His Own Man (29 page)

Marina interrupted me and brought up what was troubling her. “The kids didn’t understand my silence when I finished the last page of their father’s speech on human rights. I couldn’t say a single word. I couldn’t even try.” Without hiding the bitterness overtaking her, she laughed. “They must have thought I missed Marcílio … and the charmed life we’d led together! I’m told that people in the president’s office are
still
enthralled by him. And that Marcílio’s reputation in these upper echelons continues to grow. They say his name has been considered for second-in-command at the Foreign Ministry.”

“Secretary-general?”

Marina didn’t even acknowledge my surprise. She’d gone back to her own lonely track. “A guy who spent part of his
life persecuting union leaders and intellectuals and who now gets posted to our top embassies abroad. He denied passports to many — that much I know. And he may have done worse. Far worse …” A long look in my direction, a final silent plea for an answer. I chose to follow the flight of the birds over the sailboats. “He’s even admired by the former guerrillas he fought,” she exclaimed. “He’s applauded, praised for his speeches. He continues to hoodwink everyone!”

We both burst out laughing. Then a novel feeling came over me. Marina seemed to be sensing something similar. Max, who until then had kept us apart — lost as we’d been in decades of doubts and uncertainties about him — had suddenly left the scene. With that, he had drawn us together. The laughter had freed us from his story, making room for us to create our own — if we so desired. No matter how modest and tentative it might be. This unexpected emotion took us by surprise.

We kept walking. In a totally different frame of mind now. I took Marina’s hand in my own. And she, just as naturally, interlaced her fingers with mine. A young couple with a baby stroller and two other children was heading in our direction. The small family soon passed by us, the mother smiling at the baby, the father cleaning his sunglasses, the kids having fun.

“Felipe!” the dad shouted. “Don’t go near the road! Stay by your sister …”

We watched the five moving along, the boy zigzagging down the sidewalk with his arms out like an airplane, dashing from one side to the other, the worried father hurrying to close the space between them, the mother pushing the stroller, and the little girl carefully sidestepping holes to keep her pristine shoes from getting dirty.

“That’s what I imagined having one day, when I got married.” Marina sighed, as if returning to her senses.

We continued with our morning stroll. Christ the Redeemer emerged from behind the clouds once more. From the looks of
it, to stay this time … Life went on, with its joys and sorrows. Always moved by memories that would never completely fade. Memories that, with a little luck, might prevent the dead from being forgotten. And lead some of the living to pale amid the guilt overtaking them a bit more each night.

“Should we head back?” Marina suggested. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?”

These were questions that had to do with the realities of our present but that would in no way affect our future. Or so we thought.

“Okay,” I answered. After a minute, I added, as if to myself, “But it was a delightful walk.”

Looking over my shoulder, I said goodbye to Lagoa then. Not knowing that I was also saying goodbye to Marina forever.

“It was so nice to see you again,” she said softly, looping her arm through mine as we crossed the street. “When will you be back in Rio?”

“Soon,” I promised confidently.

When we reached the opposite sidewalk, I hailed a cab and gave my friend a long, affectionate hug. A hug that, ever since her death, means more to me with each passing day.

In 2006, nearly two years after Marina’s death, when I was stationed in Los Angeles for the second time, I went back to Rio de Janeiro to visit my children. Leafing through the pages of a newspaper on the way there, I came across the announcement of the funeral mass for Colonel João Vaz’s wife. I called him when I arrived. Ever since meeting in Vienna, we’d exchanged Christmas cards and spoken a few times by phone.

At first he wasn’t able to place me in his circle of acquaintances, for he was still suffering the impact of his loss. But once I tried to explain my absence from the mass, and mentioned our time together in Vienna, the colonel, to my embarrassment, began to weep over the phone. “My poor Matilde,” he sobbed. “You can’t imagine how touched she was by the teddy bear you sent our grandson!”

“Who must be a big boy by now!” I exclaimed, trying to rally him. “He must be ten or eleven, right?” I had actually forgotten about the bear I’d sent his grandson — essentially a tribute to him, the colonel, and the big-hearted way he’d lumbered along the streets of Vienna in search of our restaurants. But it seemed the stuffed animal had left a lasting emotional impression on the veteran’s memory.

