The Great Wide Open, page 29
‘You heard me.’
‘What happened to this editor?’
‘He was hardly an “editor” the way we might think of one back home: an actual moral arbiter. The guy was a right-wing lackey.’
‘Which made it okay to kidnap him?’
‘And put a bullet in the back of his head, as we had to do,’ she said.
‘Don’t shit me here.’
‘I shit you not, Girl Scout. The asshole was held for around three weeks by El frente. We offered the junta a deal – release our second in command, El Teniente, and we will give you your propaganda stooge back. You know how the junta responded? They dumped El Teniente’s body in front of the burned-out headquarters of the Chilean Socialist Party. His eyes had been gouged out, his balls cut off, his skull beaten in with hammers and iron bars. What else could El Capitán do but order that Pinochet’s favorite apologist be executed? At least they did it cleanly. No torture, no disfiguration. Just one bullet to blow the back of his head off.’
‘Don’t tell me Peter pulled the trigger.’
‘You’ll have to ask him that.’
‘Tell me now: did Peter kill him?’
Another of her sardonic smiles as she fired up another cigarette. How I wanted right now to smash that smile back into her face.
‘I’ve got you upset, don’t I?’
‘Yes you do.’
‘You evict me from your room, the girl who was missing, presumed dead, who was victimized for years, who comes to you in fucking Dublin, seeking shelter … ’
Part of me felt guilt in the face of this accusation. But it was overshadowed by the thought: she is bad news. Thorny, malignant, menacing. And unstable. I had a choice here: give in to her blackmail and let her return to the floor of my little bedsit in the hope that she might inform me more about Peter. Or stay firm and see what I could still get out of her. Dad once told me: never do a deal with someone who tries to blackmail you. They will always take that to be a sign of weakness … and one which they have to exploit. I downed part of my pint, then said:
‘I don’t want you in my room anymore. I don’t want you in my life anymore.’
She looked thrown by such directness. It was clear to me now that, in the years since she had disappeared, she had turned her anguish and grief into the sort of hardness that expressed itself best in intimidation and browbeating. Like most bullies she didn’t know what to do when her bluff was called.
‘Blood is very much on Peter’s hands,’ she said.
‘And on yours.’
‘I can live with that.’
‘I’m sure you can.’
‘Fuck you,’ she said, standing up.
‘Is my brother okay?’
‘You shit on me like that and now you want reassurance?’
‘Just tell me: did he shoot that newspaper editor?’
As she snatched her cigarettes, she leaned across the table and hissed:
‘El Capitán ordered that Peter do it. Not only that: he ordered that Peter force the gun in Duarte’s mouth and pull the trigger so that Duarte would be staring into your brother’s eyes in the moments before he died. It was a test – and one which your hard-ass revolutionary brother fulfilled. Perfectly.’
I shut my eyes, thrown beyond belief by what I’d just heard. Not knowing whether to believe it, or to write it off as one of her vicious inventions designed to unsettle me. What I did know in this very instant was that I would never have anything more to do with her. Opening my eyes again I told her just that:
‘Stay away from me.’
‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.’
After she left I must have smoked three cigarettes in a row, going over to the bar to order a Powers to accompany the smokes. I never drank whiskey at lunchtime. I certainly needed one right now. Did my brother truly kill that editor? Was there even an editor named Duarte connected to the Pinochet junta? Could Peter have become entwined in matters so radical that he followed such terrible orders? Or was this another of Carly’s dark fantasies, put out there in front of me in an attempt to destabilize me further? Clearly she had met Peter – because how else would she have known where I was so precisely?
I needed a walk. It was a rare day without rain, and I had no further lectures that afternoon. I walked down to the quays and hopped on a bus heading westward. Twenty minutes later I found myself in Phoenix Park. It was my newfound refuge, at the far westerly end of the quays; a huge green space with lakes and forests and pathways that led you to believe you were in dense wilderness even though the gray tangle that was Dublin was never more than a few miles away. It may not have had the visual drama of Wicklow, but it certainly allowed me space alone with all the ongoing infernal conundrums playing themselves out between my ears.
