The Neruda Case by Roberto Ampuero Page A

where he danced cumbias and boleros with a young woman who had black curly hair, eyes the color of olives, and
café con leche
skin, and wore an amaranth-colored blouse, baring large, straight teeth when she smiled. He returned home at dawn, having drunkpisco sours with the girl at a restaurant called Jota Cruz, which was crammed with customers eating
chorrillana
over french fries, drinking beer and wine, and belting out “Bandera Rossa” and “La Internacional.”
    He was reading Maigret alone in his bedroom when the phone rang.
    “Don’t ask where I’m calling from,” his wife said in a tone that sounded as if she were calling from another world. “This was only a practice coup, a test run. Now they know the people don’t have weapons with which to defend themselves. They’ve got us now. Don’t tell me you were one of those fools who went out to celebrate?”

12
    T he Mexico City sky was dense and gray, like the warships docked at the Valparaíso port, Cayetano Brulé thought. He rode in the backseat of a green taxi known as a “crocodile,” which was taking him from the airport to his hotel in Zona Rosa. The Chrysler made its way slowly through traffic thick with buses, trucks, taxis, motorcycles, and the shouting street vendors flooding the city’s central arteries, hawking needles, combs, drinks, and newspapers. New buildings of concrete and glass replaced mansions with pillars, balconies, and gardens, changing the character of the streets. Enormous billboards hid undeveloped areas studded with shabby hovels, while numerous Cadillacs with chrome accents and uniformed chauffeurs revealed the fortunes being made in Mexico. An enormous number of restaurants, with tables out on the sidewalk, for the benefit of the cheerful, boisterous crowds enjoying the benign climate of the capital, infected the city with an optimism born of the belief that the path of progress had been found. Cayetano sadly thought of the city of Santiago, which at this very moment was submerged in cold and darkness, the clamor of street chaos, and the threat of tear gas.
    He still didn’t understand the poet’s need for discretion in searching for the man who could save his life. For a person who feltdeath close at hand, his reaction seemed inexplicable. Was it true that he was keeping his illness secret to keep from feeding the right’s campaign against Allende? So many unanswered questions, he thought as he rolled down the window, inhaled the street’s smell of gasoline and tar, and listened to the murmur of the motor and the entreaties of women running alongside the taxis, selling matches and candles. In all honesty, Neruda was an icon of the global left as an acclaimed poet, communist activist, and friend of Allende’s. Was that why, despite the fact that Bracamonte was his last hope, he wouldn’t look for him by crying out his name to the four winds?
    Cayetano considered what he’d left behind: a sad, divided Chile, where food was scarce and uncertainty ruled; a Valparaíso lost every morning in a thick fog that erased outlines, softened echoes, and wrapped its inhabitants in sorrow. Though stifled, Colonel Souper’s rebellion had had disastrous consequences for the government. A few days earlier, the wives of several generals had thrown corn at Prats at a public event and called him a faggot for failing to oppose communism. Discouraged by the campaign and the pressure, Prats had submitted his resignation to the president. Allende replaced him with a general who had little talent and poor oratory skills, a vulgar and affected man who, according to the constant commentaries of Bar Inglés’s patrons, had at least one thing going for him: He respected the constitution to the letter. His name was Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.
    What was the poet doing now? Cayetano Brulé wondered as he exited the taxi at the Savoy, in a beautiful neighborhood of two-story houses and tree-lined streets studded with restaurants, bars, cafés,