“It was the first gift that made Ernestinho laugh and clap his hands together!” He then began to speak of his other grandchildren, now totaling three. His sadness seemed to lessen momentarily. Memories rooted in the pleasures of the table quickly
followed and he soon invited me to dinner. We agreed to get together two nights later. The colonel recommended a restaurant in Ipanema, the name and address of which he had me repeat. He said he’d take care of the reservation and expect me around eight. “I can’t guarantee a fireplace,” he joked before hanging up. “But the food is quite good.”

I arrived at the restaurant a little late on the designated night. The colonel was already seated at a table in the rear and signaled me over with a jovial wave. As I approached, however, I noticed that it was with difficulty that he rose to greet me. He had aged quite visibly. An entire decade had elapsed since we’d last seen one another, and at his stage of life the years usually take a toll. Even so, he gave me a big hug, which immediately whisked us back to our nights in Austria.

After speaking briefly of his deceased wife, we attacked our caipirinhas. Within minutes, we were engrossed in lively conversation. At some point, he showed me photos of his grandkids. “This one here is Ernestinho,” he said with open pride, sliding a picture of a chubby young fellow under my nose. He followed up with a few comments about his daughter and son-in-law, who didn’t live far from him. “Which is convenient, given the onset of old age,” he acknowledged a bit wistfully.

Soon enough, however, the invisible link that had brought us together in Vienna came up in conversation. “How about Max?” the colonel asked. “What do you hear of him?”

I said I hadn’t seen him for some time but that I’d been following his career from afar with the same admiration.

“Admiration and bewilderment,” he joked, eyeing me as he took another sip of his drink.

But the conversation had yet to wind its way through assorted de rigueur topics before returning to the subject. We talked about Brazilian politics and the economy, which individuals were rising and falling on the power scale, of soccer victories and upsets.

Once dinner was served, Max joined us again, only this time accompanied by a supporting actor, another old acquaintance of ours, Eric Friedkin.

“Max was always a source of fascination to Eric,” the colonel remarked, as though speaking of another mutual friend. He looked up from his plate. “How’s your food?”

“Excellent.” And it was.

I took advantage of the lull to acknowledge, in the same warm tone, the new character’s entrance from the wings. “Eric Friedkin! The CIA’s station head in South America!”

“Chief of station, or COS,” he corrected, with a mouthful. “Those were crucial years in our region. The toughest stage …” He glanced to both sides since one never knew who might be listening. For in those days, the hunt for the Fascist witches had dropped from its lofty platform of political righteousness to the trivial level of beauty salon gossip. (“
That guy? Don’t even tell me
,
hon. They say he was one helluva torturer
,” and then, after a furtive pause, in an even lower voice, “
during those heavy years of repression
.”)

“… after our military movement in sixty-four,” he finished at last. Pleased with his retrieval of the formula he’d been resorting to since our times in Vienna, he concluded, “He settled in Uruguay and from there he followed the developments in Montevideo, Chile, and Argentina.”

Followed
, I mused, taking great pains to keep the smile frozen on my lips.

Luckily, we were interrupted right then by an acquaintance of the colonel, who took him aside and expressed his condolences. After which the two got caught up talking in a corner, while I retreated into my thoughts. Still under the effect of the casual way my host had mentioned Eric Friedkin’s activities, I recalled Max’s outburst at the infamous wedding reception more than twenty years earlier, when he had drawn on Merce Cunningham’s genius to establish a parallel between the
coups taking place in the region and a choreographed operation inspired and coordinated by the CIA.

Apologizing profusely, the colonel returned to his seat. He seemed quite pleased with himself. “A former colleague from the army,” he explained. “He invited me to a reunion of the old guard. To see if we can improve the retired officers’ pensions.”

After waving over the waiter, he asked, “Should we move on to beers?” Perhaps keeping tabs on his own wallet, the congenial colonel had discreetly turned down the wine list the waiter had tried in vain to hand him. “Now, where were we?”

