His Own Man

by Edgard Telles Ribeiro

  While I concentrated my best efforts on subtly serving myself a second helping of the excellent lobster salad from the lavish buffet, Max wandered, whiskey in hand, through rooms and hallways, studying paintings, etchings, and Persian rugs, quietly taking note of the mysterious and seductive objects in that collection of antiques set against walls covered with brocades and textiles from other eras. Until he came across the library — and our host on the phone. He quickly retreated, but not soon enough. The ambassador, who was just hanging up, invited him, with a friendly gesture, to peruse the shelves of leather-bound books in his company.

  The conversation that followed drew them closer together, although the actual bridge that would ultimately connect them remained hidden for the time being. Well before falling into the orbit of the ambassador’s political influence, Max allowed himself to be seduced by his literary prowess, evidenced in the library’s collection, as the two discussed books and authors in an exchange of ideas that had gradually mapped out their personal preferences.

  Several guests, myself among them, saw Max return to the living room with the ambassador’s hand resting on his shoulder in a familiar manner, as if the two, at the end of that conversation, had shared an intimate moment. Both then made a concerted effort to rejoin the reception and casually insert themselves into different groups.

  Later that night, once the foreign guests had left and only the Brazilians remained (“the inner circle,” in the tired expression someone always used on such occasions), the ambassador probed Max on his personal plans for transfer abroad. During their talk, our host acknowledged that his young colleague must have had a specific foreign post in mind, access to which would be facilitated by his having worked at the secretary-general’s office for years. He added, however, that Max shouldn’t rule out Montevideo as an option — given his experience with South American issues. According to him, the fragile state of the local democratic regime, combined with the concentration of exiled Brazilians of all social levels and classes, “beginning with our ex-president and his deranged brother-in-law,” made work in Uruguay highly stimulating.

  “A broad leftist coalition has formed here too,” he said at one point, hands crossed over his chest, eyes fixed on the ceiling. “And if they win the next election, there’s going to be trouble. A great deal of trouble …”

  After a sober pause, during which no one said a word, the ambassador continued, “And that’s not all.”

  He went on to sketch the geopolitical picture in neighboring countries, doing so with cool detachment. To my ears his conclusions seemed to point to an imminent series of Greek tragedies. In fact, as he predicted, without lowering his eyes — as if the script of the calamities to come were etched on the ceiling — Uruguay did become the domino piece that, after Brazil and Argentina, would complete the shadow the military cast over the region. The one that would herald the next coup, this time in Chile.

  “I’m leaving for the Kingdom of the Tupamaros!” Max would announce to me days later when we had returned to Rio de Janeiro, in a euphoric tone that made me think of a Crusader on the way to the Holy Land.

  I wouldn’t have been any more surprised had he unsheathed a sword. But it was his next line that really struck me: “In exchange, I even got a promotion. I’ll be going as first secretary.”

  And in a lower voice, which enhanced rather than contained his joy, he added, “Leapfrogging forty-seven colleagues, to boot.”

  His fate was sealed. Because if up until then he had acted like an amateur whose information the military appreciated, in Montevideo, under the ambassador’s tutelage, his opinions would soon earn accolades as doctrine.

  11

  Max’s transfer abroad coincided with the beginning of Itamaraty’s move from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia, which in a way reinforced my feeling that we had both gone into exile. In fact, the new Brazilian capital in early 1970 looked more foreign to my colleagues and me than anyplace beyond our borders. Max, in Montevideo, quite likely felt closer to Rio than did those of us who imagined we were on Mars.

  We began to exchange letters regularly through the diplomatic pouch. Mine were long and typically reported on the deteriorating political climate we were living in. Max never commented on my criticisms. On the contrary, he tended to share details of social life on weekends in Punta del Este or trips to the countryside. Marina had friends in Uruguay, the children of bankers her parents knew, who had opened their stately homes to the new arrivals.

