The Neruda Case by Roberto Ampuero Page B

bookstores, and galleries. At this very moment, he might be working on his memoirs or perhaps composing new poems, or running his hands across his collection of conches, immersed in his amphibian calm. After each session at Van Buren, he rested in bed for hours, quiet, without a spark in his eyes, dozing, trusting that the young Cuban would succeed in finding Bracamonte. Matilde probably came throughperiodically to tidy the books, costumes, furniture, and figurines brought all the way from France. The effort and detailed attention with which his wife organized these objects made the poet suspicious.
    “I think that, more than organizing the things we’ve brought back to Chile, she’s doing it for the museum they want to open after I die,” he’d confided in the living room of La Sebastiana, just before Cayetano’s departure.
    “Your room, Mr. Brulé. Fourth floor,” the receptionist told him as a bellhop took his suitcase.
    The bed frame groaned pitifully when he sat down on it. He looked up Ángel Bracamonte in the phone book, and as he’d imagined, he found a long list of entries with that last name, but no Ángel. He wasn’t daunted. He acted as though he were Maigret: The next day he’d visit the places where he could seek facts for his investigation: the Medical Association and the
Excelsior
newspaper.
    It didn’t take long to make both appointments by phone, one with the public relations representative for the Medical Association, and the other with a manager at the paper. In both cases he introduced himself as a freelance journalist who wrote articles for the Chilean leftist magazine
Hoy
. And in both places they promised to welcome him with open arms. Salvador Allende and his government inspired sympathy in Mexico, where he was seen as a sign of hope on a continent riddled with corrupt politicians.
    Then he called Laura Aréstegui in Valparaíso, promised to look for the books she’d requested, and assured her that Mexico City filled him with vitality and optimism.
    “It won’t be hard to reconstruct his time there,” she said. She was in her office, trying to optimize the distribution of bread, meat, and oil in the port city’s hills. This, when vegetables and eggs were also disappearing, not to mention chickens. “Neruda was friends there with the muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, and in the 1940s he traveled to Cuba.”
    “To Cuba? Long before the revolution?”
    “Even long before the
Granma
, the yacht Castro bought in Mexico to transport his tiny army to Cuba, set sail toward the island with its eighty-two voyagers, in 1956.”
    “In that case, my girl, the poet has always had a tremendous nose for politics.”
    “Don’t kid yourself. There’s a detail nobody wants to remember today.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “In the forties, he admired Batista. In Havana he delivered an apologia in his honor, calling him the ‘sublime son of Cuba.’ At that time, Batista governed with the support of Cuban communists and the Soviet Union.”
    “Just a moment. Are we talking about Batista, Fulgencio Batista, the tyrant?” he asked, alarmed.
    “One and the same. I guess that’s why Fidel and Neruda can’t stand each other. As the saying goes, they couldn’t even swallow each other with codfish oil.”

13
    C ayetano ate coffee, tortillas, scrambled eggs, and beans for breakfast in his hotel room as he perused the newspaper. Later that morning, at around nine o’clock, he took a taxi to the Museum of Anthropology, following the express instructions of the poet, who had told him it was a must-see. The previous afternoon, the public relations representative at the Medical Association had confessed that she’d never heard of any Dr. Ángel Bracamonte, but that she was more than happy to assist Cayetano, and if he returned to her office the following afternoon, she would search the files for any more information. On his trip to Chapultepec Forest, he racked his brains but