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Apologia

What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?

 

—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE,
“AN APOLOGY FOR RAYMOND SEBOND”

Frankly, I’m the last person you should be asking about Alejandro Bevilacqua. What can I tell you, my dear Terradillos, about someone I haven’t seen for thirty years? I mean, I hardly knew him, or if I did, then it was only very vaguely. To be honest, I didn’t want to know him any better. Or rather: I did know him well—I admit that now—but only in a distracted sort of way—reluctantly, as it were. Our relationship (for want of a better word) had an element of courteous formality to it, as well as that conventional nostalgia shared among expatriates. I don’t know if you understand. Fate threw us together, so to speak, and if you asked me now, hand on heart, if we were friends, I would have to confess that we had nothing in common, apart from the words República Argentina stamped in gold letters on our passports.

What draws you to this man, Terradillos? Is it the manner of his death? Is it that image—which still haunts my dreams even though I didn’t see it with my own eyes—of Bevilacqua lying on the pavement, skull crushed, blood running down the street to the drain, as though wanting to flee from his lifeless body, as though refusing to be a part of such an abominable crime, of such an unjust, unforeseen ending?

I think not. You are a journalist, in love with life. You’re a man of the pulsing world, I’d say, not an obituaries junkie. Far from it. It’s the truth you’re after, the living proof. You want to lay these facts before your readers, though they may not be much interested in someone like Bevilacqua, a man whose roots once delved into the soil of Poitou-Charentes (which, let us not forget, is your region, too, Terradillos). You want your readers to know the truth—a dangerous concept if ever there was one. You hope to redeem Bevilacqua even as he lies in the grave. You want to equip him with a new biography assembled from other people’s memories. And all this for the earth-shattering reason that Bevilacqua’s mother hailed from the same corner of the world as you. It’s a lost cause, my friend! Do you know what I suggest? Find another personality—some colorful hero or notorious celebrity—of whom Poitou-Charentes can be really proud, like that heterosexual faggot Pierre Loti or that inquisitive egghead Michel Foucault, darling of Yankee universities. You’re good at writing learned articles, Terradillos, I can tell, and I know about these things. Don’t waste your time on dross, or the hazy recollections of an aging curmudgeon.

And, to return to my first question: why me?

Let’s see. I was born at one of the many staging posts of a prolonged exodus, one that took my Jewish family from the Asiatic steppes to the steppes of South America; the Bevilacquas, by contrast, traveled straight from Bergamo to what would become the province of Santa Fé toward the end of the eighteenth century. In that remote colony, those adventurous Italian settlers established a slaughterhouse; to commemorate their bloody achievement, in 1923 the mayor of Venado Tuerto bestowed the name Bevilacqua on one of the minor streets of the eastern zone. Bevilacqua père met the girl who would become his wife, Marieta Guittón, at a patriotic celebration; they were married within a few months. When Alejandro was a year old, his parents were killed in the rail disaster of 1939, and his paternal grandmother decided to take the boy to Buenos Aires, where she opened a delicatessen. Bevilacqua (who, as you know, was annoyingly fastidious about details) once made a point of telling me that the family’s business had not always been in tripe and cold cuts, and that, centuries ago, back in Italy, a Bevilacqua had been surgeon to the court of some cardinal or bishop. Señora Bevilacqua took pride in those vague but distinguished roots, preferring to ignore the Huguenot Guittóns. She was what we used to call a font-kisser, and I believe that in seventy years she never missed a day’s Mass, until the heart attack that left her crippled.

My friend Terradillos, you think that I can paint you a portrait of Bevilacqua that is at once spirited, heartfelt, and true to life; that you can pour my words straight onto the page, adding a dash of Poitiers color. But that is precisely what I cannot do. Bevilacqua certainly trusted me; he confided in me some very personal details of his life, filling my head with all kinds of intimate nonsense, but, truth be told, I never understood why he was telling me all these things. I can assure you that I did nothing to encourage him—on the contrary. Perhaps he saw in me, his fellow countryman, a solicitude that wasn’t there, or he decided to interpret my evident lack of affection as pragmatism. One thing’s for sure: he turned up at my house at all hours of the day and night—oblivious to my work or my need to earn a living—and he’d start talking about the past, as though this flow of words, of his words, could re-create for him a world that, in spite of everything, he knew or felt to be irredeemably lost. It would have been pointless to protest that I did not share his condition of exile. I had left Argentina when I was ten years younger than him, a teenager yearning to travel. After putting down tentative roots in Poitiers, I moved on to Madrid, hoping it would be a good place to write, shouldering some of that resentment that Argentines inevitably feel toward the capital of the mother country while never actually surrendering to the commonplace of living in San Sebastián or Barcelona.

Don’t take these observations the wrong way: Bevilacqua was not one of those people who plant themselves on your couch and then can’t be shifted. On the contrary, he seemed incapable of the slightest rudeness, and that was what made it so hard to ask him to leave. Bevilacqua possessed a natural grace, a simple elegance, an understated presence. Tall and slim, he moved slowly, like a giraffe. His voice was both husky and calming. His heavy-lidded eyes—typically Latin, in my opinion—gave him a sleepy appearance, and they fixed on you in such a manner that it was impossible to look away when he was talking to you. And when he reached to grab at your sleeve with those fine, nicotine-stained fingers, you let yourself be grabbed at, knowing that any resistance would be futile. Not until the time came to say good-bye would I realize that he had led me to waste a whole afternoon.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Bevilacqua felt so at home in Spain—even more so in those gray years—was that his imagination favored dreams over concrete reality. In Spain—I don’t know if you agree—everything has to be made obvious: they put signs on every building, plaques on every monument. Of course, people who really know that pretentious village perceive Madrid as something else, semihidden, mysterious; the plaques are deceptive, and what the tourists see is simply a mise-en-scène. For some strange reason, he gave more credence to the shadowy evidence before him than to the substance of his own memories and dreams. Even though he had suffered, for decades, from political fabrications and press deception in our own country, he placed a surprising faith in the press fabrications and political deception of his adopted country, arguing that the former had been a pack of lies but that these were truths.

Do you see what I mean? Bevilacqua made a distinction between true falsehood and false truth. Did you know that he had a passion for documentaries, the drier the better? Before I knew that he was going to publish a novel, I never would have guessed that he had any talent for writing fiction, because he was the only person I knew who was capable of spending a night watching one of those films that follow a day in an Asturian meat-processing plant, or a sanatorium in the Basque mountains.

Now, don’t go imagining that I did not think highly of him. Bevilacqua was—let me find the mot juste—very sincere. If he gave you his word, you felt obliged to take it, and it would never occur to you that this might be an empty gesture or mere formality. He was like one of those men I used to see as a boy in Buenos Aires—thin as a pencil, dressed in double-breasted suits, their black hair glossy with brilliantine beneath their Shabbat hats—who used to greet my mother as we walked to market. My mother (who knew about these things) said that these men’s tongues were so clean that one could find out whether or not a coin was made of silver by placing it in their mouths: if it was false, it turned black from the slightest contact with their saliva. I think that my mother, who was a harsh judge of people, would have taken one look at Bevilacqua and declared him a mensch. He had something of the provincial gentleman, Alejandro Bevilacqua, an unruffled air and an absence of guile which meant that one toned down jokes in his presence and tried to be accurate about anecdotes. It’s not that the man lacked imagination, but rather that he had no talent for fantasy. Like Saint Thomas, the apostle, he needed to touch what he saw before he could believe it was real.

That is why I was so surprised the night he turned up at my house and said he’d seen a ghost.

Where was I? Those countless mornings, afternoons, and nights that I spent listening to Bevilacqua drone on about dull episodes in his life—watching him smoke cigarette after cigarette, rolling them between amber fingers, crossing and uncrossing his legs then jumping to his feet and taking great strides around my room—have merged in my memory into one single, monstrous day inhabited exclusively by this emaciated man. My memory, though increasingly unreliable, is both precise and vague on this point. I mean that it does not consist of a series of clear recollections, but in an agglomeration of brief, confused memories that seem contaminated by literature. I think that I am remembering Bevilacqua, but then portraits of Camus, or of Boris Vian, come to mind.

These days I share Bevilacqua’s grayish hue, if not his emaciation. Inconceivably, I have aged; I have grown fat. He, on the other hand, seems as old as he was when I first met him: today we would say “young,” but in those days it was “mature.” I have continued, as it were, the story which we began together, or which Bevilacqua began, in an Argentina which is no longer ours. I know the chapters that followed his death (I was going to say his “disappearance,” but that word, my friend Terradillos, we must not use). He, of course, knows nothing of all that. What I mean is that the story he wove and picked apart so many times is now mine. I am the one who will decide his fate, who will make sense of his journey. That is the survivor’s duty: to tell, to re-create, to invent—why not?—other people’s stories. Take any number of events in the life of a man, distribute them as you see fit, and you will be left with a character who is unarguably real. Distribute them in a slightly different way and—voilà!—the character changes, it’s a different person altogether, though equally real. All I can tell you is that I will devote the same care to my story of Alejandro Bevilacqua’s life as I would wish a narrator to devote to my own, when the time comes.

I realize that we’re not talking about a self-portrait here. It isn’t Alberto Manguel you’re interested in. A brief excursion into that tributary will be necessary, however, if we are going to navigate the main river with confidence. I promise not to drag the depths of my own waters, or to linger on its banks. But I need to explain some shared experiences, and in order to do that a few asides are necessary.

On one of the occasions you interviewed me, Terradillos, I believe I told you how it was that I came to live in Madrid, in the midseventies, renting two small rooms at the top of the Calle del Prado. I had an American scholarship, and enjoyed the sort of robust health one cannot take for granted after thirty. I spent nearly a year and a half there, believe it or not, before events forced me to flee and take refuge here, in Poitiers. At the time, you asked me why I had chosen Poitiers. I’ll answer you now: because I had to leave Madrid, a city that was haunted, for me, by the ghost of Alejandro Bevilacqua. Everything has changed since that time, and these days the city is full of music and light. But on the few occasions that I’ve returned, even when sitting at a café on the Paseo de la Castellana or the Plaza de la Ópera, I’ve felt his presence beside me, his fingers on my arm, the smell of tobacco in my nostrils, the cadence of his voice in my ears. I don’t know if Madrid is particularly prone to such enchantments. You and I know that nothing like that ever happens in Poitiers.

It’s strange, but sometimes I cannot be absolutely sure whether a certain memory is mine or his. Here’s an example: Bevilacqua spoke fondly of the house in Belgrano, where he had lived with his paternal grandmother. I also lived in that neighborhood, with its austere houses and streets lined with jacaranda trees, about seven or eight years after Bevilacqua had moved downtown. Now I no longer know if the house I half remember is mine, or the one described to me by Bevilacqua, with its colored-glass door panels, its narrow stairways, the velvet curtain separating the dining area from the sitting room, the chandelier reflected on the mahogany table, the bookcase with its blue volumes of A Children’s Treasury, the porcelain figures of the Meissen monkey orchestra, in powdered wigs, playing a silent concert. It may even be an invented house, based on memories that are partly his and partly mine, but I’ll never know now, because the neighborhood has been torn down to make room for skyscrapers. It would have mattered to Bevilacqua, who was precise even about the detail of his dreams. It doesn’t matter to me.

Bevilacqua believed that he had inherited this obsession with detail from his grandmother, a severe and demanding woman—here in Europe they would say she was not so much Catholic as Lutheran. Throughout Alejandro’s infancy, his grandmother had reminded him that God is always watching us, day and night, with an unblinking eye, and that every gesture, every thought, is registered in His Great Book of Accounts, like the one that lay on the desk in the delicatessen. Ever faithful to her convictions, Señora Bevilacqua ran her business with exemplary rigor and hygiene, never allowing herself to be seduced by the new wave of supermarkets which were replacing shops like hers with plastic shelving and neon lights. La Bergamota, until well into the 1970s, was the pride of Belgrano.

She was equally rigorous with her grandson. Privations, prohibitions, and lashings with the carpet beater were alternated with rewards and affection. On one occasion, some adolescent nonsense got him locked in his room for three whole days, with nothing more than bread and water to eat or drink. Bevilacqua assured me that this was not an exaggeration: he literally got a slice of bread three times a day and a jug of tap water. There was something medieval about Señora Bevilacqua, something of the embittered, unyielding dowager, with a touch of the overseer.

