La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  Her eyes full of excitement, Anita told me about Leila, her friend from school, whose mother had a room full of doors and those doors were closets where she kept all her clothes. It was one of those languid Saturdays during that time of my life. Anita, if she was with me, could turn those days into something wonderful or disastrous. Because if she had a tantrum for some reason, there was nothing I could do except bring her back to my mother’s house.

  Leila’s mother, she told me that day, is the Moroccan ambassador. And Leila, when her mother isn’t home, takes some little keys out from where she hides them among her gloves, and with those little keys she opens the safe. And the safe is in another closet, the shoe closet. Leila’s mother has thousands of shoes, and she keeps them in their boxes and behind the boxes is the safe. Anita helped her move the shoeboxes very carefully. Leila opened the safe and took out mountains of rings, necklaces, bracelets, and earrings that belonged to her mother. “It’s like a princess’s treasure,” she says smiling, her face radiant with happiness.

  “Like a chest in Ali Baba’s cave,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “And Leila,” she says, “puts them on and looks at herself in the mirror.” And with her hands she draws pictures in the air of those jewels that shone on her friend’s hands, her neck, her ears. “She looks like a real live princess, Mama!” Sometimes, she let Anita wear a pearl necklace.

  “Mama,” she said, filled with enthusiasm. “When are you going to show me your rings and earrings and bracelets?” I looked at her, surprised. “Because you have all those things hidden away, too. And I know where.” She ran to my room, opened the closet, and showed me the little safe built into the wall. “Come on, open it, Mama. I want to see your rings and bracelets.” I put my hands on her shoulders. I thought about the darkness of my CZ at rest. As always, minutes before Anita arrived, I had put it in there with my documents from Central.

  “No,” I told her. “I don’t have jewels, Anita.”

  “But Mama, what do you keep in there, then?”

  “Letters,” I told her. “Documents.”

  “Love letters, Mama? Letters my father wrote to you?” And Anita looked at me with rounded eyes. “Let me see them, Mama. Mama . . . Let me see what my dad’s handwriting looked like.”

  “Another time, Anita.”

  “Mama, please!” I closed the closet door.

  The night when Flaco finally came, without warning as always, I had my plan ready and decided on: I would flirt like a crazy person and then, nothing. So he’d be left high and dry, so he’d be left longing for me. He brought a bottle of Absolut vodka and a little jar of Iranian beluga caviar. He was one of those who said the Russians couldn’t even get vodka right; only guns. Hence the Absolut. We sat down, and by the second Swedish vodka we were kissing and kissing, and he was frantically pulling off my shirt and jeans and everything else. I couldn’t bear the idea that Pancha had slept with him. How was it possible, when I was so much better than her?

  I was lying on the sofa, on my back. He knelt down in front of me. He placed me there, and I knew what for. And I let him do it. And I opened myself and turned my hips in search of his thirsty tongue. And he sunk his fingers in. And I touched my breasts. And he returned with an insatiable tongue. I brought my hands down. And suddenly the rhythm of my body seized hold of me, it broke away from my control and I came, I came suddenly and completely. Afterward I started to cry.

  He doesn’t understand. He wants me to stop crying. Why? Why doesn’t he let me cry if I want to cry? He gets mad. He won’t leave me alone. There’s nothing to explain. I give up. I say to him: “Why do you have this power over me? You do something like that to me, and I come like an idiot. That power I’ve given you is humiliating.” He starts to laugh, and he pulls my hair away from my face.

  “You’re pretty,” he tells me, after inspecting me with his playful, tender, ironic gaze. That’s it: You’re pretty. That damned son of a bitch knows that when he gives me that look, I melt.

  “I know,” I tell him. “I’m going to find another man who will make me forget about you.”

  He says: “You’ll wish the sex was as good with him as it is with me.”

  I tell him: “I’m the one who knows how to fuck, I’ll teach him everything.” He laughs. “Also, as you know, he’ll be rich,” I tell him. “He’ll have tons of cash.” He laughs less loudly, now. I say: “There comes a time when a man’s money becomes almost the only thing that matters to a woman.” He’s not laughing anymore.

