All Men Are Liars (2 page)

She was equally rigorous with her grandson. Privations, prohibitions, and lashings with the carpet beater were alternated with rewards and affection. On one occasion, some adolescent nonsense got him locked in his room for three whole days, with nothing more than bread and water to eat or drink. Bevilacqua assured me that this was not an exaggeration: he literally got a slice of bread three times a day and a jug of tap water. There was something medieval about Señora Bevilacqua, something of the embittered, unyielding dowager, with a touch of the overseer.

And yet, in spite of Señora Bevilacqua's avowed desire that her grandson follow the family tradition, he never felt that his destiny lay among sausages and cheese. After school, before entering the shop redolent of brine, where he helped his grandmother to fish ladlefuls of olives out of the oak barrels, or to turn the handle on the ham-slicing machine, Bevilacqua used to stop in front of the bookshop (at least that's what I imagine), where the yellow volumes of the
Robin Hood
series were displayed in the window, and dream of faraway countries and extraordinary encounters. He imagined himself a Sandokan or a Phileas Fogg, but those distant lands were no farther than the Tigre Delta, just outside Buenos Aires, and his Indian princess was the pharmacist's daughter. Later he realized that he was drawn not so much by the lure of journeys and adventures, but simply by things that appear out of reach.

When did I first see him? In Madrid, in February or March of 1976, at the offices of Quita, our go-between and our nemesis.

Blanca, Blanquita, Blanquita Grenfeld. Larralde de Grenfeld. Always elegant, always bright, always on the crest of the
nouvelle vague
. Of course you know who I'm talking about! Oh, Terradillos! Fame works in mysterious ways! In Argentina, before the dictatorship, Blanquita Grenfeld was the supreme ruler in the world of culture. She was the younger daughter of the Larraldes, landowners who lost everything in a failed enterprise to raise yaks—or was it camels?—on the pampa. As dark as a
mulatta,
she was married in her teens to some German industrialist—who was considerate enough to die shortly afterward, leaving her to enjoy a widowhood that liberated her simultaneously from a groping parent and a dim-witted husband. Blanca Larralde de Grenfeld used the name of her incestuous father and the fortune of the deceased industrialist to establish her own republic of Arts and Literature. In Buenos Aires, no painting was hung, no book published, no film shown or play put on without her say-so. Everyone, from the most bureaucratic official to the most anarchic artist, knew her as “Quita.” She was present at every creation. She was also one of the first to leave. “Let's go and make culture in the motherland,” Quita said, when the military began to close down bookstores and raid theaters and galleries.

A few weeks after moving to Madrid, Quita founded the Casa Martín Fierro, on a fourth floor in the Prospe district, among bungalows and workers' houses. There, like some refined materfamilias, she played host to the fugitives, the born-again, the dispossessed, the damaged, the lost and found that the various dictatorships of Latin America had not yet contrived (and please forgive the transitive use of the verb) to “disappear.” She looked gorgeous in her suit and pearls, a leopard-skin coat thrown over her shoulders like a cape, an aristocratic down on her upper lip, and her eyes always lively behind tortoiseshell glasses. She had the right words for everyone, without that undertow of contempt that so often accompanies philanthropy. Behind the desk in the reception area, a brand-new bookcase displayed a copy of the immortal
Martín Fierro,
by Hernández, various books that had been banned by the military regime and a couple of matés which Andrea, Quita's loyal assistant, had learned to offer the guests. From that time on, no refugees arrived in Spain without stopping off to present their credentials at Quita's place.

The telephone rang one morning when I was thinking of catching up on one of those big backlogs of sleep that are the privilege of youth. It was Quita.

“Come over immediately.”

Without opening my eyes, I asked where to.

“To the Martín Fierro, of course.”

I said that I didn't understand. Quita heaved an impatient sigh. There was a newly arrived group of Argentines who needed our help. That “we,” for reasons I did not fully understand, included me. And I admit that I felt flattered. Quita was calling on me. Ergo, I existed.

She explained that one of the refugees appeared to be a writer.

“A novelist,” she added. “The surname's Bevilacqua. He's very good-looking. Do you know him?”