And yet, in spite of Señora Bevilacqua’s avowed desire that her grandson follow the family tradition, he never felt that his destiny lay among sausages and cheese. After school, before entering the shop redolent of brine, where he helped his grandmother to fish ladlefuls of olives out of the oak barrels, or to turn the handle on the ham-slicing machine, Bevilacqua used to stop in front of the bookshop (at least that’s what I imagine), where the yellow volumes of the Robin Hood series were displayed in the window, and dream of faraway countries and extraordinary encounters. He imagined himself a Sandokan or a Phileas Fogg, but those distant lands were no farther than the Tigre Delta, just outside Buenos Aires, and his Indian princess was the pharmacist’s daughter. Later he realized that he was drawn not so much by the lure of journeys and adventures, but simply by things that appear out of reach.

When did I first see him? In Madrid, in February or March of 1976, at the offices of Quita, our go-between and our nemesis.

Blanca, Blanquita, Blanquita Grenfeld. Larralde de Grenfeld. Always elegant, always bright, always on the crest of the nouvelle vague. Of course you know who I’m talking about! Oh, Terradillos! Fame works in mysterious ways! In Argentina, before the dictatorship, Blanquita Grenfeld was the supreme ruler in the world of culture. She was the younger daughter of the Larraldes, landowners who lost everything in a failed enterprise to raise yaks—or was it camels?—on the pampa. As dark as a mulatta, she was married in her teens to some German industrialist—who was considerate enough to die shortly afterward, leaving her to enjoy a widowhood that liberated her simultaneously from a groping parent and a dim-witted husband. Blanca Larralde de Grenfeld used the name of her incestuous father and the fortune of the deceased industrialist to establish her own republic of Arts and Literature. In Buenos Aires, no painting was hung, no book published, no film shown or play put on without her say-so. Everyone, from the most bureaucratic official to the most anarchic artist, knew her as “Quita.” She was present at every creation. She was also one of the first to leave. “Let’s go and make culture in the motherland,” Quita said, when the military began to close down bookstores and raid theaters and galleries.

A few weeks after moving to Madrid, Quita founded the Casa Martín Fierro, on a fourth floor in the Prospe district, among bungalows and workers’ houses. There, like some refined materfamilias, she played host to the fugitives, the born-again, the dispossessed, the damaged, the lost and found that the various dictatorships of Latin America had not yet contrived (and please forgive the transitive use of the verb) to “disappear.” She looked gorgeous in her suit and pearls, a leopard-skin coat thrown over her shoulders like a cape, an aristocratic down on her upper lip, and her eyes always lively behind tortoiseshell glasses. She had the right words for everyone, without that undertow of contempt that so often accompanies philanthropy. Behind the desk in the reception area, a brand-new bookcase displayed a copy of the immortal Martín Fierro, by Hernández, various books that had been banned by the military regime and a couple of matés which Andrea, Quita’s loyal assistant, had learned to offer the guests. From that time on, no refugees arrived in Spain without stopping off to present their credentials at Quita’s place.

The telephone rang one morning when I was thinking of catching up on one of those big backlogs of sleep that are the privilege of youth. It was Quita.

“Come over immediately.”

Without opening my eyes, I asked where to.

“To the Martín Fierro, of course.”

I said that I didn’t understand. Quita heaved an impatient sigh. There was a newly arrived group of Argentines who needed our help. That “we,” for reasons I did not fully understand, included me. And I admit that I felt flattered. Quita was calling on me. Ergo, I existed.

She explained that one of the refugees appeared to be a writer.

“A novelist,” she added. “The surname’s Bevilacqua. He’s very good-looking. Do you know him?”

I said that I did not. The truth was that since I had left Buenos Aires, I wasn’t very up-to-date with Argentine writing. With youthful arrogance I judged that if this Bevilacqua had published something in the last two or three years, his books must obviously be either official propaganda or pseudo-romantic pap.

“We’re due a renaissance,” I added, but Quita had already hung up.

When I arrived at the Martín Fierro, Bevilacqua was installed in a tiny chair, but with all the dignity of a man seated on a throne. When he saw me, he got to his feet.

He was the saddest person I had ever seen. The others who were with him, two or three new arrivals, looked at me like dogs in a pound; by comparison, they seemed merely tired. That melancholy that afflicts most porteños mani fested itself physically in Bevilacqua’s whole body. He was someone who suffered—that was obvious—but in such a visceral and profound way that it was impossible for him to contain the sadness: it darkened his appearance, stooped his shoulders, softened his features. It withered him to such a degree that it was difficult to gauge how old he was. If one tried to touch him, he shrank away. Through goodness knows which diplomatic stratagems, he had been pulled out of prison only two days earlier and put on a plane with hardly any luggage.

As though to justify my presence, Quita explained that I was a writer and a fellow Argentinian. For the sake of saying something, I mumbled a question about what books he had published. For the first time, Bevilacqua smiled.

“No, brother,” he answered. “It’s not books I write. I used to make fotonovelas for a living.”

Perhaps I should explain, Terradillos, what these fotonovelas are, because I’m guessing that this form of literature is not popular in France. Back in the 1930s, some long-forgotten genius thought to combine the attractions of movies, comic strips, and romantic novels, thereby inventing a new hybrid genre between drama and photography. Actors were positioned as required, photographed at different angles, and then speech bubbles with the relevant dialogue were superimposed on the photographs. Bevilacqua penned the contents of those bubbles.

Quita was not to be defeated.

“That also counts as art,” she said later, when we were alone. “Don’t tell me that we’re only going to help people who write high literature. My conditions of acceptance are the same as those of the Real Academia: it’s sufficient for him to know that there’s no h in España. Manguel, don’t be a shit. This man needs our help.”

“A new favorite,” some onlooker observed as, after wishing Bevilacqua luck and giving him my address, I said good-bye with a hug. “It’s the same everywhere.”

Two days later, in the middle of the afternoon, Bevilacqua turned up at my house, shivering with cold. Thus began the first of many such afternoons.

Of course, you probably want to know all the details of Bevilacqua’s early life: the ins and outs of his primary education, his sexual initiation, his first steps in politics, his imprisonment and torture. And again I must say that I am not the best person to answer these questions. Discretion, if not indifference, was our watchword during those months in which we used to see each other. I know what you’re thinking: he talked and I resigned myself to listening, and you imagine that out of that farrago, I must have salvaged some dramatic scene, some crucial episode. It wasn’t like that. Bevilacqua would talk about his life in an erratic way, filling an improvised ashtray with yellow cigarette butts, with no concern for the historical or chronological coherence of his tale. This was no bildungsroman he was spinning me, but something more akin to a story from one of his fotonovelas—predictable, melodramatic, and doomed.

Let us take, as an example, that Buenos Aires he remembered through a haze of nostalgia. Bevilacqua could not believe that I didn’t miss the city—which, I believe, is better in memories than in real life. Bevilacqua, in contrast, not only missed the place in which he had lived; he missed the very map of Argentina. I mean, he missed the forests, the mountains, the great expanses of plains which he could have seen only once or twice—if that—from a train. I, in contrast, was drawn to ever-smaller space: a market square rather than the countryside; a village rather than the city. Madrid and Poitiers, as you well know, are villages with a metropolitan vocation. Bevilacqua suffered from what you French call le mal du pays—but I think he’d still have had it, even if it had been possible for him to return. He was missing not a place, but a moment that had passed, a geography of lost hours in streets that no longer existed, where he had lingered in the doorways of houses long since demolished, or in cafés which had some time ago exchanged their boiserie and marble for glass panels and Formica. Believe me, I understood his nostalgia—I just didn’t share it.

For me, Buenos Aires was a city in which I had scarcely lived and which—even during the years that I knew it—had entered a decline. Bevilacqua, on the other hand, had fallen in love with Buenos Aires when she was still a grande dame, resplendent in silk and high heels, perfumed and bejeweled, unaffectedly elegant and unostentatiously brilliant. But in the last few decades (this was how Bevilacqua explained recent Argentine history), a shameful illness had defiled her. She had lost her grace, her eloquence. Her new avenues and skyscrapers seemed false, like artificial limbs. Her gardens were withering; a dense fog descended on her, one that was barely pierced by the intermittent glow of orange lamplights. By comparison with this decayed Buenos Aires, the city of his childhood seemed a thousand times more beautiful and radiant.

From very early on, when he first became aware of a certain subcutaneous itch and of a particular weight in the groin, he knew that what he felt for Buenos Aires was similar to an erotic attraction. To touch the rough stone facades, the cold railings, to smell the jasmine in September and the damp pavements in March (I, too, was in paradise!) aroused him. Walking down the street where he lived or sitting on the plastic seats in the buses made him pant and sweat with desire.

“Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu,” as someone once said. I’ve remembered something that may satisfy your scurrilous, journalistic curiosity.

Bevilacqua first fell in love on the day of his twelfth birthday. A classmate oddly named Babar (which is why I’ve never forgotten him) had told him about a cinema a few blocks away from the Retiro station, wedged into the wall which separated the tracks from the Paseo Colón. The woman in the box office didn’t ask if the boy with the unconvincingly deep voice was indeed eighteen, as required by the notice at the entrance. With his blood pounding in his ears, Bevilacqua penetrated the gloom and groped his way toward a seat. Incidentally, the cinema smelled of sweat and ammonia.

Bevilacqua could never remember (if indeed he ever knew) the name of the film: he thought that it was German or Swedish, and he never saw it again. The story line, so he told me, sparing no details, had something to do with a country girl who went off to the city to seek her fortune. This innocent child had a heart-shaped face and wore a tight white dress which, in the film’s raunchiest scene, she tore off and flung onto a chair. Bevilacqua watched on, mesmerized, as her face filled the screen and a boy (because of course there was a boy) kissed her. With mawkish sentimentality, Bevilacqua told me that he had felt as though the lips kissing her were his own.

Gradual fade-out. The following scene showed dawn breaking over the tiled rooftops. Naked but for a pair of underpants, the boy jumped out of bed and started to fry a couple of eggs. The girl asked him sleepily if it wasn’t too early to eat eggs. Bevilacqua, for whom breakfast, in the Argentine style, consisted only of coffee and toast, never forgot the answer: “I eat what I want, when I want.” “It was then,” he told me, “that I understood what that freedom was that I had dreamed about in my grandmother’s shop. Freedom was fried eggs at dawn.”

I don’t know if the poor man really believed in the relevance of this inane observation, or if he made it simply to relive the adventure—but it’s certainly true that Bevilacqua spent a large part of his adolescence wanting to do unusual things in unpredictable places. For survival’s sake, Bevilacqua meekly filled the roles required of him by convention—loyal grandson, disciplined student, restless adolescent—at the same time regarding himself as a youth far wiser than any adult authority, braver than any adventurer, and so bursting with passionate love that his imagination latched onto worldly knowledge like those sticky spider threads known in Argentina as “the devil’s drool.”

The heart-shaped face of that anonymous actress pervaded his dreams. I think that he must have superimposed her face onto every other woman’s, even years after that first encounter. In his tedious descriptions her features changed, often depending on the context, so that sometimes the hair was black and silky like Loredana’s, sometimes the eyes were smaller and shining like Graciela’s, sometimes the whole face became translucent and hazy, as though it belonged to a woman in his memory who had almost vanished. He searched for that face throughout his adolescence. Once he thought he spotted it in one of those mildly pornographic magazines, Rico Tipo, or Tutti Frutti, which tend to pile up in the barbershops. After that, he started looking for her among the newspaper sellers of the Puente Saavedra, beneath the pillars of the Pan-American Highway. He never found her again.

You’ll be wondering how I manage (in spite of reservations) to reproduce these conversations. I confess that during my time in Madrid, when I was not yet fat and my beard not yet white, it did cross my mind to write a novel. The thought of adding my own volume to the universal library was wickedly tempting—as it would be for any other person with a love of books. I had in mind a character, an artist, whose whole life would founder because of one lie. The novel would be set in Buenos Aires and—since I trust my memory more than my imagination—I told myself that these confidences of Bevilacqua’s would come in useful for the creation of my fictional protagonist. Very soon, however, I realized that Bevilacqua’s memories lacked passion and color and, almost without thinking, I began to add to his stories a little fantasy and humor.

As I’ve said before, Bevilacqua was a stickler for details—which, as you know very well, is a way of avoiding emotion. He protected his secrets by wallowing in minutiae. Between one cigarette and the next, he would get to his feet to show me how the characters involved had behaved, using his saffron-colored fingers to reenact their gestures; he imitated their voices and gave me lists of names, dates, places. Such was his obsession with accuracy and his horror of getting things wrong that Bevilacqua gave the impression of reinventing his past, as though to convince me of its existence.

I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, dear Terradillos. Nobody has a clear memory of events that happened years ago, unless he has had them photographed and archived for the purpose of reproducing them later. Apparently Balzac did that: he created faces for his characters, tried them out in front of the mirror, then sat down to describe them. It was the same for Bevilacqua. His descriptions of the people in his past were so sharp that I felt I had seen with my own eyes (for example) the little Lennon glasses that Babar wore, his military waistcoats, and his contagious smile. When Bevilacqua was reminiscing, I kept quiet, not wanting to encourage him. But after he had gone, I was left with the feeling of having taken part in some sort of retrospective performance.

