The Neruda Case by Roberto Ampuero

contacts in the State Department.” He turned his face upward, giving himself an air of importance. “Of course, it was only later that I figured out why nobody else wanted the job: it paid next to nothing. I ended up paying the bills by writing columns for Santiago newspapers. There wasn’t much to do in Rangoon, so I wrote poems. Well, to be frank, my verses from that period were hermetic, indecipherable; to this day even I can’t fully penetrate them. The academics of Europe and North America, on the other hand, enjoy them as though they were a naked woman on a bed, or a naked man, perhaps, because all things can be found on God’s green earth, Cayetano.”
    He thought again of their first meeting, the day of the party by the shores of Playa Ancha, and thought that the poet, on occasion, could still be quite hermetic. But he kept his opinions to himself and stayed focused on the poet’s reminiscence.
    “I suppose the climate in Rangoon must be like Havana, no?”
    “Rangoon is as humid, hot, and exotic as your city, Cayetano. The air is so thick it won’t fit in your mouth. The plants and trees are identical to those of your island, and the fruits are the same, too. At midday, you’re forced to lie down in a hammock for siesta. I lived by the sea, between coconut palms, on a beach with sand as white and fine as flour …and now, my friend, there isn’t even enough flour here to make
sopaipillas
. My house was modest, made of wood, with a pitched tin roof. I didn’t manage to learn the language of the people,who were descended from typhoons. At night I’d drink at the bar of the Grand Hotel, on the river, where I’d go on the prowl for women.”
    “Beautiful?” he dared to say.
    “Gorgeous.” To judge from his smile, the poet hadn’t forgotten them. “But I never knew what they were thinking. When they made love they were as silent as iguanas,” he added, lowering his voice. “They had sturdy thighs, girlish waists, an ass that could fit in your palms, light and timid breasts, and there was something gymnastic about the way they did it within the confines of those mosquito nets. Cayetano, those women are nothing like ours.”
    The poet invited him to the top floor of the house to see his studio, up a few concrete stairs. It was a wood-paneled room with shelves full of books and a mirrored wardrobe. The city and bay struggled to slide in through the windows. Cayetano was intrigued by an old black Underwood typewriter on a worn desk between two windows.
    “Do you write poems on that machine?”
    “Are you crazy? Nobody writes decent poems on keys. Poetry is written by hand, with a pen, my friend. Verses descend from the brain like the tide on the Chiloé coast; they flow through the body to your hands and pour out on the page,” he explained as Cayetano examined a door hidden behind a large sepia photograph of a slim man with a long white beard.
    “What’s behind that door?” he asked.
    “A heliport designed by Sebastián Collado. This room was going to be a giant aviary, open to the city, but as you see, it’s become my studio.”
    “Excuse me. Did you say heliport?” Cayetano repeated, astonished.
    “Exactly.” The poet calmly half closed his eyes.
    A heliport. Sebastián was a great dreamer, a visionary. And nowthey’d moved from spaceships to heliports. Poets truly left no stone unturned. He was determined to keep up. “And the man in that photograph. Is he your father?”
    “In a way,” Don Pablo said, amused. “He was my poetic father. One of my greatest teachers. Look, I even have an outfit in his image.” He opened the wardrobe by the door. “That’s Walt Whitman, a marvelous poet from the United States.”
    “Is he alive?”
    “Let’s say that he continues to live. Great poets never die, Cayetano.”
    He took a hanger out of the wardrobe, from which hung a white beard, a cloak, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He tied the beard around his neck with a cord and donned the hat