The Blue Fairy
“Be honest and good and you’ll be happy,” the Fairy told him.
—CARLO COLLODI,
THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO
Monsieur Jean-Luc Terradillos,
L’Actualité Poitou-Charentes
Poitiers, France
1st January 2003
My dear Curious Impertinent,
I mistrust letters as a literary genre. They claim to tell an impartial truth independent of their scrumdolious author (my Cuban grandmother used this adjective to describe dresses which look swanky but are badly cut and sewn, and I bet myself that I would manage to use it in the first paragraph), when the opposite is true: only one chronicler gets to give his version of the story. But the epistolary genre is, in this case, the only one left to me. I’ve exhausted all my options: my literature no longer encompasses the epic genre, and the lyric one, such a conceited form, has always been denied to my muse. So I’ll have to be satisfied with this letter. At least no shit-stirring editor is going to stick his nose in it.
I met Bevilacqua in prison, but you already know that. I enjoyed talking to him, telling him my repertoire of stories, bouncing my literary inventions off his beleaguered eardrums. Whenever I start remembering things, my lips move of their own accord. If I have a typewriter in front of me, I start typing; if I have a blank page, I start writing; in the absence of any other instrument, I use my tongue. At night, faced with sheep butchers that get in the way of sleep, I make up stories that begin to unravel as I fall into the darkness. Bevilacqua was good for that: he could stop them unraveling.
Right from the beginning I trusted him. I felt that I could trust him the way that, in the army, one instinctively trusts the less daring corporal, the more familiar weapon. Novelty is no friend to success. And for someone like me, whose attractions are not obvious, it’s better not to expect aesthetic charity from anyone. Sincerity, yes, that’s a different matter. Or honesty, which brings with it a touch of meekness.
He wasn’t jealous. That envy which fuels literary inspiration, which desires that everyone else’s books fail and all their recompense be derisory—that wasn’t apparent in Bevilacqua. His emotions were all on the surface; envy requires a pretense of modesty, a show of reserve, and reveals itself at the corners of the mouth, in the hue of one’s skin. Bevilacqua’s smile was sweet, and his skin a constant gray. Of course prison would not have put color in his cheeks even if his constitution had favored it. As the Good Book puts it, “When I was in my Father’s house, I was in a better place.”
It’s weird how the most humdrum places can produce encounters that go on to have momentous consequences. For him, in this case; not for me. Human beings can be divided between those whom the gods, for their own amusement, guide through strange woods only to abandon them somewhere at the edge of a precipice, on a moonless night, and the others who find their own way along well-lit paths. I never lost my way. Whether I was filling a book with letters or a suitcase with banknotes, I was always disciplined; I always knew what I was doing. It isn’t true that certain constellations and propitious winds must be in place for our destiny to be fulfilled: all that is required is a solid punt and someone to row it. That’s important: some poor, obedient soul. Bevilacqua served my purpose, without my realizing it at the time.
I think, in some ways, my fate has been dictated by my physique. My nickname isn’t merely a nickname; I resigned myself early on to acknowledging it as a nom juste. The other one, bestowed on me at baptism, is the misnomer. Nobody who looks like me can rightly be called Marcelino Olivares. No one. As a boy, and a devoted reader of Pinocchio, I realized that I was my own caricature, the reverse of my hero: a little boy converted into an ugly lump of wood. That had its advantages: it was impossible to laugh at me, because I was already too much of a buffoon. One can’t parody a parody. Short arms, truncated legs, a barrel chest, and a face better shaped for disgust than for desire—that’s me. My face, in particular, is like something a Romanesque sculptor would place in the buttresses of churches to chase off the devil. Not that I would have wanted to have one of those gentle, light, angelic faces blandly adorning the columns inside. But perhaps something in between. It doesn’t matter much, because the conditional tense doesn’t get you far. The thing is that, with looks like mine, it was clear that only two careers were open to me: arms and letters. I dedicated myself to both.
When I was twenty years old I went to enlist under the severe gaze of General Batista, whose portrait adorned every room in every office. The sergeant who took my details asked if I would prefer to be known as El Chancho, “The Pig,” or El Sapo, “The Toad.” I don’t know why I chose the former—perhaps because the porcine race is more associated with the world of smells and that of batrachians with touch.
To this brief self-portrait I’ve sketched for you, I must add one last disagreeable feature: my sense of smell. One day, during my adolescence, I woke up in the middle of a terrible stench. I looked for the cause, and unable to find it, I asked my mother what it was that smelled so bad. That was how I found out that the smell did not exist for other people—only, by divine grace, for me. Certain molecules in my chemical makeup communicated to my mind the impression of a constant stink, an olfactory hallucination, a fetid phantasm that did not exist for anyone else. I live with it. They say that the emperor Germanicus suffered from the same ailment. As for me, I have grown so accustomed to its presence (given that more than sixty years of doctors and healers have not been able to cure my disease) that I have given it a name: it’s called Rubén, after my father. Rubén inhabits my nasal day and night. I am never alone.
