His Own Man (27 page)

“For years my kids associated Brazil, where they only settled on a more permanent basis in 1981, with a home that was no longer
ours
but rather belonged to a threesome that would alternately have their dad or me at the head. Later, the kids found out about my involvement with drugs, thanks to Marcílio, even though I’d cleaned up my act by then and had been sober for more than ten years. He didn’t need to do that.”

We resumed our walk. “I heeded my father’s advice as long as I could and focused on my kids. Until there was a point, in Washington, when I couldn’t take it anymore. The last straw was when Max had the nerve to invite a CIA operative to have lunch with us, thinking I wouldn’t be able to tell. The guy didn’t need to have it stamped on his forehead. The look in his eye was enough, and the crew cut. That’s when I left. I packed a bag, picked up the kids from school, and went straight to a hotel. And from there to Brazil.

“The truth is, I’d checked out a long time before that. Since Montevideo. Since Nilo.… Paolo was just a passing thing, exacerbated by my discovery of drugs. The rupture, the internal kind
that bleeds without anyone’s noticing, happened with Nilo during our encounter in Montevideo. I never recovered from what happened on that street corner.”

I remembered that evening in 1983, more than twenty years before, when Marina had mentioned that first rocky period of their marriage, in Uruguay during the early 1970s.

“Today I no longer know if I stuck around so long because of the kids, or my aging dad, or because I felt I was somehow to blame. Maybe I was hopeful … or afraid. Sometimes I felt like a character in a 1940s gangster movie, one of those noir films the two of you were always going on about — Itamaraty’s own Barbara Stanwyck or Ida Lupino. Marcílio was never physically abusive; he wasn’t that type. But he hurt me in a much deeper way. In Montevideo, I started to drink more heavily. All of which would later explain Paolo. Anyone could have seen it coming.…”

“The acclaimed photographer!” I exclaimed, with a hint of envy I chose to disguise.

“Laugh all you want, but Paolo was an interesting guy. And he led a pretty wild life back then, before he met me. He came to Chile by bus, from Bolivia, where he’d done a photo shoot for
National Geographic
. He had a kilo of coke in his backpack. A kilo! I don’t know what he was thinking. He told me the stuff had come from the Indians he’d befriended after living with their tribe for so many weeks. Could have … The fact is that he arrived in Chile a week before the coup. In other words, two or three days before us. An Italian journalist, a tourist, no one bothered to go through his bags, which held more dirty clothes than clean ones and a few souvenirs he’d hidden the drug in.

“Days later, all hell broke loose in Santiago: there were bombings, tanks, shootings, corpses in the streets. What to do with the coke? He could hide it or flush it down the toilet. He decided to hide it. So he removed one of the tiles above the little balcony near his room, waterproofed the package, and
tucked the stash under the roof of the hostel where he was staying. Then he hit the streets with his camera. Allende was dead, Pinochet and his posse had seized power, and Paolo had a massive amount of coke hidden just outside his room. Minus what he’d snorted before heading out.”

She glanced over to make sure I was still following the story, then went on. “Marcílio and I were stranded at our hotel. Pedro Henrique was shivering with a fever. The day after the coup, the two of us took off in a hurry for Brazil. I don’t know if I was dreaming or not, but I think smoke was still rising from La Moneda.”

“Might well have been,” I said.

“Paolo later told me he managed to reach the burning palace with great difficulty. He must have passed right beneath our windows. And then he realized that he’d forgotten to put film in his camera! That’s how far gone he was … a professional photographer! Trucks piled with corpses were passing by, passengers in cars were waving handkerchiefs, singing or shouting, loudspeakers were announcing the curfew. Shots rang out in the streets, hundreds of rounds were fired; protestors were chased, cornered, and gunned down right in front of him. And he had no film in his camera. He began to take photos without film, he was so high.

“He was eventually arrested by a patrol. They yanked the camera out of his hands, smashed it with the butts of their rifles, had him strip, and went through his clothes, leaving him squatting naked for an hour at the police station. But they ended up letting him go, he howled so much.… Crazy, and Italian to boot — it was too much for the first day of civil war!”