  FORTY-NINE

  A week later Flaco Artaza had already been promoted. The positive evaluation after the “elimination”—the term they used—of the Spartan and Max got him that. Two very hard blows for Red Ax. They took him out of Central and installed him in Military Intelligence. It was what he wanted. Flaco left Central behind and he vanished from my life without even saying good-bye. Do I need to tell you how I felt?

  But after about four months he called and invited me to lunch. I got into my red Nissan in the parking lot, and when I started it up, I saw . . . What? But, it’s Macha! He was a few yards away from me walking with his slight limp, without his Ray Bans and escorted by six armed men. Two of them carried long guns. They stopped next to a black Chevrolet four-door with tinted windows that I’d never seen in the parking lot before.

  The one in front went over to Macha and spoke to him. He was a dark, thick guy with a short moustache. I had my windows rolled up so I couldn’t hear, but I saw. What I mean is, I saw Macha put his hand behind him, to his belt under his dark leather jacket. I watched with my own eyes as he handed over his CZ. He did it without any ceremony, like a person returning the keys to a car. Then I saw how he let himself be cuffed, his hands tamely behind him, putting up no resistance. The black Chevrolet with tinted windows sped off with him in it, followed by a Peugeot fake taxi.

  Flaco took me that day to eat oysters at Azócar. I arrived still trembling a bit from what I had just seen, but I didn’t want to mention it to him. We laughed, we had a good time in that old Chilean mansion illuminated by a skylight above us. The oysters were marvelous. When, after several glasses of sauvignon blanc, I dared to tell him what I had seen, how they’d taken Macha away in handcuffs, he wrinkled his forehead and assured me that he wasn’t up-to-date on counterintelligence matters, that his new job had to do with strictly military intelligence in neighboring countries; countries to the north, he added with a smile, to make it very clear to me. And he changed the subject.

  We kissed in his Volvo, and he invited me on a trip, a short and intense trip, he said, just three or four days in the pure mountain air. He told me about a unique place in the mountains close to Torres del Paine, full of stalactites; a place no one has photographed yet, he told me, ice sculptures carved by the wind. I ached to go. Even so, I told him no. Looking at me with sad, languid eyes, he told me that I was very pretty, that we deserved a real good-bye. I told him that too much time had passed for me to care about being pretty, that when I was younger, sure, I would have been grateful for the flattery. Lies. I didn’t want to suffer, I told him, I begged him. That trip, when it ended, would leave me worse off than before. And that was true. He insisted, but I didn’t give in.

  He went with me to my apartment. I didn’t invite him in. The slam of the door when it closed. I jumped. As if an enormous window had shattered. I closed my eyes. When I heard his footsteps moving away down the hall, I burst out crying. For months and months I waited for his call. It never came.

  FIFTY

  I’m feeling tired . . . You know, during that time it never even crossed my mind that my life would end like this, alone in a Swedish home, or even abroad . . . One of my students helped me out of pure kindness. There are good people out there, too. She got in touch with Teruca’s mother and gave her my message: I was being followed and had decided to go into exile for safety reasons. It wasn’t the bravest thing to do, but what the hell, the decision was made. She would pass along the information to her daughter Ter
uca, who would communicate it to my brothers and sisters, the ones who were left, and so a curtain of smoke would extend over me. And while that was happening in Chile, I was on a plane flying out of there.

  As soon as I got to Stockholm, I got a job at Berlitz. Every morning I dropped my daughter off at school, took the subway, got off at the Gamla Stan stop, emerged onto Gamla Brogatan, and in a few steps I reached number 29. That was my routine for years. I taught French to advanced students and studied Swedish on a grant. They helped me a lot here. It’s not true that the Swedish are cold. I’m thinking of my friend Agda Lindstrom, who took us into her house for our entire first month here. She was a lawyer. She was killed. Car accident, a year and a half after I arrived. Horrible. She was a thin woman, not very tall, with very white skin, dark brown hair, and gray eyes. She was an older sister to me. Frank, direct, serious, at first she seemed a little distant to me, perhaps a bit hard. But after a few days, I discovered a person of exceptional generosity and gentleness. She knew only as much about me as I wanted her to. She introduced me to her friends, all of them professionals. I talked to them in French. After two years, I had learned Swedish. Of course, I’ll never have Anita’s accent.