Do you believe in reincarnation? I do. I believe that this flesh, this brain, these stubby fingers will fall to ashes, but also that the imagination contained in this flesh, this brain, these fingers, will be reconstituted in some other form that I still don’t know. An anteater, for example, something that would make sense of my nasal encumbrance. A fat, short-legged spider, spinning patterns with its own saliva, as I did with my writing. Or, why not, a tree, strong and squat, throwing roots down into the shit, like a profusion of Ys—yaicuaje, yagruma, yaití, yaba—the trees that twist and delve into my native land. Rubén would like that, living in a swamp.
What would my Basque grandfather have made of his horrifying grandson? Eliades Cemi Olivares arrived in Cuba in the nineteenth century, trailing along his younger brother, Miguel. With pleasing symmetry, Eliades and Miguel married Martina and Socorro, two little sisters from Camagüey, more black than mulatto, who gave them litters of children at nine-month intervals. My father was one of the middle rankers in a long line of progeny scattered across the island.
Perhaps it was a contrary nature, rather than any repulsion he may have felt on seeing me, that prompted my father to limit his own progeny to only one. He did not love me. That absence of love may have explained his parsimonious seed-sowing; the kicks and punches that characterized our relationship would seem to confirm this theory. My mother would beg him not to kill me; my father obeyed, stopping on that threshold that separates the body present from the absent soul. My mother really did love me. I listened at her knee as she told me that in a few years I would be like other boys, and with the patience of a hummingbird she attempted to kiss me on my almost inexistent nape, between my outsize ear and my enormous shoulder. Her promise of normality was never fulfilled, of course. But learning to live on the margins of normal life served me well later on, when, in times of hardship, I was tempted to take the lazy option and call it a day. I learned not to suffer from vertigo.
I joined the Cuban army very young, just as it was beginning to fight the rebels in the Sierra. At that time this was not yet a serious enterprise, although (probably to frighten us) the colonel, an enthusiast of war films, handed to each conscript a little yellow-and-black capsule which he said contained cyanide, and which we must break open with our teeth should we fall into enemy hands. That capsule, which I christened my “bee,” accompanied me through many years, from one enemy to the next.
Our mission, when we weren’t drinking or groping each other back at base, was to ambush the rebels who came down from the mountains to steal food and munitions. We called this “the vermin hunt,” and we placed bets on who could snare a peasant first. Few of us ever won. At night they sent us out to patrol the streets so that the American marines could finish their puddings in peace at the Miami Prado or the Neptune, or to shoo away from street corners any troubled soul who might otherwise be found hanging from a lamppost the next morning. There’s nothing like dawn in Havana.
I have no talent for hunting. When they sent us on those missions, I stayed in the rear guard, letting myself be swept along by the column of handsome, smiling boys. Once we came to some hovel on the beach, where they had told us we would find a peasant who had stolen two pigs from a farm nearby. A small, dark-skinned woman came out, frowning. “What are you looking for?” she asked before we could say anything. “Severo Frías,” answered our sergeant. “He’s not here.” “And who are you?” “His mother.” “We’re going to come in and look for him.” The woman fixed us with a furious look. “I’ve told you, he isn’t here.” “We’re coming in all the same, señora. Just to be sure.” “Well, then take off your boots. I’ve just washed the floor, and I’m not having you make it dirty again with those filthy shit-boots.” The sergeant ordered us to remove our boots. When we made to enter the house, the woman stopped me. “Not this one,” she said to the sergeant. “He’s going to jinx the house.” I waited outside while my fellow soldiers carried out their search. They found nothing. I never told the sergeant that while they were putting their boots back on and taking leave of the woman, I saw a pair of eyes shining beneath the veranda. Before we left, I looked at the woman and smiled. She was still scowling.
I left Cuba a little before Dr. Castro’s first skirmishes, in one of those boats that depart amid streamers and arrive to trumpets and balloons. I’m not heroic. As I’ve said, my twin-headed vocation was for arms and letters: yes, but neither to get killed, nor to bend over to a publisher’s prurience. Our duty in this life is to survive, not to die. In that sense, the military attitude is right. (The true one, not the one which sends poor chancers out on the front line like those sacrificial goats which hunters in Johnny Weissmuller films place in pits to snare tigers.) To identify an enemy, plan an attack, predict a line of defense, devise a withdrawal strategy. That was how I turned up at the Cuban embassy in Buenos Aires, in the summer of 1952.
