All Men Are Liars (3 page)

You'll be wondering how I manage (in spite of reservations) to reproduce these conversations. I confess that during my time in Madrid, when I was not yet fat and my beard not yet white, it did cross my mind to write a novel. The thought of adding my own volume to the universal library was wickedly tempting—as it would be for any other person with a love of books. I had in mind a character, an artist, whose whole life would founder because of one lie. The novel would be set in Buenos Aires and—since I trust my memory more than my imagination—I told myself that these confidences of Bevilacqua's would come in useful for the creation of my fictional protagonist. Very soon, however, I realized that Bevilacqua's memories lacked passion and color and, almost without thinking, I began to add to his stories a little fantasy and humor.

As I've said before, Bevilacqua was a stickler for details—which, as you know very well, is a way of avoiding emotion. He protected his secrets by wallowing in minutiae. Between one cigarette and the next, he would get to his feet to show me how the characters involved had behaved, using his saffron-colored fingers to reenact their gestures; he imitated their voices and gave me lists of names, dates, places. Such was his obsession with accuracy and his horror of getting things wrong that Bevilacqua gave the impression of reinventing his past, as though to convince me of its existence.

I don't know if I'm making myself clear, dear Terradillos. Nobody has a clear memory of events that happened years ago, unless he has had them photographed and archived for the purpose of reproducing them later. Apparently Balzac did that: he created faces for his characters, tried them out in front of the mirror, then sat down to describe them. It was the same for Bevilacqua. His descriptions of the people in his past were so sharp that I felt I had seen with my own eyes (for example) the little Lennon glasses that Babar wore, his military waistcoats, and his contagious smile. When Bevilacqua was reminiscing, I kept quiet, not wanting to encourage him. But after he had gone, I was left with the feeling of having taken part in some sort of retrospective performance.

Bevilacqua admired people for whom the world was based on solid facts, on figures and documents. He did not believe in invention. He had discovered his mistrust in appearances very early on. I can put a date on it for you: it was a Sunday in September, after the inevitable Mass. Walking along behind his grandmother, Bevilacqua saw a scruffy old man standing beneath a jacaranda tree on the street corner. In his sermon on charity, the priest had described the archetypal beggar to whom Saint Martin of Tours gave half his cloak on a winter afternoon; this old man's bushy mustache and threadbare sleeves matched the description of the beggar in the sermon. Bevilacqua saw this apparition as proof of the power of reality, which had come to give substance to the priest's words. His response to that power was to take out a few coins from his pocket and place them in the shriveled hand. The old man looked at the coins, looked at his benefactor, and burst out laughing. Bevilacqua mumbled an explanation. Still laughing, the old man apologized, thanked him for the gesture, and returned the coins.

For a few days afterward, Bevilacqua looked for the old man he had seen on the corner of the street. Then, one afternoon, returning from school, he saw him standing, as before, beneath the same tree. The old man motioned for him to come forward. Bevilacqua obeyed, feeling a little nervous. Now that he saw him again, he was not too sure what to say. It was the old man who spoke first.

“You're wondering what I'm doing standing here on my own, looking like this, if I'm not a beggar, aren't you? You imagine that beggars look like this. You see me and say to yourself, ‘That's a beggar
.
' But you shouldn't trust appearances, boy. Do you like puppets?”

Bevilacqua had seen a puppet show only once in his life, at a boring birthday party. Curiosity and surprise prompted him to say that he did.

“Follow me,” said the apocryphal beggar, and taking the boy by his arm, he led him toward the Barrancas district. They stopped in front of a decrepit-looking house with large, low windows.

I'll paint the scene for you.

Bevilacqua had recently entered adolescence. Far from mistrusting the human libido, the interest which he was capable of provoking in adults intrigued him. That second glance in the bus; that silent sizing up, seeking signs of mutual interest in the street; that knee moving closer in the dark-ness of a cinema—Bevilacqua took them as a compliment, as welcoming gestures on the threshold of adulthood. I'm not saying that the old man was a pervert, nor that Bevilacqua had a taste for those pleasures so well described in Greek literature. But something that he had not noticed before now removed his fear, prompting him to carry on, to go with the old man and slip into the rooms of an unknown house.

