The Neruda Case Read Free

the beginning it had been hard for him to adapt to the severity of Chileans and the rigorous climate of its mountainous land, now the island of Cuba, its people, and its weather were more of a pale and distant evocation, because his new homeland, with all its light and shadows, had ended up conquering him, despite the fact that it was neither green nor an island, unless, perhaps, it was, just in a different way.
    “Have you decided what to eat?” the goth asked as she served his coffee. She had translucent arms, riddled with thick blue veins.
    “A Barros Luco with extra avocado,” he said, and tried to imagine what it would be like to glide his fingertip along those blue lines until he reached her perfumed, hidden slopes.
    And it was after he had sweetened his drink and tasted it that his gaze fell upon the back of the menu, with its photo of Pablo Neruda on a sofa in his Valparaíso home. He felt his heart freeze, sipping espresso slowly until the lenses of his glasses steamed up, and smiled faintly. It suddenly seemed that the palms, the crosses of the mausoleums on the summit, and even Neptune himself had begun to vibrate like mirages in the desert. His memory transported him to thatwinter morning in 1973 when he began his first investigation, which he never disclosed to anyone, as it was the most closely guarded secret of his life, the secret he’d still carry as they took him up the hill, feet first, to that cemetery where the dead, on warm summer nights, swung their hips joyfully to the rhythm of tangos, cumbias, and boleros, longing for the next earthquake to hurl them back down to the picturesque and winding streets of Valparaíso.
    He closed his eyes and felt his surroundings begin to fade away: the growling of engines, the songs of blind men accompanied by accordions and player pianos, even the shouts of grocers selling herbs, avocados, and lottery tickets with guaranteed prizes, and suddenly there appeared before him, as if by some magic trick and with prodigious clarity, the coarse, rustic texture of the wooden door on Collado Way.

2
    T he door was made of knotted wood. It didn’t open. He stroked the old bronze knocker, put his hands in the pockets of his fleece jacket, and told himself that all he could do now was wait. He exhaled wafts of white breath into the overcast winter morning and thought, amused, that it looked as if he were smoking, even though, in this city, there were no more matches or cigarettes.
    He had just whiled away an hour at Alí Babá, a soda fountain around the corner, on Alemania Avenue, across from the Mauri Theater. There, he’d read Omar Saavedra Santis’s column in
El Popular
and Enrique Lira Massi’s in
Puro Chile
while Hadad the Turk made him coffee and a gyro and cursed the food shortages, the queues, and the disorder on the streets, terrified that political friction would tear the country apart and throw him in the garbage can. When Cayetano looked at his watch again, it was past ten o’clock. Perhaps he hasn’t yet returned from the capital, he thought, glancing at the bay, half covered in mist.
    He had met the man he was about to see a few days earlier, during a party serving
curanto a la olla
, a seafood specialty from the southern island of Chiloé, in the home of the mayor of Valparaíso. His wife had dragged him to the party so that he could rub elbows withpoliticians and progressive intellectuals from the region. According to Ángela, he should know Congressmen Guastavino and Andrade, the singers Payo Grondona and Gato Alquinta, the painter Carlos Hermosilla, and bohemian poets from the port, such as Sarita Vial or Ennio Moltedo, people who were innovative, creative, and committed to the process. Well connected as she was, Ángela refused to give up on her efforts to help him find work in those turbulent times, hard as it was for a Caribbean such as himself, who’d been in Chile for only two years. But beneath those almost maternal efforts, Cayetano sensed