Bevilacqua admired people for whom the world was based on solid facts, on figures and documents. He did not believe in invention. He had discovered his mistrust in appearances very early on. I can put a date on it for you: it was a Sunday in September, after the inevitable Mass. Walking along behind his grandmother, Bevilacqua saw a scruffy old man standing beneath a jacaranda tree on the street corner. In his sermon on charity, the priest had described the archetypal beggar to whom Saint Martin of Tours gave half his cloak on a winter afternoon; this old man’s bushy mustache and threadbare sleeves matched the description of the beggar in the sermon. Bevilacqua saw this apparition as proof of the power of reality, which had come to give substance to the priest’s words. His response to that power was to take out a few coins from his pocket and place them in the shriveled hand. The old man looked at the coins, looked at his benefactor, and burst out laughing. Bevilacqua mumbled an explanation. Still laughing, the old man apologized, thanked him for the gesture, and returned the coins.

For a few days afterward, Bevilacqua looked for the old man he had seen on the corner of the street. Then, one afternoon, returning from school, he saw him standing, as before, beneath the same tree. The old man motioned for him to come forward. Bevilacqua obeyed, feeling a little nervous. Now that he saw him again, he was not too sure what to say. It was the old man who spoke first.

“You’re wondering what I’m doing standing here on my own, looking like this, if I’m not a beggar, aren’t you? You imagine that beggars look like this. You see me and say to yourself, ‘That’s a beggar.’ But you shouldn’t trust appearances, boy. Do you like puppets?”

Bevilacqua had seen a puppet show only once in his life, at a boring birthday party. Curiosity and surprise prompted him to say that he did.

“Follow me,” said the apocryphal beggar, and taking the boy by his arm, he led him toward the Barrancas district. They stopped in front of a decrepit-looking house with large, low windows.

I’ll paint the scene for you.

Bevilacqua had recently entered adolescence. Far from mistrusting the human libido, the interest which he was capable of provoking in adults intrigued him. That second glance in the bus; that silent sizing up, seeking signs of mutual interest in the street; that knee moving closer in the dark-ness of a cinema—Bevilacqua took them as a compliment, as welcoming gestures on the threshold of adulthood. I’m not saying that the old man was a pervert, nor that Bevilacqua had a taste for those pleasures so well described in Greek literature. But something that he had not noticed before now removed his fear, prompting him to carry on, to go with the old man and slip into the rooms of an unknown house.

Slip is perhaps not the right word, since it suggests a progress which meets no resistance. The rooms of this house were obstacles in themselves, each one stuffed with all kinds of objects: wardrobes, shelves crammed with books, armchairs, desks and bedside tables, statues that looked as though they were made of stone and turned out to be papier-mâché, piles of newspapers tied together with twine, laundry baskets, unidentifiable packages—and on top of every object, protruding from every conceivable gap, there were puppets of every style and size. Arms, legs, daubed faces with glass eyes and colorful wigs peeped coyly out from behind the furniture or sprawled obscenely on the boxes, collectively evoking an orgy or a battlefield. For a few seconds, Bevilacqua had the impression of having entered an ogre’s cave, filled with the corpses of dwarves.

The old man picked up a Roman soldier from a threadbare chair and offered the seat to Bevilacqua, then sat down opposite him, on a large painted chest. Apparently the old man (whose name, by the way, was Spengler) then launched into a long and seductive paean to the art of puppetry, in which creatures made of wood and felt enacted before an audience a more solid reality than that of our own illusory world. Spengler said that he took his theater to schools and parks, factories and prisons, with the aim of telling what he called “truthful lies.” “I am a missionary from the world of storytelling,” he told Bevilacqua. And giving the boy a little slap on the thigh (Bevilacqua would have judged it innocent, but I’m not so sure), he began pulling on different strings, leaping over the furniture, and making mysterious noises.

As you can imagine, Bevilacqua was fascinated by all those tiny arms and bodies, noses and eyes. At twelve or thirteen, we do not want anything to be strange, and yet strange things hold an irresistible attraction for us. They are appealing and terrifying at the same time. Bevilacqua was torn between going and staying. Just then, a girl—a woman, almost—came into the room and sat down at one of those cluttered tables to mend some of the puppets. Later Bevilacqua learned that her name was Loredana.

Bevilacqua began to visit Don Spengler at all times of the day: as the years passed, he never lost that disagreeable habit of thinking that other people should tailor their day around his. He went to see him before school or in the evening, when Señora Bevilacqua was busy at La Bergamota. I imagine that the old man must have felt flattered: Bevilacqua was already blessed, it seems, with that seductive expression bestowed on him by hooded eyes, pronounced eyebrows, and black irises. Spengler was not, however, the one he came to see, much though he had grown fond of the mustachioed old man. He came looking for Loredana, who barely even spoke to him as she bent over her mending, in a low-cut top, crossing her legs in such a way as to reveal one thigh, as shiny as an apple. He would find Spengler sleeping in an armchair with a book, or making his marionettes dance frenetically on an improvised dais, or staring out of the window, lost in thought, or painting, with brisk brushstrokes, a face or some scenery. Don Spengler seemed to move from an almost catatonic state to one of febrile activity, with no intermediate stages, and Bevilacqua used to make bets with himself about how he would find the old man on a given morning or afternoon.

Loredana was not always at home, but the mere fact of knowing that she had been there a few hours earlier or that she would be coming later—when he would already have gone—filled Bevilacqua at once with a sensation of anguish and dreaminess. When he did see her, he felt that Loredana handled the soldiers and princesses with the skill of a goddess. On the lips of Bevilacqua, that word was no mere hyperbole.

Now, if it had been up to me to invent a life for Bevilacqua, I would have gone about it differently. Knowing how he was when he arrived in Spain—knowing, above all, about his tragic end and the terrible events that drove him to it—I would have furnished him with a more passionate childhood: skirmishes with the underworld, affairs with older women, some petty criminality which would later, toward the end of his adolescence, evolve into revolutionary action. Because, the way he himself told it, violence, frenzied love, politics (the kind which landed him in prison) played no more than chance roles in his life, were nothing but accidents of fate. Bevilacqua was cut out for observation, contemplation, like that traveler of Baudelaire’s who cares about nobody—neither family nor friends—but only for the clouds: les merveilleux nuages.

It’s my belief, Terradillos, that this contemplative vocation fostered his talent as a storyteller, for detailing trivialities with a pornographer’s gusto. For example, Spengler only mattered as a preamble to Loredana, yet Bevilacqua claimed to remember the old man’s entire life story.

It seems that Spengler had been born in Stuttgart, not far from the house of the philosopher Hegel (who had even exchanged greetings with his grandfather once or twice). His family was in the watchmaking business, and the regular ticking of clocks had inured them to the passage of time. Spengler’s father was a devout but cantankerous Jew who spent his days ranting and raving about the iniquity of his God. He had devoted himself to clocks out of respect for the great mechanisms of Time, but without actually conceding them his approval. It struck him as scandalous that God should have invented a single, continuous, eternal time while simultaneously apportioning to men short little spans in which—adding insult to injury—there was nothing for them but frustration and suffering. His wife, who was dumpy and dumb, smiled all day and night while he, reddening with rage, bent over his wheels and cogs. “A man must keep on working,” he muttered, “even when his employer is a madman.”

At the age of twelve, Spengler was apprenticed to a puppet maker, and never saw his parents again. War hounded him to the edge of the Atlantic. There his master, too exhausted to attempt the journey to the New World, gave him a trunk full of puppets together with a little money from his savings, and saw him off on a boat loaded with Syrians who had little clue where they were going. That was how he arrived in Buenos Aires, one autumn afternoon, thousands of years ago. He wanted Bevilacqua to know about his background, so as to understand that all human lives are, in the end, the same. “Directionless, difficult, incomprehensible,” he told the boy, gently slapping his leg. “But the same.”

I am, on principle, totally against giving psychological explanations, but—if you want my opinion—I do believe Bevilacqua felt that Spengler’s presence settled, in some way, the debt of his own parents’ death. He decided to devote his life to puppets. He would learn the necessary skills from the old man, and he would be with Loredana. Señora Bevilacqua (who was beginning to lose all notion of time and to forget people’s names and faces) was persuaded to approve his increasingly long sessions at Spengler’s place. Finally came the memorable day when the old man allowed him to work one of the puppets in public. Even years later, Bevilacqua could still sing to himself the music that was played when the curtain went up.

Let’s talk about Loredana now. How often had he seen her? Half a dozen times at Spengler’s, perhaps a few more in the street and at the little theater. From those snippets, he had assembled an entire physical person. The English talk about “falling in love”; Bevilacqua would never have used such an expression. For Bevilacqua, to become enamored of someone was no accident, no happenstance: to love was to be converted, to acquire a new state of being. You did not fall in it, you let it fall over you, like rain, soaking you to the marrow. I don’t know if Loredana realized that; I suppose she did—women know about these things. Loredana never gave him any encouragement. She was impeccably polite, allowing him to walk her to the bus stop, or to give her a box of candied fruit or a tin of La Gioconda membrillo stolen from his grandmother’s shop—but she never confided in him or cracked a joke. Bevilacqua learned nothing of her life beyond Spengler’s workshop, on the other side of the curtain, except that Spengler had trained her himself and that her surname was Finnish.

A little before Christmas 1956, Don Spengler was invited by a producer of variety shows to put on a performance in Santiago, in Chile. Loredana, of course, was going to go with him. Bevilacqua fell into despair. I don’t think he had told anyone about his feelings. He could never have confided such a thing to Señora Bevilacqua, and—as far as I know—he had only one real friend at school. All reality was reduced now to this one single fact and its consequences: Loredana was going. He would be left alone. He could not live without her. He decided to follow her.

You can imagine my surprise when he told me about this adolescent escapade. Nobody—certainly not I—would have thought of Bevilacqua as an impulsive person, a man of action. We used to talk (or rather he talked while I, as usual, kept an eye on my watch) about sudden and rash acts, the kind that people associate with a Latin temperament. Bevilacqua praised them. Not for him the cool, premeditated decision, but rather the one that strikes suddenly, like lightning. I think I told you before that I thought of Bevilacqua as very much a northern Italian—very rational. Perhaps he hoped that by telling me about this adventure, he would show me that he was not like that at all.

The greatest difficulty was crossing the border with Chile. He knew that his identity card would be enough, but he also knew that as a minor, he would need his grandmother’s authorization—and that she would never give it. The solution was to obtain a document from someone older. Reasoning that identity photographs are rarely recognizable, he persuaded Babar to get hold of his older brother’s card—with the excuse that he wanted to get into some particularly smutty cabaret—and lend it to him for a few days. To get money, he sold his Grundig tape recorder to a neighbor’s daughter. He bought a train ticket, packed a few scant belongings, and left a note for Señora Bevilacqua very early one morning, in which he explained that he wanted to go out into the world and make his fortune, on his own and without asking anyone’s help. He hinted that his adventure might take him to Patagonia—which, for Señora Bevilacqua, had a reputation as fearsome as the Amazon jungle.

I don’t know if you agree with me, Terradillos, but there is something magical about train journeys. Boarding a train at the start of a new life (or what Bevilacqua imagined to be a new life) must have felt like an epic moment for the boy. He noticed every detail, as if it were already passing into history: the cherry-colored upholstery, the long-haired guard, a group of boys playing guitar. Everything was important, because each moment (so Bevilacqua told himself) was now part of his future.

He journeyed across a monotonous landscape for one interminable day; to Bevilacqua it seemed the necessary preparation for a great victory. When the mountains appeared, they confirmed his expectations. Before night fell, the train arrived at a little border station, tucked between stone walls and dirty snow. While they waited for the engine to be brought down the other side, Bevilacqua and the other passengers got out to stretch their legs on the platform, which was crowded half with Argentinians, half with Chileans. The Oriental-looking officer cast an indifferent glance at Bevilacqua’s apocryphal document. Years later, Bevilacqua would comment, as if it had just dawned on him: “I have walked on the Andes.” The rest of the journey took place in darkness.

When he arrived in Santiago, it was after midnight. He must have fallen asleep because, when he got down from the train, the other passengers had disappeared. The station was deserted, and an old man was sweeping the platforms. As he emerged onto the street, he saw the gates being locked.

