The Neruda Case Read Online Free PDF Page B

facets of his life the way the thick spring fog hid some of Valparaíso’s heights. He was cautious about investigating his client’s life. Nobody could begin to suspect that he was on assignment. The flame of distrust that burned in his chest made him feel contemptible, but he needed to know the artist through others, using the same method employed by the diligent Maigret, who spied without qualms, but in great secrecy, even on his most trustworthy informants and closest colleagues.
    Two days later, while eating a remarkable seafood dish at Los Porteños in the Cardonal Market near the port, he received an encouraging tip from Pete Castillo, who happened to come into the restaurant for some clams in parsley sauce. A fisherman had just broughtthose “poor man’s oysters” in a wicker basket. Their elongated shells gleamed like sand on the beach on a clear morning. Pete was a labor union leader who lived in a wooden stilt house in a ravine of Monjas Hill, near Cayetano’s home. He had quit the university in his third year, after the triumph of Salvador Allende, to devote himself completely to local political activism, but he still devoured Latin American novels and was a great admirer of Julio Cortázar, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Ernesto Sábato, as well as Jorge Luis Borges, whom he considered a despicable reactionary who just happened to be graced with a magnificent pen.
    “Neruda isn’t among my saints,” Pete said in a deep voice as he squeezed lemon with his coarse, dark hands, its juice sprinkling over an open clam, its pink tongue shrinking into the shell in pain. “His cantos to Stalin in
The Grapes and the Wind
and his rejection of the armed approach to building socialism in Chile make him suspect. That poet has gotten too bourgeois.”
    “Stop calling the kettle black and tell me, who can give me more information about him? I mean, about his personal life.”
    Pete thought for a moment. “Perhaps Commander Camilo Prendes could help you.” He sucked the clam’s tongue into his mouth, leaving the smooth shell impeccably clean, then washed the delicacy down with a gulp of house white wine. “The commander oversees a brigade of the most radical students from the School of Architecture at the University of Chile, and if memory serves, he has a cousin who’s an expert in poetry, an encyclopedia on two marvelous legs, they say. She should know something about Neruda, and anyway it’s never a waste of time to meet a woman like that.”
    “So where can I find this guy?”
    “At the Hucke cookie factory.”
    “His job is to make cookies for afternoon tea? In times like these?” Cayetano fished a chunk of sea bass out of his soup. It was aswhite and smooth as the cheeks of princesses in stories by the Brothers Grimm.
    “Don’t make fun of the commander, Cayetano. Prendes means business. Hucke is in the hands of workers who are fighting for its expropriation, and he’s leading the charge. He’s succeeded in expropriating several factories and some country estates under one hundred twenty acres in size, despite the opposition of the government. Prendes participated in the Paris uprisings of ’sixty-eight, where he met Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and he also studied in Havana. He’s a real threat to the reformists who infest the presidential palace, La Moneda. He’s a little bourgeois, too, but he knows his stuff.”
    Cayetano headed over to Hucke that same night. With its illuminated windows and cacophonous machinery, the factory resembled an ocean liner navigating a dense, calm sea, or so it seemed to Cayetano as he approached it through the misty industrial zone. Flags of the Socialist Party hung from the walls, of MAPU and MIR, parties that described themselves as true revolutionaries and dismissed Allende as a mere reformer, as well as canvas signs demanding the expansion of the state’s economic power and an end to capitalism. Despite the takeover, the factory continued to operate, although, according to