La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  When he saw me come in like that, he shouted an order for the woman to remove my handcuffs. He took off my blindfold himself, and a sob escaped me. He took a can of Coca-Cola from the small refrigerator that was camouflaged in a cabinet, opened it, and handed it to me. I kept crying. The soda tasted so good to me. But I went on crying, and I felt I was disgusting. My chest hurt so much with every moan, it was as if the sobs were fighting their way out with a knife blade.

  Flaco was a man with an aquiline nose and enormous liquid eyes, blue and melancholy. He moved with lethargic ease. He struck me as attractive when I saw him from behind, one hand on his hip, the other writing on the chalkboard. Long legs. Well-shaped, he was. I noticed his wedding ring. A serious man, I thought. He’d gone bald. He couldn’t be over thirty-four, I thought, and already bald as a father—a father with youthful skin and no potbelly. He offered me a cigarette. We talked. I felt his eyes on me. No one inside there had looked at me. He did. You can’t know what that means, it’s the warmth of a nest. He told me he’d been born in Valdivia. He missed the Calle-Calle River. He hated the Mapocho River, he told me. “We can agree there,” I said, and he laughed with me.

  On the whiteboard, a flowchart. In the box at the top, our Commander Joel. It was the same image that appeared in our internal newsletters: his glasses, behind which you could see his serene Asiatic eyes; his abundant black hair combed away from his face; his nose and mouth, wide; his beard, trimmed. It was an image that we carried with us burned into our memories. Flaco noticed my un-ease. A vertical line connected Joel to “Bone,” who didn’t have a photo. From there three lines radiated out and opened up into boxes with names and photos—almost all very blurry—from which other lines led to other boxes. Over time I learned that it was copies of these blurry photos that Macha had been given. In one of the boxes I recognized Tomasa.

  He asked me in a smooth, respectful, and convincing tone to help him fill in the boxes with our pseudonyms. They had christened my brothers and sisters with the names of the streets where they had been located for the first time. “We put him to bed there and got him up there in the morning.” That’s how, he told me, the agents in charge of surveillance gave their reports. I never found out who it was they called “Antonio Varas” after they saw him stay overnight the first time in a building on that street. The photo was too blurry. The tail sometimes allowed them to see a “meet.” Surveillance was the thing those bastards did best. But there were also brothers and sisters who had turned. And Flaco wanted me to understand that very well. Tomasa? Briceño? Escobar? How many had flipped? Whoever arrived last to a “meet” and sat in the safest place was the most senior in the hierarchy, they did know that. That’s how they recognized the leaders. The intermediaries confused them, I noticed; those sainted women threw them off the trail. And, looking at things from a distance, I must have been the one who gave Flaco a precise explanation of their function. Accordingly, he perfected their system of tailing and location of leaders. Because it was easy to figure out that they came to few group “meets” but had many meetings with intermediaries.

  The box at the top of my cell had a name: “Prince of Wales.” I had met once with the Spartan in a restaurant on that avenue to eat Spanish omelets. Next to our cell, a series of new nicknames were waiting for me to sort through them. “Gladiolo” was obviously Rafa, because his mother lived on Calle Los Gladiolos, where—remember?—I had left him a note he never answered. Others were “Redhead Curinanca,” “Plaid Curinanca,” and “Big-Nose Curinanca.”

  “What a way of guarding me,” I said. And with tears still in my eyes I started to laugh, disconsolate, understanding that this would be forever.

  At Flaco’s instruction I called my mother and explained to her that I had to leave right away for Paris—for Paris, which for me meant Giuseppe’s love—as an interpreter for a delegation of businesspeople. The interpreter who was supposed to go was sick. It was urgent, it was a good opportunity, I was packing as fast as I could. One week, I lied; I would be gone for one week. My voice shook a little. I said good-bye to her and to Anita.