Today I found myself walking furiously, my anger acute. How fucking dare she accuse Peter of such things? When it came to matters radical my brother was someone who always sided with the forces of non-violent change, who condemned assassinations or any sort of taking of life in the name of a cause. Hell, all his civil rights work in the South was inspired by Martin Luther King’s example of peaceful protest. The last thing he would ever have agreed to do was kill anyone in cold blood.
But why had he decided to drop out of university and head to Santiago? Yes, pissing off our father had something to do with it. Showing the old man that a member of his own family would take the other, more righteous side against a military junta, that too was part of his decision to head there. But to team up with a violent revolutionary group, to do their homicidal bidding, to force the nozzle of a gun into the mouth of a man whose only crime was to play propagandist for a nasty regime, who no doubt had a wife and children … no, hyper-moral Peter would never have bought into such belligerent extremist insanity. Of that I was absolutely certain. By the time I finished my three hours in the park, getting out of its grounds just as night was falling, I also decided that the worst thing I could do right now was alert my mother about Carly Cohen’s monstrous stories. Or contact my father via his office in New York and ask him if, perchance, his ‘contacts’ in Chile knew that his son was deeply ensnarled in the activities of El frente … if, that is, such an organization even existed.
The next day, after an hour spent with a very helpful woman in Trinity’s library, I was able to track down – via copies of The Times of London on file there – recent news from Chile. There, in an edition dated March 4, 1974, was a brief story on their ‘Abroad’ pages about how the body of Alfonso Duarte, the editor of a ‘government-backed Santiago newspaper’, had been dumped in front of his newspaper’s offices two nights previously … and how ‘a Marxist revolutionary group, El frente, had claimed responsibility for his murder’.
I slept badly that night, waking once when I heard raised voices. Sticking my head out the door I peered downstairs and saw Carly and Sean stagger in.
‘If you think I’m going to fuck ugly old you tonight … ’ she yelled at him.
‘Why don’t you fuck off to East Germany?’ he bellowed back. ‘Though the fucking Commie Nazis there would probably boot you out for being a fucking ideological child.’
I shut the door before either of them could catch me eavesdropping. My relief at not having her crashed out on my floor was overshadowed by my fury at everything she had become, and how her rage at the world was a terrifying vortex into which she sucked anyone in her immediate vicinity. When, half an hour later, she banged on my door, demanding to be let in, I remained silent, not daring to move. Her garbled yelling woke everyone up. I heard Diarmuid now also outside my door, ordering Carly to shut the fuck up, and her screaming back, saying that she knew I was inside and wouldn’t stop bellowing until I let her in. Sean’s voice joined this angry duo, trying to talk sense to her. Diarmuid threatening to call the police finally shut her up. Within minutes, peace reigned again outside my little bedsit. I fell into an uneasy, shallow sleep.
I could have slept on for half the morning, as I didn’t have a lecture until after lunch. But at 8.20 a.m. Sheila knocked on the door and handed me a yellow envelope marked Western Union. One thing I knew about telegrams: they were rarely the carriers of good news.
‘Thanks,’ I said and shut my door before she could ask me what was in it. I sat down on my desk table, fearing the absolute worst: my brother Peter killed by the junta regime. Or Dad – all the stress of his life finally getting to him – dead of the heart attack I always feared would take him from us, leaving me in the clutches of my mother.
I ripped open the envelope.
Can you get to Paris? I’m alive – barely. We need to talk.
Peter
17
I WENT TO the student travel agency off Grafton Street that morning and found a cheap flight to Paris at the end of the week. Then I crossed over to a post office and telegrammed Peter back:
Coming Friday. What’s going on? Carly Cohen is here.
Peter’s Western Union reply the next morning:
Don’t listen to her. Will explain all. See you at Orly Friday p.m.
