Woes of the True Policeman (12 page)

Once, when he was teaching in Italy, he somehow found himself in the middle of an informal dinner attended by new-fledged Italian patriots, the same people who years later would form the New Right.

The dinner was held at a celebrated Bologna hotel and between the dessert course and the after-dinner drinks there were speeches. At a certain point, clearly as the result of a misunderstanding, it was Amalfitano’s turn to speak. To sum it up in a few words, his short speech—delivered in a passable Italian flavored by what more than a few listeners thought was a real or faked central European accent—was about the mystery of so-called great civilizations. In two lines he dispatched the Romans and the princes of the Renaissance (with a tossed-off mention of the tragic fate of the Orsini, probably referring to Mujica Láinez’s Orsini), arriving rapidly at the subject of his toast: World War II and the role of Italy. A role that was distorted by history and obscured by Theory: the ersatz exploits, forged in mystery, of the brave Alpini and the gallant Bersaglieri. Immediately, and without putting too fine a point on it, he asked what the French of the Charlemagne Brigade had achieved, what the Croats or the Austrians or the Scandinavians of the Viking Division, the Americans of the 82nd Airborne Division or the 1st Armored Division, the Germans of the 7th Panzer Division or the Russians of the 3rd Guards Tank Army had
really
accomplished. Shreds of glory, he mused aloud, deeds that pale alongside the countless hardships of old Badoglio’s Greek Campaign or the Libyan campaign of bold Graziani, the anvil on which Italian identity was forged and the well from which the strategists of the future will drink when the mystery is uncovered at last. The desert raids, he said, and he raised a finger skyward, the bitter fight to hold the forts, the fixed-bayonet charges of the brave men of the Littorio (a tank division) still rouse the ardor of this patient and peaceful nation. Next he spoke in commemoration of the generals, old and young, the most skilled and steadfast that the palm groves and huts of Africa (he said the word
huts
, or
bohíos
, in Spanish, to the bafflement of his audience, except for a professor of Latin American literature who understood the term but was left even more in the dark) had ever seen. Then he argued that the glory of the Germans obscured the memory of Gariboldi, for one, who, to make matters worse, was dogged by a nagging error: in nearly every country’s history books, except those of Italy, France, and Germany—meticulous in this regard—he was referred to as Garibaldi, but history, Amalfitano confided, was rewritten daily, and, like a humble and virtuous seamstress, constantly stitched up any holes. He warned that Africa should strive to be worthy of Sicily’s stubborn resistance or the hard fighting on the steppes that had earned Italy the admiration of the Slavs. At this point, those who weren’t whispering to each other or staring off into space with cigars in their mouths realized that he was pulling their leg and the uproar and shouting began. But Amalfitano refused to be cowed and he continued to hold forth on the matchless courage of those who fought to the last on the peninsula, the San Marco Regiment, the Monte Rosa, the Italia, the Grenadiers of Sardinia, the Cremona, the Centauro, the Pasubio, the Piacenza, the Mantua, the Sassari, the Rovigo, the Lupi de Toscana, the Nembo. The betrayed Army, fighting at a disadvantage, and yet still, at some point, like a miracle or an annunciation, laughing in the faces of the arrogant pups from Chicago and the City.

The end was quick. Blood, Amalfitano asked himself, to what end? What justifies it, what redeems it? And he answered himself: the awakening of the Italian colossus. The colossus that everyone since Napoleon has tried to anesthetize. The Italian nation, which has yet to speak its final word, its brilliant final word. Its radiant final word, in Europe and the world. (Punches, shoves, shouts of foreigner go home, the applause of two vaguely anarchist professors.)