  “Relax,” Flaco said to me, “Relax.” He took hold of my jaw and turned it roughly to the left. A vertebra cracked and I cried out. Then he did the same thing toward the right. A vertebra cracked again. I felt better. “Relax,” he repeated, “Relax.” He got behind me, took me by the legs, and launched me toward the ceiling. In the middle of my flight, my spinal column cracked violently. I shrieked. But it was a good pain. He caught me, placing me gently back on the floor. And that’s how my first conversation with Flaco ended. They gave me a bar of soap and let me shower. If you could only know how marvelous it was to feel the hot water and soap suds sliding all over the skin of my poor body.

  The next day, Flaco called me into his office again. He had a surprise for me: a Lancôme palette de maquillage. That’s what he called it, and I was delighted with his gesture and the effort he put into his badly pronounced French. It fascinated me: to be able to wear makeup again. We had lunch together. It was a bit late and the cafeteria was almost empty. I looked at him, trying not to. His smile made my knees weak. I was invaded by a sweet languor, and a few yawns escaped me. My mouth was dry. He’d left his cigarettes in his office. We went to get them after lunch, and I kissed him there. It was an impulse. I kissed him with an exquisite calm, and it was as if he knew intuitively that if he rushed, it would ruin everything.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Would you believe me if I told you that more than one prisoner came out of her cell at night to kiss and dance with her jailers in some club, and that was part of the horror? Would you believe Tomasa and I did it, that sometimes, like a couple of Cinderellas, we went happily into Oliver to toss back one Chivas Regal after another, and that we also went to that mansion with adobe walls and high ceilings on a plot of land in Malloco?

  Flaco took me out in his brand-new Volvo and—I almost forgot!—he took me first to Calle General Holley. There were many fine boutiques on that street back then. He gave me a lot of gifts. I had looked down on those clothes, those mirrors, those boutiques designed to flatter the skin and eyes. They didn’t mesh with the steely spirit our struggle demanded. But now I wanted to look pretty, I wanted to feel like a woman who could drive those fool men crazy. In Privilege, I chose, without doubting for a second, a pair of black pants with a matching velvet jacket and a leopard print Lycra shirt that hugged my body (the original, the saleswoman told me, was Versace). We bought a pair of dark glasses. From there we went to Mingo and found a pair of boots made of soft, shiny leather. I was delighted. I felt like a little girl getting presents from Santa Claus. Never in my years as a clandestine fighter would I have worn clothes like that. All that austerity of ours, I’m telling you, I threw it out the window. Was I turning into a whore? Me? The timid girl who’d been educated by nuns? I trembled when I felt the sensuality of those fabrics. And later, looking at the way the stockings evened out my skin, leaving only the essential geometry of my legs. The stockings made me into a Cézanne painting, I thought then. And in the Lycra shirt I looked at my breasts in the mirror as if they were my very being. I thought: if my soul existed, it would be in my breasts.

  It was Flaco, as I said, who took me to Oliver. Great Dane was at a table in the back. I’d caught a glimpse of him at Central once, wearing workout clothes. Tomasa thought he was the best looking. Though, as I’ve already said she thought Flaco was more attractive, maybe, for that elegance that was so unique to him. Great Dane was with a young woman with intense, light blue eyes and brand-name clothes who smiled at him like a Siamese cat, caressing his three-day-old beard and his long, blond hair. He signaled to Flaco and left, his kitten draped over him and, enormous as he was, moving nimbly between the pub’s tightly arranged tables. He noticed me and right there, at that moment, I realized that Flaco was looking at me anxiously, and that my leopard print shirt was driving him crazy. His eyes flickered every so often to exactly where you would imagine. And it pleased me to please
him and it made me move and laugh with much more grace than I actually have. I think I’m pretty ordinary, but not that night, no. That night I shone.

  As we were leaving Oliver, Flaco wanted to buy a bottle of Chivas for the road. The waiter told him no. Flaco, annoyed, got up from the table and went to talk to someone. Two minutes later, a man who introduced himself very solicitously as “the manager” saw us to the door. We had with us as a gift from the house, a recently opened bottle of Chivas that we drank in the car, with no glass or ice, straight from the mouth of the bottle. We took small sips, and my tongue lapped up every drop of the golden liquor in fascination.

