All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel Page A

One, small and bald, belonged to the nightwatchman. The other introduced itself as Inspector Mendieta, from the Investigation Squad. Apologizing for the fact that I was still in pajamas, I invited the inspector in, then closed the door in the nightwatchman’s face.
    You have good eyesight, Terradillos, and I bet you can’t imagine how awkward it is to talk to someone whose features are a blur. My discomfort was exacerbated by the paradoxical character of Inspector Mendieta. Even without glasses, I could tell that he was both cordial and menacing, paunchy and mustachioed, like a Mexican Father Christmas. He asked me to sit down as though we were in his house, not mine.
    In a way I was almost disappointed that he didn’t treat me more severely. He asked a few obvious questions (why Bevilacqua had been in my house, how long we had known each other, what his state of mind had been when I left him, if anything unusual had happened in the last days of his life), and he wondered if I would be staying in Madrid in the following weeks. Then he took a look around the flat, pausing for several minutes on the balcony without saying anything. He sat down again.
    â€œThe rail is very low, isn’t it?” he suddenly said.
    â€œNot just mine,” I protested. “All the balconies are the same. It’s part of the design. Art Nouveau,” I explained. My fuzzy vision was really annoying me, and when I noticed how bothered I was, it made me feel even more bothered. I began to talk about Madrid’s Art Nouveau, comparing it to Barcelona’s. Apparently not listening, Mendieta got to his feet and went back out to the balcony. I stopped talking. When we said good-bye, I felt accused, without knowing why.
    I said before, Terradillos, that the death of someone close has something unreal about it. That’s true, but there’s a solidity and a substance to it as well. Those deaths that take place out there in the world, those hundreds of thousands of deaths that swamp us every day—they’re insubstantial in their vast anonymity. That of a friend, on the other hand, wrenches from our very core something that belongs to us, and to which we belong. I think I’ve been clear on this point: I didn’t love Bevilacqua. And yet, the fact that he had died there, in my house, under my momentarily absent nose, hurt like a pulled tooth, like a cut finger. Something was missing, now, from my life’s routine, something regular, albeit a bit insipid, a bit boring and annoying: the tall, thin, pale, and tormented shadow of Alejandro Bevilacqua.
    The following weeks were difficult for me. I wrote a few articles for newspapers, continued to read dry research documents for my book, visited the welcoming reading room at the National Library—but in all these things I felt now like a man who’s lost a limb or an eye. Unconsciously, I was always waiting for the door to open and for that very familiar voice to start recounting some tedious episode from his life.
    Bevilacqua was buried in the Almudena Cemetery, as inappropriate a choice as one can imagine: its ancient grandiosity didn’t suit his character. Have you ever been there? It’s all stone angels and broken urns, a phony decadence standing in for the all-too-real decay of the flesh. “I have walked on the Andes”—that should have been his epitaph. But only his name and dates are there.
    Of course it was Urquieta’s decision that his final resting place should be the Almudena. Beneath a few conventional cypresses, the editor repeated (with some respectful modifications) the speech he had made at the book launch. Flesh remains, the word takes flight. If you were looking for an example on this earth of
sic transit,
Bevilacqua’s funeral would have provided an unforgettable one.
    Now that I think of it, the ceremony at the Almudena was like a grotesque parody of that other one, a few days earlier, at the Antonio Machado