His Own Man (8 page)

At these gatherings, I slowly began to realize that I no longer saw Max as a mentor of sorts but simply as an older colleague with whom I shared a broad range of interests regardless of our ideological differences. At the same time, and on another level, I sensed Marina was gradually withdrawing. Once full of joie de vivre, she now seemed downcast, which, in my view, didn’t correspond to her condition — since, at that stage, she was pregnant with their first child.

It’s at large parties that we sometimes share truly private moments, as Fitzgerald memorably remarked, and this is precisely what happened to Max and me at one of these lunches, in 1970, when something he said shot through me like a warning.

We’d had plenty to drink and he allowed himself to get caught up in an unexpected reverie, centered on his boss, whose personality and political opinion were known to all. At some point I asked, half joking, how far to the right Max found himself now. Would he continue to be buoyed by the respectability of the conservative wing, or had he given in to more radical schemes, the secret nature of which I kindly declined to mention?

Max laughed a little at my nerve, but his expression soon grew serious, as if he’d distanced himself from me for a few seconds — and even from the little room to which we’d retreated. I didn’t push it. In fact, I began to think I’d gone too far, particularly because I’d never, not even in jest, engaged in conversation
with him on such a sensitive subject. But he took one of his Cuban cigars out of his breast pocket and was preparing to light it, which, in the past, typically meant that he wished to think aloud with me, in the unmistakable tone of a man talking to himself. I settled at the opposite end of the sofa where he was seated. It was a long piece of furniture, Italian leather, which would fit four people comfortably. We each kept an arm draped over the back, his left hand holding the lit cigar.

Max began to speak somewhat evasively, as if preparing to launch into a series of reminiscences. Except that his voice, which was usually upbeat and energetic, sounded like that of an old man at the end of his career, concerned with recalling scenes from a distant past. I understood that the withdrawal in some sense protected him, as though sparing my friend from threatening memories. Unsure where Max was headed, and imagining that he too was unclear as to what he really meant, I listened closely, aware of a wistfulness behind his words. Thus my surprise when, at a certain point, and completely off topic, he turned to me and asked, “Have you ever asked yourself why some people collaborate with the military?”

He went on, without awaiting my response: “Out of fear, in some instances … or for money, in the case of minor players.”

Here he settled back into his seat, further distancing himself from me, and continued. “In our line of work, it’s never for money. At most, it’s out of fear. Or, more often, for access to power. The
expectation
of access to power.”

As luck would have it, I had taken up smoking again that week. A politically incorrect admission today but one that bought me time right then. I pulled out a cigarette and searched my jacket unsuccessfully for a lighter.

Max raised his, flicking it at my eye level.

“How about you?” he asked. “Are you afraid?”

“All the time,” I confessed, unblinking, as I lowered his arm and lit my cigarette.

I wasn’t lying. But I surprised myself. I wasn’t sure where that unexpected revelation had come from. After a long first drag, I added, “Every time I land in Geneva for work, I feel I’m entering another world. Not another country, but another
world
.”

“Such an intriguing notion, fear …” He seemed to be warming to his topic.

Intriguing?
I remember thinking. Fear could be everything, from chronic to unbearable, from dreadful to dark. But
intriguing
?

Max continued: “Take the guerrilla’s fear, for instance” — and here he looked at me, seeking a tacit sign of approval, it would seem, for not having used the then-common term
subversive
— “the guerrilla’s fear as he weighs the odds of being caught. Which, depending on the case, might mean
being tortured and killed
. It’s a concrete, objective, almost tangible fear, which runs as deep as his beliefs.”

He winked at me, as if making an amusing side comment. “As the ambassador has a habit of saying, from the depths of his favorite armchair in his Montevideo office, ‘It’s fear shrouded in bravado.’ A fine phrase, isn’t it?”

I no longer knew if he was kidding or serious. I remembered a colleague who loathed him and was always professing, “Max’s problem is that he lies all the time.” Was he lying? Or simply having fun with me, creating a character inspired by his sinister boss?

