To Antonio, Gerardo, Fernando, Ramón and René, prisoners in the United States for having penetrated the Cuban counter-revolutionary groups in Miami, whose terrorism against the socialist homeland they were trying to prevent.
For Hilda, my zoon politikon, as always.
In my action novels I tend to construct a plot line for which I then design the necessary characters. In this novel, I did the contrary; I set myself the experiment of first creating the characters without having designed the story. Using broad strokes, I planned an adventure novel where the good folk, generous, simple, and sincere souls with no aspirations for power or wealth, having exceptional intelligence, recruited for the cause of truth and justice by way of a highly original competition, would confront those too well known bad guys of all times within a plot that I had not yet sketched out. But when I finished conceiving my good characters, I fell in love with them; I didn’t want to misuse them against ordinary enemies. So, I got rid of the capi maffiosi, mercenaries and killers that I was counting on a priori and I decided to confront them with the crème de la crème of international banditry, amongst whom, as we know, shine the presidents of powerful nations, vice presidents, prime ministers, owners of news networks, CEOs of huge transnationals, bankers, speculators, etc. And soon I made a calculation; I saw that such an ambitious novel, with such big-league characters, would never fit into the modest space of the 500 pages I was allotting myself at the beginning, but it would require 1500 to 2000 pages and that would put me in hot water with my editors. So I opted to convert my initial novel into a trilogy—or pentalogy, or hexalogy, depending on how things were going. For that reason, in this first volume, I have limited myself to present good characters who, as my dear reader shall see, become the protagonists of three amusing novellas, full of action and suspense. Later, the memories of two old men bearing the imprint of a World War II adolescence, and the enigmas present all the way through the plot, still without the agon required by Aristotelian precepts, seem to me to be more than enough to fill a good novel, I mean, this novel. Then, in the next ones, Deo volente, we shall find those same characters struggling against the bad guys, very evil ones, whom they have gained as their rivals.
With Oscar, Ambrosio erred seven times. When he saw him come into the restaurant car, he assumed he was a southern Italian, and a few minutes later, a French playboy. He was wrong on both counts. He knew that when they had barely started their first conversation.
In a little while, he thought he had discovered in his personage a romantic Byron-type, in love with a Greek woman. Third and fourth errors.
Later yet, when Oscar mentioned to him that he had just inherited some money, he imagined a well-heeled gentleman, and if he was traveling by train it was only because he was afraid of planes. And finally, seeing him get off suddenly with that heavy suitcase, he feared that he was a train robber.
In total, seven failed conjectures.
Between Paris and the Italian border, the High Velocity Trains (TGVs) stop only at Chambéry and St-Jean de Maurienne. But before enjoying the delights of the Jura or recalling the prowess of Hannibal negotiating the Alpine abysses with his elephants, the passenger must put up with the monotonous lowlands where the Loire, the Saône and the Rhône flow.
“As boring as Buenos Aires Province,” thought Ambrosio.
Rural France south of Paris under a cloudy sky with a grey drizzle, seen from the restaurant car of a TGV, offers an invitation to drowsiness, ill humor and, in Ambrosio’s case, anxiety-provoked drinking and eating.
Landscape doesn’t exist; especially for a fat man measuring one meter eighty-five; because seated in front of the large sliding window, Ambrosio’s eyes were at the exact same height as the chrome horizontal band dividing the large panes of glass. In order to observe the exterior, he had to stretch to see above the chrome band, or he had to torture his stomach and neck into a scrunch so as to be able to see beneath it. Even so, the trench through which the TGV cars snake their way, practically hidden, only allow you to see the sky and its fugitive slopes from below.
On the other hand, the grande vitesse would give you no time to read the signs at the stations, not even to kill boredom by looking for them on the map. And neurotic people, accustomed to read-ing in silence, couldn’t even take refuge in their books. By the third page, Ambrosio had closed his. The constant brushing against his elbow by the swaying to and fro movements of passengers in the aisle distracted him. And a fat man weighing 130 kilos had no way of pulling his elbow back to safety. He was also distracted by the furiously paced gusts of air and their repeated roar whenever they passed through the tunnels. It made reading impossible.
A girl, an employee of the French railroad company, came up to him with an invitation to take part in a survey about the trip. Ambrosio limited himself to saying: “This trip is boring and it’s making me gain weight. Never again as long as I live am I going to travel on the TGV. I prefer a stagecoach or a plane.”