  Whenever the couple came to Brazil on vacation, or took advantage of some long holiday to leave the post, I almost always found a way to travel to Rio de Janeiro to be with them, which also enabled me to see my family. We would have dinner together in small groups at the Casa da Suíça in Lapa, or at the Château, a lovely restaurant on Anita Garibaldi in Copacabana, which, to our dismay, disappeared a few years later. In these two settings, which rarely varied, we would swap stories about our experiences, bad-mouth our bosses and their wives, and philosophize about the future. Max hardly ever referred to his job other than in very general terms. From what he led us to believe, he was primarily involved in technical cooperation. And he belonged to a poker group, to Marina’s displeasure, since she was home alone two nights a week.

  During these trips to Rio, the visitors would usually hold a big luncheon for friends and acquaintances at Marina’s parents’ place. Colonel Cordeiro never failed to show up. Often, when coffee and liqueurs were being served, he would retreat with Max to some remote room for a private talk, the content of which, despite my many attempts, I never managed to learn.

  At these gatherings, I slowly began to realize that I no longer saw Max as a mentor of sorts but simply as an older colleague with whom I shared a broad range of interests regardless of our ideological differences. At the same time, and on another level, I sensed Marina was gradually withdrawing. Once full of joie de vivre, she now seemed downcast, which, in my view, didn’t correspond to her condition — since, at that stage, she was pregnant with their first child.

  It’s at large parties that we sometimes share truly private moments, as Fitzgerald memorably remarked, and this is precisely what happened to Max and me at one of these lunches, in 1970, when something he said shot through me like a warning.

  We’d had plenty to drink and he allowed himself to get caught up in an unexpected reverie, centered on his boss, whose personality and political opinion were known to all. At some point I asked, half joking, how far to the right Max found himself now. Would he continue to be buoyed by the respectability of the conservative wing, or had he given in to more radical schemes, the secret nature of which I kindly declined to mention?

  Max laughed a little at my nerve, but his expression soon grew serious, as if he’d distanced himself from me for a few seconds — and even from the little room to which we’d retreated. I didn’t push it. In fact, I began to think I’d gone too far, particularly because I’d never, not even in jest, engaged in conversation with him on such a sensitive subject. But he took one of his Cuban cigars out of his breast pocket and was preparing to light it, which, in the past, typically meant that he wished to think aloud with me, in the unmistakable tone of a man talking to himself. I settled at the opposite end of the sofa where he was seated. It was a long piece of furniture, Italian leather, which would fit four people comfortably. We each kept an arm draped over the back, his left hand holding the lit cigar.

  Max began to speak somewhat evasively, as if preparing to launch into a series of reminiscences. Except that his voice, which was usually upbeat and energetic, sounded like that of an old man at the end of his career, concerned with recalling scenes from a distant past. I understood that the withdrawal in some sense protected him, as though sparing my friend from threatening memories. Unsure where Max was headed, and imagining that he too was unclear as to what he really meant, I listened closely, aware of a wistfulness behind his words. Thus my surprise when, at a certain point, and completely off topic, he turned to me and asked, “Have
you ever asked yourself why some people collaborate with the military?”

  He went on, without awaiting my response: “Out of fear, in some instances … or for money, in the case of minor players.”

  Here he settled back into his seat, further distancing himself from me, and continued. “In our line of work, it’s never for money. At most, it’s out of fear. Or, more often, for access to power. The expectation of access to power.”

  As luck would have it, I had taken up smoking again that week. A politically incorrect admission today but one that bought me time right then. I pulled out a cigarette and searched my jacket unsuccessfully for a lighter.

  Max raised his, flicking it at my eye level.

  “How about you?” he asked. “Are you afraid?”

  “All the time,” I confessed, unblinking, as I lowered his arm and lit my cigarette.

  I wasn’t lying. But I surprised myself. I wasn’t sure where that unexpected revelation had come from. After a long first drag, I added, “Every time I land in Geneva for work, I feel I’m entering another world. Not another country, but another world.”