He repeated the line, so that I could savor what was to come. “ ‘Fear shrouded in bravado … that only comes to a head when skilled hands —
pop!
— burst the bravado like a bubble.’ ”

Unable to contain himself, he proceeded, “You can’t imagine how happy he is when he goes
pop!
He’s like a kid.”

He exhaled deeply, long enough for the ambassador to take shape between us, eyes flashing maliciously, the poor blood-covered victim hanging in chains, his bravado undone.

Max calmly went on. “Now, what you were referring to earlier — the fear of someone unaware of why he feels afraid —
that’s
something else entirely.”

He turned to face me. “Like you, for example. You don’t know why you feel afraid. You just know that’s how you feel. It’s what you tend to think about before you go to sleep. And almost always what you think about when you wake up. Without your having a single thing to feel guilty about. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

I remained silent.

“More than dread or fright, it’s an insidious sensation, the strength and
utility
of which come from its constancy.” His voice had taken on a professorial tone. It was his boss talking through him.

“And that constancy, do you know what it feeds off? Hundreds of sources at once, from censorship of the press to rumors that someone’s disappeared, from doubts about a neighbor’s real identity to the possibility of tapped phone lines, from statements by certain colonels who threaten to tighten the screws even further to the decision that political crimes will now be judged by military courts. Year in, year out, nothing changes. And nothing will change. Except for minor details. Because what we’re dealing with here, my friend, is a huge and mysterious
oyster
, a self-contained bureaucratic corporation, which depends on absolute cohesion to survive. Its members will fight among themselves and no one will know a thing out here. The head honchos will indeed change. But not their profiles, or their uniforms. Even if these are replaced by suits, there will always be uniforms. The generals will always prevail. And everything will remain that way beyond our generation. Even the fear.
The fear
,
above all
.”

He briefly smiled at me and concluded in a soft, almost gentle voice, “Because it spreads by contamination.”

“Like Camus’s plague,” I added.

“Exactly.”

He got up and found an ashtray, which he set between us on the coffee table. It was high time, since our ashes, which had remained precariously perched, now threatened to fall onto the rug.

Marina came in just then. The carpeted hallway had prevented us from hearing her footsteps. I was taken aback when I saw her, as if I had come face-to-face with a ghost, welcome though the encounter may have been. Only then did I become aware of the angst that had taken hold of me.

Marina seemed overwhelmed. Despite her lovely pregnant form, it was her weary expression that struck me. And the sadness I detected in her eyes.

“Marcílio,” she protested, “our guests are looking lost without you.”

It would be thirteen years before I saw Marina again. After the birth of their son, the couple rarely came to Rio. My trips to Geneva, on the other hand, became more frequent. This wasn’t altogether a bad thing, since I’d been shaken by my last conversation with Max in Santa Teresa. I would cross paths with him only in Brasilia, when he periodically returned to Brazil for work. Always alone, never with his wife. So we ended up growing apart, Marina and I. Later, when I was transferred to Los Angeles, our contacts became fewer and farther between. Max, I still saw occasionally. But not her.

As the years went by, there came more news, some good, some less so. Marina had another child with Max, a daughter born in Chile. Four years later, when the couple was living in Washington, she left him. In 1983, however, while on vacation in Rio, I heard of her father’s death and went to the wake. I imagined I’d find Marina there with her children. To my surprise, however, the person who kept an arm protectively around her, and remained at her side the entire afternoon — as if a spouse or partner — was Nilo Montenegro, an actor I quickly recognized, who had performed in several Teatro de Arena plays and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade films, and helped produce the first
Opinião
shows. Marina’s father’s bank had financed several of his plays in the 1960s, when the openings would invariably be celebrated at the house in Santa Teresa, with parties that would go on all night — and be faithfully reported in the next day’s papers.