The girl taking the survey scribbled something down and smiled indulgently.
“Je vous remercie de votre sincérité, Monsieur.”
And with her hand already on the door, she turned to smile at him again. Two hours into the trip and that fat man had been the only passenger who had given her an honest and amusing answer.
Ambrosio flashed her a hostile glance, not understanding that the girl was thanking him for his pinch of salt on the pointlessness of her job. The girl had barely left when a man entered the car, followed by a bang of the sliding door and thus occasioning several reproachful looks.
The train was passing over a stretch that had it rocking and made it difficult for people to walk in the aisles. Nevertheless, watching how the man was balancing with a series of Chaplinesque grimaces and pirouettes, the irritation of the passengers and readers, interrupted by the banging of the door, turned into smiles; and judging by his burlesque of raising his knee and twisting his neck around, he was overacting his difficulties on purpose just to amuse everyone.
Dark skinned, fiftyish, slim, very dapper; he was dressed with bold and careless elegance—a red shirt without a tie, beige jacket and grey trousers. In his loose-limbed balancing act he tousled a beautiful head of black hair that had touches of grey. When, in the midst of his prancing, the man finally arrived at the counter next to the kitchenette and he grabbed onto the edge with the cross-eyed grimace of a drowning man, the two Italian waitresses broke out in a guffaw. At that, the man began kidding around with them in their language. When he saw that the girls didn’t stop laughing, Ambrosio supposed that he was quite the wit. That was the kind of company he needed in order for him not to bore himself to death all the way to Milan.
Due to his outgoing and friendly nature, the color of his skin, the fluidity with which he spoke to the waitresses, it was logical that Ambrosio assumed he was an Italian from the mezzogiorno.
Minutes later, the man came up with a little tray to the large window where Ambrosio was throwing back a beer. In his other hand he clutched a panino con prosciutto e provolone. 1
1. A ham and provolone cheese sandwich. (All notes have been taken from the first Spanish edition, Letras Cubanas 2004, except otherwise indicated.)
In excellent French, the man asked if he could sit down and he placed his tray on the only free space left on the table, between Ambrosio and a lady. So as not to take up too much space, he took the small bottle of Bordeaux and a quiche Lorraine 2 from the tray and placed them directly on the table.
2. A pie originating in Alsace-Lorraine, filled with scrambled eggs and bacon.
His mastery of the language and the quiche—that wouldn’t be eaten by any southern Italian on a train selling panini—, added to the age and histrionics of the character, led Ambrosio to change his idea. Perhaps he was more of an aging playboy, very likely French.
Using the excuse of asking what the next stop would be, Ambrosio started up a conversation that revealed a splendid conversationalist to him. His name was Oscar. The guy was a veritable box of surprises.
The first surprise was his nationality: English. With his dark skin and black hair, nobody would have guessed it; even less after hearing him speaking French and Italian so fluently and with such a great accent.
Right from the beginning Oscar informed him that he was headed to Athens where he lived.
“Oooh, la la . . . to Athens, from Paris, by train?”
“Well really, from London.” And he explained that his tickets took him right to the south of Italy, to Bari, where he would board the ferry.
Because of his clothing and manners, he didn’t seem to be short of money.
And if he was well off, why then was he traveling by train, and in second class?
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of planes . . . ,” probed Ambrosio.
“Nothing of the sort; I adore planes. But I’m a bit short of money and flying to Greece would cost me four times as much.”
When he learned that Ambrosio was Argentine, he praised Buenos Aires, an adorable city, and above all, the south, the Magellan Strait, the southern Andes, and, Ah! Oh! Nahuel Huapi, Bariloche, unforgettable spots. After excusing himself as an Englishman for what he described as that “perfidious Falklands War,” he spent some time ranting about the “American-British alliance in Iraq.” To Ambrosio’s great amazement, in the presence of a stranger like himself he used expressions like “crime against humanity,” “end of civilization.” According to Oscar, Bush and Tony Blair were “war criminals,” “oil thieves” who, moreover, were destroying Baghdad, its history and its culture.
He was speaking smoothly and with passion.
Ambrosio thought he looked somewhat like Omar Sharif.
So, the southern Italian, the French playboy he imagined at the beginning, was an Englishman residing in Greece, and to all appearances, a leftist. Life sure gives you some surprises . . .
When he repeated that he was living in Athens, Ambrosio couldn’t resist asking what interests had prompted him to move there.
“Love of the country and . . . other loves.”
