“Mama,” she said, filled with enthusiasm. “When are you going to show me your rings and earrings and bracelets?” I looked at her, surprised. “Because you have all those things hidden away, too. And I know where.” She ran to my room, opened the closet, and showed me the little safe built into the wall. “Come on, open it, Mama. I want to see your rings and bracelets.” I put my hands on her shoulders. I thought about the darkness of my CZ at rest. As always, minutes before Anita arrived, I had put it in there with my documents from Central.
“No,” I told her. “I don’t have jewels, Anita.”
“But Mama, what do you keep in there, then?”
“Letters,” I told her. “Documents.”
“Love letters, Mama? Letters my father wrote to you?” And Anita looked at me with rounded eyes. “Let me see them, Mama. Mama. . Let me see what my dad’s handwriting looked like.”
“Another time, Anita.”
“Mama, please!” I closed the closet door.
The night when Flaco finally came, without warning as always, I had my plan ready and decided on: I would flirt like a crazy person and then, nothing. So he’d be left high and dry, so he’d be left longing for me. He brought a bottle of Absolut vodka and a little jar of Iranian beluga caviar. He was one of those who said the Russians couldn’t even get vodka right; only guns. Hence the Absolut. We sat down, and by the second Swedish vodka we were kissing and kissing, and he was frantically pulling off my shirt and jeans and everything else. I couldn’t bear the idea that Pancha had slept with him. How was it possible, when I was so much better than her?
I was lying on the sofa, on my back. He knelt down in front of me. He placed me there, and I knew what for. And I let him do it. And I opened myself and turned my hips in search of his thirsty tongue. And he sunk his fingers in. And I touched my breasts. And he returned with an insatiable tongue. I brought my hands down. And suddenly the rhythm of my body seized hold of me, it broke away from my control and I came, I came suddenly and completely. Afterward I started to cry.
He doesn’t understand. He wants me to stop crying. Why? Why doesn’t he let me cry if I want to cry? He gets mad. He won’t leave me alone. There’s nothing to explain. I give up. I say to him: “Why do you have this power over me? You do something like that to me, and I come like an idiot. That power I’ve given you is humiliating.” He starts to laugh, and he pulls my hair away from my face.
“You’re pretty,” he tells me, after inspecting me with his playful, tender, ironic gaze. That’s it: You’re pretty. That damned son of a bitch knows that when he gives me that look, I melt.
“I know,” I tell him. “I’m going to find another man who will make me forget about you.”
He says: “You’ll wish the sex was as good with him as it is with me.”
I tell him: “I’m the one who knows how to fuck, I’ll teach him everything.” He laughs. “Also, as you know, he’ll be rich,” I tell him. “He’ll have tons of cash.” He laughs less loudly, now. I say: “There comes a time when a man’s money becomes almost the only thing that matters to a woman.” He’s not laughing anymore.
FORTY-NINE
A week later Flaco Artaza had already been promoted. The positive evaluation after the “elimination”—the term they used — of the Spartan and Max got him that. Two very hard blows for Red Ax. They took him out of Central and installed him in Military Intelligence. It was what he wanted. Flaco left Central behind and he vanished from my life without even saying good-bye. Do I need to tell you how I felt?
But after about four months he called and invited me to lunch. I got into my red Nissan in the parking lot, and when I started it up, I saw. . What? But, it’s Macha! He was a few yards away from me walking with his slight limp, without his Ray Bans and escorted by six armed men. Two of them carried long guns. They stopped next to a black Chevrolet four-door with tinted windows that I’d never seen in the parking lot before.
The one in front went over to Macha and spoke to him. He was a dark, thick guy with a short moustache. I had my windows rolled up so I couldn’t hear, but I saw. What I mean is, I saw Macha put his hand behind him, to his belt under his dark leather jacket. I watched with my own eyes as he handed over his CZ. He did it without any ceremony, like a person returning the keys to a car. Then I saw how he let himself be cuffed, his hands tamely behind him, putting up no resistance. The black Chevrolet with tinted windows sped off with him in it, followed by a Peugeot fake taxi.
Flaco took me that day to eat oysters at Azócar. I arrived still trembling a bit from what I had just seen, but I didn’t want to mention it to him. We laughed, we had a good time in that old Chilean mansion illuminated by a skylight above us. The oysters were marvelous. When, after several glasses of sauvignon blanc, I dared to tell him what I had seen, how they’d taken Macha away in handcuffs, he wrinkled his forehead and assured me that he wasn’t up-to-date on counterintelligence matters, that his new job had to do with strictly military intelligence in neighboring countries; countries to the north, he added with a smile, to make it very clear to me. And he changed the subject.
We kissed in his Volvo, and he invited me on a trip, a short and intense trip, he said, just three or four days in the pure mountain air. He told me about a unique place in the mountains close to Torres del Paine, full of stalactites; a place no one has photographed yet, he told me, ice sculptures carved by the wind. I ached to go. Even so, I told him no. Looking at me with sad, languid eyes, he told me that I was very pretty, that we deserved a real good-bye. I told him that too much time had passed for me to care about being pretty, that when I was younger, sure, I would have been grateful for the flattery. Lies. I didn’t want to suffer, I told him, I begged him. That trip, when it ended, would leave me worse off than before. And that was true. He insisted, but I didn’t give in.
He went with me to my apartment. I didn’t invite him in. The slam of the door when it closed. I jumped. As if an enormous window had shattered. I closed my eyes. When I heard his footsteps moving away down the hall, I burst out crying. For months and months I waited for his call. It never came.
FIFTY
I’m feeling tired. . You know, during that time it never even crossed my mind that my life would end like this, alone in a Swedish home, or even abroad. . One of my students helped me out of pure kindness. There are good people out there, too. She got in touch with Teruca’s mother and gave her my message: I was being followed and had decided to go into exile for safety reasons. It wasn’t the bravest thing to do, but what the hell, the decision was made. She would pass along the information to her daughter Teruca, who would communicate it to my brothers and sisters, the ones who were left, and so a curtain of smoke would extend over me. And while that was happening in Chile, I was on a plane flying out of there.
As soon as I got to Stockholm, I got a job at Berlitz. Every morning I dropped my daughter off at school, took the subway, got off at the Gamla Stan stop, emerged onto Gamla Brogatan, and in a few steps I reached number 29. That was my routine for years. I taught French to advanced students and studied Swedish on a grant. They helped me a lot here. It’s not true that the Swedish are cold. I’m thinking of my friend Agda Lindstrom, who took us into her house for our entire first month here. She was a lawyer. She was killed. Car accident, a year and a half after I arrived. Horrible. She was a thin woman, not very tall, with very white skin, dark brown hair, and gray eyes. She was an older sister to me. Frank, direct, serious, at first she seemed a little distant to me, perhaps a bit hard. But after a few days, I discovered a person of exceptional generosity and gentleness. She knew only as much about me as I wanted her to. She introduced me to her friends, all of them professionals. I talked to them in French. After two years, I had learned Swedish. Of course, I’ll never have Anita’s accent.