Woes of the True Policeman (7 page)

When Amalfitano came in, the room was dark. He spied Guerra sunk low in the big chair and for an instant he thought the other man was asleep. When he turned on the light he saw that Guerra was wide awake: his eyes were unnaturally alert and bright, as if he were high, and there was a sly smile on his lips. Despite the manner of their meeting, they greeted each other formally. They talked about the school year, about Amalfitano’s predecessors, and about the university’s need for good professors. In the sciences the best people left for Monterrey or Mexico City, or made the leap to some American university. In the arts it’s a different story, said Guerra, nobody pulls a fast one on me, but to make sure of it I have to be everywhere, supervise everything personally, it’s a lot to handle. I can imagine, said Amalfitano, who had decided to tread with care. Then they talked about theater. Horacio Guerra wanted to revamp the department’s drama program and in order to do so he needed the cooperation of everyone. Absolutely everyone. The department had two theater groups, but if he was to speak frankly both were undisciplined. Though the students weren’t bad actors. Amalfitano wanted to know what he meant by undisciplined. Announcing the date of an opening and not opening, losing an actor and having no understudy, starting the show half an hour late, failing to stick to a budget. My task, explained Guerra, is to find the evil and root it out. And I’ve found it, my friend, and I’ve rooted it out. Do you want to know what it was? Yes, of course, said Amalfitano. The directors! That’s right, those ignorant kids, ignorant but most of all undisciplined, who have no idea that a play is like a battlefield, complete with logistics, artillery, infantry, cavalry to cover the flanks (or light armored units, don’t take me for some old fart, even air squadrons if you insist), tanks, engineers, scouts, etc.,
etc.

“Actually,” said Guerra, “as you may have guessed, this isn’t my office. My office has air and light and I take pride in the furniture, but good generals have to stand with their troops, so I moved here.”

“I know,” said Amalfitano, “your secretary told me.”

“Have you been to my other office?”

“Yes,” said Amalfitano, “that’s where they told me how to get here. I guess it took me a while to find you. At first I got lost.”

“Yes, yes, the same thing always happens. Even our theatergoers get lost on their way to our plays. Maybe I should put up signs pointing the way.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Amalfitano.

They continued their conversation about theater, although Guerra avoided asking Amalfitano what he thought about the repertory he had planned. The only authors Amalfitano had heard of were Salvador Novo and Rodolfo Usigli. The others sounded either like discoveries or yawning pits. All the while Guerra talked about his project as if he were planning a delicate repast that only a few would really attack with relish. Not a word was spoken about Amalfitano’s job. When they parted, an hour later, Guerra asked whether he’d been to the Botanic Garden. Not yet, answered Amalfitano. Later, as he was waiting for a taxi to take him home, he wondered why Guerra had sent a gardener rather than an office boy to summon him. It seems a good sign, he thought.

The Texan; the people who bought the fake Larry Rivers paintings from the Texan; Castillo, who sincerely believed he was doing good work; the art market in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas: all of them, thought Amalfitano, were ultimately like characters from an eighteenth-century philosophical novel, exiled on a continent like the moon, the dark side of the moon, the perfect spot for them to grow and be formed, innocent and greedy, singular and brave, dreamers and utterly naïve. How else to explain, he thought, that not only are these paintings commissioned and painted but even sold, that there are people who buy them, and no one exposes them and turns them in? The art spreads across Texas, thought Amalfitano, like a revelation, like a lesson in humility that bypasses the dealers, like a kind of goodness that redeems everything, even bad forgeries, and he immediately pictured those fake Berdies, those fake camels, and those extremely fake Primo Levis (some of the faces undeniably Mexican) in the private salons and galleries, the living rooms and libraries of modestly prosperous citizens, owners of nothing but their well-appointed houses and their cars and maybe a few oil stocks, but not many, just enough, he imagined them strolling through rooms cluttered with trophies and photographs of cowboys, casting sidelong glances at the canvases on the walls at each pass. Certified Larry Rivers. And then he imagined himself strolling around Castillo’s nearly empty studio, naked like Frank O’Hara, a cup of coffee in his right hand and a whiskey in his left, his heart untroubled, at peace with himself, moving trustingly into the arms of his new lover. And superimposed on this image again were the fake Larry Rivers paintings scattered across a flat expanse, with big houses set far from one another, and in the middle, in the geometric and artificial yards, art, shaky and fragile as a forgery; Larry Rivers’s Chinese horsemen riding across a field of roiling white horsemen. Fuck, thought Amalfitano in excitement, this is the center of the world. The place where things really happen.