Do you know what it’s like to fall in love? It’s like entering another state, an all-encompassing cosmography. Not the dream of love, which we say will arrive one day or which we believe, in spite of everything, to be living in the present. Not the conviction of an attractive exterior, the rational justification of an ecstasy. I mean absolute captivity, heart and mind—unconditional, irrevocable surrender. The blinding revelation: I no longer belong to myself, I am hers entirely, I live because she lives, and I live only for her. I compare it to a translation. All of me in another language, everything I am to be read now through her language, which I must learn, as I once learned my ABC. I shall know who I am when I know who she is. That is what I am talking about.
The daughter of our commercial attaché was about seventeen at the time. During dinners at which the ambassador liked to surprise his guests—who had never suspected such Caribbean formality—with detailed menus in elegant French calligraphy, Bohemian porcelain bowls filled to the brim with gorgeous fruit, silver cutlery arrayed in decreasing sizes to the right and left, and fancy wines poured into Baccarat glasses, I amused myself telling the girl stories of cannibals, of wild men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders. I seduced my Desdemona with my voice.
It may surprise you to know that I am a man not much given to change. I obey conventions. In general, I write according to the rules of the Royal Spanish Academy, which are the same as those of the Cuban Academy of the Language, and no worse than any others. My sentences all come with verbs, my subjects have a predicate, my pronouns know how to differentiate the accusative from the dative. I wear a tie. I never sit down to eat in short sleeves. I don’t work on Sundays. I married Margarita soon after her eighteenth birthday, both of us still virgins. My mother-in-law wept. Several times during the celebrations I heard her whisper: “He’s the ugliest man I’ve ever seen.”
My new family extended to me, among other things, various privileges: a genteel house near the Bosque de Palermo in Buenos Aires, a lowly position at the embassy (revoked in that fatal year of 1959); introductions to various writers and other creatures of the publishing world and, above all, good contacts with a range of Argentine military types who had acquired a certain notoriety after the flight of General Perón. I knew how to make the most of this. Bridges must be built between the Arts and the Arms. We know (because we have read it in Don Quixote) that to be eminent in the Arts requires time, vigilance, nakedness, mental confusion, indigestion, and other things; to be eminent in Arms entails all this plus a risk of death. I accept that this is the way things are, although I haven’t had to try it myself. Therefore I pressed my literary experience (to say nothing of time, vigilance, etc.) into the service of the army. The military needed stories: I provided them.
The problem, as with almost all the problems of those who hold power, was simple. On the other side of the law (I mean, on the side of those who lack and desire that power) there exists a solid parallel economy. Shady deals, bribes, cash collections, interest, bankruptcies, and fortunes are made and unmade on that murky Wall Street. When the two sides come face-to-face (which happens less frequently than one might suppose) and the powerful side wins (also less common than moralists would have us believe), the rules of the engagement demand that secret fortunes change hands. Were such covert dealings to come to light, it would cause a worse stink than my poor Rubén; it would stir up decades’ worth of sludge, unearthing skeletons and putrefaction which nobody wants to remember. In such cases, ideally one would appoint a Charon, accustomed to darkness and willing to ferry these ghostly monies from the side of the living to that of the immortal—the Swiss, for example. I offered my services, with discretion. With discretion, the military men accepted. I could have pictured them, wearing their autumn uniforms, stretching out their hands full of love, toward the other bank.
For years, as one government was succeeded by the next, I served as Charon for these high-ranking gentlemen, carrying, for a modest commission, sums that were invisible to the public eye, from a safe in La Plata or Córdoba to the near-anonymous coffers of certain European banks. I was efficient, punctual, modest, and reliable. Superstitious, too: my bee talisman was always in my pocket, just in case. I never made a mistake: I never arrived late, I never opened my mouth, I never forgot anything. I carried out my duties with the same rigor I applied to writing. There are no real synonyms in business or literature. Nothing is “as if.”
At the start of the new decade, a new, unprecedented source began to swell the contents of my saddlebags, or rather the saddlebags in my care. The “subversives” (as they were known to my clients) were now using kidnapping and holding up banks as a way to procure funds; with increasing regularity, these funds ended up in the gloved hands of a colonel, an admiral, or a general. My job was to channel the funds. I did so with my—by now proverbial—diligence. Only, this time, I decided that greater danger deserved greater recompense. Without wishing to bother the gentlemen with a trivial inquiry, I took what (in my opinion) I was entitled to and, having a knack for the craft of fiction, spun a story to justify the figures. Three or four times, everything worked wonderfully. The fifth time was different. An overscrupulous colonel did a few sums. At the airport, on the way back from Geneva, an immigration officer asked me to accompany him. All night they beat the soul out of me, demanding to know the number of the secret bank account. At dawn I gave it to them. It never occurred to them that there were two accounts. I spent several weeks in that place—I don’t want to remember its name—hooded and shackled, naked on the floor as lurid folk music resounded incessantly around the four windowless walls. Before going to sleep, I put paper in my ears to keep the cockroaches out. Those days left me with a fear of bright lights: that is why I always wear dark glasses.