Smiling tearfully, Marina hugged me and said affectionately, “You two know each other, don’t you?” Before we could answer, she added in a tender voice, “Nilo Montenegro …”

From down on his small satin pillow, surrounded by flowers, Marina’s father seemed to be smiling at us. I stood beside his coffin for a few minutes. The longer I looked at him, the more he seemed to smile. He must have somehow sensed the growing line of artists and intellectuals in the small São João Batista chapel, made up largely of men and women whose works owed much to his altruism and whose attendance also represented the dead and the disappeared.

Marina and I made plans to get together and ended up seeing each other the following week, on a night Nilo had traveled to São Paulo. When I arrived at the small apartment the two shared in Jardim Botânico, she greeted me with a photo album in hand. Leafing through it while Marina fixed me a drink, I could see nearly fifteen years of her life unfold before me, in Uruguay as well as in the cities that had come after Montevideo. I saw that Max had put on weight with the arrival of their first child, and had grown a beard after the birth of their second. All the while collecting medals and decorations, visible on his jacket lapels in some photos, pinned in rows to his gala uniforms in others. Even so, as often happens in such cases, he started to appear less and less on each page, until he didn’t show up at all. Nothing like a family album to let us see, far beyond the ravages of time, the personal and emotional hardships that shape our lives.

As I expected, Marina got to talking about her ex-husband. That was when she told me the train story in full detail, while I continued to flip through the album, now from back to front. She described the encounter with Max in the wrong cabin and spoke of the long dinner that would change her life. “It’s strange,” she added after a pause. “When I met Marcílio and we spent a good part of the night talking in that deserted car, I was positive that endless possibilities would open before me. And
all for one ridiculous reason: simply because he was listening to me. No one had ever listened to me that way before, with an intensity that shut out the rest of the world.… It was just an illusion, of course.”

She looked at me with some small hope that I would be able to grasp what she was trying to say. And she continued, “I was barely twenty years old, a victim of one of those classic adolescent infatuations. With someone I mistook for a father figure. Someone who knew how to play his part adeptly, giving me the attention I desperately craved — and hadn’t received in my childhood.”

She took the album from my lap and chose a photo at random. “Santiago,” she said. “The worst time of my life. And the country’s.” She then told me about a lover of hers back then, an Italian photographer named Paolo. I had the impression she was talking to herself as her tone remained impassive.

Since I said nothing, she fell silent. And began to turn the album’s pages without lingering, until she pointed to an image of utter desolation: a snowman lost in the middle of a completely white yard, with two bare, black trees in the background. She sighed. “Washington. “The kids built the snowman but disappeared at picture time. They went to get a carrot for the nose, tomatoes for the eyes, string beans for the mouth. I don’t think they could get the vegetable drawer in the fridge open. And they forgot about me. They went to watch TV, leaving me standing out in the yard. Kids … So I took the snowman’s picture.”

I set the album aside. Her sadness had only increased with each photo.

“I felt completely alone,” she continued. “The house was far from the city. My marriage, already a sinking ship, ended up going under for good. One day I packed up the kids and left.”

We talked about other things, but in circles, without getting anywhere. One painful impression gradually came over me: the hour spent together had produced incomplete fragments rather
than the tapestry I had hoped the two of us would weave. The remarks about Max, which had reflected a whole series of truncated perceptions, the revelation about her Italian lover, the abandoned snowman in the yard, the questions I didn’t dare to ask — and the photo album itself, incomplete as they always are — all made us feel farther apart.

When I showed signs that I wished to leave, our gazes converged on the empty whiskey bottle. We realized we’d drunk too much — and yet remained sober.

Marina closed her eyes, as if lost in thought. She seemed to be mustering the courage to face a test beyond her strength. “One cold winter afternoon, walking around Montevideo, I bumped into Nilo. We hadn’t seen each other in years, since I was a kid, back when he used to spend a lot of time at our place. What a happy coincidence. It was as if a whole past full of joy, hope, and creativity had suddenly sprung up at my feet. We weren’t just two Brazilians lost on a corner of some distant city. We didn’t even feel the cold! For a few brief moments, we rekindled memories of Dad’s parties for his artist and intellectual friends. We were surrounded by Cinema Novo and the theater, swept up by pop music …”