  12

  “Such an intriguing notion, fear …” He seemed to be warming to his topic.

  Intriguing? I remember thinking. Fear could be everything, from chronic to unbearable, from dreadful to dark. But intriguing?

  Max continued: “Take the guerrilla’s fear, for instance” — and here he looked at me, seeking a tacit sign of approval, it would seem, for not having used the then-common term subversive — “the guerrilla’s fear as he weighs the odds of being caught. Which, depending on the case, might mean being tortured and killed. It’s a concrete, objective, almost tangible fear, which runs as deep as his beliefs.”

  He winked at me, as if making an amusing side comment. “As the ambassador has a habit of saying, from the depths of his favorite armchair in his Montevideo office, ‘It’s fear shrouded in bravado.’ A fine phrase, isn’t it?”

  I no longer knew if he was kidding or serious. I remembered a colleague who loathed him and was always professing, “Max’s problem is that he lies all the time.” Was he lying? Or simply having fun with me, creating a character inspired by his sinister boss?

  He repeated the line, so that I could savor what was to come. “ ‘Fear shrouded in bravado … that only comes to a head when skilled hands — pop! — burst the bravado like a bubble.’ ”

  Unable to contain himself, he proceeded, “You can’t imagine how happy he is when he goes pop! He’s like a kid.”

  He exhaled deeply, long enough for the ambassador to take shape between us, eyes flashing maliciously, the poor blood-covered victim hanging in chains, his bravado undone.

  Max calmly went on. “Now, what you were referring to earlier — the fear of someone unaware of why he feels afraid — that’s something else entirely.”

  He turned to face me. “Like you, for example. You don’t know why you feel afraid. You just know that’s how you feel. It’s what you tend to think about before you go to sleep. And almost always what you think about when you wake up. Without your having a single thing to feel guilty about. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  I remained silent.

  “More than dread or fright, it’s an insidious sensation, the strength and utility of which come from its constancy.” His voice had taken on a professorial tone. It was his boss talking through him.

  “And that constancy, do you know what it feeds off? Hundreds of sources at once, from censorship of the press to rumors that someone’s disappeared, from doubts about a neighbor’s real identity to the possibility of tapped phone lines, from statements by certain colonels who threaten to tighten the screws even further to the decision that political crimes will now be judged by military courts. Year in, year out, nothing changes. And nothing will change. Except for minor details. Because what we’re dealing with here, my friend, is a huge and mysterious oyster, a self-contained bureaucratic corporation, which depends on absolute cohesion to survive. Its members will fight among themselves and no one will know a thing out here. The head honchos will indeed change. But not their profiles, or their uniforms. Even if these are replaced by suits, there will always be uniforms. The generals will always prevail. And everything will remain that way beyond our generation. Even the fear. The fear, above all.”

  He briefly smiled at me and concluded in a soft, almost gentle voice, “Because it spreads by contamination.”

  “Like Camus’s plague,” I added.

  “Exactly.”

  He got up and found an ashtray, which he set between us on the coffee table. It was high time, since our ashes, which had remained precariously perched, now threatened to fall onto the rug.

  Marina came in just then. The carpeted hallway had prevented us from hearing her footsteps. I was taken aback when I saw her, as if I had come face-to-face with a ghost, welcome though the encounter may have been. Only then did I become aware of the angst that had taken hold of me.

  Marina seemed overwhelmed. Despite her lovely pregnant form, it was her weary expression that struck me. And the sadness I detected in her eyes.

  “Marcílio,” she protested, “our guests are looking lost without you.”