During my abduction (the word detention does not do justice to the physical violation I suffered), it crossed my mind that perhaps some literary angel would notice my absence. Nobody did. The list of supposed friends who took my disappearance as proof of my nonexistence is long. It had been years since I had last had links with the embassy, where ruffles had been replaced with beards and the portrait of Batista with one of the heroes of the revolution—with no sign of a slowdown in the consumption of oysters and champagne. My editor (because I had one, Gastón Asín Hajal, a pornographer by vocation and a usurer by practice—I wish him a painful death) gave the order for my books to be pulped on the sly so as to leave no trace of my presence in his catalog.
Treachery has its artists. Polybius, in one of the few surviving pages of a work which has been lost for the most part, says that it is not easy to establish who can properly be considered a traitor. According to him, the name cannot be applied to a man who freely puts himself at the service of certain monarchs or regents in order to do their bidding, nor to him who, in extreme circumstances, incites his fellow citizens to break old alliances or friendships in order to forge new ones. Polybius seems to reserve this opprobrious title for the man who benefits from his own actions: the person who denounces a friend in order to save himself, or who hands over the keys to a city to advance personal ambitions. My traitors (with one exception, but I’ll talk about him later) were more subtle. They simply did nothing. Hajal denied knowing me. This flaccid cocaine addict for whom Apelles’s motto nulla dies sine linea—not a day without a line—could have been justly written, presented himself now as a virtuous prude. He came over all forgetful, claiming that my grotesque figure had been erased from his literary memory and that, in any case, an editor such as he had neither the obligation nor the resources to help every pen pusher who had, at some time, borne his imprimatur.
Theology teaches us that of all sins, those of omission are the most interesting and complex. Having always written in secret and been almost obsessively discreet, I handed to my friends the justification for their own treachery. They were all able to claim that my disappearance was nothing out of the ordinary, but the obvious and predictable result, by now of common knowledge, of my ill-defined presence.
I suspect that there are many of us spinning in the shadows. My books were not published, with the exception of a few anthologies of other people’s work, the odd short story, and an ill-fated novel to which Hajal added an obscene title and one or two anatomically exaggerated descriptions. It enraged me to see the windows of bookshops filled, month after month, with disgusting novelties that oscillated between hyperbolic pretension or documentalist fervor. Hajal, to whom I confided some of my feelings, told me with a smile that the name of that fury was envy. He was right, up to a point. Apparently, during a soiree at which Oscar Wilde was present, one of the topics of conversation was literary jealousy. Wilde told the following story. The Devil sent several demons to tempt a very saintly hermit. The demons tried everything, but not even the most delicious food, the most beautiful women, or the greatest riches were capable of distracting the hermit from his prayers. Impatient, the Devil told his followers: “That’s not how you do it—watch and learn.” And, approaching the holy man, he whispered in his ear: “Your brother’s been made Archbishop of Alexandria.” Immediately the old man’s face contorted with a grimace of furious envy.
So you see that envy, that fury (which, as I said before, was foreign to Bevilacqua), I cultivated patiently. I’m convinced that it is a good cordial for the imagination and, at the end of the day, an excellent remedy for taking revenge on life. I think it’s not too far-fetched to say that I kept my fury alive with deliberate elegance—if one can speak of elegance in someone with my appearance.
Perhaps it was this fighting fire with fire that gave me, during those terrible days, the patience and the heart necessary to survive and also, paradoxically, the hope that my situation would change. And so it was. Nothing in my circumstances pointed toward this change except for my burning desire, and I am convinced that desire shapes our reality. If something does not happen, it is because we failed to desire it with sufficient force.
One day, I was moved to the building they called the Cesspit. Torture was practiced there, too, of course, but alongside the dungeons where business was carried out, there were cells that were more or less (I hesitate to use the epithet) comfortable. I was put into one of these. Perhaps as a reward for having given them the bank-account number, perhaps because one of those sinners thought he would salve his conscience by awarding me a stint in limbo, or perhaps (more likely), in the topsy-turvy logic of that system, somebody had judged that a given act of contrition deserved a corresponding privilege. Suddenly I could wash myself, use lavatory paper, eat something recognizable, sleep under a blanket, sit at a table without shackles or a hood, protect my eyes once more with dark glasses, receive books to read and paper to write on. Amazingly, they allowed Margarita to visit me. I asked her to bring my “bee,” just in case, although I knew that I would never succumb to using it. Our understanding of paradise can only be defined by our knowledge of hell.
