La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  One of them told me, “My name is Phoebus,” just like that, like Apollo, and he was what you call an homme beau. He put his arms around me and pressed me against him and I felt it against my belly, against my thigh. After that night I found myself with him a few more times. An homme beau. There were thugs in that place, as you know, men and women of the repression who frequented the club, despicable and disgraceful—monsters, if you like. They hid themselves among slender whores and rent boys and gorgeous transvestites that you’d only recognize as transvestites, if you even did, by their muscular backs, and stupendous fags and horrible fags and maybe one or another prisoner who would return under the salt sky of dawn to the underground cell that I knew well, and pimps and young men with piercing eyes and old men who weren’t so old, well-heeled, gray-haired aficionados of these games, and simple mafiosos who put on airs and felt at ease here. Once I thought I recognized two actors I’d seen not long before in a play by Heiner Müller. I’m not sure.

  There, inside that mansion cum club and hotel, sliding in the restless dark with those sharp guitar rhythms and provocative drums, we melted into a single high-voltage sea, and the hate coincided with attraction and the rage dovetailed with compassion and the fear with laugher and the violence with tenderness and the desertion with intimacy. Nothing is true, believe me, nothing of what they teach us is true.

  In the bathrooms you could always find some upper or a line of white powder. In one of the bathrooms, there was always someone naked in the sunken bathtub, and bodies would go up to it with their kidneys full of beer, and they would unzip, draw, swords would cross for a moment, and they would empty themselves in a fountain spray. I liked to see that those repugnant things, it made me laugh to see those manly men clashing their swords and then forming, euphoric, a proud yellow arc of triumph. And someone received that golden water as a blessing. You wanted details, didn’t you? There’s a baptism for you.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I watch Macha in the cafeteria. Gato never sets foot in here. I watch Macha at his table eating his charquicán beef stew or his beans with noodles with a bottle of Cristal beer. His agents surround him, the women and men of his horde. I remember the scene exactly. Great Dane is there. I’ve already mentioned him to you: he was at Oliver with the girl with Siamese cat eyes, he’s the one who kicked in the door of the safe house I gave them. He’s a handsome and simple blond, with a huge body and a big head and long, well-tended hair. Sometimes I see him in a karate gi. Great Dane is a black belt and he smashes bricks obsessively on the patio with the calloused edges of his giant hands. There’s Iris Molina, skinny and gaunt, with a mysterious voice and an oily, astute gaze. She’s the one who went first into the safe house. She’s an expert in pistol shooting and she hopes to make the Olympic team. (She never will.) There’s Mono Lepe, with his rebellious hair, dark circles under his eyes, his flat nose crooked from some ugly punch, his narrow little shoulders. There’s Chico Marín, his lips always livid, his eyes always darting, abrupt and nervous like a lizard, his head shaved. He’s wide and thick like a cube. There’s Pancha Ortiz, whose anxious eyes follow Macha constantly; she has haughty, high breasts and is the mother, she confessed to me once, of a pair of fraternal twins. She was the one who talked to me about the beauty of guns. There’s Indio Galdámez, in a gray sweatshirt with dark spots of old perspiration. Indio is attractive, proud, and reticent. His hair is greasy and he has a green boa tattooed on his left forearm. And then there are the other men, coarse and forgettable, and women who are rougher and more common, with indiscreetly dyed blond hair and whose names I never learned. Am I exaggerating? From this home in Ersta, Stockholm, do I see things in black and white? Obviously, none of them had the words “I am a monster” written on their faces. Mono Lepe hovers at the bedside when his little Carmen has a fever. He makes her hot lemonade and won’t go to bed until the fever breaks and the girl falls asleep. He takes her to day care every day in the Nissan 4×4 that Central gives him to use. I know all this from Gato.

  But they’re surrounded by an imaginary circle of silence, enigma, and risk. They share in the true mysteries of Central. Every one of them is a trunk full of secrets in the shape of a body. A brotherhood of blood. The others in the cafeteria treat them carefully, look at them with admiration: they’ve been chosen for this. They are the workers of death. And death inspires respect, even here. Macha has told Flaco: “In my team, a person who has killed no one is no one. Around here, Flaco, it’s a corpse that baptizes you.”

