I saw Vera Sigall again six months later, at a reception in the Argentine embassy. I’d been able to get María Soledad to talk to me about her on our way back from the afternoon in the country. That was how I’d learned that Manuel Pérez, Vera’s husband, was her senior by twenty years, that he’d had two previous marriages, and that, in the ten years of their union, Vera had never ceased being unfaithful to him. María Soledad declared her not only a whore, but also a social climber. What bothered her most was the fact that Vera, “a Jewess,” had entered into a marriage with Manuel Pérez. According to María Soledad, Pérez was a scion of “the noblest lineage in the country,” an assessment that obliged me to repress a laugh, given that those lines of descent she was alluding to were formed by the descendants of some desperately impoverished Spaniards who had come to Chile to seek their fortune.
If I must be strictly accurate, I should disclose that I’d seen Vera Sigall on three occasions prior to our meeting at the embassy. The first was in front of the doors of the Municipal Theater in Santiago. There, after letting her gaze rest on me for a fraction of a second, as if my features looked somehow familiar but produced no greater interest, she turned her eyes to her companion, a good-looking man who reminded me of María Soledad’s accusation and therefore made me feel slightly uneasy. The second time, I spotted her through the windows of Darío Carmona’s bookstore. I was tempted to go in, but she, sitting on a stool with a book in her hands, was looking straight ahead with half-closed eyes. Her solitude and her stillness expressed strength, but at the same time they betrayed her fragility. The potential embarrassment of interrupting her when she was so deep in thought and the certainty that she would once again look at me without seeing me made me give up. The third time was outside Café Paula, on the corner of San Antonio and Agustinas. She was with a little boy, and she was squatting down on the pavement, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. The child clutched his ice cream cone and docilely let himself be worked on. He had the thinness of a convalescent and his mother’s high cheekbones and almond eyes. Vera studied him with an expression of immense sweetness. When she finished, she caressed his face. I thought her gesture was a sort of once-over, verifying that the boy was still there, at her side, and that he was hers.
The past six months had been fruitful ones for me. Above all, I’d succeeded, with the help of a friend who worked in a print shop, in publishing a book of poems, and the reviews, though far from numerous, had all been positive. There had been change in other areas as well. My savings had turned out to be scantier, or my expenses more abundant, than I had foreseen, and I’d had to accept a job with the United Nations, which entailed returning to Geneva for some time. My departure was a few weeks away.
I remember that in the long meetings I had to attend for my new job, I developed a habit of making lists in my notebooks of the women with whom I’d had relationships, cataloging them according to a crude scale which took into account their beauty rating and the degree of their liberalism in sexual matters. Each name was accompanied by a coded letter: S for sublime, P for passable, I for inadequate, and LTI for less than inadequate. Later I scrawled over and scratched out those lists, hiding the identities of the women involved, the majority of whom were married, while others were engaged and on the verge of entering into matrimony. I wasn’t proud of my adventures, but I consoled myself with the thought that I hadn’t simply had intercourse with those women; I’d given something of myself to each one. María Soledad’s talk about Vera Sigall’s recurring infidelities hadn’t escaped my notice, and in some part of my consciousness I harbored the hope of adding her name to my list. In those days, I was convinced that a man’s true path was the one that led to the next woman he would kiss, or better yet, if the conditions were right, take to bed.
In my daydreams, I pictured Vera Sigall’s gaze finally coming to rest on me, recognizing our mutual roots in the wasteland of the landless. But that night in the Argentine embassy, things happened in a way I would have been unable to imagine even in my cheekiest fantasies.
The ambassador’s residence was one of the most magnificent in the city. From every object, from every corner emanated an aura of luxury and good taste, and through the windows you could see the vast park that surrounded the house. I spotted Vera the moment she came in. She was wearing a violet-colored dress with a flared skirt that accentuated her slender waist. In this setting, her presence projected a looseness, an ease I hadn’t noticed the previous time. While conversing with a group of women, Vera laughed, gesticulated, lent an ear to the comments of the others, and agreed with them completely. It was obvious that this display of worldliness (which to my aspiring poet’s critical eyes appeared ostentatious and false) came naturally to her. I felt a touch of disappointment, and throughout the rest of the evening, I refrained from making any effort to approach her. Manuel Pérez was utterly absorbed in one of his conversations, his hands clasped behind his back, his body slightly stooped. It was only when we were preparing to move to the dining tables that Pérez and Vera Sigall rejoined each other. I noticed, however, that in the course of those months, the years seemed to have fallen on Manuel Pérez with all their weight. Even his impeccably tailored suit was too large for his body, which was obviously thinner. Vera went to him and whispered something in his ear, and after she took his arm, they walked together to their table. I noticed that the man, even though he kept looking determinedly straight ahead, staggered a little, and that after he sat down it took him a few seconds to catch his breath. Vera and her husband were seated at a table next to mine, but behind me, so I didn’t have an opportunity to observe them during the dinner. After so many years, when I try to put together what happened next, I realize that the events as they occurred are distorted by the multiple versions of them that Vera and I re-created over the course of time, endowing them with subjectivity and with a patina of romanticism that they doubtless didn’t have. There are moments like that. Moments that in time turn into shared fables. We reconstruct them with the purpose of accommodating them to our story and transforming them into something we can hoard.