It was for love of Margarita (who gives her name to everything) that I began to write. I wrote every day, feverishly, from first light until the orders came to go out, to eat, to go to bed. Having Bevilacqua by my side accelerated the pace of my writing: I could confidently try out a line on him, or a chapter, and if it sounded as it ought, I set it down on paper. Bevilacqua was my rough draft. My text grew before my eyes. (Feverishly, confidently, as it ought, before my eyes: these words give me away. Every author discovers himself through his adverbs.)
I said that my feelings sharpen my intuition, they allow me to advance through the tunnels of the future, to see what my circumstances will or could be. I intuit, I guess (except that guess suggests improvisation) my destiny. Rubén is my canary in these cases. He senses before I do the lack of oxygen. His disgusting stench increases if there is a danger of asphyxiation, warning me to be prepared. And, of course, I make sure that I am.
Rubén was worried. His smell woke me up in the darkness; it had suddenly grown in intensity. Something was going to happen. Margarita tried to calm me down. During the nights on which they allowed her to stay (some libidinous jailer always came along to spy on us, like someone ogling two copulating beasts), she always begged me to be calm, telling me that they had said it would not be long until everything ended, and that they had assured her father that it wouldn’t be long before I’d be free. But Rubén persisted. I must be prepared.
I slept as little and wrote as much as possible. By the time I reached the last word, I was exhausted. Three hundred neatly filled pages. I picked up a plain sheet of paper and wrote the title on it, in capital letters. I was careful not to sign it. One of the many paradoxes of that place was that the few visitors were searched as thoroughly on leaving as they were on arrival, and it was strictly forbidden to take away letters or any material written by the detainees. Those being released, however—their number was even smaller—had the right to take out a bag or a suitcase, which was barely opened at the exit. I have seen (nothing in human nature surprises me now) a boy who had been badly tortured go home taking in his bag the small tweezers used by one of his torturers.
The following morning I said to Bevilacqua that if by chance he got out of this place before I did (I never wanted to contemplate the possibility of neither of us getting out), I would like him to take my manuscript with him. Surprised and, I think, touched, he promised me that he would.
Bevilacqua was what we once called—in those days before we lost our innocence—an “honest man.” Did you know that sometime in the 1970s, in Argentina, the word honest began to acquire a connotation of “fool,” of “dimwit”? I once heard a businessman use it contemptuously of some poor fellow he had tricked. What can I say—he’s an honest man! It’s strange how, during a dictatorship, words become infected by politics, lose their nobility, and start to lie about themselves. The tongue is a sly little muscle, and goes wherever it likes. The nose, on the other hand, is like a loyal dog.
Rubén had warned me that something was up. When the guards came in to blindfold me, I knew that my faithful sniffer dog was not wrong. Then I heard a clear, deep, and agreeable voice announce, in an expression of condolence it took me a while to understand, that Margarita would not be coming anymore. The voice echoed in my head, as though I had received a blow. In schmaltzy, precise terms, the message was repeated. I understood what it was saying, but what infuriated me almost more than this extraordinary piece of news which threatened to destroy my world was the voice itself, sounding so polite, so cheerful and deliberate. So this is it, I told myself, the impossible has come to pass. Margarita isn’t here. Margarita is dead.
An immense, cosmic fury overtook me. I realized that nothing that had happened to me up until that point had really mattered—neither the pain, the fear, or the lack of freedom. This voice was awakening me to my first, my only loss. I felt as though I had been broken in two, as if half of my body had been torn away.
I howled, I screeched, I vowed to do terrible things without knowing what they would be. The voice spoke in conciliatory tones, trying to provoke me, like someone putting out fire by throwing gas on the flames. Give us the number, and we’ll let you see her one last time. Give us the second number, after all, it’s no use to you anymore, not with her in a pine coffin and you banged up between four walls. Give us the number and we’ll let you out to see that she doesn’t get slung into a pit, like a bitch.
I tried to stand up and launched myself in the direction of the voice. A punch forced me down again. In the rush of blood to my bandaged eyes, I thought I saw Margarita among pinpricks of light; I saw her dissolve into something liquid and bright, and then I saw her no more. After that, several of them carried me to another cell and put me to sleep with a veterinary anesthetic and a good kicking.
I don’t remember the following months too well. Darkness, shouting, meals, some brief interrogation, more darkness . . . They had broken my glasses, so the half-light came as a relief, not as a hardship. Every now and then the voice spoke to me from the shadows. Give us the number, and we’ll take you to where she is, there is still time, the body takes a while to rot.
One day several Cuban diplomats appeared in my cell, accompanied by a frowning general, and I left the Cesspit forever. I arrived in Stockholm in the middle of a blizzard. It was the first time I had seen snow.