  But Macha hardly speaks. He’s shy, he’s stony. But, you know, the others talk to him. His difference. His distance. His contained sadness. Once in a great while, the surprise of a smile under his bushy moustache. Then the row of large, even teeth. His conspicuous cheekbones, his cleft chin, the sharp lines of his face, and his dangerous eyes, his eyelashes long like a foal’s: all this intrigues me. I’d like to sit at his table, look at him from close up, smell him. And at the same time there is this, my hate: he killed Canelo. The gang he commands loves him with a doglike loyalty. Is it jealousy, damned jealousy, this bitterness I feel when I see the way Pancha looks at him? And what of it?

  THIRTY-THREE

  One Friday, I don’t know why but I remember it was a Friday, Flaco took me out to lunch. He brought me to the Giratorio, the rotating restaurant on the top floor of a building on Avenida Lyon. From up there you could see a good portion of Santiago. San Cristóbal Hill was in front of us as we started lunch and we turned, we turned without noticing it while we ate an exquisite sole and drank a Santa Rita white wine. I felt happy up there. Everything was left behind, down below. The snow-covered mountains paraded in front of us and Flaco showed me the Plomo, the Provincia, the Punta de Damas, the San Ramón, mountain names I’d never heard and that seemed to me mysterious, poetic, evocative. He described the way to climb up the sheer cliff of El Altar—anchors, ice ax—or the La Paloma glacier, the hanging glacier of San Francisco wedged into the Morales canyon. Two days it had taken them to go up, bivouacking only once. They’d slept hanging from the rock. During the night a sudden jerking and a collision woke Flaco up. A bolt had come loose, and he was left hanging by only the other one.

  “You never feel as free as in the mountains,” he told me, and it seemed incredibly profound and true to me. Then he asked if I would dare go climbing with him up a peak that wasn’t very difficult. I loved the idea. “The air,” he said, “what I like most is to feel on my face that cold air, biting and pure, which at that height has touched nothing but the ice.” At that moment, the only thing I wanted was to feel the freedom of that cold air, biting and pure; I wanted to leave with Flaco right away and go there. When the check came we were in front of San Cristóbal Hill again. I leaned over the table and kissed him. Flaco gave me another kiss as we got into his silver Volvo, then he got onto the Costanera highway. We drove fast.

  I was picturing myself standing in the wind of a glacier. Then I thought of the house in Malloco. I saw myself in my mind’s eye disfigured in the little mirror, anxiously inhaling what was left of a line he’d shaped with his MasterCard Gold, the same one that just paid for lunch, and I felt my body swept up by the loud guitars and the powerful, tireless motor of the electric bass. I told him we should go that very night. He smiled. We shared that powerful secret. The complicity was exquisite. I believe in that: the attraction you feel when you share a dangerous secret. Don’t you? I always loved that exclusion that separates those who are in on the secret from those who aren’t. It’s the drug of co-conspirators, and without it there wouldn’t be secret societies or networks in clandestine life, or loyalties among secret agents like the one who was beside me in the driver’s seat then. He turned suddenly and parked in front of the Tajamar Towers. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see, my dear,” he smiled mischievously.

  We went into an eleventh-floor apartment, with big windows looking out over the river and San Cristóbal Hill. It had a light beige carpet, almost white, wall-to-wall. A
bedroom and a living-dining room. The walls were white. There wasn’t a stick of furniture. “Do you like it?” he asked me. Everything was luminous. “Would you like to live here?” And in a voice that was too serious to be serious: “For security purposes, the time has come for you to change your residence, don’t you think?”

  In that moment I loved him with a furious, urgent passion. That silent, empty apartment, those windows high over the San Cristóbal Hill, I don’t know, I was flooded by an acute sense of helplessness just at the moment when Flaco was protecting me. I pulled off my clothes and we made love frantically, standing up, and then again on that recently carpeted floor. I’m seeing him lying there on his back with me astride him, his clear eyes and his bald, youthful head, the dark hair on his chest, the almost white beige of the rug. Me? Could this be happening to me?