“Ah! Another Lord Byron!” quipped the Argentine.
“No, just a modest archaeologist.”
Ambrosio, fifty-eight years old, professor of French Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, bestowed a gesture of admiration his way, eyebrows raised.
Oscar explained that he lived in Athens, but he only spent the weekends there. The rest of the time he supervised excavations in the Cyclades Islands.
“I had no idea that the English were still over there, filling Greece with holes.”
“Privileges from our colonial heritage,” Oscar commented, making a guilty gesture.
Interested in his training, Ambrosio learned about his years studying at Cambridge, Trinity College . . .
“Scholarship?” he hazarded a guess when it was already too late to be discrete.
“No. My family had means.”
Bloody hell! What a blunder! Here you are, almost sixty, and you keep on being the same damned idiot as always. Just because the guy is short of funds today doesn’t mean that he has always been a bum . . .
In order to change the subject, he asked about his skin color, way too dark for an Englishman.
“I owe that to my mother . . . ”
“Italian? Greek?”
Ambrosio preferred not to guess, wanting to save himself from another faux pas.
“She was born and raised in India.”
He was English, but in no way was Oscar an introvert. In just a few minutes, Ambrosio learned that the Indian lady, coming from a Brahman family, after she married an English colonel, “my father,” became a rather successful writer in the 1940s and 1950s with her India-based novels.
“Nostalgia sometimes produces good writers.”
“Not her; and furthermore, she became quite a shameless Anglophile.” Oscar commented.
“We didn’t get along. She ended up hating me. Nonetheless, she remembered me in her will.”
“Has she been gone long?”
“No. A couple of weeks. I went to London to pick up my inheritance.”
Ambrosio imagined an evil mother, capable of sadistic posthumous jokes, such as having Oscar go from Athens to London to cash in an inheritance that wouldn’t even cover a return flight to Athens. But the Englishman must have noted something in his face and he hurried up to add:
“Really, I went to cash it in, but I haven’t touched a penny of it. I gave it all away.”
That was the first thing that didn’t ring true to Ambrosio and he was about to let loose an aggressive comment, but he succeeded in toning it down.
“I confess that when someone I have just met expresses such scorn for money, I have a tendency to get my guard up.”
“That’s the best thing, especially on a train.” Oscar smiled indulgently. “But I made a break with my parents when I was a child and now I would feel humiliated if I had to accept their money.”
Without beating around the bush, Ambrosio asked him how much the inheritance was worth.
“It was only 35,000 pounds; but I gave it all away in one night, to some nameless Limey drunks.”
“I feel like a character in a novel,” commented Ambrosio flinging out his arms to indicate the setting.
Oscar just looked at him, disconcerted.
“Bear in mind that in real life, the absolute majority of people have never been in a TGV, talking to a fellow tourist-class passenger who has been capable of giving away 35,000 pounds sterling to a bunch of drunks. Would you allow me to buy you another quarter liter of wine?”
“Of course, I’d be delighted.”
Ambrosio got up with unexpected agility and when he returned with his beer and the wine, he came intending to squeeze the most out of that unusual dialogue.
“And wouldn’t it have been much more human to donate that inheritance to some pauper’s orphanage?” He looked him in the eyes as he opened his beer.
He was hoping that provocation would motivate the Englishman.
“Maybe, yes . . . But that money was scorching my fingers, and I wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible, without getting any thanks in return, or any benefits . . . That’s why I aimed to give it away to people I didn’t know and who would never thank me for it: ‘Hi there, Tom, great to see you, look, here’s what I owe you . . . ’ I would throw a thousand or two thousand pounds on the table and then disappear, without any time to remember faces, looks of surprise or anything.”
“So you gave away the money only to drunk guys?”
“Yes. I would go into a pub, sit at the bar, look the place over and walk right up to the chosen one.”
“And why just to them? Some sort of special preference?”
“The thing is drunks are always more accessible and trusting.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Ambrosio admitted; “it’s not easy to walk up to a sober guy and give him money. Right away he’s suspicious; he thinks it’s a trick . . . ”
“And since mine were truly anonymous alcoholics, I was guaranteed my own anonymity as well.”
By now, Ambrosio had no more doubts. The gestures, his voice, everything seemed genuine to him. That guy was transparent like glass and lacking any kind of reticence. The perfect companion for a long boring trip; and perfectly opportune when there were still more than three hours before they arrived in Milan.
