La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  And he: You’re unfaithful to the core. You can’t help it.

  And me: Who told you? The thing is, I’m a different person with every man I like. That’s why I don’t feel guilty. It’s just that I’m a different person.

  And he: You like to change men, then.

  And me: Change penises.

  And he: Ah, really?

  And me: Sure, we’re living in the era of diversity. The same thing every day gets boring, even if it’s Iranian caviar.

  And he: Have you tried Iranian caviar?

  And me: Never. But I read in some magazine that it was the best caviar. Iranian beluga. And you know something else?

  And he: What?

  And me: I want them with money. I’m tired of these poverty-stricken guys; I’m past the stage of hot, handsome guys, boys who are strong but who are ultimately pretty poor, like you. Let’s see, what’s the most an intelligence official can make? That’s that! Now I want hard, big, thick penises and you know what else? I want them stuffed with money. That’s what I want.

  And he: But who wants that? Do you, really? Or is it just that you want to get married and you’re thinking about your kids, so they’ll have a good life?

  And me: Maybe yes, maybe no. But above all the one who wants that penis-house is the one you’re imagining and you keep quiet about. Above all, her.

  And Flaco bursts out laughing and gives me a kiss that his own laughter interrupts. He pulls off my dress and kisses my nipples and I fall onto the bed and he penetrates me without even removing my underwear.

  I’m not going to deny it: I loved Flaco Artaza. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to stand doing what I did, I think now. Can anyone understand that? He was a man who pleased me, I was a person to him, and he took care of me. He had problems with his wife, she suspected there was another woman. So many times he came home at dawn, or just he didn’t come home at all. Work, he said. She had her doubts. But divorce was unthinkable. Their two little girls came first. I knew that very well, and I had no illusions. Or at least, I had them but I denied it.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Suddenly, Flaco is tormented by the future. He tells me: “We have to wipe out the terrorists. We’re in the process of exterminating the rats in this country.” That’s what Central’s director had told him that morning. He’d asked for an audience so he could “expound on” a few things, as he put it. Flaco did not agree with what was happening. It’s impossible for me to connect the person talking to me now with the one who goes with me to the Malloco house. Of course, the same happens with me and with everyone else who goes there. Images of Wild Cat cross my mind, and I wish I were there with him now. But he’s talking to me about his problems, sitting on the worn black leather sofa in the apartment at Tajamar Towers. The sky over San Cristóbal Hill is gradually losing its light.

  It’s a conversation that he would never have with his faithful wife or with women like his faithful wife. Part of the attraction I have for him is that with me, he can talk about these things as if I wasn’t a woman and, at the same time, not as though I were a man. It’s a small hollow where a warm intimacy is born, one that is novel for him. Because he’s never encountered women like me before. Because for him—for all of them, really—a woman doesn’t participate in this open and cruel world, she is outside of “History” and completely absorbed in the petite histoire of the family. He goes on talking in a tired voice, and I think about my long, tedious Saturdays and Sundays spent alone and thinking about him, imagining him going to the supermarket and the cinema with his faithful wife. Does he still sleep with her? He showed me a photo once. I asked him to. I needed to have an image to anchor my imaginings. She wasn’t a bit ugly, the bitch. I was furious.

  “Just to capture one single enemy combatant,” he is saying, his forehead wrinkled and his voice contrite, “too many people are martyred: people who are mere dissenters, lefty kids who are treated like full-blown terrorists. And they’re not, they’re just members of the opposition, they are not military enemies. Poor kids. They get treated like shit. We’re confusing the Opposing Front with the Subversive Front . . . In the inspections, the assault teams swoop in at night on a house and grab everyone in sight. Well, I put my balls on the line, I told the director what was what, I called a spade a spade.”

  Did he really put them on the line? I wonder . . .

  “The director didn’t like what he heard. What we’re sowing here, I told him, is terror, of course, and then hate and more hate. In the end no one will believe us about anything. Not even that there ever were groups of trained terrorists . . . Because they kill in cold blood, they kill people who were never terrorists . . . I don’t deny that fear brings about a military ‘victory,’ but it’s a pyrrhic victory. It’s achieved at the price of political failure and moral shame.