My lodgings were somewhere between a hospital and a convent. The sterile whiteness of the place exacerbated my physical problems and hurt my eyes. The Swedes gave me a new pair of dark glasses. In the mornings, a red-haired, freckled nun brought me my breakfast, but I could find no reason to get up. Without Margarita, there was nothing. If I so much as shied a foot out of the blankets, I had the impression of falling into a void. Then I received a letter.
It’s strange that no reader ever understood that my only subject is love. Or rather, I should say it was love, given that I shall never write again. Because it has taken me so many years to realize that she was enough, that she required no telling. Then time changed, thanks to her, who is in everything. Before, I had little faith, I said that things were impossible, that my world would vanish if I let it, like those faces we struggle to remember in a half-waking state. Now, with her letter in my hand, I didn’t need even to breathe. She was alive: therefore everything continued to exist. Nothing was in doubt any longer. The mornings would no longer be a time of waiting for night, nor the night a postponement of the morning. The streets could once more be streets, not maps of meeting places, and the houses houses, not walls concealing an empty bedroom. She, who had always hovered on the edge of what was believable, had returned. She, without whom there would never have been any words, for the ink sprang from her veins, the paper was made from her skin. I was, am, the superfluous, unnecessary element. I am the grotesque redundancy.
Here I could give you one of those suspenseful pauses so beloved of spy films, but it would be intentionally bad literature. Margarita was in Spain. On her arrival at the Cesspit that evening, they had told her not to visit me again if she didn’t want something horrible to happen to me; soon afterward they advised her to leave the country. She managed to arrange for the Venezuelan embassy to receive her in Madrid; there she had waited for months for news that never arrived. The voice had wanted to make me believe that I had lost everything, that there was no longer any reason for me to keep the code of the second account a secret—that, at any rate, the final chapter of my life had begun. Like Job’s friend, the voice advised me: confess and die.
I read the letter, I got up, I filled in some forms, I asked them to take me to the airport, I arrived at Barajas that same night.
Margarita was working now at the Venezuelan embassy in Madrid; it wasn’t difficult for her to find me a job as a pen pusher. I didn’t mind what I did. I was with Margarita; I was out of prison. As I said before, I knew that I would never write again. I no longer felt that hunger, that thirst I had felt in the cell. As if to hush the echo of that infamous voice, I built my days in Madrid around Margarita’s timetable, and when I found myself with her, a profound, immensely soothing calm enveloped me and wafted me to a placid sleep beneath a starry sky. I didn’t need anything else. When you rediscover something so essential that you thought you had lost, that thing occupies all conceivable space. That’s how it was with me.
That atmosphere of blessed torpor lasted a few months. No inner impulse, no outside spur tempted me. I lived purely in the present, far from everything, except Margarita. That was how I knew that no one in love ever writes. Because, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, but writers are essentially disloyal, flitting from one passion to another; never dedicating themselves exclusively to one alone.
We were in Madrid, but we could have been anywhere. We went out for strolls, or we stayed in the flat that the embassy had arranged for us: it was all the same to us. We went on the odd excursion, to Toledo, Alcalá de Henares, Chinchón: it didn’t really matter. Everything happened now as though nothing else could happen, or had ever happened. There are insects that evolve from chrysalis to butterfly in a few hours and then die. That was how we lived. Then, one night, Margarita told me that she had seen Bevilacqua.
It was a sickening coincidence, a hideous shock. The truth is that we had forgotten about him, as we had forgotten about everything. Margarita had wanted to say hello to him, to tell him what had happened to me, to ask him how he was. But Bevilacqua had rushed away from her, like a hounded animal, and Margarita could not understand why.
That night when Margarita told me that she had seen him was like remembering a shipwreck. Hearing about Bevilacqua revived thoughts of my book, since my Robinson had perhaps—no, surely—been saved. Because, to be honest, I was so happy with Margarita that I hadn’t spared a thought for In Praise of Lying. Now, suddenly, her encounter reminded me of those old pages. As though on a whim, I told Margarita that I wanted to get them back.
Cheerfully, we made plans, started thinking about the publication, the readers, the reviews, the recognition. I dared to imagine a new career, a new life, something to anchor us again in time and space. Table, paper, ink. Stories. Woven words.
We let a few days pass. Then, in one of the newspapers, we saw an ad for the launch of In Praise of Lying. Author: Alejandro Bevilacqua. My Praise. His book. Think about it. I felt abused, violated. I felt betrayed by a ventriloquist, a gray dampener, a real Drinkwater, as his name suggested.
“Let’s go and see him,” Margarita said.
We went to the launch. Not because I wanted to steal his thunder—do you understand? I don’t care about all those prizes Argentine writers are always bragging about. One of my tropical compatriots, who never acquired the recognition he deserved until he was on the brink of death, claimed always to have lived “in a state of grace.” I felt the same way. Given that I have been able to shoulder indifference with total dignity, someday, I told myself, I shall be totally indifferent to fame. If fame comes.