The new surprise, and not the biggest nor the last, came when he wanted to ask about the person who had enticed him to Athens.
“Was she Greek?” he asked him.
“No. He was a young Libyan,” Oscar confessed and looked him straight in the eye.
Ambrosio, ungainly, no chin, fat, myopic . . . was sorry he didn’t have that physique, charm and personality. If he had wanted, even at his age, Oscar could have had an army of beautiful women running after him.
But suddenly, without any transition, the Englishman’s smile turned into a grimace of pain; and as two copious large tears trickled down, the rim of his eyelids reddened. He lowered his head and started running his hand through his hair.
Ambrosio stayed silent to give him time to compose himself. When he recovered, he smiled an apology. His dark coloring, suddenly pale, imbued his gaze with pathos and depth; nobody could possibly fake that.
He didn’t cry again. A lock of grey hair fell over his forehead. With his eyes lost among the snowy heights of the Savoyard Alps, he confessed how much he had loved that boy, Abdel.
“But at the end of last summer, he left me.”
One day, Abdel walked out of the apartment they shared for several years in Athens and left him a letter informing him that he was returning to Libya. He wanted to get married, have children and give his parents a good old age. He still loved Oscar; but he was now twenty-five years old and he was thinking that their union had no future. For the good of them both, he would be starting a new life.
“Finally, he said goodbye with the news of his wedding in Benghazi, the following week. His father would take care of everything and his father-in-law would be giving them an apartment.”
Oscar shrugged his shoulders in grief.
“Very inconsiderate,” Ambrosio commented. “He ought to have told you earlier, and in person.”
It was all he could think of to fill the sudden anguished silence.
“Yes, very inconsiderate. Even Abdel recognized that in his letter; he begged my pardon for not having had the guts to say goodbye to my face; and I forgave him. He is such a fragile boy . . . ”
By then he was calmer and he revealed that from the beginning of their living together in Athens, Abdel would travel every two or three months to Libya to see his family, especially his father, whom he worshipped; but he returned from his last trip very strange, evasive and somewhat gloomy. Oscar wasn’t able to find out what was going on with him.
That note allowed him to understand. When he saw that Abdel had packed up all his belongings, Oscar reacted with serenity. That night he went to sleep with the aid of a strong dose of sleeping pills, and the next day his sense of self-preservation forced him to return to the Cyclades to bury himself in his work and to forget his misery. For seven months he worked under the sun, excavating from dawn to dusk. He took long walks and tired himself out on purpose. In the afternoons he would collapse from exhaustion. But he couldn’t forget.
By mid April, when he returned to Athens and entered the apartment he had shared with Abdel, his broken heart sent him into a tailspin. He flung himself onto a sofa and wept for a long time, disconsolately. The omnipresent traces of his lover created a stinging sense of emptiness inside him. He chose to leave and he slept that night in an alcoholic haze in a seedy Piraeus hotel. He spent eighteen horrible days there, strung out between pills and wine.
In a sordid little room, he tried to kill himself twice but he couldn’t do it. Both times, seconds before downing a fistful of pills, he was stopped by a feeling of pity, painful pity for his own person and repulsion for his suicidal other self that had emerged to murder a defenseless being.
Finally convinced that he wasn’t going to kill himself, he pulled himself together to exit out of his lethargy. He shaved for the first time in more than two weeks and put on some fresh clothes.
He returned to his apartment in Athens and moved everything around. He got rid of undesirable mementos and erased the traces of Abdel. And since he received the news of his mother’s death on the next day, he borrowed some money and left for London. The inheritance did not interest him. Twenty years earlier he had sworn never to accept anything from his family and he was a man of his word.
His trip to England was especially motivated by the hope of finding some job there that would allow him to get far away from a scenario where Abdel’s memory would haunt him. He wouldn’t return to his beloved Greece until his heart was at peace, even though he doubted that such thing would ever happen.
“Judging by your evident good mood with the waitresses as I came in, it would seem that the trip to England did you a world of good.”
Oscar smiled again and let out a sigh with a nod that Ambrosio was at a loss to decipher.
“Something I wasn’t expecting happened.”
“Abdel called you,” Ambrosio broke in.
“Exactly. On May 17, three days ago.” And Oscar sighed again with another enigmatic nod which was a mixture of uncertainty, happiness and fear. “He’s back in Athens and wants to see me.”
