Much Ado
About Nothing
DON PEDRO: Officers, what offence have these men done?
DOGBERRY: Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and to conclude they are lying knaves.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, V, 1
Alberto Manguel is an asshole. Whatever he told you about Alejandro, I’ll bet my right arm it’s wrong, Terradillos. Manguel is one of those types who see an orange and then swear it’s an egg. “What, and orange-colored?” you say. Yes. “And round?” Yes. “Does it smell of blossom?” Yes. “So, like an orange?” Yes, but it’s definitely an egg. No, nothing is true for Manguel unless he’s read it in a book. As for everything else, he’ll concede only what he wants. The slightest insinuation, the smallest detail, sets him off on a wild-goose chase.
I’ll tell you something, Terradillos—and you’re not going to believe this: there was a time when he thought I had the hots for him. Can you imagine? Me? For Manguel! In those days, the poor man was as indecisive as a swinging gate. During the weeks that he pursued me, he persuaded himself that I was interested in him, and all because I had asked him some stuff about an Argentinian writer I was reading. It was pathetic to see him traipsing round to the Martín Fierro, looking for me in the café, offering to walk me home—though less so for me, because I grew absolutely sick of him. Quita wiped the floor with him. Did you know she called him “Manganese” behind his back? “There’s Manganese,” she would say to me, “filling two chairs in the waiting room. See if you can shift him.” But it was hopeless. Only after Alejandro and I moved in together did he stop following me around like a lapdog.
I don’t know why Alejandro liked talking to him so much. You probably know more about such things, being a journalist. Alejandro talked about his life partly to relive it and partly to show off. Perhaps it amused him to entertain Manguel, the way it can be amusing to entertain a rather stupid dachshund. Or perhaps Alejandro went to see him precisely because Manguel didn’t listen to what he was saying, but extrapolated outlandish literary stories from what he was hearing. Manguel would tell me something that he swore Alejandro had said to him, and I would just stare at him thinking, This fool, what planet’s he on?
I think Manguel’s inability to pay attention comes from too much reading. All that fantasy, all that invention—it has to end up softening a person’s brain. I must have been barely twenty-five at that time, and Manguel was under thirty, but I felt a thousand times more experienced, more real than him. I used to listen to him and think to myself: At his age, and still playing with toy soldiers.
I bet Manguel painted you a picture of Alejandro as a man defeated and morose. Am I right? A victim finished off by years of suffering and persecution or whatever. Well, it’s true, of course, about the prison, and that can’t have been a bundle of laughs. But apart from that, Alejandro was the opposite of a broken man. His setbacks galvanized him and made him stronger. Even as a boy.
I’m the one you should listen to, Terradillos. Because I’m from the land of your ancestors. Because Alejandro told me his whole life story in all its intimate, dirty details. You know, of course, that he was brought up by his grandmother, a woman who must have been tough, having to struggle alone throughout her life. I feel sorry for her, poor soul, because I also have some experience of these things. Alone and in charge of a crafty fox like Alejandro. She only had to look away for a moment and Alejandro would be going through her handbag, or nipping into the back room with some girl or playing hooky from school to go to the adult cinema down by the port. The poor woman found herself in a terrible pickle once, when her darling grandson got the pharmacist’s daughter pregnant. Alejandro could scarcely have been fifteen at the time, and the girl nearly twenty. Can you imagine Doña Bevilacqua willing herself to stand, firm as an oak, in the face of gossiping neighbors?
I don’t care what people say—I like the woman, even if we are separated by oceans and decades. I feel that both of us have had to deal with situations that were forced on us, and both of us have been prepared to fight tooth and nail to have something of our own in this life. She had to do it year after year. I did it every day. It’s okay. God gives beans to the toothless.
I suppose, at the beginning, Alejandro must have won her over the way he did me. With the same allure, the same charm. She watched him grow, whereas I knew him as a grown man; but I’m sure both of us were captivated by his poise, his presence, that gift for warmth that came to him from somewhere deep inside. In my case, I don’t know if it was the eyes, so deep you could drown in them, or those hands, which could make you shiver if you imagined them running over your skin, under your skirt . . . or the smooth neck into which you would love to sink your teeth . . . I’d better not go on.
I’ve always had a thing for older men. I mean, you’re really sweet, Terradillos, but a bit too green for my taste. Come back to see me when you’re riper. Alejandro was about fifteen years older than me—which, considering how young I was at the time, was quite some gap. The most handsome man I’ve ever known was my father, may he rest in peace. Look, there he is, in his silver frame, as befits a man like him. Did I tell you that my father was a bullfighter? I adored him.
On the evenings when there was a corrida, he, my mother, and I would go to my paternal grandmother’s house, because there was hot water there, and he could get ready more comfortably. My grandmother lived with two of her sisters, and these three old ladies would busy themselves with my mother, preparing his costume and laying out freshly laundered towels on the side of the bathtub, together with a perfumed soap that was kept for his exclusive use. My father would go into the bathroom and emerge after a while no longer himself but transformed into some magical creature, an enchanted being resplendent in pink silk embroidered with gold thread and sequins, and as handsome as the blessed Saint Stephen. We said good-bye to him (“never wish him luck,” my mother warned me, when I was barely old enough to say anything), and I went to sit on the balcony between the geranium pots, with my legs hanging down either side of a post, to watch him as he left the house, and went, gleaming, down the cobbled street. Immediately my mother and her sisters put on their mantillas and took down from her niche Our Lady of Perpetual Help; my mother lit the candles, and the four of them set to reciting Hail Marys until his safe return.