Sitting on the porch of his Mexican house at dusk, Amalfitano thought that it was strange that he hadn’t read Arcimboldi in Paris, when the books were closer at hand. As if the writer’s name had been suddenly erased from his mind when the logical thing would have been to go in search of all his novels and read them. He had translated
The Endless Rose
at a moment when no one outside of France, except for a few Argentinean readers and publishers, had shown any interest in Arcimboldi. And he had liked it so much, it had been so thrilling. Those days, he remembered, the months before the birth of his daughter, were perhaps the happiest of his life. Edith Lieberman was so beautiful that sometimes she seemed to glow with a dense light: lying in bed, on her side, naked and smooth, her knees drawn up a little, the serenity of her closed lips disarming, as if she passed straight through every nightmare. Forever unscathed. He would stand there watching her for a long time. Exile, with her, was an endless adventure. His head swarmed with projects. Buenos Aires was a city on the edge of the abyss, but everyone seemed happy, everyone was content to live and talk and plan.
The Endless Rose
and Arcimboldi were—he realized then, though later he forgot—a gift. A final gift before he and his wife and daughter entered the tunnel. What could have made him fail to seek out those words? What could have lulled him like that? Life, of course, which puts the essential books under our noses only when they are strictly essential, or on some cosmic whim. Now that it was too late, he was going to read the rest of Arcimboldi’s novels.

III. ROSA AMALFITANO

For the first week they stayed at the Sinaloa Motel, on the edge of Santa Teresa, off the northbound highway. Each morning Amalfitano called a taxi to take him to the university. An hour or two later Rosa followed suit and spent the rest of the morning wandering the streets of Santa Teresa. When it was time for lunch they met at the university cafeteria or at a cheap restaurant discovered by Rosa called The King and the Queen, which served only Mexican food.

They spent the afternoons looking for a place to live. They hired a taxi and visited apartments and houses downtown or in other neighborhoods, but none of them satisfied Rosa, either because they were awful or too expensive or the neighborhoods weren’t to her liking. As they went back and forth by taxi, Amalfitano read and prepared for his new job and Rosa stared out the window. In their own way, father and daughter were living in another world, a happy, enchanted, provisional world.

Until at last they found a three-bedroom house with a big, sunny living room, a bathroom with a bathtub, and an open kitchen in Colonia Mancera, a middle-class neighborhood in the south of the city.

The house had a small front yard that had once been well tended but was now full of weeds and burrows, as if inhabited by moles. There was a front porch with a tiled floor and wooden railings that promised rocking chairs and peaceful afternoons. There was a smaller backyard, too, about two hundred square feet, and a junk room filled to the rafters with useless objects. It’s the perfect house, Dad, said Rosa, and there they stayed.

Amalfitano took the biggest bedroom. In addition to the bed, the bedside table, and the wardrobe, Rosa found a writing table, moved in a chair from the dining room, and hired a carpenter to build two big bookcases for the books that had been sent by boat from Barcelona and would still be a while in coming. In the room that she chose for herself Rosa put a smaller bookcase and after filling it hastily with the old belongings of her nomadic childhood she painted the walls, taking all the time in the world: two the shade of tobacco and two a very pale green.

When she wanted to give Amalfitano’s walls the same treatment, he refused. He liked white walls and it distressed him to see his daughter dressed in a T-shirt and old pants all day doing work that he should ostensibly be doing himself.

They had never lived in a house with an open kitchen, and the first few nights, dazzled by the novelty, they cooked together, talking and moving constantly from the kitchen to the living room, wiping the counter, watching each other cook, and then eating, one of them perched on a stool while the other served, as if they were at a bar, taking turns being waiter and customer.

When life returned to normal, Rosa had time to fall in love with the streets of Santa Teresa, cool streets, streets that in a secret way spoke of a field of transparencies and Indian colors, and she never took a taxi again.

Accustomed as she was to the colorful, perfectly demarcated streets of Barcelona or the perfectly fussy streets of the Casco Antiguo—the streets of a civilization, or in other words real streets—the streets of Santa Teresa seemed somehow newborn, streets with a secret logic and aesthetic, streets with their hair down, where she could walk and feel alive walking, on her own and not
a part of
.

And also, she discovered in surprise, they were streets shooting outward, urban and at the same time open to the country, a country of great mysterious spaces that crept in during the first hours of dusk down streets shaded by stunted or powerful trees, in a system she couldn’t explain to herself, as if Santa Teresa were interleaved with even the humblest of the nearby hills, viewed from an impossible perspective. As if the streets were the barrels of multiple telescopes trained on the desert, on the planted fields, on the scrubland and pastures, or on the bare hills that on moonlit nights seemed to be made of bread crumbs.

