The Return

Snow

I met him in a bar on Calle Tallers, in Barcelona, it must be about
five years ago now.
When he found out I was Chilean, he came over to say hello;
he too had been born in that faraway place.

He was more or less the same age as me, thirty-odd, and he drank quite
a bit, though I never saw him drunk.
His name was Rogelio Estrada.
He was thin,
shortish, and dark.
His smile seemed to be permanently poised between wonder and
mischief, but after a while I discovered that he was far more innocent than he
made out.
One night I went to the bar with a group of Catalan friends.
We got
talking about books.
Rogelio came over to our table and said that the greatest
writer of the century was, without a doubt, Mikhail Bulgakov.
One of the
Catalans had read
The Master and Margarita
and
A Theatrical
Novel
, but Rogelio mentioned other works by the distinguished novelist,
more than ten of them, if I remember correctly, and he gave their titles in
Russian.
My friends and I thought he was joking, and soon the talk moved on.
One
night he invited me back to his place and I went, I don’t know why.
He lived in
a street nearby, a few yards from a very decrepit movie theater known to the
local kids as the Ghost Cinema.
The apartment was old and full of furniture that
wasn’t his.
We sat down in the living room, Rogelio put on a record—some awful,
emphatic music with an unrelenting crescendo—and then he filled two glasses with
vodka.
On a shelf, presiding over the room, was a silver-framed photo of a girl.
The rest of the decor was nothing special: postcards from various European
countries and some very old shabby-looking soccer pennants: Colo-Colo,
University of Chile and Santiago Morning.
Pretty, isn’t she?
said Rogelio,
pointing at the girl in the silver frame.
Yes, very pretty, I replied.
Then we
sat down again and drank for a while in silence.
When Rogelio eventually spoke,
the bottle was almost empty.
First you have to empty the bottle, he said, then
your soul.
I shrugged.
Though, of course, I don’t believe in the soul, he added.
It all comes down to time, though, doesn’t it?
Do you have time to listen to my
story?
Depends on the story, I said, but I think so.
It won’t take very long,
said Rogelio.
Then he stood up, took the silver-framed photo, sat down in front
of me cradling it in his left arm while holding the glass of vodka in his right
hand, and began:

My childhood was happy; it had nothing to do with the way my life
turned out later.
Things started going wrong when I was a teenager.
I was living
in Santiago with my family and according to my father I was well on the way to
becoming a juvenile delinquent.
My father, in case you don’t know (and I can’t
see why you would), was José Estrada Martínez, aka Chubby Estrada, one of the
big wheels in the Chilean Communist Party.
And we were a proudly proletarian
family, fighting the good fight, upstanding and righteous.
At the age of
thirteen I stole a bicycle.
You can imagine, I don’t need to spell it out.
I was
caught two days later and got one hell of a thrashing.
At fourteen I started
smoking dope—some of my friends in the neighborhood used to grow it in the
foothills of the Andes.
At the time my father had a senior position in Allende’s
government, and his biggest fear, poor old dad, was that the right-wing press
would reveal the misdemeanors of his eldest son.
At fifteen I stole a car.
I
wasn’t caught (though now I know that with a bit more time, the cops would have
found me) because a few days later the coup happened and my whole family took
refuge in the Soviet Embassy.
I don’t need to tell you what the days I spent in
there were like.
It was awful.
I slept in the corridor and kept trying to hit on
the daughter of one of my father’s comrades, but all they did, that bunch, was
sing
The International
or
No pasarán
.
You get the picture, it
was dismal, like party time at the Bible Hall.

We arrived in Moscow at the beginning of 1974.
Personally, to be
honest, I was glad to be going: a new city, blonde blue-eyed Russian girls, the
plane trip, Europe, a new culture.
The reality turned out quite differently.
Moscow was like Santiago, but quieter, bigger and brutally cold in winter.
At
first they put me in a school where it was Spanish half the time, Russian the
other half.
Two years later I was at a regular school, speaking okay Russian,
and bored out of my wits.
I guess some strings were pulled to get me into the
University, because I really didn’t study much.
I enrolled in medicine, but
dropped out after a semester; it wasn’t for me.
Still, I have good memories of
my time there: it’s where I made my first friend, I mean the first friend who
wasn’t an exiled Chilean like me.
His name was Jimmy Fodeba and he came from the
Central African Republic, which as the name suggests, is in the middle of
Africa.
Jimmy’s father was a communist, like mine, and like my father, he’d been
forced into exile.
Jimmy was pretty smart, but underneath he was just like me.
I
mean, he liked to stay up late, he liked to drink and smoke the occasional
joint, and he liked women.
Before long we were joined at the hip.
The best
friend I’ve ever had, except for the gang back in Santiago, the guys who
stayed—I’ll probably never see them again, but who knows?
Anyway, what happened
was that Jimmy and I combined our forces, and our desires, and, while we were at
it, our needs as well, and from then on, instead of being two separate exiles,
feeling lost and lonely, we were a pair of wolves roaming the streets of Moscow,
and whenever one of us was scared, the other one dared, and so, little by little
(because sometimes Jimmy had to study, he was a good student, unlike me), we
started to get a general idea of the city where both of us would probably be
living for a fair while.
I won’t go on about our youthful adventures, all I’ll
say is that after a year we knew where to find a bit of weed, which may not seem
like much of a feat now, in Barcelona, but in Moscow, back in those days, it was
truly heroic.
By then I’d tried studying Latin American literature, Russian
literature, radio broadcasting, food science, just about everything really, and
whether it was because I got bored, or didn’t pay attention in class, or just
didn’t turn up, which is basically what happened most of the time, I failed
everything, and eventually my father threatened to send me to work in a factory
in Siberia, poor old guy, that’s the way he was.