He had heard Don Spengler mention the name of the theater where they were going to perform, and asked a taxi driver if it was far away. He set off walking. It was dark, of course, but finally he picked out the lights of the Gran Hotel O’Higgins, on the other side of the road. He went in and asked the receptionist if this was where Don Spengler and his troupe were staying. The receptionist said that it was. Bevilacqua asked to be put through to Loredana’s room.

Let me say that when Bevilacqua claimed not to be a writer, there was some truth in that. He lacked the inventive spark necessary for fiction, that disregard for what is and that excitement about what could be. He didn’t imagine: he saw and documented things, which is not the same. Proust goes looking for details a posteriori, because he wants the past to confirm what he is inventing in the present. Not so Bevilacqua: he was interested in the a priori, in facts as pure narration, with no gloss, no commentary.

I don’t know what he was expecting. That his beloved would cry out with joy, run downstairs, and hurl herself into the arms of her intrepid Hannibal? That she would invite him into her bed, share the night with him as a reward for his bravery? I know that the last thing he expected was absolute silence. He heard the receiver being picked up, some sleepy breathing; he heard the echo of his own voice saying, “Loredana, it’s me, Alejandro”; he heard the receiver being put down. Still holding the handset, he asked the receptionist if there was a free room for the night. As the man got him a key, Bevilacqua heard himself observe that it was the first time he had ever stayed in a hotel.

That unbearable night finally reached its end. Bevilacqua had not slept a wink, as far as he remembered, but when he saw that it was light outside, he got up and went downstairs. Don Spengler was in the restaurant room, having breakfast on his own. Loredana had woken him and told him about what had happened. She had also told him to send Bevilacqua back to Buenos Aires that same morning. Bevilacqua refused. He had left everything to be with her. He would follow her wherever she went. He would love her in silence, from the shadows. He couldn’t go back.

Don Spengler tried to persuade him. He repeated his lecture on reality and our obligation to accept it. But for Bevilacqua, the fiction, the lie, was Loredana’s absence; the truth consisted in her accepting his presence, his act of love, his very self.

At that moment, Loredana entered the room. It took him a minute to recognize her. This Chilean Loredana was different. The one from his memory, his yearning, was taller, darker, marked by absence and desire. In every waking hour, every sleeping minute, he had felt Loredana’s physical presence, from the brush of her hair against his arm to the scent of apples exuded by her skin under her clothes. This woman who came into the restaurant room was different: slightly round-shouldered, haggard, rather graceless in her movements. As though to confirm her presence, Bevilacqua tried to grasp her arm. Loredana avoided him, and was about to sit down when Bevilacqua once more put his hand out toward her. Loredana slapped him. Then Don Spengler got to his feet and ordered the girl to go to her room. Her suitor’s nose was bleeding. Don Spengler handed him a napkin to wipe it. Bevilacqua turned to catch a final glimpse of her, but Loredana had already gone.

That very afternoon he returned to Buenos Aires, this time by plane, courtesy of Don Spengler. At the border, an official pored over his document, but let him through without saying anything. I don’t know what explanation he may have given his grandmother. Years later, Bevilacqua still wished he could ask Loredana why she had not spoken to him. It was something that he never came to understand.

Bevilacqua told me that his grandmother did not ask him where he had been. He never knew for sure if she had read his note, or if she had simply decided to ignore something that would have been hard for her to understand. What was true was that, from that moment onward, Señora Bevilacqua scarcely paid him any attention. Perhaps, in some way, after all the years of bickering and punishments, she had realized that force and discipline were of little avail where her grandson was concerned, and decided to take a kind of laissez-faire approach—that is, to let him live his life. It began to seem more important to Señora Bevilacqua (less bewildering, you might say) not to leave two knives crossed on a table, for this presaged a fight, than to ask her grandson for a truthful account of his life out in the big world.

In the only photograph that Alejandro possessed of his grandmother (which, of course, he showed to me), Señora Clara Bevilacqua was pictured in black-and-white—a thin, pale woman, her eyebrows plucked and drawn in, as though with a dark pencil, her hair arranged in tight curls, as rigid as a jockey’s helmet. Wearing a flowery dress, and posed against a chalk wall, she bore an expression of unflinching hardship. She was tall, upright, and severe, a woman who was clearly uncomfortable with physical contact and didn’t go in for hugs and kisses. Throughout his childhood, Bevilacqua felt that he must have failed some secret test. He never knew which, but this mystery and his sense of failure made him feel guilty nonetheless. So Bevilacqua’s adolescence passed between that ancient and haughty woman and the evanescent Loredana.

I must confess to a certain impatience with Bevilacqua’s angst. All my life, my parents had believed that every single thing I did was the work of a genius, and that my faults were the mere peccadilloes of a saint. Señora Bevilacqua held the opposite view: any task upon which her grandson embarked must, from the outset, be destined for failure. Without knowing it, this woman—just like my parents—was in the grip of superstitions that predate the cultures of the Po River or the Caucasus. For my parents, these simply constituted the rules of the game, whereas for Bevilacqua’s grandmother, they were traps set by an imperious and vengeful God, traps that her hapless grandson would not know how to avoid. Poor Bevilacqua—I think that his grandmother never really loved him.

One thing was certain: when the boy returned from Chile, the world had changed, for his Loredana was no longer in it. Then he decided to alter his habits, his daily itinerary, as if to take revenge, through his own conduct, on the conduct of what he dared not call fate. His grandmother’s life was divided between her home, the church, and the shop. Bevilacqua wanted to escape from all three. He began to find excuses to linger after school, or to leave the house earlier than usual. Every day he took a different route to school, and he would lose himself in the tree-lined streets of the poorer neighborhoods, in ancient parks, or among building complexes whose purpose he could not guess at. In those days, Buenos Aires was a good city to get lost in. Hours went by like this, and then weeks, months. It is strange how one afternoon can prolong itself to infinity, and several years be reduced to five words.

But I don’t know if you’re interested in this, Terradillos. I don’t know if what I’m saying is at all useful. You want to know why Alejandro Bevilacqua died. You want to know how a polite and reasonable man in his forties, at a time when fortune was beginning to smile on him, came to grief against the pavement of the Calle del Prado, in the early hours of a Sunday in January, beneath my balcony.

I’m getting around to it, my friend. Be patient.

I have a theory about these things. We often think of our births as being the result of a chance series of historical and personal events, of the ebb and flow of society, as well as the personal circumstances of our own parents and grandparents—that is, to the tendril-like current of the world itself. But our deaths also stem from these comings and goings—perhaps even more so—and from circumstances both important and trivial. Just as our coming into the world is the result of many thousands of actions, both secret and public, so is our leaving it. In order to explain any death, especially a violent, mysterious death, it should be enough to carry out an exhaustive review of time, to retrieve every detail, every word, every avatar of that life, and then to wait for our intelligence to decipher the constellation formed from all these facts. Detectives must be partly astrologers. Poirot and Paracelsus are blood brothers. I’ve always said that a criminal investigation resembles the study of celestial bodies—at least it does in books, where all the greatest crimes are solved.

Let’s start with the scene. Do you remember, or can you at least imagine, what Madrid was like then, in the midseventies, when the stench, the darkness, the dejection of those years under the Caudillo were just beginning to fade away? I say “just,” because there was still a sense of wandering through a lugubrious ballo in maschera, especially for someone young, as I was then, with the echo of real porteño parties still ringing in my ears. None of the faces were genuine—they were all hiding something; each of them lied as a matter of course. The city itself wore a mask—it was a city in flight from itself, pretending not to feel that ubiquitous unease, that weight of sadness menacing from the shadows.

Because there was something else, and you could feel it. You knew that it was present on winter mornings, for example, when a dirty mist swirled through the streets of the city center, around the Plaza de Oriente, and into the squalid crannies of alleyways slithering like earthworms between the grimy brick houses. Or sometimes in the summer, when the rubbish that had accumulated in corners over the weekend filled the night with the putrid odor of artichokes and sour wine. Often, during the time I spent in Madrid, listening over and again to a recording of “Bohemian Rhapsody” a friend had sent from New York, I felt as if I were suffocating.

In my room on the Calle del Prado, I would sometimes glance up from my writing to see people in funereal garb advancing wearily, as though dragged along by a river of mud. Only when I saw a couple—he wearing blue, she wearing red—running up the street laughing, did I begin to feel that change was in the air.

To the South Americans, on the other hand, coming from where they came, Madrid was like a dream. True, the new culture that people said was being forged in France, in Italy, in England (even in Sweden—imagine that!), was not much in evidence here, but neither did they live in constant fear of a kidnapping, an interrogation. If this new land seemed like a desolate place where no one—not even the vermin—could be bothered to create anything, the cities from which they had fled were wastelands where even inactivity was dangerous, where every crack was suspicious, every stone a threat. Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Santiago were barren and frightening places, whereas Madrid, as far as they were concerned, was simply reassuringly barren. I know a number of writers who lugged half-finished books inside bulky folders with them into exile. They managed to finish them in Barcelona, in San Sebastián, even in Seville. Not in Madrid.

Enrique Vila-Matas got interested in this phenomenon I’m describing to you, that of the exiled, unwritten novel. Vila-Matas met Bevilacqua during those years (if only you had seen him then—the future author of Montano’s Malady, such an elegant young dandy, a connoisseur of fine wines and fine women!), and I believe that it was this encounter that gave him the inspiration for what, decades later, was to become that wonderful classic, Bartleby & Co.

There is a passage in Bartleby in which I’m convinced that Vila-Matas, without actually naming him, talks about Bevilacqua. You’re so well read, I’m sure you know it by heart: “In the literature of No, there are certain works which not only are unwritten, but of which we know nothing, neither the subject, nor the title, the length or the style. We are told that such and such a person, a writer, is a well-known author. But of what? He denies his own paternity without even, like his famous ancestor, allocating himself the role of stepfather. Señor X claims not to be a writer, not to have written; vox populi contradicts him and asserts that his work, not read by anyone, is remarquable.”

When Vila-Matas found out about Bevilacqua’s death, he wrote to me, suggesting that the crime had intellectual roots. “What better solution for a pseudo Bartleby, for the author of an evasive* book, than to make himself an evasive author. Now both of them, author and work, share the same empty shelf.”

Empty may not be the best word to describe Bevilacqua at that time. Apprehensive, awkward, listless, yes; suspicious and distrustful, I would have to agree. That fear he had learned during his last years in Argentina, which caused him to jump out of his skin every five minutes, to mistrust kindness, to keep secrets and opinions to himself, did not entirely disappear when he arrived in Spain.

An example. Soon after his arrival, Bevilacqua was taken by Andrea to one of those cafés on the Paseo Castellana that serve bad coffee at an exorbitant price, a favorite meeting place for the flocks of newly arrived South Americans. Tito Gorostiza, may he rest in peace, was ferreting around in that bag he always carried with him, a memento from Mendoza, searching for some quote he wanted to read to the others. Among the books he stacked up on the table was an anthology of stories published in Havana. When he saw it, Bevilacqua glanced over his shoulder, then picked up his jacket and quickly covered the book with it. He had gone quite pale. It took me a moment to understand why.

I don’t think Bevilacqua regretted his exile in Madrid. On the contrary—he was enchanted by all that he imagined Spain to be. His good fortune in falling under the protection of Quita and Andrea meant that, rather than braving some downtown hostel, he had, from day one, been able to lodge in a flat in the Prospe area, not far from the Martín Fierro. There were already five other Argentine exiles living in the flat, among them Cornelio Berens, dubbed the “Flying Dutchman” because of his swift passage through so many countries.

Bevilacqua’s room in the flat was small but full of light. Quita gave him a little money, and Andrea—who was well acquainted with Latino survival methods—suggested that he go with one of the others to sell craftwork on the Calle Goya. You wouldn’t believe how many famous names started off laying out their wares on that pavement! I have a dried-bean bracelet made by a gentleman who tops the bestseller list in his country now, Terradillos. Anyway, it was on the wide pavement of the Calle Goya that the Spanish chapter of Alejandro Bevilacqua’s life began.

But, Terradillos, forgive me, I’m getting ahead of myself: I see now that we had not quite finished the Argentine chapter. Let’s go back for a moment, if you don’t mind.

After he finished school, Bevilacqua had opted not to go to university, rejecting it as too systematic and authoritarian. At first, despite rumblings of protest from Señora Bevilacqua, he tried to make a living as a puppeteer. Later he found that he could make a little money by writing the text for those fotonovelas I mentioned earlier.

