All Men Are Liars (4 page)

The greatest difficulty was crossing the border with Chile. He knew that his identity card would be enough, but he also knew that as a minor, he would need his grandmother's authorization—and that she would never give it. The solution was to obtain a document from someone older. Reasoning that identity photographs are rarely recognizable, he persuaded Babar to get hold of his older brother's card—with the excuse that he wanted to get into some particularly smutty cabaret—and lend it to him for a few days. To get money, he sold his Grundig tape recorder to a neighbor's daughter. He bought a train ticket, packed a few scant belongings, and left a note for Señora Bevilacqua very early one morning, in which he explained that he wanted to go out into the world and make his fortune, on his own and without asking anyone's help. He hinted that his adventure might take him to Patagonia—which, for Señora Bevilacqua, had a reputation as fearsome as the Amazon jungle.

I don't know if you agree with me, Terradillos, but there is something magical about train journeys. Boarding a train at the start of a new life (or what Bevilacqua imagined to be a new life) must have felt like an epic moment for the boy. He noticed every detail, as if it were already passing into history: the cherry-colored upholstery, the long-haired guard, a group of boys playing guitar. Everything was important, because each moment (so Bevilacqua told himself) was now part of his future.

He journeyed across a monotonous landscape for one interminable day; to Bevilacqua it seemed the necessary preparation for a great victory. When the mountains appeared, they confirmed his expectations. Before night fell, the train arrived at a little border station, tucked between stone walls and dirty snow. While they waited for the engine to be brought down the other side, Bevilacqua and the other passengers got out to stretch their legs on the platform, which was crowded half with Argentinians, half with Chileans. The Oriental-looking officer cast an indifferent glance at Bevilacqua's apocryphal document. Years later, Bevilacqua would comment, as if it had just dawned on him: “I have walked on the Andes.” The rest of the journey took place in darkness.

When he arrived in Santiago, it was after midnight. He must have fallen asleep because, when he got down from the train, the other passengers had disappeared. The station was deserted, and an old man was sweeping the platforms. As he emerged onto the street, he saw the gates being locked.

He had heard Don Spengler mention the name of the theater where they were going to perform, and asked a taxi driver if it was far away. He set off walking. It was dark, of course, but finally he picked out the lights of the Gran Hotel O'Higgins, on the other side of the road. He went in and asked the receptionist if this was where Don Spengler and his troupe were staying. The receptionist said that it was. Bevilacqua asked to be put through to Loredana's room.

Let me say that when Bevilacqua claimed not to be a writer, there was some truth in that. He lacked the inventive spark necessary for fiction, that disregard for what is and that excitement about what could be. He didn't imagine: he saw and documented things, which is not the same. Proust goes looking for details a posteriori, because he wants the past to confirm what he is inventing in the present. Not so Bevilacqua: he was interested in the a priori, in facts as pure narration, with no gloss, no commentary.

I don't know what he was expecting. That his beloved would cry out with joy, run downstairs, and hurl herself into the arms of her intrepid Hannibal? That she would invite him into her bed, share the night with him as a reward for his bravery? I know that the last thing he expected was absolute silence. He heard the receiver being picked up, some sleepy breathing; he heard the echo of his own voice saying, “Loredana, it's me, Alejandro”; he heard the receiver being put down. Still holding the handset, he asked the receptionist if there was a free room for the night. As the man got him a key, Bevilacqua heard himself observe that it was the first time he had ever stayed in a hotel.

That unbearable night finally reached its end. Bevilacqua had not slept a wink, as far as he remembered, but when he saw that it was light outside, he got up and went downstairs. Don Spengler was in the restaurant room, having breakfast on his own. Loredana had woken him and told him about what had happened. She had also told him to send Bevilacqua back to Buenos Aires that same morning. Bevilacqua refused. He had left everything to be with her. He would follow her wherever she went. He would love her in silence, from the shadows. He couldn't go back.

Don Spengler tried to persuade him. He repeated his lecture on reality and our obligation to accept it. But for Bevilacqua, the fiction, the lie, was Loredana's absence; the truth consisted in her accepting his presence, his act of love, his very self.