  “I don’t know what the director answered. Chain of Command, Chain of Command . . . ‘But what does Command want?’ I asked him. There was nothing concrete in his answer. Our job isn’t to conquer a territory but rather the people in it. In this conflict, the main thing is to win the war of images. You know?” Flaco goes on saying to me. “We live in a world of pure interpretation.” And he opens his long arms, inviting me to understand him. Because that’s what he wants from me, he wants me to think he’s good. In the midst of the filth and disgust, here is a just man who loves me. I take advantage of the situation to ask him why he fights. It’s something that intrigues me in him, in all of them. What really drives them? Are the sacred rites of “order” and “Command” enough?

  My question irritates him. I’ve taken him out of his noble deliberations. His answer is rote, fast, machinelike, he launches his entire demonology at me: that they are fighting so our country won’t be taken over by people who defend a system that builds a wall in Berlin so the populace can’t get out; the same people who in ’39 supported the pact between Hitler and Stalin, the same ones who wrote panegyrics for Stalin and later for Brezhnev, who in ’56 supported the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, who in ’68 supported the Soviet Union’s invasion of Prague and—incredibly—here in Santiago came to defend the Soviet embassy against the people who went there to protest the invasion; the ones who trained in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Bulgaria, and who received and were still receiving AK-47 rifles, and M-16s and FALs and RPG 7 rocket launchers . . . Didn’t they catch MIR, at the very start, with something like two hundred AKs hidden in gas cylinders? Meanwhile, in Europe, they think these people are social democratic doves . . . Idiots! They’ll never understand the double dealing these con artists are capable of. They just sit there sucking their thumbs! Castro fooled them already, but they didn’t learn. Idiots! Because this irregular war is against Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Because it’s Cuba that wants to destabilize Chile and it’s Cuba that sends trained men and the weapons we find in arsenals and hideouts. From Cuba and the USSR. He tells me: “Behind it all, the big Russian bear is always lying in wait . . . No, not here,” he boasts, “here they’re not going to do what they did in Nicaragua; in Iran, in Vietnam. No, no. Here, we’re going to tear them a new asshole . . . Our freedom is at stake. And democracy?” he asks himself. “It will come, not yet, but it will come.”

  I tell him that such an attitude, so reactionary, is lacking in poetry. He smiles with the simplicity of the simple and literal man that he is, a smile that inspires in me a certain disdain and, at the same time, an uncertain tenderness. Then he talks to me again about the purity and freedom of the mountaintop. “If you only knew the beauty of Alto de Los Leones. A true obelisk that’s 18,570 feet high. Huge walls of smooth rock, vertical cliffs of over 3,000 feet. One of them is 7,200 feet! The famous German alpinist Federico Reichert, who explored the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Andes, said in his book in 1929 that the Alto de Los Leones ‘will never lose its virginity, since its inaccessible summit seems beyond the limit of all possibility.’ Can you imagine? Even so, after the Italians Gabriele Boccalatte and Piero Zanetti went up in 1934, there are several of us
who have reached the summit. Believe me: that’s what poetry is,” he tells me. “Unadulterated poetry.”

  But after that moment of exultation the furrowed brow returns, and the same aggrieved tone as before.

  He’s bored with what he does, he tells me. He’s disgusted, he tells me. “My work is ‘intelligence,”’ he tells me. “My work is secret recordings, tracking over the course of months, photos taken from fake ambulances and false taxis, fingerprints, duly verified confessions, microphones hidden behind the plate of a power socket, recordings from a tapped phone, weapons found in secret compartments, documents that I turn into classified information . . . But, of course, the evidence is never more than the tip of the iceberg. You have to imagine the reality. But where the imagination creates, reason prunes. That’s what we’re here for, that’s what we train for, to investigate. But here there has been bad intelligence, there’s been shooting into the flock, lack of professionalism, and simple barbarity. The cruelty of wolves in a cage.

