The Crime of Julian Wells (8 page)

“A self-conscious American in France would never do that,” I told him.

He laughed. “Yes, but I am French, so I can do what I want.”

He ate with great relish, like a man accustomed to answering his appetites without reserve, and in that way quite the opposite of Julian, who had lived a far more Spartan life.

“Did you ever see Julian happy?” I asked. “Did you ever see him laugh uncontrollably?”

“He had only black thoughts,” René answered. “That was his nature.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “When he was a young man, he was happy and self-confident. He had lots of romances. He would horse around like anyone else.”

“Horse around?”

“Joke with people, that sort of thing.”

“This is what it means, ‘horse around’?”

“Yes.”

René took out a pad and made a note. “Julian, yes, you are right, he did not, as you say, ‘horse around,’” he said as he returned the pad to his pocket. “Only sometimes he went to Le Chapeau Noir.” He placed the bowl of his glass between his large hands and rolled it back and forth. “It is like a place from a movie, this bar
,”
he said.

“In what way?” I asked.

The glass stilled, as did René’s usually darting eyes. “If you go there, you will see,” he said.

11

But why should I go there? Julian had never written about Le Chapeau Noir in any of his books. From time to time it had made an appearance in his letters, though rather sketchily, a line here, a line there. Still, he’d written about it enough for me to have gathered that it was typical of Pigalle, that is to say, rather seedy. I’d imagined it with a cement floor, its tables and chairs a mismatched assemblage. Julian had once described its clientele as a ragged array of expatriates. He’d probably said other things about it, too, though only one of them had stuck, the fact that it was the sort of place where, even when men talk of love, they seem to talk of murder. That had been a telling phrase, which no doubt accounted for the fact that I’d remembered it.

Clearly, Julian had gone to Le Chapeau Noir quite often, and perhaps for that reason, I found myself imagining him as a lone figure, dressed in a worn trench coat, moving down a deserted, rain-slicked street, the lights of Pigalle’s famous windmill shining dimly through a mist.

This was a purely fanciful portrait, of course, and yet, in imagining such a scene, my curiosity was heightened, particularly as to why Julian had described Le Chapeau Noir in a way that was so incontestably sinister, a bar where love and murder mingled with the smoke, curled and twined and became entangled.

“It was like places in those spy books he was reading,” René told me when I mentioned this to him the next morning over breakfast. “There was still the Cold War in those days, and this bar, it was maybe a little like Vienna in that movie.” He began to hum the theme of
The Third Man.
“And now you are maybe a little like the American in that movie, no?” he asked with a short laugh. “Searching for your dead friend?”

I’d never thought of myself as a character in a film, especially one written by Graham Greene, and yet, I had to admit that I did feel a little like Martins in
The Third Man
. I wasn’t a penniless pulp writer, as he’d been, and I didn’t expect to meet a mysterious woman in a cemetery, but, as a man who’d lived a relatively safe life, experienced only the most commonplace adventures, risked nothing except on the stock market, there was something in Martins’s steadily intensifying investigation of the mysterious Harry Lime that was not unlike my own.

But I could also feel Martins’s confidence that no matter what he discovered about Harry Lime, it would do nothing to undermine his love or admiration for him. Anna Schmidt had assured him of exactly that in one of the movie’s most quoted lines: “A
person doesn’t change just because you find out more.” I felt no doubt that it would be the same with Julian, for it seemed to me at the time that the goodness of a man was like a vein of gold that only widens as it deepens, then dazzles at the core.

My walk through Oradour had only increased my confidence in his essential goodness because it was here that Julian had made innocents the focus of his art by giving them voice, while at the same time, in a single, extraordinary artistic choice, he had denied any voice to their tormenters, so that while the villagers had emerged as individuals, the Germans had all but disappeared.

Disappeared.

Strange how that word brought Marisol back into my mind, she whose disappearance had so disturbed Julian, his search for her one of his life’s distinct failures, a dark end to his Argentine adventure that could not have been predicted by its bright beginning.

And it had been very bright, indeed, that beginning. We were often together, the three of us a faintly
Jules and Jim
trio of young people, though it was never a love triangle.

But though Julian was not in love with Marisol in that fiercely romantic way, he had certainly searched for her as if she’d been a lost lover, journeying all the way to the Chaco to see the priest who’d raised her.