At that moment, Loredana entered the room. It took him a minute to recognize her. This Chilean Loredana was different. The one from his memory, his yearning, was taller, darker, marked by absence and desire. In every waking hour, every sleeping minute, he had felt Loredana's physical presence, from the brush of her hair against his arm to the scent of apples exuded by her skin under her clothes. This woman who came into the restaurant room was different: slightly round-shouldered, haggard, rather graceless in her movements. As though to confirm her presence, Bevilacqua tried to grasp her arm. Loredana avoided him, and was about to sit down when Bevilacqua once more put his hand out toward her. Loredana slapped him. Then Don Spengler got to his feet and ordered the girl to go to her room. Her suitor's nose was bleeding. Don Spengler handed him a napkin to wipe it. Bevilacqua turned to catch a final glimpse of her, but Loredana had already gone.

That very afternoon he returned to Buenos Aires, this time by plane, courtesy of Don Spengler. At the border, an official pored over his document, but let him through without saying anything. I don't know what explanation he may have given his grandmother. Years later, Bevilacqua still wished he could ask Loredana why she had not spoken to him. It was something that he never came to understand.

Bevilacqua told me that his grandmother did not ask him where he had been. He never knew for sure if she had read his note, or if she had simply decided to ignore something that would have been hard for her to understand. What was true was that, from that moment onward, Señora Bevilacqua scarcely paid him any attention. Perhaps, in some way, after all the years of bickering and punishments, she had realized that force and discipline were of little avail where her grandson was concerned, and decided to take a kind of laissez-faire approach—that is, to let him live his life. It began to seem more important to Señora Bevilacqua (less bewildering, you might say) not to leave two knives crossed on a table, for this presaged a fight, than to ask her grandson for a truthful account of his life out in the big world.

In the only photograph that Alejandro possessed of his grandmother (which, of course, he showed to me), Señora Clara Bevilacqua was pictured in black-and-white—a thin, pale woman, her eyebrows plucked and drawn in, as though with a dark pencil, her hair arranged in tight curls, as rigid as a jockey's helmet. Wearing a flowery dress, and posed against a chalk wall, she bore an expression of unflinching hardship. She was tall, upright, and severe, a woman who was clearly uncomfortable with physical contact and didn't go in for hugs and kisses. Throughout his childhood, Bevilacqua felt that he must have failed some secret test. He never knew which, but this mystery and his sense of failure made him feel guilty nonetheless. So Bevilacqua's adolescence passed between that ancient and haughty woman and the evanescent Loredana.

I must confess to a certain impatience with Bevilacqua's angst. All my life, my parents had believed that every single thing I did was the work of a genius, and that my faults were the mere peccadilloes of a saint. Señora Bevilacqua held the opposite view: any task upon which her grandson embarked must, from the outset, be destined for failure. Without knowing it, this woman—just like my parents—was in the grip of superstitions that predate the cultures of the Po River or the Caucasus. For my parents, these simply constituted the rules of the game, whereas for Bevilacqua's grandmother, they were traps set by an imperious and vengeful God, traps that her hapless grandson would not know how to avoid. Poor Bevilacqua—I think that his grandmother never really loved him.

One thing was certain: when the boy returned from Chile, the world had changed, for his Loredana was no longer in it. Then he decided to alter his habits, his daily itinerary, as if to take revenge, through his own conduct, on the conduct of what he dared not call fate. His grandmother's life was divided between her home, the church, and the shop. Bevilacqua wanted to escape from all three. He began to find excuses to linger after school, or to leave the house earlier than usual. Every day he took a different route to school, and he would lose himself in the tree-lined streets of the poorer neighborhoods, in ancient parks, or among building complexes whose purpose he could not guess at. In those days, Buenos Aires was a good city to get lost in. Hours went by like this, and then weeks, months. It is strange how one afternoon can prolong itself to infinity, and several years be reduced to five words.