  “I don’t mean to say they’re all tame doves. No. And I know that Mossad eliminates terrorists and, sometimes, they make mistakes, too. I know it very well. We’ve had instructors from Mossad in Central who spoke perfect Spanish. Smart guys, let me tell you. And the English do the same. You don’t believe me? For example, in 1978, on the way to Gibraltar, I’m telling you, gunmen from SAS and MI5 murdered three terrorists from the IRA. Three. They didn’t even give them a chance to surrender. Well, and then there’s the United States . . . Not only in Vietnam. Later, in Libya . . . But here, there’s no sense of proportion. Macha’s people fight just to fight, because why not, you understand?”

  I answer, quoting Violeta Parra: “Pero no es culpa del chancho . . . But it’s not the pig who’s at fault, it’s the one who feeds it the mash.”

  He looks at me with a disdainful sneer on his lips.

  “I know what you’re thinking. . . And yes, you’re right,” he explains, showing the white palms of his hands. I had hurt him. “A lot of missions go straight to Macha from C-1,” he says. “They skip over me because they know what I think, did you know that?” And his tone gets softer to win me over. “And Macha thinks he’s the Macho of all machos, right?” Now his tone is mocking. “The little boss of that mafia only obeys macho orders and he only gives macho orders, right? He goes first into the most dangerous safe house. He wants to take risks. And you know why? To assuage his guilt. It balances things out, he figures. He ignores procedure so he can attack with few people, he’s even gone into a house alone, and then he makes mistakes, like what happened when the ‘Prince of Wales’ got away from him. And then the ones he wants to catch or blow the whistle on get away from him, poor fucker . . . It’s so he can avoid leaks, he says, to avoid accidents, because in small houses there’s a big risk of friendly fire, he says, he only trusts his own people, no one else, he says, there’s a mole here, someone warns the enemy; he says he had to investigate Colonel Vergara’s assassination and found it would have been impossible without information from inside . . . That’s what he says. I’ve asked him for proof and he doesn’t have any. But of course, you know, they shot at him point-blank and the bullet stayed in him. Too close to the femoral to extract it. So it hurts him. So he limps a little. They could have killed him, but they didn’t kill him. Friendly fire? Betrayal? We’ll never know. That’s it. The truth is that when it comes to Macha, one more death won’t keep him up at night.”

  He takes his knees in his hands. He’s dejected. “This shit comes from above,” he tells me in a barely audible voice. “That’s why no one puts a stop to it. My complaint went into a vacuum. The director wants more power, so he needs a bigger budget, so he needs to increase the danger posed by the enemy. And the boss above him, you think he’s not doing exactly the same thing?”

  He shakes his bald head, with its smooth, soft, and shining skin that I like to kiss when we say good-bye. He’s already regretting what he’s going to tell me.

  And you, writer who wasn’t there, does my telling you this help you see the situation, the ambiguity of that moment of mine with Flaco?

  “Listen to me,” he says, and he lowers his voice until it’s nothing but a thread. “Listen to me well. This is a secret for you and no one else. A couple of weeks ago, Macha got the order to organize an operation to deal with an ugly situation. The order wasn’t to arrest the subject, the terrorist, you understand? They were about to leave. They were in the cafeteria having sodas: Great Dane, Iris, Chico Marín, Pancha Ortiz, Indio . . . Macha didn’t know who the victim was, nothing, not the slightest idea. He had a photo, an address, and an order, that’s it. You know how these things are done. And he was listening, surrounded by his people, and he was quiet as always.

  “I asked him: ‘And you, Macha, what do you think of having to carry out an order like this?’ There was a silence. ‘Answer me,’ I pressed him. Macha leaned back, balancing calmly on the back legs of the chair. After a long pause he looked me straight in the eyes and said:

  “‘Flaco, tell me, old man: What does one more fuck matter to an old whore?’

  “Everyone started laughing. But I didn’t laugh at all.

  “And he said: ‘Let me be the one to live with this, old man. Other people can’t do it. They have a future to think of. Me, I’ve got nothing.”’

  Flaco rolled his eyes upward and he laughed, then, a cold laugh.