Slip
is perhaps not the right word, since it suggests a progress which meets no resistance. The rooms of this house were obstacles in themselves, each one stuffed with all kinds of objects: wardrobes, shelves crammed with books, armchairs, desks and bedside tables, statues that looked as though they were made of stone and turned out to be papier-mâché, piles of newspapers tied together with twine, laundry baskets, unidentifiable packages—and on top of every object, protruding from every conceivable gap, there were puppets of every style and size. Arms, legs, daubed faces with glass eyes and colorful wigs peeped coyly out from behind the furniture or sprawled obscenely on the boxes, collectively evoking an orgy or a battlefield. For a few seconds, Bevilacqua had the impression of having entered an ogre's cave, filled with the corpses of dwarves.

The old man picked up a Roman soldier from a threadbare chair and offered the seat to Bevilacqua, then sat down opposite him, on a large painted chest. Apparently the old man (whose name, by the way, was Spengler) then launched into a long and seductive paean to the art of puppetry, in which creatures made of wood and felt enacted before an audience a more solid reality than that of our own illusory world. Spengler said that he took his theater to schools and parks, factories and prisons, with the aim of telling what he called “truthful lies.” “I am a missionary from the world of storytelling,” he told Bevilacqua. And giving the boy a little slap on the thigh (Bevilacqua would have judged it innocent, but I'm not so sure), he began pulling on different strings, leaping over the furniture, and making mysterious noises.

As you can imagine, Bevilacqua was fascinated by all those tiny arms and bodies, noses and eyes. At twelve or thirteen, we do not want anything to be strange, and yet strange things hold an irresistible attraction for us. They are appealing and terrifying at the same time. Bevilacqua was torn between going and staying. Just then, a girl—a woman, almost—came into the room and sat down at one of those cluttered tables to mend some of the puppets. Later Bevilacqua learned that her name was Loredana.

Bevilacqua began to visit Don Spengler at all times of the day: as the years passed, he never lost that disagreeable habit of thinking that other people should tailor their day around his. He went to see him before school or in the evening, when Señora Bevilacqua was busy at La Bergamota. I imagine that the old man must have felt flattered: Bevilacqua was already blessed, it seems, with that seductive expression bestowed on him by hooded eyes, pronounced eyebrows, and black irises. Spengler was not, however, the one he came to see, much though he had grown fond of the mustachioed old man. He came looking for Loredana, who barely even spoke to him as she bent over her mending, in a low-cut top, crossing her legs in such a way as to reveal one thigh, as shiny as an apple. He would find Spengler sleeping in an armchair with a book, or making his marionettes dance frenetically on an improvised dais, or staring out of the window, lost in thought, or painting, with brisk brushstrokes, a face or some scenery. Don Spengler seemed to move from an almost catatonic state to one of febrile activity, with no intermediate stages, and Bevilacqua used to make bets with himself about how he would find the old man on a given morning or afternoon.

Loredana was not always at home, but the mere fact of knowing that she had been there a few hours earlier or that she would be coming later—when he would already have gone—filled Bevilacqua at once with a sensation of anguish and dreaminess. When he did see her, he felt that Loredana handled the soldiers and princesses with the skill of a goddess. On the lips of Bevilacqua, that word was no mere hyperbole.

Now, if it had been up to me to invent a life for Bevilacqua, I would have gone about it differently. Knowing how he was when he arrived in Spain—knowing, above all, about his tragic end and the terrible events that drove him to it—I would have furnished him with a more passionate childhood: skirmishes with the underworld, affairs with older women, some petty criminality which would later, toward the end of his adolescence, evolve into revolutionary action. Because, the way he himself told it, violence, frenzied love, politics (the kind which landed him in prison) played no more than chance roles in his life, were nothing but accidents of fate. Bevilacqua was cut out for observation, contemplation, like that traveler of Baudelaire's who cares about nobody—neither family nor friends—but only for the clouds:
les merveilleux nuages
.