He came to this almost by accident, on one particularly uneventful day, by imagining a script which told the unhappy, romantic tale (it would be an act of exorcism for him) of his love for Loredana. If you think about it, the subject lends itself to theater: there’s the infatuated adolescent, the indifferent beauty, the paternal and ineffectual old man, the hot pursuit through mountains and valleys, and the final disillusionment. He showed his script to Babar, who was working as a journalist on a financial newspaper, and far from pouring scorn on the idea, Babar suggested he send it to Editorial Jotagé, which specialized in soft pornography, sentimental magazines, and fotonovelas. Thus began the literary career of Alejandro Bevilacqua. So much for that proverb, “The eagle doesn’t catch flies.”

Meanwhile, his grandmother, now old and frail, was increasingly prone to mental confusion and unreliable memories. Less intransigent, less determined, Señora Bevilacqua had become preoccupied and distracted. Little things slipped her mind: she forgot to order more olives or to check on the quality of the cold cuts. She made mistakes in the accounts, or left the kettle to boil dry on the stove. Once, Alejandro found her sitting in the kitchen, as though sleeping with her eyes open, black smoke swirling around her as a beef matambre burned to a crisp in the oven. Another time, Señora Bevilacqua rose before dawn, dressed in her Sunday best, and woke up her grandson to tell him that she was going to the cemetery, “because they’re waiting for me there.” Alejandro felt obliged to spend more and more time with her, and watched her deteriorate day by day: her skin became transparent, her posture more stooped, her voice weaker; her gaze was unsteady, her hands shook.

One afternoon, on his way home after handing in a script and without knowing precisely why, Bevilacqua went a few stops farther than usual on the bus. It was dark by the time he had walked back and, at home, he found the door to the street ajar. He went upstairs without putting on the light. The scent of eucalyptus and of something else, both sweet and rancid, held him at the doorway to his grandmother’s room. He heard a hoarse noise. In her bed, watched over by the orchestra of bewigged monkeys, the old lady’s body had shrunk to the size of a puppet. Her curls fanned out extravagantly on the pillow, while everything else about her seemed almost impossibly small. Her penciled eyebrows and pale lips heightened the sense of unreality, of something suspended at the point of undoing. Her grandson called her: the eyes opened, closed, and opened once more. Looking at her, he felt those eyes were accusing him. It was the last time, he told me, that Señora Bevilacqua’s reproving gaze fell on her grandson.

Her breathing became labored, measured in long, calculated pauses. After a time, it ceased. Bevilacqua remembered that his grandmother would have wanted the last rites. But where to turn for this? Who would he find at this time of night? Where was the closest church? Eventually, he went to bed. The following morning, he called the undertakers.

A week after the funeral, during the long, inevitable requiem Mass attended by La Bergamota’s longest-standing clients, Bevilacqua reflected on his formidable grandmother’s life. What remained of all this for him? What would become of him, orphaned and insecure? He was almost thirty, with no family and very few friends (loyal Babar could still be counted on, and some of the photographers from Jotagé). The time had come to define himself, to acquire a set of characteristics and a presence that were entirely his, with no residue of that rigorous woman who had wanted to consign her grandson to a life of cold cuts. He began with a gesture: when the priest came toward him holding out the Communion wafer, Bevilacqua made some slight motion of rejection, and the priest was obliged to move on to the next communicant. Señora Bevilacqua was buried in the Chacarita Cemetery. After the ceremony, Bevilacqua never returned to her grave.

And so on to 1967. Bevilacqua had just turned twenty-nine. He had inherited, without too much paperwork, his grandmother’s house and the premises of La Bergamota, along with a respectable nest egg. To cut a long story short, he sold the properties, put the money in the bank, and by the time he was thirty, without asking himself why, he had embarked on a degree at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts. That was where he met Graciela.

As you will have realized by now, a number of women were important in Bevilacqua’s brief life. I told you that his adolescence was played out between the magnetic poles of two of them—the cold and austral grandmother and the northern, misty-eyed Loredana. In the second part of his life there were two others, equally opposed. But we shall come to them later.

Allow me an aside. It’s strange how the dramas in our lives play out, over the years, with a small cast, which, scene after scene, takes on all the characters. These are always the same: the hero or heroine, the older man, the ingenue, the mother figure, the villain, the loyal friend. In Bevilacqua’s case, there were always two female performers: the strong, reserved woman, whom Bevilacqua obeyed while yearning to escape her clutches; the other an unattainable object of desire, capable of wounding him without even a glance in his direction. As for the men in his life, I can see at least a couple: first, the constant friend, as exemplified by Babar, who spoke little but was always there, serving as a bridge to the practical world; second, the educator, the guru, father confessor, such as Don Spengler, whose role, to my chagrin, I ended up inheriting.

There is also a third one, now that I come to think of it: the invisible enemy.

But let’s return to Graciela for a moment. She was a little younger than him, dark, slight, aggressive, and intelligent. The first time they ever spoke was in a café opposite his faculty, where Bevilacqua had gone to do some studying for an exam and she was meeting with a group of protesters. I imagine that both of them felt rather old among so many adolescents. Bevilacqua had looked up from his page only to find himself gazing at Graciela’s cleavage.

“Hey, you,” he suddenly heard.

He realized that these words were directed at him and, taken aback, he said, “Me?”

“Yes, you. You staring at my tits?”

Bevilacqua buried his head in his book. When he finally looked up, Graciela had gone. Later they ran into each other in the same class. Inevitably, it was she who made the first move. She wanted to know what he did, what course he was studying, what his political beliefs were. Bevilacqua offered up one or two opinions. Graciela scoffed at them and recommended others. That first exchange set a pattern that varied very little during the many years of their relationship.

Graciela was the younger daughter of a couple of notaries. I think they were Armenians or something—at any rate, their surname was Arraiguran. They lived in Almagro, which says it all. Graciela did not want to be a writer, did not read literary magazines or care about the new French novel. She envisioned her future in some vaguely political post, but her natural vocation, for law, struck her as too close to her parents’. She thought that studying in the Faculty of Arts would give her a useful grounding in history and rhetoric. She was, apparently, an excellent speaker.

Look, Terradillos, I think that Graciela took Bevilacqua under her wing less to protect him than for the sake of having something to protect. People who saw them together said they made an ideal couple, but the more astute observers noticed how she had gotten her claws into him. Bevilacqua was alone in the world; he knew nothing of life’s dangers; he lacked experience of human wiles. Graciela prided herself on being an expert in all that. She was amused by Bevilacqua’s bewilderment, as one might be amused to see a moth lunging at a pane of glass it cannot see. I would say that she even married him to watch him crash into the glass.

They married, they bought a flat in Boedo, they finished their studies and got jobs—he as a teacher in a local school, she as an assistant in some faculty department or other. I know what you’re thinking: how banal! Maybe, but, when one takes a backward look at history, every decision, every move, each step contributes to the grand finale, complete with drums, glockenspiel, and cymbals.

Apparently Graciela began to organize meetings after class, at the university itself. Some union leader, a fellow traveler, a couple of Uruguayan intellectuals, a befuddled provincial writer—these became the founding members of a group predictably named Spartacus. She started coming home late at night, while Bevilacqua went to bed alone, leaving for her, on the kitchen table, half a portion of steak and chips bought at the corner café. During the long summer break, if Bevilacqua proposed a week or two in one of the quieter seaside resorts near Mar del Plata, Graciela would claim that she had to stay in the capital on some union business, and Bevilacqua would take off with a couple of detective novels to Necochea, Los Pinitos, or Miramar without bearing any grudge.

One of those summers, he came home a day earlier than expected and found Graciela in a nightgown, making café con leche for one of her Uruguayan stalwarts. Nobody batted an eyelid, and Bevilacqua simply sat down at the table so that Graciela could serve him, too. After that, Graciela’s late nights became increasingly frequent. Sometimes Bevilacqua would not see her for a couple of days, then would return from work to find her in bed at six o’clock in the evening, fast asleep.

Bevilacqua had what I would call a “cohesive” vision of reality. By that I mean that he could take a multitude of disparate elements and partial facts and build from them a coherent and plausible scenario, complete with main and minor characters, intrigue and denouement. From the clues that Graciela was planning to leave him (the Uruguayan’s breakfast was, I believe, the most compelling), Bevilacqua began to build up a picture of his wife’s escapades in all their potentially scabrous detail. Sometimes he imagined her lover as an old trade unionist, with a beer belly and mustache; at other times, as a youth who had barely started shaving. Once it was a leftist priest whose biceps bulged beneath his cassock, and another time a lecturer in law, slicked back and recalcitrant. One of the most persistent ghosts was a certain anonymous writer from Río Gallegos or Rawson, whose book of verse (I’m afraid it was called Red March) he found on Graciela’s bedside table one day. “But I only love you,” she told him. And Bevilacqua believed her.

One morning he decided to follow her. Graciela had told him that she was going on a demonstration, in the center of town, close to the Obelisk. She was going to set off early in order to meet first with a delegation from the Caribbean—“brothers from the other Americas,” she said, apparently, having been infected by that political argot which taints even the best intentions. The demonstration was due to start at noon. When Bevilacqua arrived, he noticed a small group forming outside the windows of the Casa Gold jewelers. He had thought that he would never find her in what he had imagined would be an enormous throng, like those shown on television. In fact he immediately spotted her, among some twenty or thirty people, helping two youths to lift up a banner. A little old man in a beret came over and shook his hand.

“Thanks for your support, compañero,” said the old man.

“I’m with her,” answered Bevilacqua, evasively.

“With Graciela?” The old man laughed. “God help you!”

They waited a bit, hoping to see their ranks swell, but no one else came. Then Graciela gave the order to advance.

Bevilacqua felt intensely uncomfortable, marching with the others along Diagonal, while from the pavements pedestrians paused to watch them and to shout out crude remarks or words of encouragement. Bevilacqua tried to keep his eyes fixed on Graciela, who was now at the head of the marchers, leading them in some pointless chant. When they arrived at the town hall, a battalion of mounted police emerged from a side street, blocking their way. The group came to a halt, but Graciela strode on. For a moment she alone confronted the horsemen; straightaway the others followed her.

Bevilacqua did not feel afraid. This was his first demonstration, the first time he had ever been a part of something greater than himself, mingling with others, singing with them, moving with them. He was doing what the group did, without having to answer to anyone, without having to feel any responsibility for his actions. And he felt happy, anonymous, and free—do you understand? For he had been chosen by the woman who was leading them all, his Graciela.

The first blow came simply as noise, with no immediate source or explanation. There followed a confusion of flying batons, kicks, shouting and neighing, a police car’s siren. He saw the banner fall, the vast flank of a horse, a hand covered in blood. He heard a distant cry and felt a shooting pain in his ear. He saw Graciela slip away between two mounted police officers, and followed her.

All at once someone grabbed him by the arm and dragged him toward a café. He let himself be dragged. Graciela made him sit down, then pressed a clutch of paper napkins to his left ear. When the waiter approached with an expression of concern, she calmly asked for two coffees and a glass of water. The waiter brought their order, and Graciela thrust another handful of napkins into the glass.

“This isn’t a hospital,” the waiter said.

“Up yours!” answered Graciela. “And bring the gentleman another glass of water.” She drank her coffee in one gulp and slapped some money on the table.

“Congratulations,” she said to Bevilacqua. “Not bad for a first time.”

And with that, she stood up and left. Bevilacqua never saw her again.

It strikes me now that there is something sketchy about Bevilacqua’s life. In literary terms, it amounts to nothing more than a collections of fragments, snippets, and unfinished episodes. Any one of them could serve as the start of a great novel, one thousand pages long, profound and ambitious. My version of his life is closer to the style of the man himself: indecisive, undefined, inept. As I warned you at the start: I’m not the person best suited to tell you about him.

But a promise is a promise. After Graciela’s disappearance, Bevilacqua lived alone in the flat in Boedo, teaching during the day and writing scripts at night. He saw Babar from time to time, and both realized that they no longer had anything in common. The last time they ran into each other in the street, neither of them even said hello, but walked on without stopping.

One afternoon, Bevilacqua bumped into one of the Uruguayans at the corner café, and they had no choice but to share a table. They struck up a halfhearted conversation about soccer, about the price of a cup of coffee, and then—under the guise of discussing a sick friend—about the vague rumors concerning what had happened to Graciela after the demonstration.

“Doctors have a hand in everything. You can’t even die in peace.”

“It’s the nurses you can’t trust. People who say they’re going to give you an aspirin, then stick a scalpel in your back.”

“Do you know the nurse in question?” asked Bevilacqua. “Are you sure there was one?”

“I’m not sure of anything, brother. Except of the grave, and even then I don’t know if it will be in earth or water. But yes, there was one.”

They parted without shaking hands, eyes cast down. In those days, you walked around Buenos Aires with your head bowed, trying neither to see nor hear, not saying anything. Above all, you tried not to think, because you began to believe that others could read your thoughts. (Later, in Madrid, Bevilacqua would discover that he could indeed think, but in the midst of such an overwhelming silence that he felt as though he were speaking on the moon, where the lack of air transmits no sound.)

