Woes of the True Policeman

He completed his secondary education at a high school lost on the muddy plain and wreathed in the mists of the south. He learned to dance rock and roll and the twist, the bolero and the tango, but not the cueca, though more than once he bounded under the leafy bower, handkerchief at the ready and driven by something deep inside of him because he had no friends in his burst of patriotism, only enemies, purist hicks scandalized by his heel-tapping cueca, his gratuitous and suicidal heterodoxy. He slept off his first drinking binges under a tree and met the imploring eyes of Carmencita Martínez and swam one stormy afternoon in Las Ventanas. He felt misunderstood and lonely. For a brief time he heard the music of the spheres on the bus and in restaurants, as if he had gone crazy or as if Nature, sharpening his senses, were trying to warn him of some invisible menace. He enrolled in the Communist Party and the Association of Progressive Students and wrote pamphlets and read Das Kapital. He fell in love with and married Edith Lieberman, the most beautiful girl of his generation.

At some point in his life he realized that Edith Lieberman deserved the world, which was more than he could give her. He drank with Jorge Teillier and he discussed psychoanalysis with Enrique Lihn. He was expelled from the Communist Party and he continued to believe in the class struggle and the fight for the revolution of the Americas. He taught philosophy at the University of Chile and he published essays on Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Marcuse. He signed declarations and letters by leftist groups. He predicted the fall of Allende but he did nothing to prepare for it.

After the coup he was arrested and brought in blindfolded to be interrogated. He was tortured half-heartedly but believed that he had endured the worst and was surprised by his resistance. He spent several months in prison and when he got out he joined Edith Lieberman in Buenos Aires. At first he made a living as a translator. He translated John Donne, Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Henry Howard for a series of English classics. He found work as a teacher of philosophy and literature at a private middle school and then he had to leave Argentina because the political situation had become untenable.

He spent a while in Rio de Janeiro and then they went to live in Mexico City. There his daughter, Rosa, was born and he translated J.M.G. Arcimboldi’s The Endless Rose from the French for a Buenos Aires publishing house while listening to his beloved Edith speculate that Rosa’s name was an homage to the title of the novel and not, as he claimed, a tribute to Rosa Luxemburg. Then they went to live in Canada and then Nicaragua because both of them wanted their daughter to grow up in a revolutionary country.

In Managua, he was paid a pittance to teach Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Lenin, but he also taught classes on Plato and Aristotle, Boetius and Abelard, and he realized something that in his heart he had always known: that the Whole is impossible, that knowledge is the classification of fragments. After that he taught a class on Mario Bunge that was attended by a single student.

A short while later Edith Lieberman got sick and they left for Brazil, where he would make more money and be able to afford the medical care that his wife needed. With his daughter on his shoulders he swam on the most beautiful beaches in the world while Edith Lieberman, who was more beautiful than the beaches, watched from the shore, barefoot in the sand, as if she knew things that he would never know and she would never tell him. He was active in a Trotskyist party in Rio de Janeiro. He translated Osman Lins and Osman Lins was his friend, though his translations never sold. He taught courses on the neo-Kantian philosophy of the Marburg School — Natorp, Cohen, Cassirer, Lieber — and on the thought of Sir William Hamilton (Glasgow, 1788–Edinburgh, 1856). He was with his wife until her death, at 3:45 a.m., while in the next bed a middle-aged Brazilian woman dreamed out loud about a crocodile, a mechanical crocodile chasing a girl over a hill of ashes.

After that he had to be father and mother to his daughter, but he didn’t know how and he ended up hiring a servant for the first time in his life: Rosinha, northeasterner, twenty-one, mother of two little girls who stayed behind in the village, and who was like a good fairy to his daughter. One night, though, he went to bed with Rosinha and as he was making love to her he thought that he was going crazy. Then he got himself into the usual hot water and had to leave Brazil with time enough only to pack the little they could take with them. At the airport his daughter and Rosinha cried and his friend Luiz Lima asked what’s wrong with these women, why are they crying.