And I had Margarita.
But it poisoned my blood to see that crowd gathered at the behest of some puffed-up editor to celebrate, in the name of an impostor, the birth of something I had conceived. There they were: the scribblers, the poetasters, the key bashers, the preening epistolarians. There they were: the babblers, the stammerers, the official cockatoos. All that brood who had once scorned me, pissing from a great height on my literary efforts—here they were now, applauding something they did not realize was mine. Margarita held my hand firmly, but it wasn’t courage I was lacking now.
The bookseller-host had put out a few rows of seats. We sat down in the back row. When Bevilacqua took the stage, I fixed my eyes on him. Then he saw me. You know what happened next.
It was too late to reclaim my book, but I still needed to speak to Bevilacqua, to hear his explanations, which I already knew would not be credible. What did I want, then? you’ll ask. I don’t know if I ever really knew. To undo that other past, perhaps, to unravel the web of events, returning to the point at which I was dispossessed. At the end of the day, isn’t that what we always want? Just because something is impossible, it doesn’t stop us trying to attain it. Any traveler worth his salt wants to venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
Margarita found out that Bevilacqua had taken refuge at the home of that other Argentinian, the one who liked to pass himself off as French among Spaniards. We got past the doorman by pretending to have an appointment. Bevilacqua’s face, when he opened the door, moved me—or almost moved me. From the back of the bookshop I had not realized how much my cellmate had aged.
Formalities are useful at times like these. He invited us in; he offered us a seat; we sat down. He smiled. I smiled. Margarita smiled.
“My friend,” began the lying thief, “you may not believe this, but I am happy to see you.”
And then he told me what had happened.
Margarita and I listened with a patience that surprised us both. His departure from Buenos Aires, his arrival in Madrid, his meeting with the other exiles, his abduction by the Circean Andrea, the literary transformation of El Chancho into Bevilacqua.
“My friend, I never intended to take anything away from you. As for your manuscript, I think I may even have forgotten that I still had it. In making such a great effort to forget all that had happened in those years, I also lost something that deserved to be remembered. Don’t blame me. I give you my word that I never meant to deceive anyone.”
Misery does not easily provoke pity. On the contrary, a mangy dog invites you to throw stones. And yet I did feel sorry for Bevilacqua. There he was, my poor Judas, with his glory swiped away, groveling for forgiveness like someone who’s just pissed himself. My coat, which Bevilacqua had neglected to take, the central heating, which he evidently liked turned up, the muddle of this situation as disorientating as a mild nightmare, combined to make me feel awkward and uncomfortable. I asked if we could open the balcony windows.
Then the bell rang. Bevilacqua stood up and, motioning us to be quiet, left us alone in the sitting room. We heard some impassioned clucking, two or three words from Bevilacqua, and then nothing. After a few minutes, he came back to sit with us and, without saying who had visited, continued on his excusatio.
He spoke, without making much sense, about In Praise of Lying—not how I remembered my book, not how I knew it to be, but as though it were an ancient thing. It was as if he were talking about some very learned classic, so excellent as to render all commentary banal. He divested, not so much me, as himself of the book, telling me time and time again that it was not his work, that everyone would come to know that, that the author photograph adorning the back flap would be mine in all future editions.
Of course, you have never heard Bevilacqua speak, the way he made you lose yourself in a story. He was not a literary man. I mean that it was neither the feeling nor the story behind his words that held his listeners’ attention, but a kind of lulling plainsong in one key, rhythmic, uneven, de la musique avant toute chose. We had gone there to hold him to account, but he had turned the tables on us. He spoke as though relishing the words themselves. But he didn’t smile; smiling was impossible for him. Whenever he made a stab at the gesture others might recognize as a smile, his face split in two, his nose dilated, his eyes creased as though he were focusing on his companion’s jugular, and his whole head, bony and grayish, tipped forward, not back, less like someone rejoicing than like someone getting ready to charge.
I’m not exaggerating: it was his serious rhetoric that seduced us. We had gone to see him because we wanted him to return what was mine; by the time he stopped talking, there was nothing left to return. In Praise of Lying belonged to nobody more than its readers; the Marcelino Olivares whose name would adorn future editions was simply another character in that kidnapped work; the supposedly piratical Bevilacqua was merely a miserable fraud, with no ship or ensign. Our unwittingly shared story had dissolved in a sea of confusion and misunderstandings. My thief had become a victim, like myself. And now, with the encouragement of Margarita, my Margarita, here I was consoling him.