Without Graciela, the passing of days seemed crushingly slow, with no progress or change. Everything seemed to happen at a remove. Bevilacqua realized now that she, with her rather brutal manner, her uninhibited sensuality, her many infidelities, had been behind all his actions, all his words. I’m not exaggerating. I’m simply telling you what I was able to glean from him. Graciela was his center. Without her everything crumbled. He lost interest in the world. He stopped caring.

One morning, at dawn, he was picked up from the street by two silent men. Inside the car, which was taking him to prison, there were stickers on the doors, threatening anyone who tried to open them. They emptied his pockets while an enormous, asthmatic woman noted down every object—watch, pen, handkerchief, wallet—in an exercise book. After that they left him for hours in a windowless cell. It was a few days later that the sessions began. I’ll spare you the details.

I don’t want to describe the horrors that followed—and not because I am ignorant of them. Bevilacqua told me everything, or everything that can be told—which, in these cases, is not very much. Beneath the surface of all that we are able to put into words lies that profound and obscure mass of the unspeakable, an ocean without light, swimming with blind, unimaginable creatures. It was a world I glimpsed only fleetingly during our many meetings, charting the course of his extremely sad story. Because Bevilacqua’s account skipped chapters, beginning at the end and then jumping back to the prologue. He started his story in Paradise, continued into the Inferno and finished up in Purgatory. And when he arrived there, neither I, nor Andrea, Quita, or any of the others who later claimed to have been loyal friends, was a Virgil for him. Feel free to condemn me for it.

It must have been nearly a year after his arrival in Madrid when Bevilacqua rang the bell of my apartment, as he used to do two or three times a week. It was late. I had promised to hand in an article the next day (at the time I was writing for a French magazine that paid more than the stingy Spanish ones), and I had thus far written only one or two paragraphs. He didn’t give me a chance to say anything. With an even more sorrowful expression than usual, he came in, sat on the only comfortable armchair, and told me what had happened.

He said that even from a distance, in the weary half-light of a winter afternoon in Madrid, he had known it was her. I assumed that he meant Graciela, but the woman he began to describe to me was quite different: a tiny body on top of extraordinarily long legs and a ridiculous hat that looked like a disproportionately large beak. Bevilacqua said that, in Buenos Aires, they had called her La Pájara, the Painted Bird, after that Spanish rhyme which you may know:

There was once a Painted Bird

On the green lemon made her room.

With her beak she cut the bough,

With her beak she cut the bloom.

Bevilacqua had met her during his stint in prison, when she had come, wearing the very same hat, to visit one of his cellmates, Marcelino “El Chancho”—“The Pig”—Olivares. I expect you’re wondering how, in one of those terrible prisons, anyone was allowed special privileges. I’ll tell you how: local custom. Primus inter pares translates in my country as “There’ll always be a favorite.” El Chancho was one such. He was a Cuban exile who had arrived in Argentina at the end of the 1950s, before Fidel’s revolution. This curious hybrid of intellectual and businessman had managed to persuade various members of the military to let him invest their savings in Switzerland. He did make the investments—no one questions that—but it seems that as the tray was passing, he helped himself to a few tidbits.

Unfortunately, the military men found him out and swore revenge; they went looking for him one dark night, and El Chancho was invited to change address. Let it never be said that the army doesn’t reward services rendered, however, because even in prison El Chanco enjoyed certain privileges: visits from La Pájara, books, cookies, cigarettes . . .

How this animal ended up in the same cell as our Bevilacqua, I shall never know. The sick methodology of those times defies comprehension, I’m sure you’ll agree, Terradillos. Because Bevilacqua wasn’t given to explanations. He never even showed any emotion when he was telling me these things. Doubtless there were dark currents flowing beneath the surface, but I swear that the impression given to a disinterested listener such as myself was of a tranquil lake into which one yearns to lob a stone, to cause a ripple or some sort of movement . . . I asked him why it was so strange to run into a woman he had known years before in Buenos Aires, in Madrid.

“Not strange, impossible,” he answered. “La Pájara is dead. They killed her a few weeks before they let me out. I was in the cell when they came to break the news to El Chancho. We were blindfolded. But I remember it because one of the men went up to him and said, ‘Sincere condolences.’”

The significance of Bevilacqua’s words still eluded me. I told him, in what I hoped was a conclusive tone, that he simply couldn’t be sure of having seen her, at that distance and in that poor light.

Bevilacqua took my arm: “Brother,” he said, “she followed me.”

I resigned myself to hearing him out.

Apparently, Bevilacqua had gone out for a walk around Plaza de Oriente, which in those days was quite a bit shabbier than it is now. It was cold. A chill wind whistled around the bushes, clustering dirty papers around their roots. The occasional hooded figure (I swear that you could still see black capes in Madrid at that time) passed by, hugging the walls of buildings. Bevilacqua suddenly caught sight of her across the square, close by the Campo del Moro. For a long time he stared at her in horror. Then began a game of cat and mouse.

Bevilacqua tried to lose her by running into the alleys around the Church of San Nicolás. On the other side of the Calle Mayor, he crossed various little squares leading to the San Miguel market, negotiating dead ends and hurrying down porticoes. Perhaps because of the weather, the time of the day, or the fact that it was a religious holiday—or perhaps Bevilacqua imagined all this later—it seemed as if everything were closed: shops, cafés, offices. All he could hear was the wind, and La Pájara’s heels on the cobblestones. Bevilacqua no longer registered the names of the streets through which he was fleeing. He seemed to cross the same square several times, retracing his steps, going up a hill he was sure he had come down a few minutes earlier. The same scene kept repeating itself in monochrome: the black stones, the ashen fog, the marble-colored lampposts. This flight of his seemed to be taking place in the past, as though, rather than running through spaces, he were running back through time. And every time he turned around, there it was, defined against the dusky light, her ever-present, ornithological silhouette. Finally he emerged into the Plaza de las Cortes and, recognizing the columns and steps, realized that he was close to my house.

I say “my house” because that is what I called it when I lived there, but now that building—with its balconies and long windows, with the imposing front door which, in those days, relied on the services of a nightwatchman, with its pavement forever stained by Bevilacqua’s blood—I think of as belonging to him. If I were superstitious, I would call it a case of satanic possession, of the kind you find in medieval chronicles, because that place, which was mine for such a long time, is inhabited now by the memory of his languid, melancholic, persistent figure. I think I even intuited, during his perorations, this inevitable outcome: that Bevilacqua would eventually take over everything that was mine.

Anyway, I managed to calm him down. I said that he should return to Andrea’s flat and not worry her with his fantastical stories. “These things,” I said, more out of weariness than conviction, “sort themselves out after a good rest.” I was generous enough to suggest he seek consolation in the arms of that young girl.

Because, you see, Bevilacqua had taken Andrea, too. Andrea, Quita’s right hand, must have been about twenty-five then. Her mother, a reader of Spanish literature, had named her after the heroine of Carmen Laforet’s Nada and, in Andrea, there was certainly something of that novel’s rebellious and sensual protagonist. Andrea herself was more into the literature of the New World, and when we first met I don’t know if it was my appearance or my passport that seduced her.

Andrea was rather small, with straight, short hair and something of an angora rabbit about her. Her Arabic eyes looked out from behind blue-framed spectacles. At that time my sexuality was more eclectic than nowadays: youth is willing to try anything. I confess that I fell in love with her immediately, as one is attracted to an anonymous traveler on an escalator—a face picked at random among those in the opposite line.

My friend: I’ve already told you that I met Bevilacqua sometime after moving to Madrid. Andrea and I must have been going out for a couple of months by then. I was not much older than her; Bevilacqua, as I mentioned before, was ten years older than me. He was elegant and slender; I’ve always been a bit flabby and scruffy. Age and poise won out. Andrea must have felt that Bevilacqua was endowed with more prestige and a better lineage. It’s true that along with the habitual expression of a slaughtered ram, a swatch of gray hairs lent him an aristocratic look, giving him the appearance of one of those characters that girls of Andrea’s age (if they like Latin American literature) lap up from the likes of Bioy Casares or Carlos Fuentes. On top of her desk, which was tastelessly adorned with little tropical plants and toy animals, I once discovered a framed photograph of a twentysomething Bevilacqua, in a French beret, arms crossed and looking like a prophet who’s expecting God knows what. In the face of such competition, I beat an honorable retreat. I believe that Bevilacqua never fully knew how generously I had yielded him my place.

Andrea began by introducing Bevilacqua into the small artistic circles which were starting to flourish in Madrid, in dark, smoky basements that hoped to imitate, after a fashion, the vie bohème of Saint-Germain-des-Prés some twenty years earlier. She introduced Bevilacqua to a way of dressing that would set him apart from the lugubrious masses, and given his horror of clothes shops, she started buying him tweed jackets and silk bow ties. Finally, she decided that Bevilacqua should move in with her. More or less forcibly, she took his few belongings to her flat in the Chueca district and even offered to pay any outstanding rent. Andrea divided her wardrobe in two, offering the more spacious part to Bevilacqua (even though she had ten times as many clothes), and in a corner of the room, she set up a little table so that he would have somewhere comfortable to string his colored-bean necklaces. Next to the toolbox, she discreetly placed a reading lamp, a ream of paper, and a portable Olivetti.

Since the first time Bevilacqua had been introduced to her, Andrea had resolved that this writer (never mind that he was a writer of fotonovelas) should take up his pen again. That was her mission: to rescue her beloved genius from a Bartleby-style indolence. Andrea believed fervently in the magnificent, resounding work that Bevilacqua, terrified of revealing it to the world, must surely be carrying in the depth of his soul. Andrea would be his midwife, his keeper, his tutor.

Vila-Matas assures me that in the case of nonwriting writers, someone usually pops up who refuses to accept this creative silence and tries to provoke an outburst of all that has not been expressed. Rather than admit that the writer exists precisely because of what he does not produce, this person sees in the absence of work a promise of great things to come. Andrea’s relationship with Bevilacqua confirms the master’s thesis.

Months passed, however, and Bevilacqua did not write. He spent every night stringing beans. Every morning he set off for Calle Goya, where he spread out his mat. Some afternoons he spent in bored resignation with Andrea at a poetry reading or a private view. But, to Andrea’s great concern, the ream of paper remained intact and the Olivetti unopened.

One day, when Bevilacqua had gone off to sell his knickknacks, Andrea decided to clean up the flat, and on removing a pile of suitcases and boxes from the wardrobe, she spotted the old Pluna bag that Bevilacqua had brought over from Buenos Aires, a shirtsleeve protruding from it. Thinking that Bevilacqua must have forgotten some item of clothing that needed washing, Andrea emptied the bag and found, at the bottom of it, a rectangular packet, wrapped in plastic. She opened it. It was a bundle of handwritten papers, the first of which bore a title: In Praise of Lying. There was no name, either on the title page or the end page.

As you can imagine, Andrea began to read, and devoured the manuscript in one sitting. As she finished, the bells of Santa Bárbara were striking six o’clock in the evening. Andrea quickly bundled everything else back into the wardrobe and set off for the Martín Fierro, taking the novel with her. There she placed it in a drawer of her desk and locked it. (I remember that desk, that drawer, and that key so well!)

Although Andrea worked out the details of her plan little by little, the main thrust of it had come to her immediately, when she had barely read the first paragraphs. Bevilacqua was a writer, as she had always suspected. Not of fotonovelas and other pap. He was a real writer, the author of a work of art. Because In Praise of Lying was (and is, as you who have read it will know) a great novel.

I know you’re thinking about that handful of bad reviews which, unsurprisingly, sought to redress the balance. I also read some skeptical and bad-tempered articles by a handful of cynical critics, including Pere Gimferrer in Barcelona and Noé Jitrik from his Mexican exile. I read them, and they honestly did not alter, in the slightest, my first opinion. Nor did they change Andrea’s—which, believe me, is not to be sniffed at. Because Andrea knew good literature when she saw it. She took pleasure, I admit, in minor works, those well-written and perfectly agreeable novels that make a journey shorter or while away the night hours. But a work of genius is something else, as Andrea knew all too well. And the one she had just read was part of that select, literary Olympus: it belonged on that shelf which Andrea reserved only for books without which, as someone once said, “the world would be poorer.” In Praise of Lying must not be hidden away. Nobody had the right to deprive the world of something so beautiful. Andrea (for all her small size, that woman was a force de la nature, as you might say, Terradillos) would be its herald, its standard-bearer. She would see it published to a fanfare. She would distribute it by hand, if necessary, to ensure that it reached the few luminaries who were beginning to appear on Spain’s dismal intellectual firmament. And not just Spain’s; Bevilacqua was going to be read in the remotest corners of the globe. Andrea felt herself possessed by a kind of evangelizing fever. If she had come to me for advice at that time, I would have cautioned prudence, reflection. But she didn’t. She went to Camilo Urquieta, instead.