  I remember my first walk along the docks. Agda wanted to come with me, but I wanted to go alone: the calm of that ocean, the clearness of the air, the sharp colors, the rolling ships. I walked to the bridge that crosses to Skeppsholmen and the beauty stopped me short. My nose touched the uncertainty of my future, as if uncertainty were a wind carrying the scent of the sea and pushing me onward. I wanted to keep that island for later. I saw a mother running a brush through her daughter’s hair. With what care, with what sensitive slowness, what infinite love. And the little girl’s long, blond, almost white hair takes on life and brilliance. Did my mother ever brush my hair like that?

  I arrived in September, and the weather was often good. At lunch-time I took my sandwich to Kungsträdgården Square, and the yellow leaves from the oaks softly grazed my hair or my shoulders as they fell. I picked them up from the grass and they were damp, and I sat looking at their veins, persisting still.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Roberto was six years younger than me. A tall, handsome Brazilian. We met in the Berlitz cafeteria. It turned out he was friends with Agda and that made things easier. You know, I actually can’t remember when we started dating. How odd. That says something. I remember his first gift to me: an amber perfume. Of course, I’d already told him about how that mysterious substance had fascinated me since I was a little girl and how it was linked in my imagination to the Vikings and the Baltic Sea. Later, he would give me a beautiful necklace with stones that shone with an internal light. Roberto . . . with his Portuguese-accented Spanish, so full of tender eñes, such soft, kind sounds.

  I brought him to the Kungsträdgården and talked to him about the yellow oak leaves that kept me company during the solitary lunches of my first weeks, and how they healed me when, as they fell, they brushed against me for a moment. Now those leaves were light, luminous green, and in the grass wild blue and white anemones were growing. His voice warmed and protected me. What more could I want than to love him and for him to love me? We liked to walk, to lose ourselves in the streets, talking and laughing. I like men with a sense of humor. I think it’s more important than looks, you know? When you have a man you can laugh with, the doors open by themselves.

  And with Roberto I crossed over the Skeppsholmen Bridge for the first time, clattering over its wooden slats. That’s where we first kissed. We were walking along, our arms around each other, toward the Moderna Museet. Roberto was talking to me, and he would suddenly interrupt himself to kiss me. He was telling me about what we were going to see, about the brilliance of the Brillo Boxes by Warhol and about the incredible power of the color orange in his electric chair; no one, he said, before Warhol had ever seen an orange like that, because the chair’s mossy green made it into the orangest of all oranges; and about the feeling of movement in the face of Picasso’s La Femme à la collerette bleue, about his drawings of birds—a running ostrich, a truly chickenlike chicken, a hawkish hawk, an unforgettable dove in flight—and about Rauschenberg’s embalmed goat encircled by a tire, its look of primitive masculinity broken by civilization, the symbol of sexuality and tragedy, of Dionysus, god of abandon, transformed by the tire into a victim, the sense of unease conveyed by its suppressed instincts and the nostalgia of its paint-spattered head. We took a long time, because he would be in the middle of telling me about Picasso’s unforgettable dove in flight or the tragedy of Rauschenberg’s billy goat in modernity, and we would stop again and again to kiss with Dionysian passion. When we finally got to the museum it was already closed. We made do with more kisses, running and embracing and running again among the happy, colored sculptures, those round, restless, powerful women by Niki de Saint Phalle. I think they’ve removed them now. Someone told me that. I hope it’s not true.

  For months, we devoted a weekend each to the archipelago’s islands. It was a wonderful period, that time with Roberto. He took me dancing, and I’ve never seen anyone dance like him. He danced to every rhythm with a spontaneous joy, graceful and contagious, that always made me want to dance with him. He danced standing up sometimes, almost without moving; he danced sitting down, moving only his head and shoulders. But the fact that he was younger than me made me nervous. Of course, he couldn’t understand my past. I couldn’t either, to tell the truth. He was a man with taut skin, mulatto. He loved me.