They never went to see him torear, and they never dared turn on the radio during his absences. The hours passed, and I would either watch them pray or entertain myself looking at picture books until the moment came to return to my place on the balcony to witness his arrival at the end of our street, where the car left him, looking more real, more earthly now, but still as handsome as a count, perhaps with a trace of blood on his cheek, perhaps with a tear in his clothes, but never, thank God—as we had secretly feared—borne home on a stretcher, mortally wounded. He died when I was ten, from a pulmonary embolism, would you believe, of a tiny clot that had formed in some secret place in his veins, and not, as I always imagined, losing streams of blood before his public. That’s life. Look at him and tell me if you’ve ever seen anyone more handsome.
Don’t imagine that Alejandro was like him. He wasn’t, either in looks or temperament. The mere suspicion of blood made Alejandro queasy. He couldn’t bring himself to step on an ant or shoo away a horsefly. I could never talk to him about bullfighting; he went to pieces just at the idea of it. The mere thought of any action that might induce pain made him ill. He could never understand why anyone would want to fight. My father, on the other hand, understood it very well. My father was slender and graceful as a reed. Alejandro, too, was skinny, but he had flesh where it mattered. The first time I saw him at the Martín Fierro, I thought, Jesus, I’d gobble him up under the sheets, and I noticed that Quita wasn’t exactly indifferent to him either. Because although she may have seemed very refined, the señora wasn’t above singling out some refugee or other for her personal consumption. That Tito Gorostiza, for example, with his flowing hair and his black leather shoulder bag—“an Andean hippie,” Berens called him. And that Peruvian—I can’t remember what he was called—who ended up living for a time in the cottage Quita had rented near Cáceres. Listen—I’m not accusing her of anything, all right? I think it’s good for a woman to enjoy herself while she can.
But Alejandro was all mine. I told her that, right at the start, and Quita laughed and said of course, go for it. First we got him settled into Gorostiza’s flat. Because Quita had put the flat in her boyfriend’s name—a neat way of using the other tenants’ rent to keep him, since selling trinkets on Calle Goya never appealed much to our Tito.
Alejandro, on the other hand, never complained about his lot. On the contrary, I would almost say that getting up every morning, gathering up his bracelets and rings, walking to his usual spot, and spreading his wares out on the pavement gave him a certain security, I don’t know—a fixed point in that nomadic life. After all, Alejandro was rather conservative. He liked good bed, good board, all that which can be savored and stroked—indulgences that are hard to come by with your butt in the saddle. Ideally, he would have liked his mornings to follow a routine and his nights to be more adventurous. He would have made a good politician, my Alejandro.
But, what can I say, I’m nothing if not ambitious. To his other qualities I wanted him to add that of “artist.” He may not have been keen to admit it, but Alejandro was so obviously a man of letters. I have a solid knowledge of South American writing—I don’t know if you knew that. Ever since I was little, while my mother was devouring books by Gironella and Casona (come to think of it, Carmen Laforet’s Nada was on her bedside table, too), I sought out authors from the other side of the Atlantic, whose books were sold under the counter by a few dedicated booksellers. Now, I wanted Alejandro to be one of them; I imagined him, undisputed and acclaimed, under one of those pastel-colored covers with daring black letters which were produced at that time in Buenos Aires, standing alphabetically proud between Mario Benedetti and Julio Cortázar.
You know what? I wanted to be a part of that transformation which was slowly beginning to make itself felt throughout Spain, like a change of season, like the end of a long illness. Each one of us, I mean in my generation, experienced it in a different way, at different times. I can tell you that, for me, it was one day at school, at the end of class. I was about to leave the room when the headmistress, a very strict, formal woman, came in and told me to help her. She took one of the gray plastic wastepaper baskets that were in every classroom, and placed it in my hands. Then she lifted a chair onto the platform, pushed it over to the blackboard, unhooked the crucifix that had been hanging on the wall, and put it into the wastepaper basket. We filled two baskets this way. Then we left them in a corner of the school chapel, under the astonished gaze of one of the priests who taught religious education. Sitting at my desk the next day, I felt for the first time freer, less stifled.
I wanted Alejandro to be a part of that wind of change, to be a dazzling new voice, a new discovery. Yes, yes, my Terradillos, I know what you’re thinking: those fotonovelas of his were hardly literature. We had a laugh when he showed me three or four that he had discovered in a pile of old magazines in the Rastro flea market. Worse than soap operas—don’t think I didn’t realize that. I’m not stupid. But Alejandro knew the art of spinning stories. There was something about his tongue (I can see that you have a dirty mind from the way you’re smiling), something in the way he measured words so well, with exactly the right nuances and shading, with more wisdom and delicacy than he ever showed stringing colored beans together. People say that there used to be sorcerers in Andalusia who could make flowers and birds burst forth from the sky simply by naming them. Believe me, it was the same with Alejandro. When he told you something, you found yourself following his stories as if they were taking place in front of your own eyes; you could see it all happening. That was why it came as no surprise to me to learn that he had written a masterpiece.
Look, Terradillos. Compare him to anyone else. To Berens, let’s say. Have you read any Berens, did you ever hear him reciting his stuff—before he went crazy, I mean? A prize for his first book, some other prize for the second. Here in Spain they loved him, because he was like a modern Bécquer. Even before the days when it became fashionable to award prizes to friends or because of publishing politics, everyone knew that the autumn wouldn’t go by without Berens getting an award. But he was nothing compared to Alejandro.