I keep forgetting that you don’t know any of these people! Being so young (forgive me, Terradillos, but at my age anyone with less than half a century under his belt is a stripling), you don’t know any of these names, which were so famous in their day. Urquieta was (he died a long time ago, poor old thing) your typical born editor. Some people embody their métier: they are a hundred percent carpenters, guitar players, and bankers to the core, and can never be anything else—they were that thing in their mothers’ womb and they will continue to be it after their last breath, as scattered dust, you might say, as part of the air we breathe. Every day, my friend, we inhale the ashes of military men, podiatrists, prostitutes, and, why not, those editorial ashes of Camilo Urquieta.

Let me tell you about him. Urquieta was born in Cartagena, in Murcia—something he always brought up when dealing with Murcian authors. Early on, he moved to Madrid. He was first there under Franco, then during the decades of slow change. Later, by representing the writers of the emerging cultural scene—the Movida—he managed to find himself a spot in the world of letters. He was an early editor of Hugo Wast and Chardin, later of a short life of Saint Thomas and etiquette manuals, such as The Polite Child and Good Manners; then, from a cautious Introduction to Theosophy, translated by Zenobia Camprubí, he suddenly went on to publish the works of several young Latin American writers who were taking their first steps in the world of books. Courting notoriety with an anthology of vaguely erotic literature, he demonstrated once and for all that nothing in this new Spain was as it had been before. Urquieta knew instinctively what to publish, at what time and in what manner, and, above all, how to sell it and then start the whole process again. There are at least half a dozen publishing houses still running which began life under Urquieta. During the time we’re talking about, Urquieta was running an imprint—the vigorously named Sulphur—that dared to include in its catalog all those poets published in Argentina and Mexico which had previously only been available under the counter in certain dangerous shops. Ask Ana María Moix, who knows much more about that chapter of Spanish publishing than I do.

Andrea knew Urquieta because, in the small social circle of those days, it was impossible not to know him. And he, predictably flattered that a beautiful and intelligent girl like Andrea would ask his advice, offered it to her in a dingy café next to Angel Sierra’s wine bar. Urquieta frequented this place, apparently, because one of his poets—Cornelio Berens, I believe—had described it in a Nerudian ode as “a mussel bravely clinging / to the prow of an old battleship.” Others says that Urquieta stayed out of the editorial offices because of the uncomfortable possibility of running into a debt collector there.

At the back of this café, Urquieta had a table reserved for life. To reach it (I, too, have made the pilgrimage!) one had to go down a series of invisible steps, then grope one’s way along a corridor crammed with chairs and tables. One mean candle (“it creates atmosphere,” claimed the café’s owner, who was from Salamanca) grudgingly illuminated the editor’s face, which was smooth and creamy, like the paper in a deluxe edition. Urquieta, I don’t know if I’ve told you, had no body hair, and wore a rather unconvincing wig. But nothing could disguise his lack of eyebrows and eyelashes, and in the gloom, one had the disagreeable impression of sitting opposite someone not entirely human.

Of course I don’t know what they said to each other, but I can imagine (humor me here) the anxious, ardent questions of little Andrea—toute feu, toute flamme, as you French say—and the solemn, know-it-all answers of Urquieta, playing part Père Goriot, part Casanova. Andrea must have explained to him about her discovery, the need to publish what she regarded as a prodigious work, the need to conceal from its author the fate of his book. Urquieta, smitten but cautious, must have asked for time to look at it and give her his opinion.

You already know the rest of the story. Urquieta’s decision to publish In Praise of Lying. The rumors that began to circulate around the secret future bestseller. The race to be one of the first to read it. The scandal of the galley proofs. Suspicions around the name of the secret author. The invariably overconservative sales forecasts. Even though it was December and people were focused on Christmas shopping, all Madrid seemed to be absorbed by one topic.

Finally, the long-awaited evening came. At about seven o’clock, a small but select group began to gather in the cramped, overheated space of the Antonio Machado cultural center. They certainly numbered more than the visitors who usually attended such presentations, which were rare at the time. I had received my invitation the day before. At first, I thought I might not go, because that same evening I was returning to Poitiers for a couple of days to attend a seminar, and the prospect didn’t thrill me. I mean to say, what would life be without that constant flow of vexatious obligations, of insipid engagements, of frustrated desires!

Terradillos, let me set the scene: the guest of honor nowhere to be seen. Andrea, at the door, anxiously looking out for him. Two or three journalists waiting impatiently. Berens making jokes about the well-known modesty of celebrities. Quita wrapped in her fur stole, annoyed as hell, asking Tito Gorostiza if he really did not know what had happened to our Alejandro. Gorostiza sulking.

Finally, Urquieta made an announcement saying that they could wait no longer.

The proceedings were opened by a certain actress, a rising star in Spanish cinema, who read a few pages from the novel. The audience, doubtful at first, listened with increasing delight, bursting into applause at the end. After that Urquieta spoke. As you’d expect, he made an allusion to the new voices emerging from the New World, to the linguistic debt repaid now by the River Plate to the cradle of Cervantes, to that inspiration born on the legendary pampas between Eldorado and Tierra del Fuego. He concluded by citing various names from the Sulphur backlist who (so he claimed) were already classic authors. More applause. Then Bevilacqua appeared.

Borne along on Andrea’s arm, he seemed to be dragged to the platform rather than guided there. Urquieta shook his hand, half turning so that the photographer could get a shot of them together. Then, with a kind of reverence, he stepped aside to let him speak. Bevilacqua stared at the microphone as though it were some strange creature, blinked, and raised his gaze to the back of the room; he looked around for Andrea and, finding her behind him, looked ahead again. With difficulty, he lit a cigarette.

There is nothing longer than a public silence; this one of Bevilacqua’s must have lasted at the very least five endless minutes. We waited, perplexed, feeling uneasy for him more than for ourselves. Suddenly, as though something had hit him in the face, he looked down, got down from the platform, forged a path through the crowd, and made a swift escape through the front door. I say “escape,” because that was the impression he gave us. Of an animal in flight.

With a few, halting words, Urquieta brought the proceedings to a close. It was apparent that even he, a seasoned master of ceremonies, was baffled. Bevilacqua’s behavior was so strange, so inexplicable, that everyone (myself included, of course) felt stunned and defrauded, as if the man who had run away was someone else. I went up to Andrea, to see if she could explain what had happened. The poor girl was on the brink of tears and, without answering me, tried to cover her face. Tito Gorostiza, always so gentlemanly, spoke consolingly to her while pocketing two of the bottles of sherry that Urquieta had laid on (because a good businessman knows when to be generous) in preparation for the final toast. Berens, who doesn’t miss a thing, joined us and, with those lizard features of his, launched into a rant.

“I suppose this is the avant-garde way of doing things, eh? Rudeness as a literary style. And there I was, thinking Spain was above the silly posturing we’re used to in South America! Because you know what’s going to happen now? This snub will be interpreted as a revolutionary manifesto—just wait and see. We come from a country where nobody is surprised to see artists getting mixed up in politics, ‘the lowest of all human activity,’ as one of my fellow countrymen describes it. But why shit all over the new nest? What’s the point of that?”

“Berens, weren’t you mixed up in politics yourself?” asked Paco Ordoñez, who had recently started working at the news agency EFE. “Isn’t that why they arrested you?”

“‘You’ll always find a clover / Amid the grass unseen / Which when you turn it over / Shines with a braver green.’ You can have that quotation free. I wrote it,” Berens replied.

I’m not insensitive to the suffering of others. I saw that Andrea was still anxious. She clearly wanted to leave. Without saying good-bye to anyone, I took her arm and led her out into the street. She didn’t put up much resistance. We found a café a few blocks away. When she had calmed down, I asked her what had happened. The poor thing said she didn’t know, that Bevilacqua seemed suddenly to have taken fright, that it must have been her fault for not consulting him, that she had thought the publication would make him happy, that she had only done it for him, so that his genius would be recognized.

I told her that that would still be the case. I was in no doubt that In Praise of Lying was an important work.

“If you say so,” she said, in a tone of voice which—given that I am easily moved—suddenly made her seem like a little girl. Isn’t there something touching about the absolute faith of people in love? All these years later, it still makes me shiver to remember Andrea’s voice.

I answered that of course I thought so, that this was my professional opinion. “Without a doubt,” I assured her. “The critics will be on your side. And you know how harsh they usually are. But in this case they’ll be kinder—I’m sure of it.”

I paid, and we left. Freezing fog was making the bad driving conditions worse, and it was a halting journey to her house. After leaving her, I went home, in a pensive mood.

There he was. Bevilacqua was standing outside my front door, the tip of his cigarette glowing like lamplight in the fog. The nightwatchman was watching him charily. I seemed to be tasked with calming people’s nerves that night. You know me, Terradillos. You know what I’m like. I was already that way in my youth. I tried to soothe them both.

We were scarcely through the door when Bevilacqua began to tell me everything. Andrea’s discovery had upset him very much, and to see, all of a sudden, the printed book had plunged him into a nightmare in which he felt utterly powerless. I reminded him of Freud’s discovery that nothing is accidental, that all events are prompted by something within us. But Bevilacqua was neither offended nor annoyed. He merely felt lost, stunned, incapable of expressing himself (he used an endless stream of words to make this point, of course). Up there on the platform, before that avid audience, hemmed in on the right by Urquieta, who terrified him, and on the left by Andrea, whom he loved, but who also scared him, the poor man had not known what to do or say. Then he caught sight of them. Him and her. The two of them. Right there in the audience. Sitting with everyone else. Smiling. He with his horrible dark glasses. She with her little hat.

“Who?” I asked, pointlessly.

“El Chancho and La Pájara,” he answered. “El Chancho Olivares and La Pájara Pinta.”

“Not your zoological phantoms again, Bevilacqua,” I said, to mollify him. “Wasn’t La Pájara dead? Wasn’t El Chancho, as you call him, in prison for conning a military man? They’re hardly going to let him take a leave of absence!”

“I can’t explain it,” he said, “but they were there.”

“All right,” I said hurriedly, because my train was leaving in a couple of hours. “Let’s see. Suppose it was them. Suppose the grave could not hold her and prison bars were not enough for him. What does it matter to you? It’s not as though they blame Alejandro Bevilacqua for their woes.”

Bevilacqua shot me a look of terror, wringing his long yellow fingers as though he were washing them. “Brother,” he entreated me, “you’re about to go to France for a few days. Would you let me stay here, in your house, just for the weekend? I promise not to touch anything. I just don’t have the courage to deal with the journalists, with Andrea, with Urquieta, with . . .” He let the sentence hang.

What can I say—I’m a bit softhearted, as you know. Someone asks me for something and I can’t say no. Also, if I’m honest, I didn’t like the idea of leaving the house unoccupied for more than a few hours. I’d heard of several robberies taking place in the neighborhood, invariably when the occupiers were away. I had a hunch that the nightwatchman was passing on information, but of course it was impossible to prove this. And to be fair, Bevilacqua was a very tidy man. So I agreed. I swear that he embraced me with tears in his eyes; he would have kissed me if I’d let him. I picked up my suitcase, gave him a copy of my key, and let him walk me to the door.

After I finished my Sunday seminar (the turnout was disappointing; from December to March the French show little interest in anything), I took the train back to Madrid. The Ávila landscape was visible through my window as, yawning and with my café con leche slopping cheerfully onto its saucer, I opened a newspaper the waiter had brought and read the terrible news that Bevilacqua had died. It was Tuesday. The newspaper said that on Sunday morning an early riser had come across the body in a pool of congealed blood. A photograph showed the nightwatchman pointing an accusing finger at my balcony. The article gave no further details, but lingered instead on the irony of this feted author having found fame such a short time before his tragic end. It quoted Urquieta, for whom the new literature had just lost one of its best voices. On the same page there was an ad in which the Sulphur publishing house reminded the public of the merits of In Praise of Lying. I reread the article several times. A death in one’s immediate circle is particularly hard to take in.

When I got home, the nightwatchman advised me, with evident satisfaction, that the police wanted to question me. Not many people like the police. The Swiss, the English maybe. Not me. With a growing sense of unease, I started looking around this flat which no longer felt like mine. Violent acts render familiar things alien, and besides, in this case, there were traces of Bevilacqua in every room, on all the furniture. On the dining-room table were the remains of a frugal supper. On the sofa (and I usually keep everything so tidy) there was a waistcoat, several shirts, and a towel. The bed was unmade. I swear that I felt I could never again sleep on that mattress, on that pillow, as if Bevilacqua had died there, between my sheets. After a while I went out onto the balcony, whose balustrade now struck me as dangerously low. For the first time in my life, I felt vertigo.