  FIFTY-TWO

  There were plenty of exiled Latin Americans in Stockholm, all victims of the horror. I made friends with some of them. Mireya, a survivor of the Tupas’s struggle in Uruguay; Claudia, whose husband had been taken prisoner and never heard from again; and María Verónica. All three of them had been taken prisoner and gone through hell. We gave a wide berth to that subject. Instead we talked about our children, our latest pap tests, and Mireya talked about her menopause, which had started recently. The rest of us listened to her and tried to mask our dread. And, of course, we discussed politics. One approach, we said, was to join in the ecumenism of the human rights movement. The battle of stamped papers, of lawyers and their endless court cases.

  “What other weapon do we have besides moral denunciation?” María Verónica said. And, turning red from passion mixed with a half-ashamed laughter that was very particular to her: “We were going to start the revolution in the only way possible: with blood and firing squads. You all, military bastards, got ahead of us and screwed us over. Now you have to pay. Because the blood you spilled, your cruelty, there’s no pardon for that.”

  And Claudia, interrupting her laughter and looking at her seriously: “But no, it’s not like that. We would never have done to them what they did to us. Anyway, for me it’s not just about a weapon, it’s about something higher: truth, justice.”

  Mireya objected, folding her hands together: “The price is to break with Che’s example. His sacrifice doesn’t die. Neither does Santucho’s, Inti Peredo’s, Miguel Enríquez’s, so many others . . .”

  And Claudia, frowning: “I don’t think all that pain has made the poor any less poor. It hurts me, but the truth is I can’t believe it anymore.”

  And Mireya: “For shit’s sake! His gesture lives on; it lives on because of its moral generosity.”

  And Mario, a history professor who had been beaten to a pulp in ESMA: “Vos, Claudia, you want us to subscribe to the cause of universal and ahistorical human rights, no? And for real, not as a tactical position. Great! Who am I to argue . . . The problem is, you see, they are situated beyond the class struggle, in a metaphysical beyond. It’s idealistic claptrap, my love . . .” And he put his hand to his black beard sprinkled with white. “Look, the first case of interrogation under threat that’s recorded in literature is in Homer, in the Iliad itself. Don’t believe me? It’s a Trojan spy named Dolon. Ulysses and Diomedes capture him. Once Dolon has talked and is begging for mercy, Diomedes breaks his promise and t
hwack! Dolon’s head rolled in the dust as he was still speaking, says Homer. That mother-fucker, man, that’s how power is, it’s ruthless.”

  Still, Mario’s wasn’t the tendency that prevailed among us, but rather Claudia’s more peaceful leanings. The truth is I listened to those conversations with very little interest. I was in love, and my love filled my days and nights.

  News started to reach us about the demonstrations at Saint Nicholas Church in Leipzig, Mondays at five in the evening, processions of people with candles and banners: Ohne Gewalt, No Violence. Some of them dared to cross over from Germany into Hungary. No one shot at them. Then many more crossed over. Soon afterward, the Berlin Wall crumbled; I watched on TV as they pulled down a statue of Lenin. It collapsed like a big sandcastle—a grand castle that, like Kafka’s, we never managed to reach. The truth is, we knew little about it. The world I’d been born into and grown up in just disappeared, that Cold War that divided Berlin in two and the planet in two, that damned war of empires that reached all the way to the ass of the world, all the way to Chile, and infected us and wounded us to the core. For someone like me, that conflict and that war was the world, not just one among many possible worlds, not one that could eventually disappear and be replaced by another, with other conflicts and other wars. It’s hard to understand what that meant for people like me. It’s incomprehensible. Everything I’m telling you is incomprehensible. I’m telling you about a way of life that is gone. I’m talking to you from a junkyard of broken, illusory, lost ideals.

  You know what? All of us, on both sides, lived inside a language that’s been forgotten now. The inscriptions are still there, but now no one knows how to read them. The truth is, those of us who remain from that time don’t know how to recognize ourselves anymore. Though we claim otherwise . . . People like me don’t exist anymore. Do I believe that? Am I contradicting myself? There will always be young people like the ones we were. Maybe. There will always be those who fight for equality. Yes. And against the Great Whore. Certainly. There will always be lives that death will transform into symbols of hope for humankind.