But then he came back down to earth and cast a skeptical eye over Castillo’s paintings and was assailed by doubt: either he had forgotten how Larry Rivers painted or the Texas art buyers were a bunch of blind raving lunatics. He thought, too, about the loathsome Tom Castro and said to himself that yes, maybe the authenticity of the canvases resided precisely in their failure to exactly replicate the Larry Rivers paintings, allowing them, paradoxically, to pass for originals. Through an act of faith. Because those Texans
needed
paintings and because faith is comforting.

Then he imagined Castillo painting—with such effort, such dedication—a beautiful boy blithely asleep on the university campus or wherever, dreaming about mixed-race exhibitions in which the authentic and the fake, the serious and the playful, the real work and the shadow, embraced and marched together toward destruction. And he thought about Castillo’s smiling eyes, his laugh, his big white teeth, about his hands showing him the strange city, and despite everything he felt happy, lucky, and he even managed to appreciate the camels.

Once, after discussing the curious nature of art with Castillo, Amalfitano told him a story he had heard in Barcelona. The story was about a recruit in Spain’s Blue Division who had fought on the Russian front in World War II, the northern front, to be precise, in an area near Novgorod. The recruit was a little man from Sevilla, thin and blue-eyed, who by some trick of fate (he was no Dionisio Ridruejo or Tomás Salvador and when he had to give the Roman salute he saluted, but he wasn’t a real fascist, or even a Falangist) had ended up in Russia. In Russia, someone said hey,
sorche
, hey, recruit, come here, do this, do that, and the word
recruit
stuck with the Sevillan, but in the dark recesses of his mind and in that vast place, with the passage of time and the daily terrors, it turned into the word
chantre
, or cantor. So the Andalusian thought of himself in terms of a cantor, with all the duties and obligations of a cantor, though he didn’t have any conscious idea what the word meant, which was choir director at some cathedrals. And yet somehow, by thinking of himself as a cantor he became one: during the terrible Christmas of ’41 he directed the choir that sang carols while the Russians pounded the 250th Regiment. In general, he bore himself with courage, though as time went by he began to lose his sense of humor. Soon enough he was wounded. For two weeks he was at the hospital in Riga under the care of the sturdy, smiling nurses of the Reich and some incredibly ugly Spanish volunteer nurses, probably sisters, sisters-in-law, and distant cousins of José Antonio. When he was released, something happened that would have serious consequences for the Sevillan: instead of being given a billet with the correct destination, he was given one that sent him to the quarters of an SS battalion stationed some two hundred miles from his regiment. There, surrounded by Germans, Austrians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes, all much taller and stronger than he, he tried to explain the mistake but the SS kept delaying their verdict and until the matter was settled they gave him a broom, a bucket of water, and a scouring brush and set him to sweep the barracks and scrub the huge, oblong wooden structure where all kinds of prisoners were interrogated and tortured. Without resigning himself entirely to the situation, but performing his new duties conscientiously, the Sevillan watched the time go by from his new barracks, eating much better than he had before and safe from any fresh threat. Then, in the dark recesses of his mind, the word
recruit
began to appear again. I’m a recruit, he said, a raw recruit, and I must accept my fate. Little by little, the word
cantor
vanished, though some evenings, under an endless sky that filled him with Sevillan longing, it still echoed, lost who knows where. And one fine day the inevitable happened. The barracks of the SS battalion were attacked and taken by a regiment of Russian cavalry, according to some, or a group of partisans, according to others. The result was that the Russians found the Sevillan hiding in the oblong building, wearing the uniform of an SS auxiliary and surrounded by the not exactly past-tense horrors perpetrated there. Caught red-handed, as they say. Soon he was tied to one of the chairs that the SS used for interrogations, one of those chairs with straps on the legs and the seat, and every time the Russians asked him a question, the Sevillan replied in Spanish that he didn’t understand, he was just an underling there. He tried to say it in German, too, but he hardly spoke a word of the language, and the Russians didn’t speak it at all. After beating him for a while, they went to get another Russian who spoke German and who was interrogating prisoners in one of the other cells in the oblong building. Before they came back, the Sevillan heard shots and realized that they were killing some of the SS, and he almost gave up hope; but when the shooting ended, he clung to life again with all his might. The German speaker asked him what he did there, what his duties and his rank were. The Sevillan tried to explain in German, but to no avail. Then the Russians opened his mouth and with a pair of pliers that the Germans used for other purposes they seized his tongue and yanked. The pain made tears spring to his eyes and he said, or rather shouted, the word
coño
, cunt. With the pliers in his mouth the exclamation was transformed, coming out as the word
kunst
. The Russian who spoke German stared at him in surprise. The Sevillan shouted
Kunst, Kunst,
and wept in pain. The word
Kunst
, in German, means art, and that was how the bilingual soldier heard it and he said that the son of a bitch was an artist or something. The soldiers who were torturing the Sevillan removed the pliers along with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the discovery.
Art
. The thing that soothes wild beasts. And just like that, like soothed beasts, the Russians took a break and waited for some sign while the recruit bled from the mouth and swallowed his own blood mixed with big doses of saliva and choked and retched. The word
coño
, however, transformed into the word
art
, had saved his life. The Russians took him away with the few remaining prisoners, and later another Russian who spoke Spanish came to hear the Sevillan’s story and he ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia while his accidental comrades were shot. It was well into the 1950s before he left Siberia. In 1957 he settled in Barcelona. Sometimes he opened his mouth and told the story of his little war in great good humor. Other times, he opened his mouth and showed the piece of tongue he was missing. It was hardly noticeable. When people told him so, the Sevillan explained that over the years it had grown back. Amalfitano didn’t know him personally, but when he heard the story the Sevillan was still living in the concierge quarters of some building in Barcelona.