I resigned myself to the worst: discomfort, uncertainty, insomnia. I unpacked my suitcase, put Bevilacqua’s things away in his (which sat in a corner of the room, like a loyal dog awaiting its master’s return), and spent the rest of the day cleaning the flat from ceiling to floor with Ajax. I slept badly that night.

It must have been eight o’clock in the morning when the doorbell rang. Not finding my glasses on the bedside table, I groped my way toward the front door. I could just make out two hazy shapes. One, small and bald, belonged to the nightwatchman. The other introduced itself as Inspector Mendieta, from the Investigation Squad. Apologizing for the fact that I was still in pajamas, I invited the inspector in, then closed the door in the nightwatchman’s face.

You have good eyesight, Terradillos, and I bet you can’t imagine how awkward it is to talk to someone whose features are a blur. My discomfort was exacerbated by the paradoxical character of Inspector Mendieta. Even without glasses, I could tell that he was both cordial and menacing, paunchy and mustachioed, like a Mexican Father Christmas. He asked me to sit down as though we were in his house, not mine.

In a way I was almost disappointed that he didn’t treat me more severely. He asked a few obvious questions (why Bevilacqua had been in my house, how long we had known each other, what his state of mind had been when I left him, if anything unusual had happened in the last days of his life), and he wondered if I would be staying in Madrid in the following weeks. Then he took a look around the flat, pausing for several minutes on the balcony without saying anything. He sat down again.

“The rail is very low, isn’t it?” he suddenly said.

“Not just mine,” I protested. “All the balconies are the same. It’s part of the design. Art Nouveau,” I explained. My fuzzy vision was really annoying me, and when I noticed how bothered I was, it made me feel even more bothered. I began to talk about Madrid’s Art Nouveau, comparing it to Barcelona’s. Apparently not listening, Mendieta got to his feet and went back out to the balcony. I stopped talking. When we said good-bye, I felt accused, without knowing why.

I said before, Terradillos, that the death of someone close has something unreal about it. That’s true, but there’s a solidity and a substance to it as well. Those deaths that take place out there in the world, those hundreds of thousands of deaths that swamp us every day—they’re insubstantial in their vast anonymity. That of a friend, on the other hand, wrenches from our very core something that belongs to us, and to which we belong. I think I’ve been clear on this point: I didn’t love Bevilacqua. And yet, the fact that he had died there, in my house, under my momentarily absent nose, hurt like a pulled tooth, like a cut finger. Something was missing, now, from my life’s routine, something regular, albeit a bit insipid, a bit boring and annoying: the tall, thin, pale, and tormented shadow of Alejandro Bevilacqua.

The following weeks were difficult for me. I wrote a few articles for newspapers, continued to read dry research documents for my book, visited the welcoming reading room at the National Library—but in all these things I felt now like a man who’s lost a limb or an eye. Unconsciously, I was always waiting for the door to open and for that very familiar voice to start recounting some tedious episode from his life.

Bevilacqua was buried in the Almudena Cemetery, as inappropriate a choice as one can imagine: its ancient grandiosity didn’t suit his character. Have you ever been there? It’s all stone angels and broken urns, a phony decadence standing in for the all-too-real decay of the flesh. “I have walked on the Andes”—that should have been his epitaph. But only his name and dates are there.

Of course it was Urquieta’s decision that his final resting place should be the Almudena. Beneath a few conventional cypresses, the editor repeated (with some respectful modifications) the speech he had made at the book launch. Flesh remains, the word takes flight. If you were looking for an example on this earth of sic transit, Bevilacqua’s funeral would have provided an unforgettable one.

Now that I think of it, the ceremony at the Almudena was like a grotesque parody of that other one, a few days earlier, at the Antonio Machado center, a gloomy da capo, as unsettling as a shadow. The same people, the same words, but what had been happy excitement at the success of someone hitherto unknown was now replaced by the terrible sadness of his premature demise. I see them as clearly now as if I had photographed them. Berens and the other comrades from the flat in Prospe, faithful friends, standing beside a great broken urn; Quita and that young journalist, Ordóñez, on the threshold of a lugubrious mausoleum; my poor Andrea, as grief-stricken as one of those stone angels draped over the tombstones. The usual busybodies were there, too, anonymous people drawn by the lure, the pleasure and perversity of someone else’s grief. And among the unknown faces, a couple who looked vaguely familiar: he was short, rough-shaven, with dark glasses prominent beneath a black, broad-brimmed hat; she, tall with a big nose, sporting a green helmet, topped with a pheasant’s feather. I asked Quita, who was talking to Ordóñez, if she knew them.

Only then did I realize that Quita had turned quite pale. I never would have guessed that Bevilacqua’s death could affect her so greatly. She looked at me as though she didn’t see me at all, distractedly searching among the tombs for the one person who was absent.

“They’re Cuban,” she said finally, with a sigh. “Recent arrivals. He writes, she reads.”

A light drizzle began to fall. Nice literary touch, I thought to myself.

I saw Andrea walk away amid a procession of umbrellas. I hurried to catch up with her.

“If you need anything . . .” I began to say.

“If I do, I’ll let you know,” she answered with an abruptness I put down to her sorrow. I squeezed her shoulder and let her go on her way.

In the following weeks, I tried to see the Martín Fierro gang as little as possible. The time comes when these sorts of relationships—based to a degree on nostalgia and shared politics—draw to a close without us knowing how or why. Something in these exiled communities unravels or comes unstuck, people go their own way, and if I see you in the street, I may not even stop. I knew that my time in Madrid was coming to an end.

I packed my suitcases, boxed up my books, and paid my outstanding bills. I spent my last morning in the city walking, indulging my nostalgia. As I crossed Calle del Pinar, I heard someone call me. It was Ordóñez. I told him that I was returning to France. Ordóñez made some joking remark about the virtues of French cuisine. We said good-bye cordially, and then he remembered something that he wanted to tell me.

“Hey, Manguel. Those people in the cemetery you were asking Quita about. The Cubans. Apparently they’re wanted by the police. I’m just telling you because you seemed interested.”

Then I realized why those two had looked familiar, and I remembered that frightened description that Bevilacqua had given me. I began to understand that something, whether horrible or banal, which had bound the ghostly Argentinian to the fantastic Cuban, had come to an end now that one of them could no longer tell his version of events. It was another one of those stories that belong to the “archive of silence,” as we refer to that infamous period in my country’s history.

The encounter with Ordóñez depressed me even more. I wandered off through the streets of the Prospe, with its ocher facades and broken paving stones. Almost without thinking, I arrived at the door of the Martín Fierro. I climbed the stairs. Quita was on her own, going through files at the reception desk, which had now been cleared of Andrea’s things, of her little plants, her toys, her framed photograph of Bevilacqua. I was shocked to see how tired she looked, her bronzed skin tinged by a whitish lichen, a lock of gray hair falling over her forehead. Quita, who felt about grooming the same way Poles feel about Mass . . . We waffled on about this and that, and then I asked her to please come and visit me if she was ever passing through France. I dared not speak the name of our absent friend.

She was the one who mentioned it. I was almost at the door when Quita put a hand on my arm.

“Albertito, don’t forget me,” she said, with that despicable habit of shrinking her friends with diminutives. “Now that our Alejandrucho’s no longer here . . . And Titito’s gone . . .”

The ellipsis called for some words of consolation, but I had not been informed about Gorostiza’s departure and so I didn’t know what to say. I confess that the news hardly surprised me. I always considered the relationship between Quita and that uptight Argentinian to be a little unsavory. Love affairs between patrons and their protégés never last. Just think of poor Tchaikovsky with his widowed millionairess, Nadezhda von Meck.

I covered Quita’s hand with my own, to console her, but Quita instantly whipped it away, as if scorched by my touch.

“Has an Inspector Mendieta come to see you?” she suddenly asked.

I said that he had.

“And what did you tell him?”

I made a brief summary of our somewhat uninspiring conversation.

“Did he ask you about me?”

“You?” I said, surprised. “No, of course not. We talked about balconies.”

“You swear that you didn’t say anything about me, or poor Tito, or anyone else?”

I swore that I didn’t.

Then she told me something which I am going to tell you and which I must ask remain entre nous. I don’t want to harm such an honorable woman needlessly. Quita was at my house the night that Bevilacqua died. It seems that his behavior had alarmed her, as it had the rest of us. And you know what it’s like with women who are a bit older: the slightest upset triggers their maternal instinct, and they feel they need to gather their chicks under their ample wings. Knowing that he was staying at my house (because in the literary world, everyone knows everything), Quita went to see him, to ask if there was anything she could do to help. The Bevilacqua who greeted her had grown even paler beneath his sallow skin, and his eyes, which were already naturally very dark, looked now (so said Quita) like hollows in a skull. Quita clutched him to her bosom, stroking his brow. But after a few minutes she began to feel that Bevilacqua wasn’t happy to see her; in fact, he seemed to want her to leave, given that he hadn’t even opened the door that led from the hall to the sitting room. Quita asked if any friends had come to see how he was. Bevilacqua said nothing. Well, I mean, what can you do? Quita may have the patience of a Griselda, but she has her self-respect, too. She didn’t push things. But before leaving, she thought she heard someone move behind the door leading from the hall. Of course, she thought that it was another woman and, with characteristic generosity, decided to leave the field clear. The last thing she ever said to Bevilacqua was that if he needed to speak to someone, he could always come to her.

“They were my last words,” she repeated, “I swear.”

I reassured her that nobody could have prevented what was about to happen, and that knowing that a woman like her cared about his fate must surely have been a great consolation to him, when the moment came to make his terrible decision.

On the train back to Poitiers, I started thinking about the sad story to which I had been an unwilling witness those last three months. Who was the man that I had known by the name of Alejandro Bevilacqua? Who had been that strange character who was at different times explicit and evasive, luminous and opaque? You’re a writer, Terradillos (a journalist, I know, but that also counts), so you know how difficult it is to make the artist coincide imaginatively with his work. On one side is the literary creation, endlessly transformed through our readings and rereadings; on the other, the author, a human being with his own physical characteristics, his inherited delusions and weaknesses, his failings. Think of one-armed Cervantes, shortsighted Joyce, syphilitic Stendhal . . . you know what I mean.

But, just suppose we had never come to know of Bevilacqua? Suppose he had died an anonymous death in that military prison in Argentina? In Praise of Lying would still be considered a masterpiece, but in a different way, perhaps more perfect, more complete—at the risk of repeating myself. I mean: if it had no identified author, we would have read the novel like some lost text by a Latin Thomas Mann, an enlightened Unamuno, but with a sense of humor. We would have brought to his flow of words our own versions of that universe, our most subtle intuitions, and our most secret experiences. Because, even if you know that that innocent, gray, rather doltish character was behind such a clever portrait of our times and its passions, In Praise of Lying is a book to which you can return time and time again. One reader will see the book as comedy, another as lyrical tragedy, a third as a ferocious political satire, a fourth as a melancholic elegy to a vanished past. There will even be (as I was telling you there were), readers who are blind to the work’s genius, readers who, through lack of feeling or jealousy, are incapable of recognizing its unique mastery. In my opinion, In Praise of Lying succeeds in capturing the world that we knew (no mean feat) through the eyes of a perceptive and discreet witness capable of putting it into words, warts and all. It will be interesting to see if future readers one day speak of Unamuno as a philosophical incarnation of Bevilacqua, or of Thomas Mann as the Bevilacqua of Lübeck.

The characters from the drama have vanished now. Quita was consumed by cancer in the final days of last millennium. I never heard anything more from Andrea. As for Berens, who considered himself an immortal poet, nobody recites him now, least of all himself: he was committed some time ago to a psychiatric clinic in Santander. Gorostiza, as I discovered much later, chose his own fate. I don’t know about the others.

Only one of them did not disappear altogether. From my house, here in France, I can still see a tall figure striding along the pavement of Calle del Prado. I see it stop at my door and climb the stairs to my apartment, I hear his hoarse voice greeting me, embarking on the familiar stories, while his eyes fix on mine and his fingers grip my arm to keep me from escaping or keeling over with boredom and fatigue. I can see him from here. And, Terradillos, even if, as I have often said, I am the least qualified person to talk about this character, there are days when I suddenly find myself, for no particular reason, thinking about him and his curious literary fate, or about the calumnies that were later heaped upon him, and about the wages of envy and sin.

And I say to myself, Fancy that. You once knew Alejandro Bevilacqua.