My flight was two hours delayed owing to a bad thunderstorm over Dublin Airport. When I reached Orly it was almost midnight. My first sight of my brother threw me. He appeared to have aged around ten years since our last face-to-face encounter many months back. He was rail-thin. His face had an anemic hue. He was smoking a cigarette with disconcerting rapidity, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. He attempted a smile when he saw me. He didn’t pull it off. We gave each other a cursory hug. An uneasy silence filled the taxi as we made little in the way of conversation during the forty minutes it took to reach the hotel – or, at least, none outside of Peter’s desultory questions about how I was getting on at Trinity. I asked him how long he’d been in Paris. His reply: ‘Ten days.’ I wanted to know why he’d only gotten in touch with me three days ago, whether he’d spoken to our parents.
It was rapidly approaching 1 a.m. I noticed fleeting images from the grimy windows of the taxi: cafes still open, a couple kissing up against a tree, moments of extravagant architecture, the interplay of lamplight on damp streets. I wanted to fall into the evident romanticism of the city. But all I could think about was: how much would Peter actually tell me? Would he entrust me with the truth … or, at least, his version?
‘Don’t expect too much,’ Peter said as the cab pulled up in front of the hotel. It’s all a bit one-star here.’
That was a serious understatement. Hotel La Louisiane was shabby in extremis. The lobby had a single dangling light bulb, a night man at the front desk who looked like he was in some sort of purgatory of his own making. He snapped his fingers for my passport, took down the details on some official form, tossed me a key and pointed to the stairs.
‘So you’ve decided we should spend a couple of days on the Paris version of skid row,’ I said.
‘Think of it as an adventure. You ever read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer ? This was the sort of room in Paris where Miller learned how to become a writer.’
‘What happened in Chile?’
‘Can this wait until tomorrow?’
The wave of exhaustion hit me again. I was with my brother and any confession or otherwise he was about to make could wait. Despite the banging in the radiator, despite the loud verbal fight in the street, despite the guy vomiting in the room next door, I managed to pass out until I heard a knock on my door the next morning. Ten minutes later, after a fast wash in the sink, I was dressed and ready to head out. It was a cloudy, cold day. It didn’t matter. Paris immediately had me in its grip. Talk here was loud – especially around the market where Peter brought me for breakfast. At a little cafe opposite a fish stand, where men in thick rubber aprons were using hatchets to chop the heads off very dead poissons, the waitress served us café au lait in porcelain bowls. We dunked croissants in the milky brew and smoked our first cigarettes of the morning. Peter talked about a couple of little cinemas in the area where he’d been spending a great deal of time, where you could watch old films for very little money and essentially hide indoors from the complexities of life.
‘Just yesterday, before you got here, I saw this fantastic film by Fritz Lang called The Big Heat where Glenn Ford plays this cop gone crazy after some mob guys kill his wife, and there’s this femme fatale played by Gloria Grahame who gets coffee thrown in her face by Lee Marvin, but has her revenge at the end – even if she dies in the process.’
‘Isn’t that how revenge works? You might get even, but you also screw yourself up along the way. Which is kind of like your bedmate, Carly Cohen.’
Peter shut his eyes, wanting to block out any mention of her. But then he opened them and said:
‘Can we first finish our coffee?’
‘Whatever,’ I said.
After breakfast Peter told me we needed to first stroll at length through Saint Germain des Prés and the city soon took us over. We walked by the Seine. He showed me the Pont Neuf, we loitered in a fantastic bookshop called La Hune – which, had I been a Francophone, I would have lived in all the time. He insisted on bringing me to the Gothic, lofty precincts of Saint-Sulpice, where he pointed out the Delacroix paintings. He also knew of a place near Les Jardins du Luxembourg which was owned by a Breton and therefore specialized in crêpes and the very alcoholic cider made in what he called ‘the Maine of France’.