“Eric Friedkin. And his admiration for Max.”

“Right. But
admiration
isn’t quite the word. It was more of a periodic
fascination
. Sometimes he would be impressed by him. But generally speaking, I think he was more
intrigued
. As if he couldn’t place him in any given context. He wasn’t alone in that. And yet he considered himself an excellent judge of character. He was never wrong. After all, that’s what he’d been trained to do.” And with a smile of virtuousness, which age alone confers on men who have been up to no good but may escape hell nonetheless: “That and
to deceive
!”

Perhaps regretting the snide remark, he quickly added, “You can’t believe how moved I was by his phone call when he learned of Matilde’s passing.” He recalled the old family ties, strengthened by Eric’s daughter, Nancy, who had become Ernestinho’s godmother. “I’ll always remember the winter nights in Montevideo when we’d roast marshmallows on sticks in our fireplaces. The girls were little and loved the fun of it.”

I averted my eyes from his, which were suddenly teary, and wondered what else Eric Friedkin might have been planning to roast those particular nights, with other kinds of sticks, after singing lullabies to the two daughters.

Meanwhile, the colonel seemed ready to get back to the subject at hand. “He was extremely clever. So clever that, where
Max was concerned (and this he only confessed to me years later), Eric simply had the
British
approach our friend. That way the CIA stayed out of it. With an added benefit: he gave Max the illusion that he was his own man, that he was outsmarting everyone. Funny, isn’t it? In other words, on the surface, for training the Uruguayan police forces, the CIA used Max and Itamaraty. But on the sly, the agency allowed the British to find out what Max really knew. Eric had a French name for the maneuver. It was called a trompe something or other.”

“Trompe l’oeil.”

“That’s it. Do you guys use that at Itamaraty too?”

“All the time. Long before Machiavelli and Renaissance painting, early sixteenth-century diplomacy invented the trompe l’oeil. It was based on a kind of visual engineering, which works to trick the eye and …”

“I see,” said the colonel, showing little interest in these details.

I decided to press further. “But what did Max know in the end? That was so … so important?”

“Nothing, at first.”

“Nothing?”

“That’s what was so curious. It was the Brits who gradually put him on the trail to what they wanted to know. To what
the Americans wanted to know
.”

“In what area?” Ten years earlier, in Vienna, the colonel had limited himself to saying that Eric had “somewhat unintelligibly” mentioned “uranium smuggling, nuclear energy, and Germany” in the same sentence. But I thought it preferable not to evoke that particular language right then.

“I know it’s been many years,” he said, after choosing the less soiled end of his napkin to wipe his mouth. “And that this story is old. But it remains secret. And your colleague is still active. Our famous Max. If the subject becomes public, he may wish to retaliate. Although people who live in glass houses …”
Here he had a timely recollection. “By the way, I met up with him a few months ago.”

“With Max? Where?”

“At the funeral of our former ambassador in Montevideo. The Caped Crusader, they used to call him. After retiring, he went to work for the Germans.” He laughed, as if introducing the Germans into the equation amused him for some reason. “The old man worked for them right up until he died. And he left behind a book of memoirs, in which he didn’t even try to hide his political preferences. The funniest part is that we, at the SNI, had a file on him the size of a truck.” Renewed laughter, the source of which I had no way of identifying. “He left out the best part of his book …” He continued to laugh alone. It wasn’t possible that such joy could be attributed solely to the Germans, a people who may have their redeeming qualities but aren’t known for their humor.

“So what’s the lowdown on the ambassador?” I inquired.

“It’s hilarious. But you won’t hear it from me.”

We’d had so many beers that he gradually gave in. Deep down, the colonel loved a good story. Especially if it strayed beyond the confines of security protocols. “He had a hobby.”

“Oh, really? What was that?”

“Photography.”

“You don’t say.”

“He had a small studio on Avenida Marechal Floriano, not far from Itamaraty, over near the Colégio Pedro II. They say all kinds of kinky activities went on there. Little schoolgirls in uniform and everything.”