Woes of the True Policeman

The northerner and his friend from Michoacán were an odd couple. Gullón was a talker, cultivated and self-centered. Pablo Negrete was reserved, not too busy grooming his ego — though he did put a lot of care into his attire — and his knowledge of the Greek classics left much to be desired. He was interested in German philosophy. Gullón professed an Olympic disdain for it: he said that the only decent German philosopher was Lichtenberg, who was less a philosopher than the ultimate jokester and clown. He liked Montaigne and Pascal. And he could recite from memory bits of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Zeno of Elea, to the delight of Pablo, who grew fonder and fonder of him as time went by.

Unlike his brother, Pedro Negrete had many friends. Being a policeman made it easier. A policeman, he discovered without being taught, could be friends with anyone he wanted. The cultivation of friendship, an art previously foreign to him, became his favorite pastime. As a boy, friendship had struck him as mysterious, sometimes risky, even reckless. When he was older he understood that friendship — the essence of friendship — resided in the guts, not the brain or the heart. Everything boiled down to the play of mutual interests and a way of touching people (touching them physically, hugging them, slapping them on the back) with confidence. And it was precisely in the police force where this art was most vigorously practiced.

In 1958, at the age of twenty-eight, he was named detective. Shortly afterward Pablo returned to Santa Teresa and obtained a post at the university. They had no money but they had wiles and they continued to rise in their careers. In 1977 Pedro Negrete was promoted to police chief of Santa Teresa. In 1982, after his predecessor became embroiled in a scandal, Peblo Negrete took the rector’s chair.

Shortly after meeting Amalfitano — seven hours later, in fact — Pablo called Pedro. The call was prompted by a premonition. This is how it happened: that afternoon, the new philosophy professor had stopped by his office to introduce himself, and that night, in the quiet of his library, with a whiskey and the third tome of Guillermo Molina’s History of Mexico within easy reach, the rector found himself thinking again about the professor. His name was Óscar Amalfitano, he was Chilean, he had previously worked in Europe. And then he had the vision. He wasn’t drunk or especially tired, so it was a real vision. (Or I’m going crazy, he thought, but immediately rejected the idea.) In his vision, Amalfitano was riding one of the horses of the Apocalypse through the streets of Santa Teresa. He was naked, his white hair was wild and bloody, and he was shouting in terror or joy, it wasn’t clear which. The horse neighed as if it were in its death throes. Its neighs stank, literally. As the horseman rode by, the dead piled up in the doorways of the old city. The streets filled with corpses that decomposed rapidly, as if time were dictated by the fiendishly swift passage of horseman and horse. Later, as the vision faded, he saw miniature tanks and patrol cars at the university and torn banners, though this time there were no dead bodies. They’ve taken them away, he thought.

That night he couldn’t find Pedro anywhere and it took him longer than usual to fall asleep. The next day he called the General Sepúlveda police station and tried to reach his brother. He wasn’t there. He called him at home and didn’t catch him there, either. At night, from his office, he called the police station again. He was asked to hold. From the window he watched the lights of the neighboring buildings go out and the last students scattering across the campus. He heard his brother’s voice at the other end of the line.

“I need a report on a foreign national,” he said, “a discreet inquiry, just for the sake of curiosity.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d asked his brother for such a favor.

“Professor or student?” asked Pedro Negrete, who had taken the call in the middle of a poker game.

“Professor,” he said.

“Name, first and last,” said Pedro, gazing gloomily at his cards.

The rector gave them to him.

“You’ll have his life and complete works in a week,” promised his brother, and he hung up.

5

Amalfitano was born in 1942, in Temuco, Chile, the day the Nazis launched their offensive in the Caucasus.