  PART TWO

  13

  It would be thirteen years before I saw Marina again. After the birth of their son, the couple rarely came to Rio. My trips to Geneva, on the other hand, became more frequent. This wasn’t altogether a bad thing, since I’d been shaken by my last conversation with Max in Santa Teresa. I would cross paths with him only in Brasilia, when he periodically returned to Brazil for work. Always alone, never with his wife. So we ended up growing apart, Marina and I. Later, when I was transferred to Los Angeles, our contacts became fewer and farther between. Max, I still saw occasionally. But not her.

  As the years went by, there came more news, some good, some less so. Marina had another child with Max, a daughter born in Chile. Four years later, when the couple was living in Washington, she left him. In 1983, however, while on vacation in Rio, I heard of her father’s death and went to the wake. I imagined I’d find Marina there with her children. To my surprise, however, the person who kept an arm protectively around her, and remained at her side the entire afternoon — as if a spouse or partner — was Nilo Montenegro, an actor I quickly recognized, who had performed in several Teatro de Arena plays and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade films, and helped produce the first Opinião shows. Marina’s father’s bank had financed several of his plays in the 1960s, when the openings would invariably be celebrated at the house in Santa Teresa, with parties that would go on all night — and be faithfully reported in the next day’s papers.

  Smiling tearfully, Marina hugged me and said affectionately, “You two know each other, don’t you?” Before we could answer, she added in a tender voice, “Nilo Montenegro …”

  From down on his small satin pillow, surrounded by flowers, Marina’s father seemed to be smiling at us. I stood beside his coffin for a few minutes. The longer I looked at him, the more he seemed to smile. He must have somehow sensed the growing line of artists and intellectuals in the small São João Batista chapel, made up largely of men and women whose works owed much to his altruism and whose attendance also represented the dead and the disappeared.

  Marina and I made plans to get together and ended up seeing each other the following week, on a night Nilo had traveled to São Paulo. When I arrived at the small apartment the two shared in Jardim Botânico, she greeted me with a photo album in hand. Leafing through it while Marina fixed me a drink, I could see nearly fifteen years of her life unfold before me, in Uruguay as well as in the cities that had come after Montevideo. I saw that Max had put on weight with the arrival of their first child, and had grown a beard after the birth of their second. All the while collecting medals and decorations, visible on his jacket lapels in some photos, pinned in rows to his gala uniforms in others. Even so, as often happens in such cases, he started to appear less and less on each page, until he didn’
t show up at all. Nothing like a family album to let us see, far beyond the ravages of time, the personal and emotional hardships that shape our lives.

  As I expected, Marina got to talking about her ex-husband. That was when she told me the train story in full detail, while I continued to flip through the album, now from back to front. She described the encounter with Max in the wrong cabin and spoke of the long dinner that would change her life. “It’s strange,” she added after a pause. “When I met Marcílio and we spent a good part of the night talking in that deserted car, I was positive that endless possibilities would open before me. And all for one ridiculous reason: simply because he was listening to me. No one had ever listened to me that way before, with an intensity that shut out the rest of the world.… It was just an illusion, of course.”

  She looked at me with some small hope that I would be able to grasp what she was trying to say. And she continued, “I was barely twenty years old, a victim of one of those classic adolescent infatuations. With someone I mistook for a father figure. Someone who knew how to play his part adeptly, giving me the attention I desperately craved — and hadn’t received in my childhood.”

  She took the album from my lap and chose a photo at random. “Santiago,” she said. “The worst time of my life. And the country’s.” She then told me about a lover of hers back then, an Italian photographer named Paolo. I had the impression she was talking to herself as her tone remained impassive.

  Since I said nothing, she fell silent. And began to turn the album’s pages without lingering, until she pointed to an image of utter desolation: a snowman lost in the middle of a completely white yard, with two bare, black trees in the background. She sighed. “Washington. “The kids built the snowman but disappeared at picture time. They went to get a carrot for the nose, tomatoes for the eyes, string beans for the mouth. I don’t think they could get the vegetable drawer in the fridge open. And they forgot about me. They went to watch TV, leaving me standing out in the yard. Kids … So I took the snowman’s picture.”