On the Closerie’s piano, “Good Morning Heartache.” On the plate, an exquisitely delicate house pâté. The travel allowance, of course, didn’t cover a meal in that brasserie. Cuyano asked me if, in my opinion, technology might actually be part of the “superstructure,” and not the “economic infrastructure,” as the Preface had taught us. “Because technology,” Cuyano conjectured, venturing out into the mined terrain of heresy, “depends on science, and on practices that are tied to ethics, and it emerges from a framework of a group of institutions, among them the protection of the right to intellectual and industrial property.”
If so, Cuyano maintained, it would dilute the primacy of the material base in respect to supposedly “superstructural” or “ideological” elements like ethics and rights. Because a mere right — the institution of industrial property — would then become a determining factor for the development of productive power. This posed thorny and disturbing questions of doctrine for us. To doubt “historical materialism” was to doubt everything. There was silence: “The Spartan would have had us playing chess a long time ago,” I said, and we burst out laughing.
The streetlights of Paris had come on and the streets were calling to me.
It was strange to get into bed and see Cuyano’s head beside me. I had trouble falling asleep.
It had rained and the dead leaves in the streets were wet. I wasn’t nervous. There was no danger in Paris. My first “meet” was at nine thirty at the Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens, next to Leda and the Swan. A young man with a Chilean accent and the look of a college student gave the countersign. While we walked along the rue de Médicis he offered me a cigarette, which, as instructed, I put into my pocket. I opened it in the hotel and read my next “meet,” which was written in invisible ink.
I got out one metro station early, took the rue de la Gaîté, turned right along boulevard Edgar Quinet and went into the Montparnasse cemetery through the main entrance. It was ten to twelve on that cold, gray morning when I stopped in front of Brancusi’s sculpture. The stone lovers kiss with their entire bodies. The legs are bent and they touch from the knee down. Their intermingled feet moved me, their tenderness. As if they wanted to belong to the other’s body, I thought to myself.
Someone coughed close by. A short young woman, with dark hair, moved decisively toward me. She gave the countersign, and in a Chilean accent she asked me if I could tell her how to get to Baudelaire’s grave. I answered as planned: “Avenue du Nord until you get to avenue de L’Ouest and there you turn left.” She took a package from her backpack that I immediately shoved into my leather bag. She said good-bye and left. I looked at the time: two minutes past twelve.
On the hotel bed I opened the package and went through the ten blank Chilean passports — they were impeccable — and hid them among the clothes in my suitcase, which I secured with a lock. Where were they forged? My nose told me: Berlin, GDR.
Pauline, the journalist from Le Monde, arranged to meet me at the Café Hugo in the Place des Vosges. It’s going to be full of tourists, I thought. I arrived half an hour early. I sat down at a table and ordered a cafè au lait. An Argentine accent made me turn my head toward the table to my right. Cortázar! I recognized him immediately. His beard, his giant body, his youthful face. He was gesticulating with outstretched arms as he talked. There were two women — one of them very attractive in whom I wanted to see la Maga — and the rest were mature men in their forties or maybe fifties, with long hair and casual, stylish clothes.
I thought about running to a bookstore to buy Hopscotch and asking him to sign it. And what if they were gone when I got back? I thought about going over, introducing myself, and asking him to sign a napkin. I thought I should let him know I was a clandestine combatant fighting the military dictatorship. That would get him interested. I looked down at my coffee. I imagined myself in a spacious apartment overflowing with books, his friends scattered on chairs and armchairs and me seated among them on a cushion, on the floor, listening to old jazz records and talking with him.
Just then I glanced at the table: it was empty.
I paid as fast as I could and went out to the square. They were walking slowly and their conversation was still animated. I checked the time. Six minutes until my appointment. I was bringing a dossier for Pauline with documentation of the repression. She was a person of great political importance for Red Ax, I’d been told. They didn’t explain why. Apparently she’d been in contact with our apparatus for years, but she only knew that we wanted to bring down the military. She was very anti-Soviet, I’d been warned, and didn’t care too much for Cuba, either. A “Menshevik,” they told me. I had to be careful answering her questions. A tremendously intelligent and well-informed woman, I’d been told. In the photo they gave me she looked attractive and severe.
But however important Pauline was, I still had six minutes. Without thinking, I started to follow them. They went into an art gallery where there was an exhibition of Japanese prints. They stopped in front of one with a wave in the foreground that curved over and seemed to trap a boat, allowing a glimpse, far away, of Mount Fuji. Horacio Oliveira lit a Gauloises. He said something enthusiastically — or whenthusiastically, to continue with Hopscotch—about those “images of the floating world.” La Maga looked on disinterestedly, as if the charm of his intelligence was foreign to her. One of his friends — presumably Etienne, who was a painter — pointed to the trunk of a flowering cherry tree up above, said that this print had greatly influenced Van Gogh. Horacio then set off on a speculation about the close-up, the perspective of those Japanese prints, photography, impressionism, the fiction of representation. “It’s painting,” he said, “that has taught us how to photograph; never the other way around, never ever.”
And they left. I followed close behind. It was raining, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They went into another shop and I followed them in. It was an antique shop full of musical instruments. They spent a good while examining clarinets, bassoons, a tuba. . Until all of a sudden Horacio started playing an old trumpet. A second later, they were gone. When I stepped back over the threshold, they weren’t there. I looked disconsolately to the right, then left — nothing. I considered taking a taxi to scour the rue du Cherche-Midi, where Horacio’s apartment was.
I went running back to the Café Hugo. When I went in, an elegant woman of some thirty-five years, alone at a table, was looking anxiously at the time. It could only be Pauline. I was twenty minutes late.
To excuse my lateness I told her the truth. She enjoyed my story about Cortázar, and we became friends immediately. She was a woman with sharp features, distant when she was serious, warm when she laughed and showed her large teeth, and seductive when she only smiled. A few errant grays shone in her light brown hair. She was wearing a simple, navy blue silk blouse and a Cartier watch. She accepted my documents and asked general, cautious questions. She didn’t want to pressure me. I started to suspect, though, that her interest in Chile was perhaps instrumental. Maybe her heart needed to attack a monster of the right in order to make her attack on the monsters of the left credible. What was really important to her, I think, was to unmask those who gave orders from “behind the Wall” and who, with their tanks, had put an end to the “Prague Spring.” She was interested in the uprising of the unions that was starting in Poland. “It’s our greatest hope,” she told me.