I pictured the Italian, racing through the city streets, dealing not with the horrors but with the impossibility of recording them. Marina, not far from him, in her hotel room, worrying less about what was going on outside her window than the sick child in her arms.

“When I dove into my affair with Paolo, I sometimes hoped that Marcílio would discover that I was leading a secret life. To replace the one he’d inflicted on me.”

“I was in Los Angeles at the time,” I said, in an effort not to leave her completely alone amid her memories. “My first post. When I heard you were getting involved with drugs, I was concerned, knowing things weren’t going well between you and Max. I thought you were going to go under.”

“I did,” she replied, laughing. “And I started to enjoy experimenting with other things too. I tried acid, mescaline, mushrooms.… Marcílio had no idea. He was always too busy. Thanks to Cordeiro, he’d boxed the ambassador into a corner and was now the all-powerful head of the commercial sector. As long as he could call home at the last minute and ask me to throw together a formal dinner for a dozen people, and then find everything all set, flowers at the center of the table and waiters on hand, the rest didn’t really matter.”

The breeze had blown hair into her face, which she smoothed back. “When did you find out about Paolo?” she asked then, a bit more relaxed. “When I told you about him at my apartment in Jardim Botânico after my dad died?”

“No,” I answered, in the same casual tone. “Long before then, in Brasilia, at the ministry. Around the time things started to go sour between the two of you. I found out from some of the diplomats’ wives. I just couldn’t understand how Max didn’t —”

“
Suspect?
” she interrupted. “Marcílio paid no attention to me!”

Soon, however, she turned to the topic that had insidiously slipped into our conversation. “The diplomats’ wives …” She sighed. “Pathetic women, with few exceptions. Someone should write a book about them one day. A coffee-table book, underwritten by Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, Valentino, Paco Rabanne, Givenchy, Chanel … Squeezed into their leather or suede skirts, tottering on their high heels, flashing almost identical scarves,
bags, and belts. How they craned their necks, keeping an eye on one another.…” She paused, lost in memories. “And to think that I was one of them,” she said at last. “It’s not easy being the wife of a diplomat. At least, it wasn’t back then. Today it’s different. Nearly all of them work or are in school. Some even join the foreign service. And do a better job than their husbands. But in my day …”

She sighed again. “What’s awful is that they depended not on their husbands — which was natural in our generation — but on their husbands’ accomplishments. The more successful their spouses were, the fuller of themselves the wives became. And the wives of the failures, the ones who weren’t promoted, or were timid and awkward, tended to shrivel, like wilted flowers. They would try to blend into the background and were the last to serve themselves at buffets. On the other hand, they were also the first to take lovers, as if wishing to punish their poor husbands for the humiliation …”

“… they’d suffered, thanks to them,” I finished.

Her voice sounded feeble. “It was a perverse system, based on incredibly backward values. In the case of the all-mighties, everything happened with class, by way of loudly whispered words, upturned noses, solemn gestures, looks dripping with irony and indifference. They only realized their true worth once their husbands were dethroned. Then they’d disappear for two or three months, go on a diet or have plastic surgery, and discreetly slip back onto the scene. Just like actors who accept supporting roles once they lose their memory or get old.”

From my less than responsive state, she must have realized that she was going overboard. And wearing me out. Enough so that she toned down her remarks.

“There were exceptions, of course, radiant women full of life, university professors, visual artists, writers. But they were the minority, viewed by the others with distrust.”

“As threats, perhaps.”

“Maybe … I don’t know.”

“What about Nilo?” I asked, trying once more to avoid going against the light on that beautiful morning the gods had given us. “When did you two meet again?”

We’d stopped at a coconut stand. Marina didn’t answer me right away. “After the disastrous scene in Montevideo?” she finally asked.

I nodded.

“I didn’t see Nilo again until 1981, when I came back to Rio, having already decided to leave Marcílio. I happened to run into him at a restaurant in Leblon. I’ve always been nearsighted and my glasses were in my bag. It took me a minute to recognize the man approaching the group I was with. Until he hugged me. The best, warmest hug I’ve ever gotten in my life! At least that’s how it felt at the time. As if nothing bad had happened between the two of us. But this time I didn’t let him disappear around the corner. We left the restaurant arm in arm. My friends understood, some even applauded. We left the party and went straight to bed. He had a huge bed.”