  To rest my head on his chest brings me a perfect peace. The cedar scent of Flaco’s soap brings me back to my father’s workshop. He’s a big man, Flaco. The muscles of his chest are my pillow. I’m protected there, almost merging into him. I press closer. I’m happy like that.

  When he left, I was still naked. I kissed his bald head. I always did that when I said good-bye to him. He left a ring of keys in my hand and a folded paper between my breasts. When I straightened up it slid to the floor: it was a fat check. Enough to pay my move from the little apartment with thin walls I rented on Carlos Antúnez and to furnish the new one. I installed a little safe in the closet, built into the wall. I hid my documents and the CZ in there when Anita or my mother or the cleaning lady came.

  And it was that apartment where he would drop in without warning, where I waited for him always just in case, in case he could get away from his wife, from his two small daughters whom he adored, I knew, and we could lose ourselves for the night in the disco music and among the rooms of the house in Malloco. I’d been holding back for such a long time. One of those nights, I let myself be carried away by the voluptuousness of the forbidden. I shouldn’t have. But the secret was burning my lips. I shouldn’t have. But I loved Flaco, I wanted to keep him with me, I wanted his complete intimacy; I longed for that communion, to open the door for him to a secret he didn’t know. It was vertiginous. So I told him something I shouldn’t have.

  I told him tremblingly that the “Prince of Wales” smoked Havana cigars. He looked at me with widened eyes, surprised. “I want to punish,” I told him, “the irresponsible people who’ve gotten us into this imaginary fight that has very real deaths.” I said it firmly, and I believed it; I needed to believe it, just as Rodrigo, when he left me, had needed to convince me that I was the one to blame. The Spartan shouldn’t have smoked. It was forbidden. And yet, he did. The perfect combatant had that one defect, that trace of rebellion against an absolute and unequivocal order of the organization. He let the ashes fall onto a saucer using the utmost caution, and then he flushed them down the toilet. I knew it was a valuable clue. Some of the ashes must fly off and be left behind.

  That detail would be important for Flaco, for his career. And of course, the information was duly processed. From then on, as soon as a safe house came up, they headed over there with magnifying lenses to look for cigar ash. The Spartan (“Prince of Wales,” to Central) would fall because of that, he would fall because of me.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Gato wanted “Gladiolo” and he wanted him alive. That’s it. In Flaco’s flow chart, “Gladiolo” appeared now as the leader of one of the cells under “Prince of Wales.” Where had that information come from? They had watched the house on Calle Los Gladiolos, but the man never turned up there. The tone of that terrible order was peremptory. I understood very well. What could I do? Those were the rules of the game. I asked for time. How much? They gave me a month. There were three weeks until Teruca’s birthday, and I’d heard she was going to celebrate at her mother’s house in Ñuñoa, a few blocks from Irarrázaval. Through Teruca, maybe I could get close to poor Rafa.

  I dropped in that day with a tray of Chilean pastries that I knew she loved and a light blue blouse that would look good on her. Her mother let me in very solicitously, but said she wasn’t sure if her daughter was coming. At around 6:30, Teruca arrived. “You’ve let your braid grow again,” I said. “I love it like that.” She was surprised to see me. I’d even say she hugged me with a trace of distrust. Her mother came in with a mil hojas cake, and after singing, blowing out the candles, and eating our slices, the two of us went out onto the terrace. Then she loosened up. She told me, enraptured, that she was engaged to Rafa now. Her mother knew. Not Francisco, no, it wasn’t worth telling him. Because, how do you explain something like that to your son in a letter? Francisco was still living in a group home in Cuba. In spite of her efforts, Teruca couldn’t keep in regular contact with him. Of course it didn’t make any sense to tell him. So why was she telling me she just didn’t know how to break the news to him? I knew Teruca bore that pain every day: having abandoned her son to avoid putting him in danger, so she could have more freedom and fight without being tied down. And I knew, too, that the few times they had met, in Mexico City, it hadn’t turned out well: “I try to understand you, Mom, I try because I love you and that’s exactly why I can’t understand. Why can’t you stay here with me?” That’s what Francisco said to her.