And that was how I came to enroll in the School of Physical Education,
which some optimistic Russians used to call the Advanced School of Physical
Education, and this time I managed to keep it together until I got my diploma.
That’s right, my friend, you’re looking at a qualified gymnastics instructor.
Not a good one, of course, especially not compared with some of the Russians,
but qualified all the same.
When I handed my father the diploma, the old man was
moved to tears.
I’d say that’s when my adolescence came to an end.

At the time I used to call myself Roger Strada.
I was always getting
into trouble; my friends weren’t what you’d call good, upstanding citizens and I
was thoroughly bad.
It was like I was full of rage and didn’t know how to get it
out of my system.
I worked as a trainer’s assistant for a man of dubious and
disconcerting moral character (it was a true meeting of minds); he specialized
in recruiting new athletes from secondary schools, and I spent most of my time
at parties, making deals and doing shady business to supplement my salary.
My
boss was called Pultakov.
He was divorced and lived in a tiny apartment in
Leliushenko Street, near Rogachev Square.
As I said, I was a bad boy and Jimmy
Fodeba was bad too, and anyone who knew us well knew that we were bad (I think I
chose to call myself Roger, at least for a start, because it went with Jimmy,
and because I secretly thought of myself as a kind of Italian-American
gangster), but Pultakov was
seriously
bad and working with him every
day, I gradually came to discover all his tricks, depravities and vices.
My
father lived in a Moscow of papers and memoranda, a bureaucrats’ Moscow, with
its commands and countermands, its current issues, its factions and infighting:
an ideal Moscow.
I lived in a Moscow of drugs and prostitution, black
marketeering and living it up, threats and crimes.
In certain circles the two
Moscows would occasionally come into contact and even intermingle, but as a rule
they were two distinct cities, each unaware of the other’s existence.
Pultakov
initiated me into the world of sports betting.
We gambled with other people’s
money of course, but also with our own.
Soccer, hockey, basketball, boxing, even
championship skiing, a sport I’ve never really seen the attraction of: we
dabbled in everything.
I met people.
All sorts of people.
Nice enough guys, in
general, small-time crooks like me, though sometimes I did come across real
criminals, the sort who’d stop at nothing, or at least you could tell that
in certain circumstances
they’d stop at nothing.
An instinct for
survival prevented me from getting too close to those people.
Prison-fodder,
sewer-food.
People who could intimidate Pultakov and terrify me and Jimmy.
With
one exception, a guy our age, who for some reason took a shine to me.
His name
was Misha Semionovich Pavlov and he was like the whiz kid of the Moscow
underworld.
Pultakov and I provided him with information about various sports
for his gambling, and from time to time this Misha Pavlov invited us to his
apartment, or one of his apartments, never the same one, all of them dingier
than Pultakov’s or mine, usually out in the old northeastern suburbs, where the
workers lived: Poluboyarov, Viktoria and Old Market.
Pultakov didn’t like Pavlov
(he didn’t like anyone much) and tried to keep his dealings with him to a
minimum, but I’ve always been naïve; Pavlov’s reputation as the underworld’s
child prodigy and the thoughtful way he treated me—occasionally giving me a
chicken or a bottle of vodka or a pair of shoes—finally won me over, and I
succumbed completely, body and soul, as they say.

The years went by and my family returned to Chile, except for my
younger sister, who married a Russian; my father died in Santiago and had a
beautiful funeral, or so they told me in the letters; Jimmy Fodeba went on
living in Moscow and working in a hospital (his father went back to the Central
African Republic, where he was killed), while Pultakov and I went scurrying like
a pair of rats around the gyms and sports complexes.
With the arrival of
democracy and the end of the Soviet Union (not that I’ve ever been interested in
politics) came freedom and the mafias.
Moscow became a charming, exuberant city,
buzzing with that fierce, typically Russian sort of exuberance.
I can’t explain
it, you have to understand the Slavic soul, and I don’t think you do, however
many books you’ve read.
Suddenly it all got too big for us.
Pultakov, who was a
Stalinist at heart (I still don’t get that, because under Stalin he would have
ended up in Siberia for sure), was nostalgic for the old days.
But I adapted to
the new situation, and decided to save some money, now that it was possible, so
I could get out of there for good and start exploring the world, Europe to begin
with, then Africa, which, in spite of my age—by then I was over thirty and old
enough to know better—I imagined as the kingdom of adventure, an endless
frontier, a new story book where I could begin again, be happy, and find myself,
as we used to say when we were kids back in Santiago in 1973.
And that was how I
joined Misha Pavlov’s staff, almost without realizing it.
At the time his
nickname was Billy the Kid.
Don’t ask me why.
Billy the Kid was quick on the
draw; Misha never did anything quickly, not even pulling out his credit card.
Billy the Kid was brave and, at least in the movies I’ve seen, agile and thin;
Misha was brave too, but built like a Buddha, obese even by Russian standards,
and allergic to all forms of physical exercise.
I went on being a bookmaker, but
soon I began to do other kinds of work for him.
Sometimes he’d give me a bundle
of cash and send me to see a player I knew to get him to throw a game.
On one
occasion I managed to bribe half a soccer team, one by one, flattering the more
cooperative players and using veiled threats on the others.
Sometimes he sent me
to persuade other gamblers to withdraw their bets or not to make waves.
But most
of the time my work consisted of providing reports on athletes, one after
another, without any evident rhyme or reason, which Pavlov’s IT expert would
tirelessly key into his computer.