I said that I did not. The truth was that since I had left Buenos Aires, I wasn't very up-to-date with Argentine writing. With youthful arrogance I judged that if this Bevilacqua had published something in the last two or three years, his books must obviously be either official propaganda or pseudo-romantic pap.

“We're due a renaissance,” I added, but Quita had already hung up.

When I arrived at the Martín Fierro, Bevilacqua was installed in a tiny chair, but with all the dignity of a man seated on a throne. When he saw me, he got to his feet.

He was the saddest person I had ever seen. The others who were with him, two or three new arrivals, looked at me like dogs in a pound; by comparison, they seemed merely tired. That melancholy that afflicts most
porteños
mani fested itself physically in Bevilacqua's whole body. He was someone who suffered—that was obvious—but in such a visceral and profound way that it was impossible for him to contain the sadness: it darkened his appearance, stooped his shoulders, softened his features. It withered him to such a degree that it was difficult to gauge how old he was. If one tried to touch him, he shrank away. Through goodness knows which diplomatic stratagems, he had been pulled out of prison only two days earlier and put on a plane with hardly any luggage.

As though to justify my presence, Quita explained that I was a writer and a fellow Argentinian. For the sake of saying something, I mumbled a question about what books he had published. For the first time, Bevilacqua smiled.

“No, brother,” he answered. “It's not books I write. I used to make
fotonovelas
for a living.”

Perhaps I should explain, Terradillos, what these
fotonovelas
are, because I'm guessing that this form of literature is not popular in France. Back in the 1930s, some long-forgotten genius thought to combine the attractions of movies, comic strips, and romantic novels, thereby inventing a new hybrid genre between drama and photography. Actors were positioned as required, photographed at different angles, and then speech bubbles with the relevant dialogue were superimposed on the photographs. Bevilacqua penned the contents of those bubbles.

Quita was not to be defeated.

“That also counts as art,” she said later, when we were alone. “Don't tell me that we're only going to help people who write high literature. My conditions of acceptance are the same as those of the Real Academia: it's sufficient for him to know that there's no
h
in España. Manguel, don't be a shit. This man needs our help.”

“A new favorite,” some onlooker observed as, after wishing Bevilacqua luck and giving him my address, I said good-bye with a hug. “It's the same everywhere.”

Two days later, in the middle of the afternoon, Bevilacqua turned up at my house, shivering with cold. Thus began the first of many such afternoons.

Of course, you probably want to know all the details of Bevilacqua's early life: the ins and outs of his primary education, his sexual initiation, his first steps in politics, his imprisonment and torture. And again I must say that I am not the best person to answer these questions. Discretion, if not indifference, was our watchword during those months in which we used to see each other. I know what you're thinking: he talked and I resigned myself to listening, and you imagine that out of that farrago, I must have salvaged some dramatic scene, some crucial episode. It wasn't like that. Bevilacqua would talk about his life in an erratic way, filling an improvised ashtray with yellow cigarette butts, with no concern for the historical or chronological coherence of his tale. This was no bildungsroman he was spinning me, but something more akin to a story from one of his
fotonovelas
—predictable, melodramatic, and doomed.

Let us take, as an example, that Buenos Aires he remembered through a haze of nostalgia. Bevilacqua could not believe that I didn't miss the city—which, I believe, is better in memories than in real life. Bevilacqua, in contrast, not only missed the place in which he had lived; he missed the very map of Argentina. I mean, he missed the forests, the mountains, the great expanses of plains which he could have seen only once or twice—if that—from a train. I, in contrast, was drawn to ever-smaller space: a market square rather than the countryside; a village rather than the city. Madrid and Poitiers, as you well know, are villages with a metropolitan vocation. Bevilacqua suffered from what you French call
le mal du pays
—but I think he'd still have had it, even if it had been possible for him to return. He was missing not a place, but a moment that had passed, a geography of lost hours in streets that no longer existed, where he had lingered in the doorways of houses long since demolished, or in cafés which had some time ago exchanged their boiserie and marble for glass panels and Formica. Believe me, I understood his nostalgia—I just didn't share it.