I let him stay at Gorostiza’s flat just for a couple of months, to get him acclimatized to Madrid. Because this was still, for the most part, a fearful city, cloaked, mute, drawn in on itself, not wanting to see anyone. When I was a young girl, I found it hard to believe that anything could ever bring down the great mountain of filth, of fetid candles and rotten vegetables, bestowed on us by that dwarf, our Franco. I told myself that if Alejandro could cope with all that in a shared flat, my house was going to seem like paradise to him. That was how, one holiday weekend, I brought him back to live with me.
No doubt you’ve heard about how I found the manuscript. On several occasions I’d asked Alejandro to show me something that he had written, for I knew he must have written something; he had poetry in his blood. He always said no, that he wasn’t a writer and I should leave him alone. I bought him a typewriter, hoping to tempt him. I left him on his own, gave him space, to see if solitude would stoke his inspiration. Nothing. He didn’t take the typewriter out even once, and solitude seemed not to inspire him—at least not to write. In fact I once came home earlier than I had said I would and found him in bed with the geisha from the flat next door (who I knew was a slut the day I saw her open the door with her kimono undone and her tits hanging out). Obviously I forgave him.
The thing is (forgive this digression), Alejandro had a vocation to share everything: food, readings, ideas, sex. If you put a plate of food in front of him, he insisted you try a little, too. If he was reading a thriller, he’d call you over and read aloud some paragaph he liked. If an idea occurred to him in the middle of the night, some piece of nonsense, he’d wake you up to tell you about it. And, as far as he was concerned, a bed was not a place in which to sleep alone. He said that only selfish people masturbate.
One morning, when Alejandro had gone to his spot on Calle Goya, I found an old bag full of what looked like dirty laundry. I opened it. There it was. In Praise of Lying, in clear, handwritten characters. There was no name on the title page, but I knew straightaway what this was. I read it all the way through. It was hours later that I finished the last page, with tears in my eyes, I swear on the memory of my father, God bless his soul. There was something there, formed of vowels and consonants, to which the word literature scarcely does any justice. Even when you give it a capital L.
I put all the things back as they had been and set off for the office with the manuscript. I called Urquieta, who must have thought that I wanted something else. I told him that I had to see him. He arranged to meet me in his café.
When I arrived, nervous and out of breath, Urquieta was already there, looking spruce in his hairpiece, and with a ready smile. He patted my wrist and insisted I tell him everything. I don’t know if you ever spoke to Urquieta, but his voice was fatherly and measured, like a matinee idol’s. It soothed me.
“I want to know what you think of this,” I said, placing the novel under his nose.
“Is it yours?”
“It’s a friend’s”
“A friend. I see.” And he smiled again.
“Read it,” I answered sternly. “Please. Read it.”
“You’re not asking me to whip through it now, in one sitting . . .”
“Make a start,” I insisted, unflinching. “Later you can tell me what you think.”
Perhaps he hoped to make a conquest; perhaps the role of wise counselor appealed to him, or perhaps it was simply that he was an experienced reader who guessed that this effort would pay off. Urquieta obeyed. He placed his spectacles over his chubby nose, inspected the title page, commented on the calligraphy and color of ink, looked, in vain, for the name of the author, discreetly adjusted his wig, turned the page, and began to read.
No question about it: the man was a professional.
I didn’t say a word. The waiter brought one coffee after another. Nearly an hour later, Urquieta looked up.
“Who wrote this?” he asked.
“First things first—what’s your opinion?”
“Remarkable. From what I’ve read so far, very good. Excellent.”
“A masterpiece—don’t you think?”
“I don’t know yet. I haven’t finished it. And I’d have to read it at least once more.”
“Señor Urquieta, I know that it is. I merely need you to confirm the fact.”
“My dear, I need more information. Who is the author? How did this come into your hands?”
“Señor Urquieta, I can’t tell you more than this. In Praise of Lying—I know that you don’t doubt it—is a unique work, important, magical. We have to publish it. I mean, you have to publish it. You can give it the exposure it needs. You can give it the reputation it deserves. Do it—for the love of art, Señor Urquieta!” I let my voice grow sweet. “Future generations will thank you for it.”
For some reason, Urquieta’s eyes always appeared rather moist, as though he were constantly finding something funny or sad, and they also looked naked without the frame of eyelashes or eyebrows, like the eyes of certain old sheepdogs. Slowly, in the manner of a cautious buyer, he let his eyes run over the contours of my face, my neck, the curves of my blouse—and his imagination took care of the rest. It was well known that Urquieta liked to turn even the most banal or practical conversations into strategies of seduction, without much thought to the outcome. It was the chase he loved. If he found his companion even minimally attractive, Urquieta let his voice and gaze fondle her with lecherous impunity. Any discomfort this might cause didn’t bother him in the least.
I let his eyes travel over me and watched him in turn, to see who would last longer. When pronouncing Ts and Ls, the old man let his tongue linger on his upper lip a fraction longer than was necessary, and there was an exaggerated pause before he answered my questions, fixing his gaze on some part of my body, as though staking claim to a territory. Several moments passed this way.
“For the love of art. Very well. Let’s see. Leave the manuscript with me. Let’s meet here again in three days. I’ll give you my answer then.”