He was in his midsixties, this priest, but he looked much older. His hair was gray, his face deeply lined, so that upon first impression he seemed to be as weathered as the destitute parish in which he’d labored all his life.

“He was already old when my aunt brought me to him,” Marisol said as we made our way to meet him that afternoon. “But he took in this little girl he did not know.”

She was dressed less stylishly than usual and had added a small white flower to her hair, a touch of the indigene that you never saw in worldly Buenos Aires. A nod to the priest, I supposed, proof that her heart—or at least part of it—remained with him in the Chaco.

The old priest was sitting alone on a bench as we approached him. He did not see us but continued to stare straight ahead while he fingered a wooden rosary.

“It is Father Rodrigo who sent me to Buenos Aires,” Marisol said, her gaze more intently on Julian than on me. “He is the saint of the Chaco.”

He was now only a few feet away, and it seemed to me that he was older than the color of his hair or the texture of his skin suggested. There was a spiritual quality to his agedness, a sense that he was as old as his faith, a witness to that first crucifixion.

We were almost upon him before he caught Marisol in his eye and struggled to his feet.

“Ah, my sweet daughter,” he said as he drew her into his arms.

She kissed him on both cheeks, then turned and introduced us.

The priest shook Julian’s hand first, then turned to me.

“I have heard of your father,” he said. He stretched his hand toward me and I took it. “He is said to be a good American. A friend.
Hermano en la lucha
.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I confessed.

“A brother in the struggle,” Marisol informed me.

Brother in the struggle?

I couldn’t imagine what Father Rodrigo was talking about.

“He is a man of the people, your father,” Rodrigo added. “This is what I have heard. He is known as our friend in your capital. The poor do not have many friends there.”

He had been gently pumping my hand during all this, and only now released it. “So, how do you know my Marisol?”

Though the question had been addressed to me, it was Julian who answered it.

“By way of the American consulate,” he said.

Father Rodrigo’s expression soured as he turned toward Julian. “They are working with the bad men of this country,” he said firmly, then looked at Marisol. “Be careful what you say, my child. It is known that they are spies.”

Spies. The word clearly caught Julian’s attention.

“Really?” he asked. “Spies for whom?”

“For Casa Rosada,” Rodrigo answered. “They give them names. Then these people disappear.” He looked at Marisol and placed a single, jagged finger at his lips. “Careful,” he said, then glanced toward a nearby bench. “Come, let us sit down.”

Once seated, Father Rodrigo took a moment to observe his surroundings. “Ah, how beautiful is San Martín. I have not seen it since I was a boy.”

He meant Plaza San Martín, a lovely park in the heart of the city, where Marisol had earlier instructed us to meet her. It was close to Retiro Station, she said, and Father Rodrigo was scheduled to leave the city that evening. I’d had little interest in coming, but Julian had insisted. Clearly he had indicated to Marisol that he considered it important to meet this old priest.

At rest, Father Rodrigo seemed even older, but also he looked neglected. His clerical collar was slightly frayed and there were a few small tears in his cassock. This suggested that no help was being provided to him, no Gran Chaco equivalent to those formidable ladies of my boyhood parish, women who kept their priests tidy down to the neatly folded underwear.

My father had explained that South American clergy who subscribed to revolution theology were being punished by what he called “the powers that be,” but on Father Rodrigo such imposed deprivations had created an aura of saintliness. Here was the Church as it should be, I thought, not a thing clothed in robes and adorned by jewels and housed in splendid cathedrals, but a country priest in a worn cassock.

“So,” Father Rodrigo said, glancing first to Julian, then back to me, “has Marisol told you of the place where she grew up?”

She had, as a matter of fact, but for the next few minutes, we listened politely as Father Rodrigo detailed the sad life of the Chaco, the poverty and poor education, young lives doomed to nothing else. It was this doom that he’d wanted Marisol to escape. He’d seen her intelligence, her will, the fact that she would grasp whatever opportunity came her way.

“Which she has done,” he said proudly, then drew Marisol beneath his arm. “She is no longer a girl from the Chaco.”

Marisol plucked the small white flower from her hair and gave it to Rodrigo. “I will always be a girl from the Chaco,” she said.

By then, night had begun to fall over Plaza San Martín. Father Rodrigo struggled to his feet.

“I must go now,” he said. “The bus home leaves soon.”

