All Men Are Liars Read online

  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.

  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.