Two days later I received a message at the Martín Fierro. It was Urquieta, summoning me back to the café.
His first words were: “We’ll bring it out in three months. I’ll send a copy to the eight people who count. I thought about having a launch in one of the cafés, the Lyon or the Ballena Alegre. But now I’ve thought of something better. A bookshop. We’ll invite them to the Antonio Machado. We’ll have a presentation like they do in Paris—make it a proper event. It’s going to set the world on fire.”
He put his hand on my arm. I don’t mind confessing that I was genuinely grateful.
“You don’t know how happy you’ve made me.” And I added: “But I must warn you—the author knows nothing about this.”
“He doesn’t know that you’ve submitted it to me?”
“No.”
“But then how will we do the contract? Who’s going to sign it?”
“I’ll sign it. I’ll take responsibility.”
“I don’t like the sound of this. Why not let him know? Who is this elusive Pimpernel? What if he turns against us?”
But I also have my strategies. I knew that his bureaucratic instinct was no match for my charm.
“I know that you’re not afraid of anyone,” I said, smiling.
“Then I’m going to need your help.”
“You can count on me,” I said, with relief.
“Day and night,” he said, smiling.
“Day and night,” I agreed.
“And now tell me. Who is the author?”
“Bevilacqua. Alejandro Bevilacqua.”
“The Argentinian? The one who shared a flat with Berens?”
“The very same. Now he shares mine.”
“I see. And why does he not want his name to be known? We’ll have to put it on the cover.”
“Yes, of course—publish it, and he can find out about it then. But at the moment he doesn’t even know that I’ve read it. The poor man was really traumatized by what he went through in Argentina. He insists that he isn’t a writer, and yet here you have proof to the contrary. In Praise of Lying is going to give him a new start, I’m sure of it. A new life.”
“Very well,” concluded Urquieta. “We shall be the midwives at the birth.”
Urquieta might be a vulture, but he was an intellectual, too. Birth was the right word. Birth of the book, birth of the real, the secret Alejandro. I swear I was so happy, I almost threw myself on him, although Urquieta never needed any encouragement and he had already progressed from fondling my arm to slipping his fingers inside my sleeve and up between my dress and my armpit. But I didn’t care. Alejandro was the writer I had always believed him to be.
Do you understand what I’m telling you, Terradillos, my inquisitive friend? He was a writer, a writer to the core, not like those others who passed through the Martín Fierro taking advantage of Quita’s literary soft spot. They never were in the same league. I’ve been to countless poetry evenings, you know, when you had to keep an eye on the door, and also make sure that your poet didn’t come out with some embarrassing remark or forbidden name—nothing that had a whiff of the Reds or Mother Russia. And even so, everyone would be waiting for some daring, blazing verse that would shine a light on us on those dark evenings. To no avail. God! To think of the times I must have listened to Berens—the most regular performer, of course, standing up on that little stage, in his imported suit, with his short, thin tie like a lizard’s tongue pointing toward his navel, reciting his poems with a smile, as if he knew what they were about, while we, poor fools . . . Urquieta understood the difference perfectly. And he knew straightaway that this was the real thing, a true fighting bull.
I’ll spare you the technical details, the sealed bids, the hushed telephone conversations, Quita demanding to know what was going on (because nothing escaped that woman), Quita gossiping with Gorostiza, who was another curious creature, Quita swearing on Saint Christopher not to tell anyone anything, Berens finding out (I don’t know how), more swearing, more devious plans, more secret meetings. And then, all the arguments about design, about the print runs, the cover—which was one of the first designed by the artist Max. And finally the proofs, the reality of the printed page, the title In Praise of Lying and the author’s name, Alejandro Bevilacqua.
I remember that it was raining on the afternoon that Urquieta arranged to meet me, to hand over the first finished copy, wrapped in brown paper. I was shaking. The following morning, after serving Alejandro his coffee, I set the little packet down in front of him. Alejandro opened it, took out the book, looked at me, looked at the cover, opened the book, closed it, opened it again, closed it again, wrapped it back up in the paper, and leaving it on the table, picked up his things and went, without saying a word.
That day was the launch, and you already know what happened. Manguel was all over me, like a bad rash, and I had to let him take me to a café and then home, just to get him to leave me alone. Alejandro hadn’t come home. I waited for him all that night and the following day.
It was Sunday. That day everyone filed through my house. Quita, with the excuse that she had lost the key to the till, Urquieta, fatherly and solicitous. I told them time and again what I knew: why, how, where. Finally, at midday, I got rid of all of them and locked the door. A little later, Inspector Mendieta came to see me. It was he who broke the news to me.
You don’t immediately understand something like that, even when it’s explained to you clearly. You don’t understand it, because you don’t know how to understand it. You lack that space in your mind that would let you take it in. You are incapable of believing in the possibility of what they are telling you, because nothing of the sort has ever happened to you before. It is like a place that does not exist on your map of the world. You can’t discover America if you have never told yourself that it could be there, on the other side of the ocean.
I spent the days that followed either in tears or asleep, expecting to see him walk through the door or to hear him calling from the other room. Sometimes I felt as though I had dreamed everything up: our meeting, our life together, our conversations between the sheets, the secret book.