I remember that a big teardrop chandelier, projecting its beams onto the women’s powdered faces, revealed their imperfections. The music of a string quartet tempered the atmosphere from the far end of the dining room, producing a sound that served as a background to the voices and the laughter and gave the scene a soft texture. It was from the depths of that harmony that the shouts burst out.
“How dare you speak that way about Mussolini?” a woman cried out.
“And you, how dare you falsify history, Madam?” That was Vera’s voice I was hearing, clear as the sound of glass shattering in the midst of silence. I turned my head and saw her. There was something in her eyes wild and sad at once.
“What’s your moral authority? That you’re a Jew? That you’re destroying the life of a man like—”
“Don’t you dare, Sonia,” Manuel Pérez interrupted her.
“Ladies, gentlemen…,” another man shouted.
“Is it possible you haven’t noticed, Manuel?” said the woman, shouting as before.
“What I’ve noticed is that I have no patience for this much ignorance and stupidity,” Manuel said caustically, rising to his feet so violently that he overturned his chair.
“Leave it, it’s not worth the trouble,” I heard Vera say. She too rose from her seat and put her bare arm around Manuel’s shoulders.
Everyone in the room had fallen silent, and now you could clearly hear the strings playing in the background, like the soundtrack of a tragedy. In the midst of the silence, broken only by the music, the two of them passed through the room, making their way among the tables before the astonished eyes of the other attendees. Vera displayed the confident composure of her youth, her chin held high, her cold eyes staring straight ahead, while Pérez walked slowly beside her, holding on to her arm. I got up from my table and joined the couple. Although Manuel had lost some size in the past few months, he was still a big man. I took him by one elbow, while Vera did the same with the other, and we continued on like that, heading for the doors of the room. The plush carpets that absorbed our footfalls also made it harder to walk, as if a force from the center of the earth were contending against our efforts to maintain our dignity. An embassy official, whose hair seemed to have been parted in the center of his head with a ruler, came up to us and babbled some confused words in a markedly Argentine accent, so that it wasn’t clear whether he was trying to dissuade us from our flight or encourage it. In any case, whatever he may have been saying, there was no way back. The same chauffeur as before, on the occasion of the afternoon in the country, was waiting for the Pérez couple at the gates of the embassy. The sound of music reached us from inside the house.
“We can give you a ride,” Vera muttered. I could see in her eyes both her fortitude and her desolation. I liked the way she took for granted that I wouldn’t be going back inside. I also liked her addressing me with the informal tu.
Together we helped settle Manuel in the front seat, and then Vera and I got in the back. The house behind us, with light streaming from every window, evoked the image of a cruise ship from which we’d disembarked and which was now sailing imperturbably on. Its passengers must have resumed their chatter by then, having already forgotten the unpleasant moment Pérez and his wife had made them go through. The chauffeur started the engine, and I opened my window. We drove through the solitary Santiago streets. At regular intervals, we passed barefoot men pushing carts crammed with packages and newspapers. Manuel was breathing heavily. With eyes closed, he began to hurl insults. In the distance, we could make out San Cristóbal Hill. While Vera was looking out at the street, and although I felt a little wretched for what I was doing, I watched her breasts rise and fall with her breathing, and if I arranged myself at a certain angle, I could even see her cleavage narrow and widen. Her body gave off a fresh aroma of soap.
“Where would you like us to drop you?” I heard Vera ask me. “Horacio Infante, right?” I was impressed that she knew my name.
I stated my address, and we drove on without saying a word.
“He needs me,” she said, adding a few seconds later, “And I need him.”
When we stopped in front of the doors of my building, Manuel was snoring laboriously and breathing with difficulty.
“He’ll be fine,” Vera declared.
I got out of the car, and while I was taking my keys out of my overcoat, she rolled down her window and said, “Thank you, Horacio.”
The morning after that strange soiree at the Argentine embassy, I found myself standing outside my apartment building with one of my neighbors. He’d seen me coming home the previous night, and he’d recognized Manuel Pérez inside the car. I imagined him peering through the curtains on one of the windows of his first-floor apartment and felt disgusted. He was a man of immaculate appearance, with a sparse little gray mustache, who had retired from some position in public service and devoted the greater part of his time to walking his dog in the neighborhood. From him I learned that the Pérez family had made its fortune in mining, and that Pérez himself, as a businessman, had for years been in charge of amassing and increasing that fortune. The same day, I went to the National Library. I was looking for a book by a forgotten poet of the Golden Age, a friend of Lope de Vega, when it occurred to me that perhaps there was some historical work in which I could find more information about the Pérez family.
