The Neruda Case (37 page)

It pleased him to find the poet in better spirits, but his frivolous humor also shocked him. Saddened, he let Neruda talk without listening to him. He tried not to think. Then, as he bent to untie his shoes, he felt blood suddenly rush to his head and his chest tighten terribly, while an immense fatigue swept over him, as though he’d aged from one moment to the next. He lay down on the bed, still holding the receiver. A buzzing sound bore into his brain.

“Are you listening, young man?”

“Yes, I’m listening, Don Pablo.” He closed his eyes. His ears felt clogged, as though he were diving deep inside the warm waters of Havana’s Malecón.

“In any case, we needed to talk, because this afternoon, as the sun was setting over Playa Ancha and making pearly sparkles in the water, I fell asleep like one of those shitty old people who start snoring the minute they hit an armchair. And do you know what I dreamed?”

“No, Don Pablo.”

The room spun around him like a mad carousel. He felt chills and nausea. He opened his eyes and counted the water stains that hovered on the ceiling like dirty clouds. Beyond them he saw faded curtains and a frameless mirror over the chest of drawers that reflected the crucified Christ above Cayetano’s head. Everything spun without cease.

“Of course, I’m such an idiot. How would you know? I’ve been lost in the clouds lately.”

After the intense confidence he’d just exhibited, this new conciliatory tone impelled Cayetano to speak. “It’s normal, Don Pablo. Don’t worry. There’s been so much going on, and it’s taken a toll on your nerves, and mine. How’s the treatment going?”

But Don Pablo, deep down, had to be doing very badly.

“Don’t treat me like a child.” He took a deep breath, clearly annoyed, and added, “You know very well this can’t be fixed. So there’s no use in your coming at me with dumb-ass questions or white lies. We’re lucky to be mortal.”

He said it with an anger that seemed to suggest the opposite, but Cayetano replied that he was right; in any case, he could barely hear him. He turned off the light. The room now spun like the carousel in a Hitchcock film he’d seen at the Mauri Theater. His throat was dry, and he was shaken by chills. Altitude sickness, for fuck’s sake, that damn altitude sickness was getting the best of him. He recalled the warnings of the Quechua man at the airport. Now not even coca tea could save him!

“So I dreamed that I was on a theater stage, that I was an actor, like Tina, only I was playing Aeneas,” the poet continued, with the same desperate arrogance. “Do you remember Aeneas, Cayetano?”

“More or less, Don Pablo.” He thought of Tina. He had seen her only once, but as he recalled her, she seemed marked by a definitive, irreparable solitude.

“You can’t just read Simenon, young man. Aeneas was the Trojan who left his homeland because Jupiter ordered him to go to Italy and founded Rome. On the journey, he passed through Carthage, where he fell in love with Queen Dido, a woman who risked everything to be his lover. When he left, she killed herself. That’s in the
Aeneid
, Cayetano. As soon as you finish Simenon, at least read Virgil and Homer.”

“As soon as this passes, I will.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, Don Pablo.” His bones hurt, his teeth chattered, and his body was bathed in cold and sticky sweat. Neruda was no detective, he thought; he made no attempt to find out more.

“So I was Aeneas, walking through the world of the dead, and I
saw the ghost of my former lover, Dido. Without knowing why, I started reciting Aeneas’s words from memory, words I just found in the
Aeneid
: ‘Oh, tragic Dido: was it true, what the messenger said, when he came to tell me you were dead and gone from us? And was I—such pain!—the cause of your death? I swear on the stars and the gods, I swear on faith itself, if faith exists here in the depths of the earth, that I was forced to leave your shores, oh Queen.’ Are you listening, Cayetano, do you realize what was happening in my dream?”

“Of course, Don Pablo. Go on.”

“‘With their ineluctable laws, the commandments of the gods impelled me, as they impel me now, to travel through these shadows, through these places covered in mold and through this deep night: nor could I ever have believed that my departure would have caused you such fierce pain. Wait, don’t go, don’t leave my sight. Where are you fleeing to? What I am telling you is final, it’s the will of fate …’”

He heard his own glasses crash to the floor, and the sound returned him to his hotel room in La Paz, to this exhausting conversation with the poet, and to the complicated text being read or recited to him from La Sebastiana.

“Do you see?” asked Neruda. “Aeneas is me, and Dido is Beatriz. This means that my story was already told by Virgil two thousand years ago. But there’s more: if I was Aeneas, then I took advantage of Dido, when she was young and happy with a decent man. I arrived in her country, seduced her with my cosmopolitan air and a whirlwind of words, and I turned her into an unfaithful wife, only to leave her to face her destiny alone. Beatriz may no longer be alive, Cayetano, and I have to get used to the idea of dying with the horrible feeling that I used her and that I’ll never be able to know the truth.”

At last the mask was falling, though the voice, as had occurred at other times, remained dramatic, playing its part in
The Tragedy of Pablo Neruda
, with its unmistakable sole protagonist. But by now Cayetano had learned to see behind the curtain.

“Don Pablo, it’s nighttime, and you’re tired. Try to sleep, if you can. You’ll see that tomorrow, when the sun rises over the Andes, everything will have a different color.”