The thing is, I don’t know if these stories he was telling were mine, or his, or someone else’s. You spend your life among words, listening, making sense out of what you say and out of what you imagine other people are saying to you, believing that something in particular happened like this or that, as a result of this or that, with these or those consequences. But it’s never so simple, is it? I suppose that if we read about ourselves in a book, we wouldn’t recognize ourselves, we wouldn’t realize that those people doing certain things and behaving in a particular manner are us. I always believed that I knew Alejandro, that I knew him intimately, I mean, the way you might know a doll you’ve once taken to pieces. But it wasn’t true.
Alejandro told me once about his crush on the girl puppeteer, back in Buenos Aires. He was very young then, and he had met that old German who made his living from puppet shows. The girl was his assistant, and Alejandro—who, even as a teenager, knew what he wanted—let the old man think he didn’t mind having his bottom patted, his buttock squeezed occasionally, if it meant he could get closer to Loredana. In bed, he and the girl did everything, the works. Personally, I wouldn’t have gone there, when you think what a baby Alejandro was at the time—I wouldn’t even have taken my coat off for him. Loredana, on the other hand, was happy to go along with it, and while the old man spent hours untangling the strings on his puppets and eyeing up Alejandro, she would sit opposite the boy with her legs apart, her skirt rucked up and her panties mislaid somewhere, or else she’d forget to do up a button on her shirt, showing her tits and some lacy edging against her coffee-colored skin.
Alejandro could not stand to think of the girl going off without saying anything, and when he found out about her desertion he went after her to Chile. As I myself came to discover, on more than one occasion, Alejandro could not stand to be humiliated.
He told me that when he found her, in the restaurant room of that hotel, he treated her like a whore, in front of everyone. He described the things that they had done together. He threatened to go to the police. He accused the old man of corrupting her. He demanded money from them. Before returning to Buenos Aires, he gained access to the theater dressing rooms and charged around like a bull in a china shop. He tore off the puppets’ clothes and painted enormous dicks onto the wooden bodies.
I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but when Alejandro told me these things it wasn’t by way of a confession. He told them in bed, while he was running his hands over my body. He told me because it excited him, I think, and he probably thought that it excited me, too, to hear about it.
But to tell the truth, I hardly listened to him. I looked at him or, rather, I remembered him as he was that time I had first seen him in the Martín Fierro, feeling myself to be in love with him. I let my eyes travel over him, like someone traveling in the dark along a familiar road. I liked making mistakes, arriving at some unexpected part of his body, or confirming my hunch that this was a dark, passionate zone. I didn’t mind if he wanted to tell me his life story—true or imaginary. I liked the sound of his voice, whatever it was saying. Not so much out of bed—but beneath the sheets everything is dreamlike. Whether or not these things had happened, or he simply believed them to have happened, was all the same to me.
I suppose Alejandro must have been like that with every woman. I haven’t got a jealous bone in my body, so I can talk about these things without blushing. I don’t think he was like that with Loredana, because he was not yet experienced with words, only with the body, which does its own thing. But certainly with his wife, with that Graciela, whom he never saw again. He didn’t say as much to me about her, but I know that he yearned for that woman the way a person yearns to breathe. And especially so because someone had taken her from him, someone had deliberately handed her over to the executioners—you knew that? And this was something Alejandro never forgot. I imagine them to have been very similar, he and Graciela, like two consummate actors sharing a stage, with no false moves, not a word out of place, whether they were alone in bed or in the company of some extra, brought out from backstage to be the third leg in their irresistible double act.
He behaved differently with all the women he knew, myself included. I’m sure that those many other lovers, described to me night after night, hung on Alejandro’s every word. To them he was like one of those storytellers who sit in the marketplace and mesmerize the crowd into silence. Enraptured, they would finally realize that the night had ended and that light was creeping in between the blinds.
Quita was the one who made me laugh. When I saw her come into the office in the mornings, I could have sworn on my life that she had been with Alejandro the night before. Not because the bastard hadn’t come home, for that was a freedom he had demanded on our first day together, and which I had agreed to, or accepted—perhaps even wanted. But because Quita’s skin had acquired an iridescent, silken quality, as though the words Alejandro had poured into her were still flowing through her blood, blue, golden, and red. Gorostiza, who never would have admitted that he and Quita were a couple, watched her with a quiet, sad half smile. I think that he voiced no reproach, so long as she allowed him to remain, clinging to her skirts, in the thick of things. Quita, on the other hand, was jealous—or perhaps maternal is a more precise term for those women who like to have a little man in their arms, close to the breast, like a Mater Dolorosa.
Alejandro lost his cool only once, that I remember. It was on a night that he came home late. He told me that he had met up with someone, but he didn’t want to say who. He began to talk, hour after hour, without stopping. This time the aim was not to seduce anyone except perhaps himself, or to console himself, embolden himself. He began with that eternity spent in prison, about which he had already spoken to me, but this time it was as though he felt it in the flesh, as if he were reliving that hell through smell, touch, everyday objects. I don’t know if I’m explaining this well: he was speaking across time.
They had picked him up in the way that had become standard at that time in Buenos Aires: the Ford Falcon drawing up to the pavement, the two men in dark glasses grabbing him by the shoulders, the blindfold across his eyes, the order not to touch the door handles, which were electrified. From beneath the blindfold he thought he recognized a street near the Recoleta Cemetery. The bus I took to school came this way, he thought then. And also: If this had happened then, from my seat I would have seen myself being taken away, because I always looked out on this side.