As introductions to Paris go, it was pretty damn wonderful – and far removed from the usual tourist trail. As we sat eating our crêpes, and Peter began to talk about how it was still an ambition of his to crack the language and live here, I could not help but marvel at my older brother’s worldliness and sense of curiosity. Along with the fact that, outside of a week spent here during his junior year, Peter had little prior knowledge of Paris, yet in just ten days he had worked out his preferred haunts. ‘Do you know anyone here?’ I asked.
‘A few people,’ he said. ‘One classmate from Penn who’s in a junior position in the Embassy. But under the circumstances I don’t think he’d agree to a visit with me.’
‘Are you on the run?’
‘That’s a little melodramatic.’
‘So is the fact that you’re here in Paris, that you demanded to see me in person, that you’ve spent the last four hours dodging the subject.’
‘I don’t want to talk in here. What I have to say I need to say somewhere where we can’t be heard. The Luxembourg Gardens are just across the street.’
He settled the check and we headed out. The sun was fighting its way through the dense cloud cover. There were traces of snow in the park. We walked to a place which Peter called his favorite corner of this very formal, exquisitely landscaped green space. Peter pointed to the Pantheon, all the famous French dead interred there. I decided the moment had arrived to speak directly.
‘Carly Cohen told me that you were ordered by your revolutionary Capitán to kill a newspaper editor. And that you blew his brains out by shoving a gun muzzle into his mouth.’
That got his attention.
‘Oh Jesus fuck,’ he whispered.
‘Is that a confirmation or a denial?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t kill Alfonso Duarte.’
‘Oh, so you know his name. Did you pull the trigger?’
‘No.’
‘Look at me, Peter – and tell me that again.’
He now faced me directly.
‘I did not kill Alfonso Duarte.’
‘Then why did Carly say that?’
‘Because she is malignant and cruel. I argued hard against it. I was overruled. Duarte was only kidnapped after the Pinochet thugs had arrested a colleague of ours. Picking up Duarte was tit for tat. But he was a bargaining tool. We let the junta know: you want your mouthpiece released, let go our ten comrades whom you’re holding. We never tortured him. We never beat him. We didn’t try to get information out of him. All we did was demand a trade. Do you know how the junta responded? They beat to death our ten comrades. That’s when El Capitán had no choice but to have Duarte killed. The junta gave us no alternative.’
‘You didn’t pull the trigger?’
He shook his head.
‘But you were there when he was executed?’
After a pause, he nodded.
‘Who pulled the trigger?’ I asked.
‘Carly pulled the trigger.’
Now it was my turn to be blindsided.
‘I don’t believe that,’ I said.
‘But you believed her when she told you it was me who killed Duarte?’
‘I never said that.’
‘The lie she told you … ’
‘But why would she do such a thing?’
‘Why? Why? Are you kidding me? She bragged about doing bank jobs with the Panthers. She bragged about going on midnight runs to score illegal guns for them. Then she shows up in Chile and talks her way into El frente de liberación revolucionaria … ’
Peter stood up.
‘There’s a lot more to say, a lot more to explain,’ he said. ‘But I am finding all this rather hard right now. I need a walk. I need to think things through.’
‘In other words: buzz off for a few hours so I can plot out how best to rationally explain my crimes and misdemeanors?’
‘You’ve really become so judgmental.’
‘That’s not true. I am simply appalled by what I’m hearing. Don’t you feel guilty?’
‘The reason I was in Chile in the first place was a woman I met at Yale. A woman named Valentina Soto. I was in love with her. She returned to Chile after the coup to work in the movement against Pinochet. And she was killed by the junta two weeks ago.’
I could see that he was on the verge of sobbing; the tragedy deeply registered in his eyes.
‘Were you with her when she was killed?’ I asked.
Peter nodded many times.
‘If you were there when they killed her, why did they spare you?’
‘That’s the complicated part of the story.’
He fished into his pockets for a cigarette, lit up, glanced at his watch.
‘It’s now almost three. Tell you what – see you back at the hotel around six. Is that okay with you? I mean, you won’t feel lost or anything?’