  The first time he brought me to a dance club—it had three floors and was all the rage, on Calle Recoleta, I think—I let myself go as I had never done before. Dancing slowly to fast songs in the middle of the dance floor, taking advantage of the darkness and the closeness, I put a hand into his pocket and then lowered his zipper a little, and I slid a hand in and took hold of him right there, still dancing. “That killed me,” he would tell me later. And that swollen, thick, and firm thing was my doing, and I liked that he wanted me, and I liked him because I liked that he wanted me so much and that he was looking at me with his big eyes, tense and shining. That thing of his wanted me. And he wanted me like that, with that tremendous and always strange thing that rose up, curving at the end, for me. I was capable of making that happen. So, of course, was any other woman. That’s how men are, I know that. But at that moment it was me, and that hard thing with taut and demanding and soft skin was for me and no one else. And it was him and it wasn’t him, and it was mine and it wasn’t mine.

  And later, in his Volvo, I was as I was not and he was as he was not, and I liked the feeling of being someone else and of Flaco being someone else, with those great blue eyes that shone on me and that slight smile, happy and tense at the same time, another who was him, another who was me, impassioned, with an urgent need to envelop inside me that intimate and secret Flaco that was now emerging into the light with a clumsiness that amused and gratified me and made me wait and tremble. And when he was lying on his back and I was above him, given over, and I felt him as I moved on top of him, it was agonizing that he was there and also that he wouldn’t go on being there or that he hadn’t been there before, always, and the air became thin and then living meant always wanting more air that would always be lacking.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Flaco paid my cover charge. Several bills. “Some expensive place,” I thought. They gave him a key that he put in his pocket. He handed me a mask that was Zorro-style, only red, and a top hat. That made him laugh a lot. “Put all your hair up under the hat,” he told me, laughing. “I like you better with short hair,” he told me. And he kissed the nape of my neck. He wore the same disguise as I did.

  Tomasa was with a friend of Flaco’s, Mauricio. He was a big man, with a blunt nose and small eyes, bald, with a big belly, a shiny, black leather jacket, and gray jeans held up by a thick belt with a buckle shaped like a horseshoe. I never really found out where he worked. We were in an old landowner’s house that had been made into a dance club, and there was darkness and champagne and, well, young boys dancing with macho men and women and girly men and manly girls embracing manly men and womanly women, and uppers and poppers, yes, and the white stuff, of course, just a few lines, and lights flashing on for a second and off again, fragmenting the bodies, music at full blast.

  The men I can see around me are vigorous, self-assured, warm, and masculine; but, I don’t know why, they are also vulnerable. They prefer tight jeans, boots and black leather vests with sleeveless shirts, or nothing, underneath. A lot of them have their hair short or shaved, or long, very long, and there are masks and caps and hats. Are they truck drivers, military men, traffickers, dancers, motorcycle riders, pimps, artists? What are they playing at with such aplomb, such tenderness? The myth of the macho falls like a shadow over them. It lets them invent a role on that stage we all occupy. Because that party—I notice right away in my body that as I walk is already dancing—is happening, if it is happening, in a time that will be brief, an open and shut of the eyes, and in a space that is closed, metaphorical, dreamlike, and fleeting.

  I can tell you whatever I want. Like with everything that happened in that club in Malloco. I can be someone else. That was the fascinating thing. Because there, I discovered I was not who I thought I was. Flaco Artaza took me there, as I told you. He took me, soaring in his silver Volvo with its new-car smell. Why? Why did he need to go, and with me? And can you see me there, amazed, at the black marble bar that was frankly louche, with all its liquor bottles shining and lit up in front of me, drinking a pisco sour with Flaco, who smiles as I laugh for no reason, Flaco, who is transfixed by my perfume, transfixed by my breasts that press against the Triumph bra—which we bought together, of course—and overflow, and that I look at from above? At that moment I like them so much I want to take them in my hands and caress them gently as if they were two turtledoves, two baby rabbits, two newborn fawns.