When they came to some invisible gates, one of the men took down the car radio and uttered what must have been the code to open them. “Uranus.” That was the first word of a new vocabulary that Alejandro had to learn during his confinement, as though his past life had suddenly been erased and he were starting again in some monstrous school where ghostly hands wrote cryptic terms on the blackboard in a tidy hand: operating theater; the machine; the grill; the egg cup; the lion’s den; the hood; the kennel; the tube; the cabin; the truck; the flights; the fish food; the fish tank. Take this down, Terradillos, because it’s history and evidence. I’m telling you this just as he told me, sparing you only the ins and outs. You see: no secrets.
He spent the first days sitting on the floor, with nothing to lean against, unable to move, as rigid as a bullfighter in the veronica stance, with the blindfold tight across his eyes. He learned to look downward, to recognize the guards’ voices, to intuit the presence of others. He thought he knew that the cell was large and that he was not its only occupant. At irregular intervals he heard the door open and close, and felt someone place a bowl of soup in his hands, or a glass of water. In the middle of the room there was a pit for relieving himself. Sometime afterward, he learned that the building was known as the Cesspit.
After three or four days, two men came into the cell and removed the blindfold. They took him, blinking in the light, to a room that looked like an office and was immaculately tidy. They made him sit on one side of a desk and, without saying a word, settled themselves on the other, under a portrait of General San Martín. After a while they brought him a chair. Two or three hours passed this way, in silence. Then the pair got up, went to the door, and ushered in two other men, who were almost identical and took over from the first. This game continued, without words or variations, for nearly a week. Sometimes Alejandro fell asleep on top of the desk, or with his head lolling back against the seat, and then one of the men would stand up and slap his face. Every ten or twelve hours, a woman in an apron brought him something to eat and drink. Alejandro ate and drank and tried to sleep with his eyes open. Nobody said a word.
We know the game in which the threat is never voiced but the imagination is left to build its own hell, in which the fear of what can happen lends a face and claws to a monster that always remains inside your mind. A promise of something unspoken. A curtain raised with no one entering the stage. Allowing the squeak of a door to be heard, or the lash of a belt, the scraping of metal in the darkness. You can imagine it all, can’t you?
We know about it. Writing, Terradillos, is a kind of silence, of not speaking, of shooting words down midflight, as the poet Vallejo once said, of rooting them on the page. Writing is a way of threatening what is not spoken aloud; the shadow of the letters taunts us from between the lines. I am too much a lover of Latin American fiction not to be accustomed to aphony, to reticence, to silence. Will you allow me a reader’s aside? From the start, under the pretext of describing great spaces and narrating vast epics, South America’s chroniclers set out to suggest certain key ideas, to leave a few faint traces. They staged some epic dramas, for sure, novel after voluminous novel, but at the end of the day the story’s essence boiled down to a few words hidden beneath the load of some impetuous paragraph we almost didn’t read, so distracted were we by number of pages. Sometimes they are concealed in the dialogue, in a footnote, perhaps even in the title. The rest would be superfluous, except that it serves to hide what really matters. It is, as those erudite Anglo-Saxons claim, a “literature of violence,” but less political than metaphysical, less in the flesh than intellectual. It concerns itself not so much with obvious violence as with the other, the deliberate, insidious kind. The wound beneath the blow, the offense beneath the insult, the mask behind another mask, the one everyone recognizes. Believe me. Lying: that is the great theme of South American literature.
Alejandro told me that when they finally began to beat him, the pain almost came as a relief. Hour after hour, day upon day, he had allowed himself to dream up the most atrocious tortures, the most unbearable agonies. Steel, fire, water, lack of air—he had conjured up all of it before actually feeling it in the flesh. He who couldn’t even bear to step on a caterpillar, to hurt a cat, was made to imagine everything. And later on, the things that he had imagined began to happen, but differently.
One of the men who often came back to visit him had, Alejandro told me, very soft, smooth skin, like a woman’s. He knew this not because he could see him (the man never entered his cell except when Alejandro’s eyes were bandaged), but because every time he came, he took Alejandro’s hand in his own, as though he were a Gypsy about to tell his fortune. Then, when they led him, with shackled feet and tied hands, to the little room where one of the surgeons (that’s what they were called) had to do his job, Alejandro had the impression that the man with soft skin was still there, watching him, always quiet, always sad. Alejandro imagined him as one of Loredana’s puppets, which, skewered on its stick, could only swivel from left to right, swaying its arms, rigid, with fixed glass eyes and varnished cheeks reflecting the footlights. In his cast of monsters, he gave this ghostly individual the name Muñeco, meaning “doll.” He told me that this character obsessed him to such a degree that a few days after arriving in Madrid, he thought he heard Muñeco’s voice in a café, in a shop, even at the Martín Fierro. Apparently many people experience this kind of hallucination, even months after leaving their own individual hells.
Alejandro did not know what they asked him, nor what he answered during the time he spent in this first cell. He had a confused recollection of beatings, shouting, terrible silences, expressionless faces, gobs of spit, the cries of men and women on the other side of the wall, the pain of injuries he could not see, moments of light sleep, almost without nightmares, the lights constantly lit, a craving for darkness, thirst. At some point they told him that Graciela was dead; later they said that she wasn’t, that she had shacked up with one of the surgeons; later that she was being tortured in a distant cell. I don’t know if he ever discovered the truth.
He had the sensation of separating himself from himself, or splitting into two and feeling that it was his double who was there, lying or sitting, expectant or expecting nothing. He said that it was during those endless months that he began to have the impression of living at the edge of real time, a feeling that never left him completely. When I first met him, sometimes he would wake up saying that he had seen himself stretched out by my side, as though he were dead.