What I found corroborated and amplified my neighbor’s revelations, but it didn’t help me conceive a fuller or more exact idea of Pérez. In any case, I’d already learned that in their zeal for generalities, history books, like museums, swallow up the particularities of the men and women who inform them, exalting the identities of only a few. Or—to put it more succinctly—if I want to understand, I always turn to novels and poetry.
A few days later, I would have a chance to learn more. An old friend from my school days, Miguel Sanfeliú, invited me to lunch at the Club de la Unión.
We were preparing to drink a final liqueur in the club’s great room, the one with the checkerboard floor, when a man came over to us and sat at our table. He held a cigar clamped between his teeth. A bald-headed man seated at a grand piano was playing a Debussy piece without much conviction.
“Bernardo Ruiz, pleased to meet you,” our new companion introduced himself, and then, without any preamble whatsoever, he asked me, “Have you known them for a long time?” I noted a slight disdain in his tone.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I answered apprehensively.
“I’m talking about Manuel Pérez and his wife,” he explained, and then, without taking the cigar out of his mouth, he exhaled a great cloud of smoke, which came apart a few centimeters from his face.
“The truth is, I don’t know them at all,” I said.
In the mirror in front of me, one of the many that covered the walls of the room, I saw a man whose every gesture was full of an arrogant and almost absurd conviction. His hair was poorly cut and his face beardless. Only a few fractions of a second elapsed before I realized I was looking at myself.
“In that case, I’d say your ‘performance’ of the other night was even more spectacular than it appeared,” replied Ruiz.
“What are you talking about?” asked Sanfeliú.
In a few words, our new companion explained to my friend what had occurred at the embassy, and Sanfeliú laughed heartily. One of the candles burning in front of the mirrors went out, leaving us sitting in a shadowy corner. The pianist stopped playing, adjusted his bow tie, and got up heavily from his piano bench.
“I didn’t know you had quixotic inclinations,” said my friend, laughing.
“Well, what’s certain is that they’re both a mystery to me,” I ventured.
“I can tell,” said Ruiz, smiling with one side of his mouth, and I sensed that he was savoring in advance the revelations he was about to make to me.
All of a sudden, as I was looking at his ruddy face, his double chin, and the carefully arranged yellow curls on his broad skull, I thought about Scarlett O’Hara’s gossipy aunt.
“It happened more than fifteen years ago but even so, there are many people who haven’t forgiven him, especially members of his family. And as you surely must know, the Pérez Somavía family is related to le tout Santiago,” he said, pronouncing these last words with a French accent.
“Explain what you mean, please,” I asked him.
And thus I learned that Pérez had been, from the shadows, one of the main architects of the migration of twenty thousand Jews to Brazil between 1938 and 1941, together with his friend the Bolivian mining magnate Mauricio Hochschild.
“But what makes this all the more interesting is that Manuel’s father, Don Jorge Pérez, was one of the founders of the Nazi Party in Chile.”
A group of men entered the room; their shoes resounded on the tiled floor. Two of the men walked ahead, in animated conversation, while the others followed them in silence.
“Don Jorge was the principal investor in the Nazi newspaper El Trabajo and also a friend of Keller, you know, the ignoramus with pretensions to divinity. Manuel defied not only his class, teaming up with a Bolivian Jewish tycoon, but also and above all his father. Recall that in those days, the majority of Latin American countries, faced with the Nazi occupation of Europe, had closed their doors to Jewish immigrants. Manuel’s actions destroyed his father. It’s said that Don Jorge sent part of his fortune to Germany to finance some obscure experiment that involved the bodies of Jews who had died in the gas chambers. But of course, so far no one has been able to corroborate that. Sometime afterward, the father had a brain hemorrhage, and that was the end of him. Everyone accused Manuel of having caused it.”
“And how about Vera Sigall?”
“What do you mean?”
“What does Vera have to do with all this? She’s a Jew. She even has a slight accent.”
“Ah, that’s another story, but I can assure you that Pérez married her so he could finish destroying his relationship with his family. Some say it was his way of redeeming the guilt and shame that weighed on him because of his father’s actions. But not much is known about her. I’ve seen her a couple of times, she’s extremely beautiful, there’s no doubt about that. They say she has a very sharp tongue and an excess of intelligence.”
At this point, my friend Sanfeliú was looking rather insistently at his watch, and soon he got up to leave. He had a meeting to go to. He offered to give me a ride in his car, but I preferred to walk. The information I’d just received had shocked me. I must confess that I even felt a little envious of Pérez. From my place amid the Byzantine workings of the UN Refugee Agency, I would never be able to do anything so impressive and important as what he’d done.
After a few days, I received a missive from Vera, delivered to me by my concierge. The envelope bore no postage stamps, which made me think it had been brought by the chauffeur. In it Vera thanked me again. She’d read my book of poems, concerning which she made a few acute and insightful comments. She’d even detected my allusions, which heretofore nobody had discovered or commented on, to Saint-John Perse. She didn’t mention the possibility of another meeting, but on the back of the envelope she’d written her address, in clear, neat letters.
At the end of that month I left Santiago for Geneva, and it would be a year before I’d see Vera again.