Rosa Amalfitano and Jordi Carrera began to write to each other a week after the Amalfitanos arrived in Mexico. The first to write was Jordi. After a strange week in which he could hardly sleep a wink, he decided to do something that in all his seventeen years he had never done before. After much hesitation, he bought what seemed to him the most appropriate postcard, a panel from a comic strip by Tamburini and Liberatore (one of the two of them, he thought he remembered, but everything was so hazy, had died of an overdose), and after writing a couple of sentences that seemed stupid to him, I hope you’re well, we miss you (why the fucking plural?), he put it in the mail and tried in vain to forget her.

Rosa’s typed response was three pages long. It said, more or less, that she was advancing by forced marches into adulthood and that the feeling this gave her was wonderful and exciting at first, though later, as always, one got used to it. She also talked about Santa Teresa and how pretty some of the colonial buildings were: a church, a porticoed market, and the house of the bullfighter Celestino Arraya, now a museum, that she had visited soon after arriving, as if magnetically drawn. Not only was this Celestino handsome, he was a local luminary killed in the flower of his youth (here Rosa went on to make various half-comprehensible and not quite successful jokes about the flower of desire and the flower of sin), and there was an impressive statue of him in the Santa Teresa cemetery that she planned to visit later on. She sounds like a sculptor or an architect, thought Jordi despondently after reading the letter for the tenth time.

It took him twenty days to answer. This time he sent her an extra-large postcard of a Nazario comic. Faced with the impossibility of telling her what he really needed to say, he launched into a garbled but scrupulously truthful account of his latest basketball game. It’s like an absurdist poem, thought Rosa when she read the postcard. The game was described as a series of electrokinetic and electromagnetic instants, bodies moving in a rapid blur, the ball sometimes too big or too small, too bright or too dark, and the shouts of the crowd—which Jordi compared enthusiastically (for once) to the cries at a Roman circus—like a metronome behind his ribs. I hope I’m not overdoing it, he thought. As for himself, he insinuated that he had played badly, inattentively, listlessly, and by this he meant that he was feeling down and he missed her.

This time Rosa’s response was only two pages long. She wrote about her English classes, the exploratory walks she took around the neighborhoods of Santa Teresa, the solitude she deemed a precious gift and that she spent reading and getting to know herself, Mexican food (here in passing she mentioned Catalan white beans with sausage in a way that Jordi found derogatory and unfair), some of which she had already tried to make for her father, chicken with red mole sauce, for example, which was relatively easy, she said, all you had to do was boil a chicken or a couple of chicken breasts and make the mole (an earthen red powder that was bought premixed, from a bin or in jars) in a frying pan with a little oil and then a little water, ideally the broth left over from boiling the chicken, and in a separate pot, of course, you boiled a little rice, which was served with the chicken and plenty of mole sauce. It was a hot, strong-flavored dish (maybe a little too intense for her father—not her—to eat
at night
), but she had loved it from the start and now she couldn’t do without it. It’s possible, she said, that I’ve become a chicken mole fanatic, which traditionally should really be turkey mole, or
mole de guajolote
, as they call it here.

In a nutshell, she wrote at the end of the letter, she was happy and life couldn’t be better. In this sense, she confessed, I’m a little like Candide, and my teacher, Pangloss, is this fascinating part of Mexico. My father, too—though actually no, my father is nothing at all like Pangloss.

Jordi read the letter in the subway. He had no idea who Candide and Pangloss were, but it seemed to him that his friend was at the gates of paradise while he was stuck permanently in purgatory.

At night, after they had watched a movie together on TV, he asked his father who Candide and Pangloss were.

“Two characters from Voltaire,” said Antoni Carrera.

“Yes, but who are they,” asked Jordi, to whom
Voltaire
sounded vaguely like some cabaret or rock band.

“The characters in a philosophical novel,” said Antoni Carrera, “but you should know that by now. Is this for some school project?”

“No. It’s personal,” said Jordi, feeling that his house was suffocating him. The furniture, the TV, the yard with the lights on, everything was suddenly oppressive.