  When we came out of that imaginary house the dawn sky was made of salt. Tomasa and I went back exhausted, and I felt my anguish rising into my esophagus: What would happen today? And we returned to our prison. When we went in we saw Chico Escobar and Vladimir Briceño. They were handcuffed and blindfolded. They had also been picked up again.

  Over the gates of Dante’s Inferno is written: Abandon all hope those who enter here. That’s how I lived. I’d lost all hope and I still wasn’t dead. I would see many others in that state of despondency. They were eaten up by desperation in those dungeons. Because they had sworn to fight unto death before giving up and they’d been captured alive; they had sworn not to falter and they’d faltered. The enemy’s cruelty had ensnared them and driven them mad from fear. What did they have before them? If they were released they would never again be what they had been. Their brothers would look at them suspiciously. They would have to give a statement. They could be punished and disgraced. No matter what, for reasons of security and for a long time, as in my case, they would be excluded from any risky missions. Hadn’t they been warned that it was better to die than to fall into enemy hands? The ancient Christians’ baptism of blood washes away all stains and allows direct entrance into Paradise. The mujahideen—didn’t they know it! The miseries of an entire life are erased in an instant, forever. All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. But they hadn’t been up to it.

  So they vegetated, lacking a purpose and sick in their souls. They suffered—we suffered—without relief. Even though the guards and interrogators didn’t do anything to them anymore. They’d finished with them, and one of these nights they’d kill them or throw them out in the street like ownerless dogs. We had trained to be heroes and now we had bodies made of jelly and we longed for a death that we hadn’t be able to consummate.

  Along with the first light of day, the pain in my head started to invade my sleep. My mouth was dry and I swallowed saliva and it was still just as dry. When I opened my eyes in the semidarkness of my cell I let out a scream like a wild animal. My heart was in my throat and I went on screaming. I tried to stop but I couldn’t: Tomasa was hanging from one of the bars in the window. Her fixed eyes bulged as if they would come out of her swollen face. She was swinging slowly. A trickle of blood flowed from her ear. When they opened the door and took her down I saw she had hung herself with a thick black belt with a metal buckle shaped like a horseshoe. Mauricio’s. I said nothing.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I give them the address of a safe house. We met there the night before the mission when I was taken prisoner. Calle Zenteno, between Sargento Aldea and Pedro Lagos, I told them, and when I did it, a tremor passed over my face. A crack was opening up. The vessel had broken.

  We parked some fifty yards from the house—Rat in the driver’s seat, Ronco in the back next to me in my ski mask. A Fiat taxi and a blue Toyota four-door pulled up. A man with narrow shoulders and a crooked nose, a woman with a blac
k shirt that hugged her breasts tightly, and another guy who looked Indian climbed up onto the neighboring roofs. A huge, agile, brawny man leaped, his blond bangs flying, and the door flew open under his kick. It was Great Dane, the man I’d seen in Oliver with the girl with Siamese eyes. A woman, skinny as a mouse, went in with her CZ drawn, and behind her went Great Dane, his blond hair grazing his shoulders. From the van, wearing my ski mask, I was just starting to recognize this group. Then, silence. It seemed that a long time went by.

  They made me get out and go through the house. Ronco asked me how I could prove that this was a safe house. I hadn’t thought about that. Except for an old woman who was half deaf, no one was there. “You lyin’ to us again, you little bitch? You want us to start all over again? Lemme tell you, Great Dane’s not here to waste his time . . . You saw what that guy’s kicks can do . . .”

  I didn’t answer. I went straight to the closet in a small room at the back, I knelt on the floor, and, trembling, I removed a board. I wanted to say: here. My voice wouldn’t come. “What’s she got?” asked Ronco. The man with narrow shoulders and crooked nose looked at me anxiously with his deep-set eyes. Mono Lepe. The woman with the tight black shirt, Pancha, Pancha Ortiz, came over fearlessly, though she took precautions. Her sure, agile hands, her meaty fingers with their manicured nails and no rings, opened the black plastic bag that was sealed with a zipper: there were two long, black, brand-new 7.62 caliber AKMSs with collapsible stocks, made in Poland.