The Neruda Case (32 page)

Matilde put my home life in order, since Delia had neglected it in her hard work with my translations, tours, and editors. At that stage, I needed a housewife, not an intellectual. The truth is that Matilde cooks the way she
reads. She neither makes elaborate dishes nor reads sophisticated books, but she has good instincts, which means her literary tastes are closer to those of my readers than to those of so many bitter critics.

She did away with my friends’ longtime habit of coming by my house whenever they felt like it, and created rules and protocols: without invitation there was no access to La Chascona, Isla Negra, or La Sebastiana. And, most important, when I met her, she resuscitated my lethargic desire. I’m grateful that she was already an experienced lover. Her artistic tours throughout Latin America had also served as torrid lessons in love. By the time Matilde arrived at my sickbed in Mexico City, on tiptoe, smiling in her makeup, with her tight blouse and fiery gaze, I was tied to Delia only by a sense of friendship and compassion. The night that I escaped with Matilde to the Island of Capri and left Delia preparing my return to Chile and the clandestine publication of
Canto General,
the die had been cast: Matilde was forty-one, Delia sixty-eight.

I ask the victims of my happiness for forgiveness. I ask it of Josie Bliss and María Antonieta, of Delia and Beatriz, and also of Matilde: all the women who were shipwrecked in an ocean of hopes nourished by my verses. They didn’t know that words cobbled together by a poet are simulacra, artifices, not the actual truth. When was my behavior most despicable? When I left María Antonieta and Malva Marina in Holland? Or when I anonymously published
The Captain’s Verses,
inspired by Matilde, even though I was still married to Delia? It was an homage to my lover, to her tenderness and intoxicating body, and a cruel slap in the face of loyal Delia. All of Chile guessed those poems were mine and that they couldn’t have been inspired by an old woman. When I returned to the country, Delia suspected it as well.

Matilde miscarried three babies that we conceived together. Now, with the bay stretching out before me, mute, gray, and still as one of those melancholy Carlitos Hermosilla engravings, I try to imagine what my life would be like today if those children had been born. It’s too late to think about these things now, late and futile. One day I asked her if we could stop
trying, and said that we should forget about children, that our love could endure without them. Instead of children, we’d have friends; instead of procreating, we’d travel all over the world; instead of telling fairy tales, we’d read Baudelaire, Whitman, and Dostoevsky; and instead of buying toys, we’d collect the most exotic objects imaginable—telescopes, bottles, shells, starfish, pottery, metal irons, and the figureheads of prows.

“Let’s forget about children, Matilde,” I proposed. “I can only be father to my poems, my true progeny.”

48

A
licia? She said her name was Alicia?” exclaimed Laura Aréstegui. They were in the Vienés, a traditional café in Valparaíso that hadn’t lost its old-time splendor and that, despite the shortages that racked the country, still served fresh coffee and first-class pastries.

“That’s right,” answered Cayetano as he lit a cigarette. “She said her name was Alicia, and that the poet was in Santiago, correcting the galleys of a new book.”

“That’s Alicia Urrutia, no doubt about it.”

“Who is Alicia Urrutia?”

“A niece of Matilde’s. A young woman with big boobs and a pretty face. They say she’s the poet’s lover.”

Cayetano put down his coffee in astonishment and looked out the window at Esmeralda Street, where Patria y Libertad nationalists were marching in their black pants and white shirts, armed with clubs and helmets. They waved Chilean flags, as well as white ones with a large black geometric spider at the center that resembled the Nazi swastika. Shouting anti-Allende slogans, they demanded the country be saved from communism. From the sidewalk, some onlookers applauded enthusiastically, while others watched in silence.

“That girl is the poet’s lover,” Laura insisted.

Could the poet really have a new lover? At his age, sick as he was? He wasn’t some puritan who needed to police Pablo’s fly, but still, this news hit him like a deluge of water that burst the pitcher of his patience. And why the devil was he scheming to send a detective all over the world to heal past wounds if he was also in the thick of a new affair? The nation suffocated in a climate of hatred and political division, about to capsize into civil war—and here the poet kept stoking the flames of his personal conflagration. If Matilde found out, she’d cut his balls off. Yes, with cancer and all, she would still cut them off and throw them in the fireplace at La Sebastiana, to heat the house in that implacable and interminable winter, because, Cayetano thought, she was a woman to be reckoned with. He loosened the knot of his tie, the one with the small guanacos, and sipped his coffee in disappointment.

“You’re going to tell me that the poet has a lover, at his age and in his condition?” he asked Laura, not hiding his surprise.