One day, without explanation, they moved him to a cell with only two camp beds. In one corner there was a lavatory with no seat and a washstand. To be accorded such luxuries astonished him. Alejandro recalled how he had not felt water run over his skin for a long time. They left him alone, but it was ages before he allowed himself to go to the basin and turn on a tap. The freezing water made him weep with joy.
They say that intense cold slows the rhythm of the body, reducing the heart rate and pressure of blood in the veins. During those weeks, Alejandro’s senses had grown less acute, his perception dimmer. It was hours before he registered the presence of someone in the second camp bed. Only when a booming voice asked him his name did he realize that there was somebody of flesh and blood there. Quite a lot of flesh: El Chancho, “The Pig,” as Alejandro called him (he never told me his real name), was a man of such low stature, or rather of such short arms and legs, that in spite of his enormous torso and bulging belly, he resembled a dwarf. His one charm (if you can talk of charm in such a graceless creature) was his voice. El Chancho was loquacious. Alejandro, on the other hand, feared that he might have forgotten how to talk altogether.
It wasn’t long before Alejandro discovered that El Chancho seemed to have some curious links with the authorities. He was a prisoner, certainly, but a prisoner with benefits, you might say. With the exception of one almighty beating he had received on first entering the Cesspit (about which he gave Alejandro all the gory details), the guards had not so much as touched a hair on his head, and even conceded him countless small favors. Sometimes they brought him magazines and books, which El Chancho discreetly shared with Alejandro, sometimes special food, which he kept to himself. They also allowed him paper and a pen, and El Chancho spent hours filling the sheets with writing in an even, clerical hand, very similar to Alejandro’s. He had a wife, as tall as he was short and as skinny as he was fat, who was known as La Pájara and whom El Chancho adored with the fervor of a man possessed. Every so often, El Chancho was let out of the shared cell and taken to another one where La Pájara had been brought, and there they spent the night together.
In that world, La Pájara was simply one in a cast of peculiar beings. In a miniskirt that drew attention to her rather full behind bouncing along on top of long legs, with her hair gathered up in the style of a turban and crowned with some outlandish hat, with her lips painted a communist red, La Pájara would arrive in the evenings with a little packet of sweets, as though she were visiting a convalescent. The only visits Alejandro was permitted, meanwhile, were from an older woman, dressed as a nurse, who took his pulse, and a young, melancholic priest who spoke to him of the Good Shepherd. These people came to see him as he lay in a state of confusion, after the really heavy sessions, when, having been dragged down corridors with signs that proclaimed HAPPINESS AVENUE or SILENCE IS HEALTHY, he would be left on the camp bed, bound hand and foot. Compared to them, the obese dwarf and the tall woman seemed unreal, or at least as unlikely as the other strange inhabitants of that world in which he did not wish to believe.
After he was transferred to El Chancho’s cell, Alejandro’s sessions with the surgeons gradually became less frequent and finally stopped altogether. He never knew why. A diabolical law governs places like the Cesspit, with its own rules and geometry. Now the days and nights became long periods of pointless waiting in which he did not know whether to fear the morning or long for it. In the meantime, El Chancho seemed increasingly eager to show him a kind of affection or complicity. He spoke to Alejandro of the sweet perfume of Havana, the milk-coffee color of the Caribbean coastline, of long evening readings on the terrace of some famous novelist’s home and of long nights partying on a still, warm beach. He recalled books for Alejandro (because it seems that El Chancho was a great reader); he told him about writers he had known in his youth; he invented stories with details which he developed and embroidered day after day. Of their own situation, he said very little. “Let us invent the world, brother,” El Chancho would say. “This one doesn’t really exist.” And, after a moment, he added, laughing: “Or ought not to exist, at any rate!”
One afternoon, El Chancho returned to the cell after a short “informative” session, and told Alejandro that La Pájara would not be coming anymore. He said that the surgeons, after reeling off countless numbers and dates which El Chancho claimed not to remember, had blindfolded him and put a hood over his head. Then he had heard the door of the little room open, and the soft voice of Muñeco told him that their patience had come to an end and, with it, the privileges. He shouldn’t expect a visit from his wife that night, or ever again.
And slowly, in fine detail, Muñeco explained what had happened to La Pájara. El Chancho refused to believe it. He prepared himself to wait. That night passed and the one following. Alejandro didn’t dare speak to him. El Chancho neither ate nor slept. He kept his eyes on the door of the cell, as though the slightest distraction on his part could cause a fragile apparition to vanish.
Sometime later, one of the other prisoners managed to whisper in El Chancho’s ear that there had been a shoot-out near the Cesspit, that a car carrying several women had been set ablaze. El Chancho passed from depression to anger, then from anger to an animal fury, punching the walls and howling like a wolf, and—even after three guards had softened him up—he was still fuming. Finally they took him away.
At the same time the surgeons resumed their sessions with Alejandro. One day, after a particularly violent session that left him with a constant ringing in his ears, which were already sensitive after the demonstration in Buenos Aires (“as though I were in the midst of a thousand bell towers,” he once told me), Alejandro was sitting on his bed with his feet still tied and his eyes bandaged when he heard Muñeco’s voice speaking to him. “I came to say good-bye,” said Muñeco. “Perhaps we’ll see each other again. If we don’t die first, you or I.”