“I now see myself as that person Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz talked about: a being who ‘is a corpse, is dust, is shadow, is nothing …’”

It was too much, almost pathetic. He had never heard him in such a state, not at such an extreme. Nor did he want to hear it. “Don Pablo. Stop.”

“Beatriz isn’t my only Dido, Cayetano. Josie Bliss was one, too, the malignant one with her visceral jealousies and gleaming dagger. And so was María Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang, the mother of the daughter I renounced.”

There were no more boundaries. Impossible to tell confessions from recital of text.

“Don Pablo, whom are you trying to scare?”

He didn’t listen. “And then I was Aeneas with Delia, whom I dispensed with when she was old, too old to start a new life with another man. I betrayed her while she was secretly carrying my manuscripts from one place to another, risking her life for my sake. And I repaid her by leaving her for a woman thirty years younger, with whom she couldn’t compete in age or beauty. I’ve been an Aeneas, Cayetano, an unscrupulous bastard. I’ve been a master of the art of escape, and I’ve just now come to understand it in my hour of twilight. I’m condemned to die remembering all the suffering I caused in my pursuit of happiness. There’s no one more thoughtless than the man who seeks only his own contentment. Are you listening, Cayetano? Cayetano?”

55

A
re you referring to Mrs. Tamara Sunkel, of Santa Cruz, Dr. Adelman?” the accountant asked. He was an older man, with brown eyes besieged by deep wrinkles.

“Precisely. The one who acquired the Antofagasta.”

The office of Elmer Soto Ebensberger, CPA, was on the mezzanine of a downtown building, not far from the Palacio Quemado. The neighborhood teemed with food stalls and street vendors, most of them indigenous, who displayed their wares on blankets spread over the sidewalk.

The most sought-after accountant in the German community of La Paz stood up from his desk, which was cluttered with files, and went to an adjacent room, where his employees processed invoices. Cayetano and Adelman waited in silence, staring out at the buildings across the street, which were still under construction but already inhabited on the first floor.

The accountant returned to his office with an array of black notebooks. “You’re referring to Tamara Sunkel Bauer, the German woman, right?” he asked, leafing though pages.

“I’m talking about the wife of Colonel Sacher.”

“May he rest in peace. In that case, we’re referring to the same woman.”

“Mr. Brulé wishes to find her on behalf of an old friend of hers.”

“She was my client for a while, Dr. Adelman. But I don’t know that I’ll be of much use to you now,” Soto Ebensberger murmured as his index finger roved the notebook. “A charming woman, of course, refined and reserved. Extraordinarily punctual with her payments.”

“We’re speaking of this woman, right?” Cayetano showed him the photo of Beatriz in Santa Cruz.

The accountant studied it for a moment, then said, with a pompous air, “That’s certainly her. And there she is with the colonel.”

“Her husband.”

“Not by law,” Soto Ebensberger corrected. He interlaced his hands. A bleeding Bakelite Christ hung on the wall behind him. “They weren’t married in the manner God intended. I know, because I prepared her tax returns, and hers alone.”

Cayetano returned the photo to his jacket pocket. “She left the country a while ago, didn’t she?”

“That’s right.”

“In a surprising, mysterious way …”

“From one day to the next, really. But I wouldn’t say it was illegal.” He unfurled a condescending smile. “She was doing very well here. High income, low profile, rubbing elbows with the elite. The death of the colonel must have devastated her.”

“That’s why she left?”

“I imagine so. And since she was a foreigner, she preferred to go abroad.”

“So the accident led to the disappearance of Mrs. Sunkel?”

“I suppose so, because it was a strange accident. The officer’s Dodge Dart ran off a cliff in El Alto. The steering failed. We’re
talking about a brand-new car, the latest model. Several rumors circulated afterward.”

“For example?”

“That it was an act of political revenge.” He stared hard at Cayetano.

“Revenge for what?”

“Well, the rumors held the colonel responsible for catching Che. He specialized in collecting information. Understand?”

“Yes, I know a little about Sacher. So where is Mrs. Sunkel now?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, Mr. Brulé.”

Cayetano stroked the tips of his mustache. “But if she owned property, she couldn’t have disappeared from Bolivia overnight.”

“You’ve missed a detail: like a good German, she prepared her affairs very calmly and in detail.” Soto Ebensberger became solemn. “She liquidated all her properties before she left.”

Cayetano lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and exhaled the smoke toward the window. “Didn’t she leave you an address before she left? If you were her accountant, then she must have. There are always follow-up details in tax matters.”

“A professional owes discretion to his clients.”

“Don Elmer, it’s a matter of life or death,” intervened Adelman.

“You wouldn’t like revealing anything, either, Doctor.”

“Mr. Brulé’s client is dying, Don Elmer.”

He stood and walked back to the adjacent office. He returned with a red notebook.

“Really, Doctor, only because it’s for you. … When she left, Mrs. Sunkel left her information for a last-minute bank transfer from the sale of a parcel of land. I don’t think it will help Mr. Brulé, since it’s a temporary address. We made the transfer and sent her a copy of the records, but we got back a proof of receipt.”

“What address did she give you?” asked Cayetano.

“She left a care-of in the name of a Maia Herzen.”

“Maia Herzen,” he muttered. “Where?”

“In Santiago de Chile. But it’s been five years, Mr. Brulé. I doubt you’ll be able to find Tamara Sunkel Bauer there now.”

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