaries and
gamines
bustling around, and the figure of Javert after he has been rescued by Valjean, standing in the mouth of a sewer, gazing at the horizon, while sewage plunges into the Seine making a truly magnificent sound, like a cataract … although I’m probably mixing it up with another film.) These days, said Romero, savoring the last drops of a coffee with cognac, the policeman gets divorced, and that’s it, at least in American films. But Javert killed himself. Times have changed, eh?

Then we climbed the five floors to my flat, where he opened the suitcase and put the magazines on the table. Take your time, he said. While you’re reading, I’ll go and do a bit of sightseeing. Which museums would you recommend? I remember I told him roughly how to get to the Picasso Museum and from there to the Sagrada Familia, and off he went.

I didn’t see him again for three days.

The magazines he left were all European. They came from Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, England, Switzerland and Germany. There were two from Romania as well, one from Poland and one from Russia. Most were fanzines printed in small numbers. A few of the French, German and Italian publications looked professional and must have had solid financial backing, but the rest were home-made jobs, photocopied or even mimeographed (one of the Romanian magazines), and it certainly showed: the poor reproduction, cheap paper and inept design matched the gutter-like content. I leafed through them all. According to Romero, somewhere, in one of them, there should have been a contribution by Wieder, under a pseudonym, of course. They were not the usual sort of right-wing literary magazines: four were the work of skinhead groups, two were brought out irregularly by soccer fans, at least seven were mainly given over to science fiction, three were offshoots of war games clubs, four (two Italian and two French) were devoted to the occult and one of these (in Italian) openly advocated devil worship, at least fifteen were clearly sympathetic to Nazism, six were associated with the pseudo-historical “revisionist” movement (three French, two Italian and one from French-speaking
Switzerland), one, the Russian magazine, was a chaotic mixture of all the aforementioned tendencies, or at least that was the conclusion I reached after examining the caricatures (of which there were an inordinate number, as if the potential readers had become illiterate, luckily for me, since I can’t read Russian), and almost all of them were racist and anti-Semitic.

It wasn’t until the second day of reading that I started to get really interested. I was living on my own, had no money and was in pretty poor health. None of my work had been published anywhere for ages, and for a while I hadn’t even been writing. My lot in life seemed miserable. I think I had begun to make a habit of self-pity. Romero’s magazines piled up on the table (I took to eating over the sink so as not to disturb them), arranged according to nationality, date of publication, political orientation or literary genre, worked on me like a kind of antidote. After two days of reading I felt physically ill, but this, I soon realized, was due to lack of sleep and proper food, so I went out and had a cheese roll, then put myself to bed. When I woke up six hours later, I felt refreshed and ready to go on reading or re-reading (or guessing, depending on the language of the magazine). I was gradually being drawn into the story of Carlos Wieder, which was also the story of something more – exactly what I couldn’t tell – but one night I had a dream about it. I dreamt I was travelling in a big wooden boat, a galleon perhaps, crossing the Great Ocean. There was a party on the poop deck and I was there, writing a poem, or perhaps writing in my diary, and looking at the sea. Then an old man, on a yacht, not the galleon, or
standing on a breakwater, started shouting “Tornado! Tornado!” just like the scene from
Rosemary’s Baby
, the Polanski film. At that point the galleon began to sink and all the survivors were cast adrift on the sea. I saw Carlos Wieder, clinging to a barrel of brandy. I was clinging to a rotten spar. And only then, as the waves pushed us apart, did I understand that Wieder and I had been travelling in the
same boat
; he may have conspired to sink it, but I had done little or nothing to stop it going down. When Romero returned, after three days, I was very glad to see him.

He hadn’t been to the Picasso Museum or the Sagrada Familia, but he had visited the Nou Camp Museum and the new aquarium. The first time I’d seen a shark close up like that, he said. Quite something, I tell you. When I asked him what he thought of the Nou Camp, he said he had always considered it the finest stadium in Europe. Pity Barcelona lost last year against Paris Saint-Germain. You’re not going to tell me you’re a
culé
, are you, Romero? He wasn’t familiar with the word. I explained its origin and he was amused. Then he seemed to drift off for a while. Here I’m a
culé
, he said. Barcelona’s my favorite European team, but in my heart I’ll always be a Colo-Colo supporter. What can you do? he added sadly and proudly.