  Macha is a murderer. That’s what Flaco is telling me. So that’s what it was that drew me to him. He was a killer. I thought: Flaco envies him. Because Macha is an animal with no conscience. He’s more primitive and pure.

  And then he came out with it. Just like that, no preamble: “I’m separated,” he told me. “I left my wife.” And I, like an idiot, thought he was pulling my leg, and I laughed.

  “Don’t laugh,” he reproached me. “There are two little girls and a woman who are suffering, their hearts are broken. Have some respect for that, at least.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry, Flaco, it’s just . . .”

  “They cry when I come to pick them up, they want to stay at their mother’s house . . . She’s brainwashed them,” he goes on telling me. “They used to love me so much. It’s unthinkable that they don’t . . . I only see them two hours a week, and sometimes not even that. They don’t feel like it, they say, or they have homework. They can’t forgive me. Should I go to court? She tells me: You’re the one who left home, aren’t you? My lawyer tells me that this gets fixed with money. But, where the fuck do I get the money? From a promotion; it’s the only way.”

  He sighed sorrowfully . . . Then I embraced him and cradled him in my arms. In that moment, there on the black leather sofa, I truly loved him and I thought I would live with him, and I imagined myself in his Volvo coming back from the beach at El Quisco, and then I saw myself on a mountaintop, and we were laughing and happy in that pure, cold air he loved so much. No more Saturdays and Sundays alone, I thought. We kissed softly, intensely. The tears slid down my cheeks. And the tears that I imagined welling in his eyes, if they existed, never fell.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Pancha Ortiz was putting on makeup. She barely greeted me. With the lipstick still in her hand, she pursed her lips in the mirror, spreading out the color until it was even. Her lips were much fuller and more sensuous than I had noticed before. Her black blouse, open, left bare that fissure that men like so much, and part of those insolent breasts of hers. She took a little bottle of perfume from her purse and she sprayed her neck and I watched her, turning her breasts, contemplating herself in the mirror as if she were alone in the bathroom. Alone, or seducing a man. She said good-bye to me, kissing the air by my cheek, and off she went, leaving me confused in a cloud of perfume. Only then did I realize what was causing my confusion: the perfume was Christian Dior and the bottle was the same as the ones Flaco always gave me.

  I went out, walking quickly to the darkened lot. I got there in time to see her get into her Nissan. The offices upstairs where Flaco worked
were dark. I looked for his silver Volvo, but I didn’t see it. I took a taxi and tried to follow the Nissan, but I lost it after three blocks. When I went into my apartment in the Tajamar Towers I went straight to the bathroom. There was a sharp pain gouging my insides.

  “Why are you in such a bad mood?” Flaco says the next day. “Chewing your fingernail is not an answer,” he said, with laughing eyes. A few days later, very early, I saw him kissing Pancha in his silver Volvo. They came in together and he was looking at her. I swore I would break it off with him. And I waited for him. The fucker didn’t even come to my apartment that afternoon.

  Then, without thinking about it, the next afternoon I went up to the second floor and presented myself in his office. He ushered me in with that friendly, affectionate manner of his. I sat in the chair facing his desk. As soon as I had him in front of me and felt him looking into my eyes with that faint, shy smile, I despaired. I imagined him looking at Pancha that way and it drove me crazy. Tears came to my eyes, I brought my hands to my face; I fell, tears streaming, from the chair onto the rough carpet that covered the floor of his office. I lay there face down and he came over, murmuring in my ear, telling me the same things, I was sure, that he said to Pancha. He tried to kiss me, to get me to turn my face to him, but I wouldn’t let him, I wouldn’t, not for anything.

  Suddenly I felt his strong fingers on my spine; he pressed on it and it cracked, and he pushed on it again, higher up, and it cracked again. They were the same hands, I thought once again, that could kill me with a single, silent blow. It was still a reassuring feeling. I got up and he kissed me on the mouth. I returned the kiss, but when I felt his hand moving up my thigh I pushed him away and left his office.

  He didn’t call me. I waited, though. I spent so many afternoons, and entire Saturdays and Sundays, in my apartment in case he showed up. Weeks went by.