The doorbell rang again, interrupting a moment ripe for pathos. Bevilacqua asked us again to be quiet, and again closed the door behind him, while we again strained to hear what was going on. Then, as though from a distant, half-forgotten place, I heard the voice, as always very precise, syrupy, and kind. The voice wanted to know what had happened. Bevilacqua may have thought he had deceived everyone, it said, but he must understand that he had not. That the moment had come to speak clearly. That, without further excuses, he must tell him what we—Bevilacqua and your humble servant—were planning to do.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” our poor friend replied, “but if you want, you can ask him yourself.” And he opened the door to the sitting room.
You never knew Gorostiza, and I don’t know if anyone ever showed you a photograph of him. He looked like a Russian poet: a mane of hair that fell over one side of his face; a heavy black coat; always clutching a book in mutton-fisted peasant hands, although I don’t think he was ever inclined to manual labor. I had been introduced to Quita, but never to him.
“Hello, Chancho,” said the voice, dropping his bag containing the stolen bottles of sherry onto the floor. “And hello, señora. I’m delighted to see you’ve come back from the dead.”
“We were just leaving,” Margarita answered, and gesturing to me, she went toward the door.
“Please stay, because this concerns us all. I was just asking our friend Bevilacqua how you were planning to share the Swiss funds.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Bevilacqua.
“I’m talking about the funds, about money, about little bundles of green notes in a certain bank in Zurich. Ask your friend, who knows all about the subject—eh, Chancho?”
As if he owned the house, he strode to the balcony windows and closed them. In two bounds, Bevilacqua leaped across the room to open them again. Then, while these two squared up to one another, flapping the balcony door panels open and closed, I grasped the opportunity to take out my faithful bee and slip it into one of the bottles in Gorostiza’s bag. As with books, habeat sua fata apis.
“Yes, we’re going,” I confirmed, taking Margarita by the arm.
Before closing the door, I turned around and managed to say to Bevilacqua that I congratulated him, that In Praise of Lying was magnificent. Downstairs, out on the street, I felt as though I were fighting for breath.
You’ll understand why I haven’t given you my postal address, esteemed Terradillos. Thanks to Margarita (and to Margarita’s family, semper fidelis), El Chancho has become a more discreet animal. Never mind the new name, new nationality, new disguise. Beneath the courtesies and formalities of a new nomenclature, I am still the caricature of that barrel-shaped boy who splashed around in the Camagüey mud.
Didn’t I say that I believed in reincarnation? I am the proof. But I haven’t been converted into an insect or a tree. No, I’m a Swiss gentleman now, in a three-piece suit, a camel-hair coat, and a white silk scarf. My presence is so imposing that even Rubén is intimidated and rarely dares to make himself felt.
“Be honest and good, and you’ll be happy,” says the Blue Fairy to her puppet. It’s a horrible lie, unless one is permitted to redefine honest and good. I think, in my case, both adjectives could apply. I have betrayed nobody but those who deserved betrayal, and I have been good to those on whom goodness is not wasted. This swine never scorned any pearls that were cast before him.
And Bevilacqua? I’m not so sure. In him, honesty got confused with ignorance, and goodness with sentimentality. It’s not the same—we agree on that, don’t we?
Bevilacqua was never happy, at least not after the disappearance of his woman, the only true one. I was, possibly because Margarita was returned to me. In the sun, beside an impeccably blue lake, surrounded by perfectly ordered mountains, a thin shadow looms over my rotund body: it is her, the exclamation mark that complements my full stop, as her father once remarked, on seeing us together.
We are growing old. Yesterday, believe it or not, I had my seventieth birthday. My Margarita is a dozen years younger; even so, we can count the Januarys left to us. I miss my much-loved bee talisman, in which I once foolishly placed all hope of ultimate salvation. That is the price of revenge: the loss of something that could one day turn out to be indispensable.
We are growing old but, in truth, without bemoaning it much. Margarita not at all, and myself very little. There are things that I would still like to do, or that I would have liked to do differently, but that’s how it is, and that’s how it would always have been. During my first few years of financial exile, I received, through an intermediary, a communication from one Mendieta, retired police inspector, now presumably interviewing the Archangel Gabriel. Of course, I pretended not to heed it, but the nature of his questions revealed that this obscure and perspicacious Spaniard had guessed the truth. The thing is, we can never complete anything. Every artist knows that he is destined for imperfection.
I hope that these notes are useful for you, or at least that they help you in forming a picture of that skinny, ashen man who still wanders into my dreams from time to time. Then I can feel that his ghostly presence is shared. For a time, he unwittingly occupied my place in the universe. May he now occupy a place of his own. Let’s not be small-minded, my esteemed Terradillos. Our molecules (our grandparents would say “our spirits”) mingle, and in this vast cosmos of ours, it’s impossible to know for sure to whom each particle, once belonging to a sun or star, now belongs.
I have the honor to remain, sir,
he who was, long ago and far away,
Marcelino Olivares