  That’s where we were when Rafa came in carrying a gift. He let out a great bellow of laughter when he saw me, and he hugged me with the frank affection of earlier days. “What’s up, sweetie?” he said. He kissed Teruca effusively on the mouth and he sat down next to her on the sofa, holding her thick black braid in one hand. “This way I can control who she looks at,” he laughed. “I guess you already know, right? This little gossip must have told you, I’m sure.” The three of us hugged.

  I offered to go buy a bottle of champagne, and in the end all of us went to the liquor store. I insisted on paying. Back at the house, when the champagne had run out and we had started in on pisco and Coke, I steered the conversation to mention that I was finding more and more frequent red chalk marks on the edge of the sidewalk on the corner. I was lying. “So you’re being reincorporated,” said Teruca.

  “It’s about time,” Rafa stated roundly, his tongue loosened from the pisco. And he added with no prompting from me: “Two red lines, parallel?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Unmistakable.” He gulped down a big swallow and laughed: “My cell, on the other hand, uses gum.” He laughed again, a laugh that was strange in him. He threw back another swallow. It’s fear, I thought to myself, fear. “They leave a piece of gum on the leg of a bench in Plaza Manuel Rodríguez. The Spartan’s idea, I’m sure,” he laughed, looking at me with glassy eyes. Teruca furrowed her brow and stayed quiet. Then she told me that Cuyano had fallen, that since Canelo’s death Rafa had been in charge of his cell, the one that used to be mine, too, and that this had left her shocked and very sad; frightened, too. I covered my face with my hands.

  “I worry about serial arrests like that,” she said to me. Teruca had been disconnected as a precaution. A thick silence fell over us.

  “An angel went by,” joked Rafael.

  The doorbell rang and a tall, thin, very blond man came in wearing jeans and cowboy boots. “The Gringo!” exclaimed Rafa. He and Teruca got up to welcome him. He handed Teruca her gift and hugged me. “It’s been so many moons!” he told me. “So long since Nahuelbuta! Right? . . . you haven’t changed a bit.” We toasted. He and Rafa seemed to be good friends. I liked the way his gray eyes turned toward me, left, and came back. He clinked his glass against mine and laughed for no reason, with something of the child who laughs from pure joy. Then he started talking to Rafa. Teruca asked me about my French classes, the latest art openings. The bottle of pisco went quickly, and Teruca and I went to get another from the pantry.

  “Handsome, isn’t he?” she said as soon as we were alone.

  “Mm,” I said.

  “Mm,” she replied, smiling. “He remembered you from Nahuelbuta, at the
camp . . .”

  “Mm.”

  When I was ready to go, the Gringo looked at his watch and exclaimed in surprise over how late it was. We left together, walking toward Irarrázaval. I don’t remember what we talked about. When we got to the bus stop I felt his gaze holding mine again. “I want to see you again,” he told me. “Give me that chance. The last time we saw each other was years ago and there was a fire between us . . .” My mouth filled with laughter and I trembled a little. My bus pulled up and from the landing I said: “All right, let’s talk soon.” I gave him a wave and the bus pulled away.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Plaza Manuel Rodríguez was empty and all the shops had closed. It was eleven thirty at night. Plenty afraid, I circled around checking the plaza’s benches, in search of a piece of gum. I kept thinking I heard Rafa’s steps behind me, and the sweat was rolling down my back. When I had only two left to check, on the bench under a big, bluish cedar tree I saw a little white-tinged spot on the green-painted iron leg. I didn’t touch it.

  Plaza Manuel Rodríguez is small and secluded. It’s bordered by four streets: Calle Plaza Manuel Rodríguez to the north, Grajales to the south, Almirante Latorre to the east, and Abdón Cifuentes to the west. And I have to mention a fifth, Teresa Clark, a short alleyway that runs north to south between Almirante Latorre and Abdón Cifuentes and ends at the plaza. Before dawn, twelve men and six vehicles distributed themselves on those streets, blocking off the plaza. Only the old Peugeot taxi parked on Teresa Clark had a direct view of the benches. We were in that taxi: Indio driving, Iris as copilot, and me, wearing a mask. The day passed in vain. “Gladiolo” didn’t show. Macha ordered sandwiches and drinks, but he didn’t change the stakeout team.