Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

But after that moment of exultation the furrowed brow returns, and the same aggrieved tone as before.

He’s bored with what he does, he tells me. He’s disgusted, he tells me. “My work is ‘intelligence,”’ he tells me. “My work is secret recordings, tracking over the course of months, photos taken from fake ambulances and false taxis, fingerprints, duly verified confessions, microphones hidden behind the plate of a power socket, recordings from a tapped phone, weapons found in secret compartments, documents that I turn into classified information. . But, of course, the evidence is never more than the tip of the iceberg. You have to imagine the reality. But where the imagination creates, reason prunes. That’s what we’re here for, that’s what we train for, to investigate. But here there has been bad intelligence, there’s been shooting into the flock, lack of professionalism, and simple barbarity. The cruelty of wolves in a cage.

“I don’t mean to say they’re all tame doves. No. And I know that Mossad eliminates terrorists and, sometimes, they make mistakes, too. I know it very well. We’ve had instructors from Mossad in Central who spoke perfect Spanish. Smart guys, let me tell you. And the English do the same. You don’t believe me? For example, in 1978, on the way to Gibraltar, I’m telling you, gunmen from SAS and MI5 murdered three terrorists from the IRA. Three. They didn’t even give them a chance to surrender. Well, and then there’s the United States. . Not only in Vietnam. Later, in Libya. . But here, there’s no sense of proportion. Macha’s people fight just to fight, because why not, you understand?”

I answer, quoting Violeta Parra: “Pero no es culpa del chancho. . But it’s not the pig who’s at fault, it’s the one who feeds it the mash.”

He looks at me with a disdainful sneer on his lips.

“I know what you’re thinking. . And yes, you’re right,” he explains, showing the white palms of his hands. I had hurt him. “A lot of missions go straight to Macha from C-1,” he says. “They skip over me because they know what I think, did you know that?” And his tone gets softer to win me over. “And Macha thinks he’s the Macho of all machos, right?” Now his tone is mocking. “The little boss of that mafia only obeys macho orders and he only gives macho orders, right? He goes first into the most dangerous safe house. He wants to take risks. And you know why? To assuage his guilt. It balances things out, he figures. He ignores procedure so he can attack with few people, he’s even gone into a house alone, and then he makes mistakes, like what happened when the ‘Prince of Wales’ got away from him. And then the ones he wants to catch or blow the whistle on get away from him, poor fucker. . It’s so he can avoid leaks, he says, to avoid accidents, because in small houses there’s a big risk of friendly fire, he says, he only trusts his own people, no one else, he says, there’s a mole here, someone warns the enemy; he says he had to investigate Colonel Vergara’s assassination and found it would have been impossible without information from inside. . That’s what he says. I’ve asked him for proof and he doesn’t have any. But of course, you know, they shot at him point-blank and the bullet stayed in him. Too close to the femoral to extract it. So it hurts him. So he limps a little. They could have killed him, but they didn’t kill him. Friendly fire? Betrayal? We’ll never know. That’s it. The truth is that when it comes to Macha, one more death won’t keep him up at night.”

He takes his knees in his hands. He’s dejected. “This shit comes from above,” he tells me in a barely audible voice. “That’s why no one puts a stop to it. My complaint went into a vacuum. The director wants more power, so he needs a bigger budget, so he needs to increase the danger posed by the enemy. And the boss above him, you think he’s not doing exactly the same thing?”

He shakes his bald head, with its smooth, soft, and shining skin that I like to kiss when we say good-bye. He’s already regretting what he’s going to tell me.

And you, writer who wasn’t there, does my telling you this help you see the situation, the ambiguity of that moment of mine with Flaco?

“Listen to me,” he says, and he lowers his voice until it’s nothing but a thread. “Listen to me well. This is a secret for you and no one else. A couple of weeks ago, Macha got the order to organize an operation to deal with an ugly situation. The order wasn’t to arrest the subject, the terrorist, you understand? They were about to leave. They were in the cafeteria having sodas: Great Dane, Iris, Chico Marín, Pancha Ortiz, Indio. . Macha didn’t know who the victim was, nothing, not the slightest idea. He had a photo, an address, and an order, that’s it. You know how these things are done. And he was listening, surrounded by his people, and he was quiet as always.

“I asked him: ‘And you, Macha, what do you think of having to carry out an order like this?’ There was a silence. ‘Answer me,’ I pressed him. Macha leaned back, balancing calmly on the back legs of the chair. After a long pause he looked me straight in the eyes and said:

“‘Flaco, tell me, old man: What does one more fuck matter to an old whore?’

“Everyone started laughing. But I didn’t laugh at all.

“And he said: ‘Let me be the one to live with this, old man. Other people can’t do it. They have a future to think of. Me, I’ve got nothing.”’

Flaco rolled his eyes upward and he laughed, then, a cold laugh.

Macha is a murderer. That’s what Flaco is telling me. So that’s what it was that drew me to him. He was a killer. I thought: Flaco envies him. Because Macha is an animal with no conscience. He’s more primitive and pure.

And then he came out with it. Just like that, no preamble: “I’m separated,” he told me. “I left my wife.” And I, like an idiot, thought he was pulling my leg, and I laughed.

“Don’t laugh,” he reproached me. “There are two little girls and a woman who are suffering, their hearts are broken. Have some respect for that, at least.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry, Flaco, it’s just. .”

“They cry when I come to pick them up, they want to stay at their mother’s house. . She’s brainwashed them,” he goes on telling me. “They used to love me so much. It’s unthinkable that they don’t. . I only see them two hours a week, and sometimes not even that. They don’t feel like it, they say, or they have homework. They can’t forgive me. Should I go to court? She tells me: You’re the one who left home, aren’t you? My lawyer tells me that this gets fixed with money. But, where the fuck do I get the money? From a promotion; it’s the only way.”

He sighed sorrowfully. . Then I embraced him and cradled him in my arms. In that moment, there on the black leather sofa, I truly loved him and I thought I would live with him, and I imagined myself in his Volvo coming back from the beach at El Quisco, and then I saw myself on a mountaintop, and we were laughing and happy in that pure, cold air he loved so much. No more Saturdays and Sundays alone, I thought. We kissed softly, intensely. The tears slid down my cheeks. And the tears that I imagined welling in his eyes, if they existed, never fell.

Pancha Ortiz was putting on makeup. She barely greeted me. With the lipstick still in her hand, she pursed her lips in the mirror, spreading out the color until it was even. Her lips were much fuller and more sensuous than I had noticed before. Her black blouse, open, left bare that fissure that men like so much, and part of those insolent breasts of hers. She took a little bottle of perfume from her purse and she sprayed her neck and I watched her, turning her breasts, contemplating herself in the mirror as if she were alone in the bathroom. Alone, or seducing a man. She said good-bye to me, kissing the air by my cheek, and off she went, leaving me confused in a cloud of perfume. Only then did I realize what was causing my confusion: the perfume was Christian Dior and the bottle was the same as the ones Flaco always gave me.