For me, Buenos Aires was a city in which I had scarcely lived and which—even during the years that I knew it—had entered a decline. Bevilacqua, on the other hand, had fallen in love with Buenos Aires when she was still a grande dame, resplendent
in silk and high heels, perfumed and bejeweled, unaffectedly elegant and unostentatiously brilliant. But in the last few decades (this was how Bevilacqua explained recent Argentine history), a shameful illness had defiled her. She had lost her grace, her eloquence. Her new avenues and skyscrapers seemed false, like artificial limbs. Her gardens were withering; a dense fog descended on her, one that was barely pierced by the intermittent glow of orange lamplights. By comparison with this decayed Buenos Aires, the city of his childhood seemed a thousand times more beautiful and radiant.

From very early on, when he first became aware of a certain subcutaneous itch and of a particular weight in the groin, he knew that what he felt for Buenos Aires was similar to an erotic attraction. To touch the rough stone facades, the cold railings, to smell the jasmine in September and the damp pavements in March (I, too, was in paradise!) aroused him. Walking down the street where he lived or sitting on the plastic seats in the buses made him pant and sweat with desire.

“Souvenir
,
souvenir
,
que me veux-tu,”
as someone once said. I've remembered something that may satisfy your scurrilous, journalistic curiosity.

Bevilacqua first fell in love on the day of his twelfth birthday. A classmate oddly named Babar (which is why I've never forgotten him) had told him about a cinema a few blocks away from the Retiro station, wedged into the wall which separated the tracks from the Paseo Colón. The woman in the box office didn't ask if the boy with the unconvincingly deep voice was indeed eighteen, as required by the notice at the entrance. With his blood pounding in his ears, Bevilacqua penetrated the gloom and groped his way toward a seat. Incidentally, the cinema smelled of sweat and ammonia.

Bevilacqua could never remember (if indeed he ever knew) the name of the film: he thought that it was German or Swedish, and he never saw it again. The story line, so he told me, sparing no details, had something to do with a country girl who went off to the city to seek her fortune. This innocent child had a heart-shaped face and wore a tight white dress which, in the film's raunchiest scene, she tore off and flung onto a chair. Bevilacqua watched on, mesmerized, as her face filled the screen and a boy (because of course there was a boy) kissed her. With mawkish sentimentality, Bevilacqua told me that he had felt as though the lips kissing her were his own.

Gradual fade-out. The following scene showed dawn breaking over the tiled rooftops. Naked but for a pair of underpants, the boy jumped out of bed and started to fry a couple of eggs. The girl asked him sleepily if it wasn't too early to eat eggs. Bevilacqua, for whom breakfast, in the Argentine style, consisted only of coffee and toast, never forgot the answer: “I eat what I want, when I want.” “It was then,” he told me, “that I understood what that freedom was that I had dreamed about in my grandmother's shop. Freedom was fried eggs at dawn.”

I don't know if the poor man really believed in the relevance of this inane observation, or if he made it simply to relive the adventure—but it's certainly true that Bevilacqua spent a large part of his adolescence wanting to do unusual things in unpredictable places. For survival's sake, Bevilacqua meekly filled the roles required of him by convention—loyal grandson, disciplined student, restless adolescent—at the same time regarding himself as a youth far wiser than any adult authority, braver than any adventurer, and so bursting with passionate love that his imagination latched onto worldly knowledge like those sticky spider threads known in Argentina as “the devil's drool.”

The heart-shaped face of that anonymous actress pervaded his dreams. I think that he must have superimposed her face onto every other woman's, even years after that first encounter. In his tedious descriptions her features changed, often depending on the context, so that sometimes the hair was black and silky like Loredana's, sometimes the eyes were smaller and shining like Graciela's, sometimes the whole face became translucent and hazy, as though it belonged to a woman in his memory who had almost vanished. He searched for that face throughout his adolescence. Once he thought he spotted it in one of those mildly pornographic magazines,
Rico Tipo,
or
Tutti Frutti,
which tend to pile up in the barbershops. After that, he started looking for her among the newspaper sellers of the Puente Saavedra, beneath the pillars of the Pan-American Highway. He never found her again.