Marisol tucked her hand beneath the old man’s arm. “I will go with you to the station,” she said.

“I’ll come, too,” Julian volunteered immediately.

“No,” Marisol said softly. “It is for me to do this.”

And I thought, here is the soul of goodness: love, duty, sacrifice, and atonement, all combined to form something for which no word exists in English, save perhaps
grace
.

“No, I want to go with you,” Julian said insistently, like one who wished to share this service with Marisol.

Marisol appeared uncertain of accepting Julian’s offer and surprised by his adamance.

“Let these good boys come with us,” Father Rodrigo said to Marisol. He pressed his sunbaked hand against her immaculate skin. “We must learn the many roads into each other.”

Had it not been for the utter sincerity in the old man’s eyes, I would have thought that final line scripted, a homily only a Barry Fitzgerald could have delivered without provoking laughter. As a statement, it was at once profound and corny, as true as it was impossible, and yet, as an expression of the old man’s Christian perfectionism, it seemed entirely sincere.

The old man smiled. “Come then,” he said, now looking at Julian and me and nodding forward, his signal that we were to come with them to the station.

It was only a short distance to the train station, but much of it was down a long sweep of concrete stairs, which made our progress slow and halting, Father Rodrigo somewhat unsteady on his feet, so that often Marisol took one arm and Julian the other.

At Retiro, crowds of people gathered in great, noisy throngs. Some carried cardboard boxes tied with twine rather than luggage, but this was Buenos Aires in the eighties, not some distant jungle outpost of a century before, and so the vast majority carried simple, battered suitcases and valises not very different from what would have been seen in any American bus station.

If the bus to the Chaco was different from the others, it was only in that those who waited for it looked poorer and more resigned than those on their way to less distant and impoverished shores. They were farmworkers, as Father Rodrigo noted, toilers in soy and sorghum and maize.

The bus pulled in after a few minutes.

Father Rodrigo got to his feet. “God be with you all,” he said, then turned to Marisol, and drew out a strand of dark beads. “I brought these from the Chaco,” he said.

Marisol took the beads and hung them around her neck. “I will wear them every day,” she said.

The old priest smiled. “Be kind to yourself, my daughter,” he said to her, “and remember me.”

Marisol faced the bus as it pulled away, her hand raised, waving, craning her neck, trying for one last glimpse of Father Rodrigo. But he had taken a seat on the opposite side, and so she did not see him again, though she didn’t give up her effort until the bus had disappeared into the night.

“He could easily be arrested,” Julian said firmly and in a way that gave his words a distinct authority. Then he looked at Marisol pointedly. “Talking the way he does about spies in the American consulate. If there were such people, spying for Casa Rosada, they might feel threatened.”

Marisol’s eyes shot over to Julian, and I could see that his remark had struck her as very serious indeed.

“Threatened? But he is just a country priest,” she said. She began to toy with the beads the old priest had just given her. “He is nothing to the ones in Casa Rosada. Who would listen to a priest from the Chaco? He is dust to them.”

Julian’s voice was full of warning. “Even dust gets trampled,” he said. He looked out toward the distant and still-­departing bus. “No one is too small to be noticed by the generals at Casa Rosada,” he added.

He spoke with great authority, as if he had knowledge of secret connections between the American consulate and the masters of Casa Rosada, which, of course, he did not have. And yet, as I could see, Marisol took his words to heart, though she added nothing to the exchange that had just taken place and instead nodded toward the stairs that led back to San Marco.

“There is a nice little restaurant there,” she said. “It is called La Flora.”

A few minutes later we were seated at an outdoor table of the little café she’d mentioned. For no apparent reason, Julian began to talk about a book I was reading, arguing with me over a certain point. He was almost never wrong in such matters, but on this point I knew he was, which rather pleased me, and so to prove that I was right, I went back to the hotel to get the book. It was a chance, however juvenile, to one-up my always completely confident friend. The hotel was only a block away, so I was back very quickly, moving briskly toward the café because I knew I was right and couldn’t wait to prove it. But as I closed in upon their table, I saw that Julian and Marisol were talking very intently. Julian was leaning forward, and Marisol looked extraordinarily grave, like one who’s just been given a dreadful warning. They both shrugged off this seriousness as I approached, however, and it wasn’t until after Marisol had left us that I brought the scene up with Julian.

“What were you talking about with Marisol?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Julian answered.