At some point Castillo brought Amalfitano to see Juan Ponce Esquivel, art student and amateur numerologist, who lived in Aquiles Serdán, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Santa Teresa, west of Colonia El Milagro, near the old railroad tracks. The original idea was that Ponce would tell their fortunes, but when they got there they found him absorbed in a forecast of the nation’s future. I think we’re going to see the same heroes all over again, said Ponce as he served them tea. Carranza, for example, has already been born. He’ll die in the year 2020. Villa too: right now he’s a kid mixed up with narcos, hookers, and illegals. He’ll be shot to death in 2023. Obregón was born in 1980 and will be killed in 2028. Elías Calles was born in 1977 and will die in 2045. Huerta was born in the year that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and he’ll die in 2016. Pascual Orozco was born in 1982 and will die in 2016. Madero was born in 1973, the year of Allende’s fall, and he’ll be killed in 2013. Everything will happen all over again. The Mexican people will watch spellbound as new rivers of blood are shed. I get a bad vibe from 2015. Zapata was born already, in 1983; he’s still a kid playing out in the street, memorizing two or three Amado Nervo poems or four
poemínimos
by Efraín Huerta. He’ll die in a hail of bullets in 2019. The numbers say that everything will repeat itself. Everybody will be born again, the heroes, the soldiers, the innocent victims. The most important ones and the ones who’ll die first have already been born. But some are still missing. The numbers say that Aquiles Serdán will be killed again. Shit for luck, shit for fate.

Viva Mexico, said Castillo.

Amalfitano didn’t say anything, but he had the sense that someone, a fourth person, was saying something from the next room or from a big chest that Juan Ponce Esquivel had at the back of the room: excuse me, is anyone there? excuse me, excuse me?

Between the medical school and the plain—a bare open space scarcely interrupted by yellow hills under a high and mobile sky, across which the highway ran east—was the famous Botanic Garden of the city of Santa Teresa, under the stewardship of the university.