“Why not? Let’s face it, men can get it up even after they’re dead.”

“It’s just hard for me to imagine …”

“It’s because of Alicia Urrutia that Neruda ended up at the Paris embassy,” Laura Aréstegui added.

“Now I really don’t understand.” He tore off another piece of his pastry. Vanilla cream clung to his mustache; he wiped it with a paper napkin. “Please explain how the poet went to Paris because of Alicia.”

“A few years ago, Matilde took Alicia, her niece, to live with them as an employee.”

“That much I know.”

“Well, Matilde was out a lot, doing work for her husband, while Alicia attended to him at home. And the situation, a pair of impressive boobs, fear of aging, well, in the end, you know …”

“I know what?”

“Please, Cayetano. Don’t try that with me.”

“So how did Matilde find out?”

“
In flagrante
. One day she pretended to be traveling to the capital, but turned back and came home. She surprised them in bed. She immediately told him they had to leave Chile to get away from her niece.”

“The same thing happened to her that she’d done to Delia del Carril in the forties, in Mexico City.”

“And what Delia did to María Antonieta, in Madrid. We women are our own worst enemies,” added Laura. The Vienés had filled with people fleeing the tumult outside.

“So that’s why they became ambassadors to Paris?”

“The poet had no choice but to give in. He begged Allende to assign him to Paris. Who could do the job better than him? And so they went.”

“But now he’s back, though officially he’s still the ambassador to France. He’s back, sick as a dog, with Alicia Urrutia by his side.”

“And I’ll bet that if Matilde isn’t careful, he’ll end up marrying the niece. Are you going to include this aspect of his life in your article?”

Cayetano wondered whether he should continue the farce of preparing a piece on the poet for a Cuban magazine. Lies always have the shortest legs, as the saying went. The protest outside was growing: the new arrivals brought helmets, nunchucks, canes, and red and black flags bearing the image of Che Guevara. The chorus of slogans shook Esmeralda Street, nunchucks whirled furiously, makeshift spears jabbed at the sky, and stones flashed on swinging bolas. Cayetano thought of June’s failed coup, when he’d been a simple spectator of events from Alí Babá. He felt that things were repeating themselves with astounding precision: he, Cayetano, sat at a table before a large window, while history flowed vertiginously outside; here he sat, doing nothing, passive and helpless, simply watching events
as they occurred, without the strength or conviction to stand, run out to the street, and speak or act.

“I’m not going to write a single line about the poet’s love life,” he replied, keeping up the farce. “That’s something private, and nobody’s concern.”

“I’m disappointed in you.”

“Why?” Outside, a fight was breaking out between MIR and the nationalists. More people sought refuge from flying fists in the café. Vaccarezza, the owner, ordered the door to be closed and the metal curtains drawn just as riot police began to chase down the revolutionaries. “Why do I disappoint you, Laura?”

“Because his love life exactly reflects his whole being, and best reveals what he thinks of women.” The lamps of Café Vienés lit up, radiating opalescent light as the metal curtains lowered and turned the place into a capsule. “He escaped from Josie Bliss; he abandoned María Antonieta and his daughter; he threw Delia away like a rag. Now that the years have caught up to Matilde and she’s not the woman she used to be, he’s sleeping with her niece. What do you think of the poet now? What do you call these dirty tricks? Sonnets, eclogues, free verse? If you don’t describe it, who will?”

“You yourself, sweetheart. Aren’t you writing your thesis for Patrice Lumumba University?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Cayetano. You know that if I include that in my graduate work, they’ll deny me a degree. When have you ever seen the church defrock its own saints?”

49

F
rom the soda fountain at Alí Babá, Cayetano saw the poet turn onto Collado Way. He walked slowly, slightly stooped, in a poncho and cap, assisted by his chauffeur. Cayetano polished off his coffee, put some coins on the table, and left the restaurant with the sense that Neruda’s health was deteriorating at the same pace as the health of the nation.

As soon as Sergio opened the garden door, he informed Cayetano that the poet was resting in his bed, which was now down in the living room because he lacked the strength to go up to the second floor. Cayetano ran up the front steps and found the poet lying beside the window, his legs covered with a blanket. The green carousel horse, which had struck him so vividly on his first visit, no longer galloped through the living room.

“Where is she?” the poet asked after he sat up against the pillows and, in a gesture that both surprised and moved Cayetano, embraced him in silence, half closing his large saurian eyelids.

“I suspect she’s in Bolivia, Don Pablo,” Cayetano answered.