The seven or eight months Alejandro spent at the Cesspit left its mark on his memory—and on his arms and legs—for years. Suddenly everything ended in as inexplicable a fashion as it had begun. A week after El Chancho was taken away, a couple of strangers entered the cell and ordered Alejandro to leave it. They blindfolded him once more, tied his feet and hands, led him down the familiar corridors and through the hellish gates and put him in a car. “It was as if they were running the film backward,” he told me. “I had the impression that everything was about to start again.”
After an hour, the car stopped. They removed the shackles, the ties and the blindfold; they placed a bag in his hands and told him to get out. Overhead, several planes were drawing furrows through the sky. The next day, Alejandro landed at Barajas Airport, in Madrid. Who would have imagined it? Now we know that the feet that trod Spanish soil for the first time that day would lead him irrevocably to the fateful balcony.
But what a question, Terradillos! You have to remember that this happened three decades ago. There is an infinite distance between the twenty-five-year-old girl I was then and the half-century me of today. I get the sequence of events muddled up, you know, like in a badly shuffled pack of cards. I can no longer say for sure exactly when I heard about Alejandro’s death, whether Quita told me about it that same day, or if, on seeing me come into the Martín Fierro, the poor woman sent me away, shouting like a lunatic that he was dead, he was dead. Perhaps someone had already told me—Berens, I think—that there were two deaths, because Tito Gorostiza had also taken his life. Or it could have been Inspector Mendieta, who came to see me once again, asking more questions than there are in the catechism, until I ended up not knowing what either of us was talking about. I can no longer remember which things I imagined and which I knew for sure, which stories I was told and which I wove myself, in an effort to figure things out.
Later it came to matter less. The world changed. When Quita fell ill, poor thing, she called me, but we didn’t talk about what had happened. Berens was probably the one who came out of things best, forever isolated by his Alzheimer’s. Perhaps we get used to everything in the end, even oblivion.
Sometimes I am haunted by an image from those days, and it’s as if I see myself in a mirror as I was when Alejandro loved me. Look at me now! But in those days, this body was still attractive and this mind was sharper and quicker. I don’t care what wise men say—age does not sharpen our senses, it deadens them. We need keen banderillas to get us going after fifty. That’s what my father always said, and nowadays I find myself agreeing with him.
As far as you and your readers are concerned, Terradillos, Alejandro’s story holds no surprises now. The facts have been established to the satisfaction of the coroner and the dossier closed with the seal of the Archangel Gabriel. In Praise of Lying hasn’t been seen for years, unless it’s in the window of an antiquarian bookshop, with a hefty price tag attached. A small publishing house here wanted to reprint it, but it was impossible to reach an agreement with some incompetent heirs who didn’t want to have anything to do with it. It’s for the best. That whole episode was embarrassing enough without having to live through it again.
I still read literature from Alejandro’s homeland. I still seek traces of him in the books that reach us from the antipodes. I still believe that one day I’ll uncover the proof that my intuition was not wrong, that under the man everyone else thought they knew was hidden a novelist, a poet.
I know that we are all fools in love, that we let ourselves create plausible ghosts in place of our loved ones. Or rather, we create a ghost which enters the solid person we see in front of us, inhabiting him, looking back at us from behind his eyes. And with the certainty that this creature is our beloved comes another certainty: that we shall never forget him, that we shall never betray him, that he will be forever at the center of our lives, of everything that is ours, however unlikely a figment he is.
I’m going to tell you something, but you must keep it to yourself, because it’s silly and I’m a little embarrassed to say it. Some time ago, in the window of a secondhand bookshop, I saw a collection of poems: the author’s name was A. Bevilacqua. I went in, bought it, hurried to a café, and sat down to read it. The title was something like Counterflows or Crosscurrents. It was light, romantic verse, with a lot of exclamation marks and capital letters. I flicked anxiously through it, unsure exactly what I was looking for, but wanting to hear Alejandro’s somber tones, to feel his hands on the nape of my neck, the smell of his tobacco in my nostrils. I thought I recognized the cadence of his sentences, his measured way of looking at things; I was surprised to see an epigraph from an author I didn’t know he liked. When I had finished the last poem, I turned back to the first. I looked for a date on the copyright page: my edition had been printed at the end of 1990s in Montevideo, but the first publication was in 1961; Alejandro would have been about twenty years old then. I read the book a third time and came, once more, to the imprint page. Only then did I spot something I hadn’t seen, or hadn’t wanted to see before: the author’s name was indeed Bevilacqua, but Andrés, not Alejandro. This was an unknown Andrés Bevilacqua, homonymous usurper of my writer, a false prophet, false ghost, with a false voice and false touch. I felt my mistake as an unforgivable betrayal, a violation of his memory. I, who had loved him so much, had been disloyal. I left the book on the café table and went back home, distraught.
I once read somewhere that the only thing we can do to fight against the unreality of the world is to tell our own story. I have never wanted to do that. I prefer to redeem him and what I knew or believed I knew of him. It doesn’t matter to me much if the truth turns out to be otherwise. You, my Terradillos, must write what you think best, and time will tell.
Alejandro was whatever I felt or imagined him to be during the time that we knew each other. If I am still looking for proof of my conviction, it’s out of habit or need. Does that make sense? My father said that if you have spent years in a bullring, you continue to wield the cape in your dreams, even when nothing is left around you: no bull, no spectators, no sand.
That’s how it is. Without a doubt.