It's my belief, Terradillos, that this contemplative vocation fostered his talent as a storyteller, for detailing trivialities with a pornographer's gusto. For example, Spengler only mattered as a preamble to Loredana, yet Bevilacqua claimed to remember the old man's entire life story.

It seems that Spengler had been born in Stuttgart, not far from the house of the philosopher Hegel (who had even exchanged greetings with his grandfather once or twice). His family was in the watchmaking business, and the regular ticking of clocks had inured them to the passage of time. Spengler's father was a devout but cantankerous Jew who spent his days ranting and raving about the iniquity of his God. He had devoted himself to clocks out of respect for the great mechanisms of Time, but without actually conceding them his approval. It struck him as scandalous that God should have invented a single, continuous, eternal time while simultaneously apportioning to men short little spans in which—adding insult to injury—there was nothing for them but frustration and suffering. His wife, who was dumpy and dumb, smiled all day and night while he, reddening with rage, bent over his wheels and cogs. “A man must keep on working,” he muttered, “even when his employer is a madman.”

At the age of twelve, Spengler was apprenticed to a puppet maker, and never saw his parents again. War hounded him to the edge of the Atlantic. There his master, too exhausted to attempt the journey to the New World, gave him a trunk full of puppets together with a little money from his savings, and saw him off on a boat loaded with Syrians who had little clue where they were going. That was how he arrived in Buenos Aires, one autumn afternoon, thousands of years ago. He wanted Bevilacqua to know about his background, so as to understand that all human lives are, in the end, the same. “Directionless, difficult, incomprehensible,” he told the boy, gently slapping his leg. “But the same.”

I am, on principle, totally against giving psychological explanations, but—if you want my opinion—I do believe Bevilacqua felt that Spengler's presence settled, in some way, the debt of his own parents' death. He decided to devote his life to puppets. He would learn the necessary skills from the old man, and he would be with Loredana. Señora Bevilacqua (who was beginning to lose all notion of time and to forget people's names and faces) was persuaded to approve his increasingly long sessions at Spengler's place. Finally came the memorable day when the old man allowed him to work one of the puppets in public. Even years later, Bevilacqua could still sing to himself the music that was played when the curtain went up.

Let's talk about Loredana now. How often had he seen her? Half a dozen times at Spengler's, perhaps a few more in the street and at the little theater. From those snippets, he had assembled an entire physical person. The English talk about “falling in love”; Bevilacqua would never have used such an expression. For Bevilacqua, to become enamored of someone was no accident, no happenstance: to love was to be converted, to acquire a new state of being. You did not fall in it, you let it fall over you, like rain, soaking you to the marrow. I don't know if Loredana realized that; I suppose she did—women know about these things. Loredana never gave him any encouragement. She was impeccably polite, allowing him to walk her to the bus stop, or to give her a box of candied fruit or a tin of La Gioconda
membrillo
stolen from his grandmother's shop—but she never confided in him or cracked a joke. Bevilacqua learned nothing of her life beyond Spengler's workshop, on the other side of the curtain, except that Spengler had trained her himself and that her surname was Finnish.

A little before Christmas 1956, Don Spengler was invited by a producer of variety shows to put on a performance in Santiago, in Chile. Loredana, of course, was going to go with him. Bevilacqua fell into despair. I don't think he had told anyone about his feelings. He could never have confided such a thing to Señora Bevilacqua, and—as far as I know—he had only one real friend at school. All reality was reduced now to this one single fact and its consequences: Loredana was going. He would be left alone. He could not live without her. He decided to follow her.

You can imagine my surprise when he told me about this adolescent escapade. Nobody—certainly not I—would have thought of Bevilacqua as an impulsive person, a man of action. We used to talk (or rather he talked while I, as usual, kept an eye on my watch) about sudden and rash acts, the kind that people associate with a Latin temperament. Bevilacqua praised them. Not for him the cool, premeditated decision, but rather the one that strikes suddenly, like lightning. I think I told you before that I thought of Bevilacqua as very much a northern Italian—very rational. Perhaps he hoped that by telling me about this adventure, he would show me that he was not like that at all.