“That’s great. And how did he know that you? . . . ”
“When the building’s doorman told him I was in London he called my friend’s little hotel, where I always stay, and he left a number for me to get hold of him.”
“And you called him?”
“Yes. I sensed something serious in the air. In fact, he sounded very lost, desperately needing money . . . He was talking about 70,000 euros to protect his father. He says that he is about to do anything crazy just to get the money.”
“And does he have what it takes to do that?”
“No, he isn’t a violent person. But I’m upset because he must be really desperate to talk to me about money. He was always very reserved on the subject.”
“In any case, I suppose that the call cheered you up a bit, am I right?”
“Yes . . . Just knowing that he needs me was a relief. He has taken me out of my depressive depths . . . I’m joking around again and smiling; but I still have my anxious moments.”
“Are you worried about what Abdel could do?”
“Not so much . . . It pains me to know that I cannot help him in his great hour of need.”
His eyelids began to bother him again.
“And you aren’t sorry that you wasted your inheritance?”
“Yes. But I’m also glad.”
Ambrosio stared at him.
“Handing over my inheritance to Abdel would have been using it for my own benefit . . . I would have betrayed an oath. Believe me, I’m very hard on myself.”
He bit his lip again and shook his head, worried.
“Surely some solution will come up.”
“It’s just that I have never heard him so desperate . . .” he sighed. “I can’t wait to get to Athens . . .”
With that, he glanced at a newspaper that someone had left on the next table, opened at the middle. Frowning in surprise, he grabbed the newspaper and started to chew on his thumbnail, consumed by that opened page. Absorbed by his reading, he cut Ambrosio off. Having forgotten Abdel and his return to Athens along with any basic good manners, he got up slowly, like a robot. He went off a few steps, still reading; rested the newspaper on a high counter attached to a metal column, and continued, more and more wrapped up in it.
Ambrosio was amazed, more embarrassed than offended. He turned around to watch him. What could he have possibly discovered in the paper? A sudden bolt of hope led him to wonder if the Iraqis had not summoned Aladdin or some other genie from Arabian Nights to make the invading army disappear.
Oscar was now alternating his frantic reading with frequent interruptions. His movements were becoming very rapid, spasmodic. He would look up at the ceiling; he would press his chin, bite his lips or stare at the price list hanging above the counter as if he were in a trance. He also saw him looking intensely as if he were deep within his own being, and after a grimace of disgust, he punched the column a couple of times. Then he turned his head towards the window and perused the grey skies of France with an expression that suggested a stubborn effort to remember something.
As they drew closer to Chambéry, the braking action had him swaying, but his eyes never left the newspaper nor did he return to the reality of the restaurant car until a few minutes later, when he was brought back to consciousness by the immobility of the train as it stood in the station.
He bent over a bit and inspected the platform to figure out where he was, but he continued to ignore Ambrosio. Making another rapid gesture of distress, he looked at the time and pulled on his ear. So did Ambrosio motivated by a mimetic reflex. It was 11:48. From the Gare de Lyon three hours of travel time had gone by.
Without saying goodbye, Oscar hurriedly left the restaurant car. A few seconds later Ambrosio saw him come back in, rummaging through his pockets with the newspaper under his arm.
“It was a pleasure; thank you for the company and the wine. It was very good talking to you. Good luck.” And after shaking his hand and leaving him his business card on the table, he slipped off without waiting for any answer.
Ambrosio learned his name was Oscar Abecromby. There was a string of academic abbreviations following his name and his Athens address.
A few seconds later, as the train was starting off again, Ambrosio saw him crossing the platform in front of his window. He was walking very quickly and carrying a heavy suitcase.
Ambrosio was relieved it wasn’t his.
Oof!
At any rate, he wondered whether the Englishman had not gotten off with a stolen suitcase.
Was he really English?
Was that really his name? Was his story true?
During the rest of the trip to Milan, Ambrosio was attempting to unravel the unusual behavior of that individual, whoever he was.
He didn’t give the impression of being a pick-pocket, a train robber, one of those guys who snatches a suitcase from some distracted passenger seconds before the train starts moving again. But his trapeze artist pirouettes, joviality and histrionics turned on for his entrance into the cafeteria also didn’t jive with the abandoned, tragic lover that he later confessed being.
What mysterious article in that newspaper had led him to get off the train in an isolated city in Savoie, at the high cost of missing his much desired meeting with Abdel in Athens?
In any case, if he was indeed a stellar liar, he deserved kudos for imagination and originality.