Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

1. Faction of the Socialist Party of Chile.

Some days later I went to a “meet” on Calle Placer. Evening was falling and the storekeepers were starting to close up shop. I spent a few minutes looking at tennis shoes outside the Danny and Robert shoe stores, until I saw the sign of recognition, heard the question we had prearranged, and I got into a Fiat with a couple in the front seat. He was muscular and very dark. The woman, a redhead, was driving. They asked me to lie down on the floor. I figure it was on Gran Avenida, around stop number 9, more or less, that we turned west, turned around, and crossed Gran Avenida again, heading eastward. After a couple of turns to disorient me, we stopped at a house that must have been on Calle Curinanca, or around there, maybe actually on Olavarrieta, which is what I thought then. The bell sounded twice in short bursts, and four big boxer dogs came out, plus a small mutt, black with a curved tail, which seemed to be the fiercest. The door was opened by a scrawny, jumpy, big-nosed kid they greeted with the name “Piscola Face.” He calmed his dogs with a whistle and let us in. After walking a stretch along some paving stones in disrepair, we went into a garage next to an old, two-story mansion. It was a large space, cold, with unpainted brick walls and high ceilings, closed off at one end with chicken wire that had ivy growing on it. There was a carpenter’s bench with tools, cans of paint on the floor, boxes, bottles of gas, paraffin drums. We were lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. We sat down in mismatched chairs. On the cement floor, old oil spots.

They listened to my story in silence and then began to ask about details. They weren’t too interested in why I had crawled under the truck but rather in what I knew about Tomasa, about Chico Escobar and Vladimir Briceño, about their functions. They also wanted to find out exactly what the brothers who made the plan had told us about the woman with glasses and the Bic pen, the one who’d put the money in my purse. I told them. Just that she was fixed, that she would cooperate. Nothing more. They asked me to describe her.

Half an hour later Puma came into the garage, and just behind him was Rafa. My eyes filled with tears when I saw him and I ran to hug him. He seemed distant. So, the next day I went to his mother’s house on Calle Los Gladiolos and left a message with her: “I want to see you. It’s been too long.” My mother’s phone number was below in invisible ink. He never called.

They accepted my version with a certain reticence, I think, but they didn’t accuse me of anything. I was left in peace and disconnected. I hoped to be reincorporated after a few days. Above all, I needed a new identity. I requested one. I needed it for security reasons, I said. And I waited.

The red chalk mark I saw on the corner two weeks later meant I should call the number they’d given me. I did, and I met up with the Spartan in a dive bar on Prince of Wales Avenue. I told him I wanted to infiltrate Central Intelligence, to pass on firsthand information, to climb the ladder in Central; I wanted to plan with him a master stroke that would lift Red Ax to new heights and light the fuse of the revolution. I’m thinking of the Red Orchestra. I believe that every intellectual learns to split in two by interpreting texts that throw them into an arcane world full of trompe l’oeils and mirages. When they’re thirsting for action, they want to be a double agent. Rimbaud: Je est un autre, I am an Other.

“I want to be a Kim Philby,” I tell him, “a John Cairncross. You should be my Arnold Deutsch,” I laughed. He listened to me attentively while we ate some Spanish omelets. He told me, “I’m not some intellectual recruiting students at Cambridge, like Deutsch. Even less if we’re talking about sexual matters. .”

But we agreed he would explore my idea. “Nothing else?” he asked as we said good-bye. “Nothing else?” I never found out what happened to my infiltration plan. It became clear to me, little by little, that my brothers and sisters were starting to phase me out. They didn’t trust me. It happened sometimes with people who’d been detained. It hurt me more than I realized at the time. Inside, deep inside, I felt wronged. Canelo had died protecting me, I had withstood my hours, and I wanted revenge. I wanted action. I deserved another chance. I couldn’t quit. But the Spartan had decreed distance.

I rented an apartment in the Carlos Antúnez Towers. Just one room, plenty of light, and thin walls that let the constant murmur of my neighbor’s TV filter in. Without my stipend I had no other choice. My daughter went on living as before, with my mother. I went to pick her up early in the morning to bring her to school. And I often brought her to stay with me on weekends. “I have to send her to Havana,” I told myself sometimes, and my heart would skip a beat and the sweat would run down my back and soak my blouse. The Spartan leaving the restaurant on Prince of Wales: “Nothing else?” I had to do it; there wasn’t the slightest doubt. I had to get in touch with him to make it happen. And the sooner the better. I promised myself I would talk to her on Friday night at my apartment. Friday, without fail. It wasn’t easy, of course. But hell, it was my duty. In the long run she would understand. I resumed my classes and I reconnected with my friend Clementina. Like me, she taught classes at the Chilean-French Cultural Institute. She also wrote catalogs for art installations. She showed me the latest one she was working on — a text that emphasized, of course, the politics of the work. My life returned to its course, only now at the sidelines of any real mission.

Clementina let me read the essays she wrote for conceptual artists and art actions. Clementina inhabited a world of gestures and words and metaphorical objects, a world I used as camouflage. I was always well aware, though, of the abyss that separated her form of “political activism” from filthy reality. I never lost my mental reserve. “The only interesting artists,” Clementina would repeat, “are those whose gestures call power into question. That’s our parti pris,” she’d say. “Our starting point. It’s not about content, of course. No.” She took me to see works that, according to her commentary, infiltrated the official media culture to counteract it from within using the logic of “hunger for novelty”—an art-news that accused the circuits of production and reproduction of power. “News understood as poiesis,” said Clementina, “as creation.”

Clementina, with her black hair dye, purple lips, and schoolgirl’s black lace-up shoes, was an intellectual leader. A group of dissident artists and critics circulated around her. At one of their openings I met the attaché culturel of the French embassy. It was she who introduced me to her Swedish counterpart, Gustav Kjellin, a big, friendly man with long, white hair, who imparted calm from the moment you met him. A couple of times Clementina and I went to lunch at his house. His wife was pretty, cordial, and silent.

“The artist,” Clementina was explaining to them in her whispery voice, a glass of Veuve Clicquot between her purple-tipped fingers, “is the inventor of destabilizing spectacles.” That’s what she wrote about in her texts, positing that, once they were decoded, of course, they would allow the observer to transform the observed. Gustav saw it all as very political, but at the same time very much in the province of elites. Of course, I agreed with him.

“Fassbinder’s films won’t overthrow capitalism in Germany,” he said. “It could very well be the opposite that happens: capitalism could leave Fassbinder with no audience. .” and he started to laugh.