We had a laugh over that. Christ the Redeemer poked out of the clouds for a few seconds to bless the long night of passion between the two and then withdrew again.

“Early the next morning, he asked me to forgive him for that afternoon in Montevideo. He explained that a few days earlier, his best friend had been kidnapped at his front door. And been taken back to Brazil in an air force jet.”

“In an air force jet?”

“That’s what he said. He was convinced that our embassy had taken part in the operation. The attachés for sure, or at least one of them. And the ambassador was probably in on it too. That man was evil. Anyway …”

For a minute, she seemed to have lost her train of thought. I let her pick it back up on her own.

“It seems officials came from Rio to help the Uruguayan police with the kidnapping. At the time, Uruguay was still a democratic country. At least on paper. Their coup didn’t happen until later, in June of 1973. I remember it well. But the two armed forces had been collaborating for years. And the police in both countries as well. Because of the Brazilian exiles who were living there. Which explains Nilo’s horror when he saw me associated with such people.

“Today, there’s a lot of talk about Operation Condor, but these countries were collaborating long before then, although informally. Operation Condor might just have been its most radical manifestation. And the Argentinean military had yet to come up with that insane practice of hurling prisoners into the ocean. Very sick people indeed.” She smiled with bitter irony. “A lot has come out on this subject in the newspapers recently. As time goes by, we end up finding out everything. Or almost everything. Not in detail. But the big picture.”

“What about Nilo’s friend?” I asked.

“Henrique or Antonio … I don’t remember his last name now either.”

Having finished our drinks, we left the empty coconuts and continued our walk. It was Sunday. A few bicycles zipped by us.

“In Montevideo, Marcílio kept me trapped in his web,” she commented. “A soft and comfortable web. Whenever one of the threads broke, he would draw close to me again. Enough to give me a shred of hope. And when that wasn’t enough, we’d end up in bed together. I always had the feeling he was thinking about other things at those times, though.…”

“Other women?”

“
Other women?
No … I don’t think so. Maybe … My impression was that he was thinking about other things. He always seemed busy. And he was never able to completely disconnect from his problems. Or from his ghosts.” She stopped, again facing the water.

“But we carried on. At some point, in Chile, he sensed that I was becoming more distant, not to mention anxious and irritable. Coke has an edge to it.… We had a serious fight when I leaned over to get the salt shaker at a dinner party one of his business cronies was hosting and a drop of blood dripped from my nose onto the white tablecloth. The host turned pale, as did the people nearby. The cartilage between my nostrils wasn’t in great shape, and I’d spent the afternoon snorting. All I remember is the terrible silence that fell over the table, from one end to the other, while the person sitting next to me tilted my head back and lent me his handkerchief.”

After another pause, she returned to her past. “On the car ride home, Marcílio berated me for what he called, in his usual manner,
an unpleasant incident
. I didn’t say a word. And he didn’t push it. But at home he brought up the subject again. He seemed suspicious more than annoyed. As if
something strange
might be going on with me.” This memory seemed to have been particularly painful.

“The next day he came to his senses. ‘After all, nothing serious happened,’ he said, by way of an apology. ‘It was an accident that could have happened to anyone.’ But now I was the one who didn’t want to talk. That’s when he began to see me for the first time … and realized that he might be starting to lose me. Not that he suspected anything or anyone. But I think his sixth sense finally kicked in. And it was high time! In a matter of days, fear grew into alarm and then panic. After all, I was the one with both the social and emotional clout.” Her voice didn’t carry the slightest trace of victory, only tremendous fatigue.

“From then on, he made an enormous effort to win me back. By coincidence, Paolo’s coke ran out around the same time. We must have snorted a half kilo each in twelve months. And the crazy fool decided to go back to Bolivia to get more. I lent him some money. But he never returned. We weren’t getting along very well by then, I suspected he’d had other affairs.… Anyway,
the fact is that he never came back. He might have been caught crossing the border with the stuff. Or been killed in Bolivia. Things weren’t easy there either.…”