But I don't know if you're interested in this, Terradillos. I don't know if what I'm saying is at all useful. You want to know why Alejandro Bevilacqua died. You want to know how a polite and reasonable man in his forties, at a time when fortune was beginning to smile on him, came to grief against the pavement of the Calle del Prado, in the early hours of a Sunday in January, beneath my balcony.

I'm getting around to it, my friend. Be patient.

I have a theory about these things. We often think of our births as being the result of a chance series of historical and personal events, of the ebb and flow of society, as well as the personal circumstances of our own parents and grandparents—that is, to the tendril-like current of the world itself. But our deaths also stem from these comings and goings—perhaps even more so—and from circumstances both important and trivial. Just as our coming into the world is the result of many thousands of actions, both secret and public, so is our leaving it. In order to explain any death, especially a violent, mysterious death, it should be enough to carry out an exhaustive review of time, to retrieve every detail, every word, every avatar of that life, and then to wait for our intelligence to decipher the constellation formed from all these facts. Detectives must be partly astrologers. Poirot and Paracelsus are blood brothers. I've always said that a criminal investigation resembles the study of celestial bodies—at least it does in books, where all the greatest crimes are solved.

Let's start with the scene. Do you remember, or can you at least imagine, what Madrid was like then, in the midseventies, when the stench, the darkness, the dejection of those years under the Caudillo were just beginning to fade away? I say “just,” because there was still a sense of wandering through a lugubrious
ballo in maschera,
especially for someone young, as I was then, with the echo of real
porteño
parties still ringing in my ears. None of the faces were genuine—they were all hiding something; each of them lied as a matter of course. The city itself wore a mask—it was a city in flight from itself, pretending not to feel that ubiquitous unease, that weight of sadness menacing from the shadows.

Because there was something else, and you could feel it. You knew that it was present on winter mornings, for example, when a dirty mist swirled through the streets of the city center, around the Plaza de Oriente, and into the squalid crannies of alleyways slithering like earthworms between the grimy brick houses. Or sometimes in the summer, when the rubbish that had accumulated in corners over the weekend filled the night with the putrid odor of artichokes and sour wine. Often, during the time I spent in Madrid, listening over and again to a recording of “Bohemian Rhapsody” a friend had sent from New York, I felt as if I were suffocating.

In my room on the Calle del Prado, I would sometimes glance up from my writing to see people in funereal garb advancing wearily, as though dragged along by a river of mud. Only when I saw a couple—he wearing blue, she wearing red—running up the street laughing, did I begin to feel that change was in the air.

To the South Americans, on the other hand, coming from where they came, Madrid was like a dream. True, the new culture that people said was being forged in France, in Italy, in England (even in Sweden—imagine that!), was not much in evidence here, but neither did they live in constant fear of a kidnapping, an interrogation. If this new land seemed like a desolate place where no one—not even the vermin—could be bothered to create anything, the cities from which they had fled were wastelands where even inactivity was dangerous, where every crack was suspicious, every stone a threat. Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Santiago were barren and frightening places, whereas Madrid, as far as they were concerned, was simply reassuringly barren. I know a number of writers who lugged half-finished books inside bulky folders with them into exile. They managed to finish them in Barcelona, in San Sebastián, even in Seville. Not in Madrid.

Enrique Vila-Matas got interested in this phenomenon I'm describing to you, that of the exiled, unwritten novel. Vila-Matas met Bevilacqua during those years (if only you had seen him then—the future author of
Montano's Malady
, such an elegant young dandy, a connoisseur of fine wines and fine women!), and I believe that it was this encounter that gave him the inspiration for what, decades later, was to become that wonderful classic,
Bartleby & Co
.

There is a passage in
Bartleby
in which I'm convinced that Vila-Matas, without actually naming him, talks about Bevilacqua. You're so well read, I'm sure you know it by heart: “In the literature of No, there are certain works which not only are unwritten, but of which we know nothing, neither the subject, nor the title, the length or the style. We are told that such and such a person, a writer, is a well-known author. But of what? He denies his own paternity without even, like his famous ancestor, allocating himself the role of stepfather. Señor X claims not to be a writer, not to have written; vox populi contradicts him and asserts that his work, not read by anyone, is
remarquable
.”