The Neruda Case by Roberto Ampuero

discouraged. If that was true, the poet would have no cure and was wasting his time with this quasi–detective search.
    “Maybe. Didn’t you say he cured cancer?”
    “So I’ve been told.”
    “Well, if he was a doctor and that was his work, it’s strange that no one remembers him, don’t you think?”
    He imagined the poet seated in his armchair, La Nube, among books and newspapers, trying to compose his memoirs, placing his hopes in what he, Cayetano, was now doing in Mexico. The poet hated seeing himself as a fragile, sick old man, an impotent witness to how reactionaries cornered his friend Allende’s government, and how illness invaded his body. First the French doctors’ treatment had failed, then the Soviet specialists’ attempt, and here, though he didn’t know it yet, was the collapse of his final hope, which he’d placed in a Cuban doctor who had told Neruda decades before that he could conquer cancer with medicinal plants.
    “Maybe Bracamonte left Mexico City a long time ago, and that’s why no one remembers him,” he mumbled. “He could be in a Yucatecan town, or perhaps in the United States, like so many others.”
    “Let’s not jump the gun here,” Mónica said. “Are you sure he was Cuban?”
    He left the office with the secretary’s phone number in hispocket and an agreement to have dinner together the following night in a restaurant downtown. He liked the woman, her delicacy, which rose effortlessly from her gestures, from her gaze, and from within her. Being a detective wasn’t so easy, after all, he thought. Maigret sometimes took days to fully launch his investigations. But he shouldn’t place too much trust in the fictional detective. Even if he braved the underworld and greased his relationships with informants, Maigret could never accomplish anything in a region as chaotic, improvised, and unpredictable as Latin America. Just like the gentleman Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, Maigret could investigate his heart out in stable and organized nations like the United States and France, where a rational philosophy reigned over the people, rules and clear laws prevailed, logic shaped daily life, and solid, prestigious institutions and an efficient police force worked to ensure respect for the law. On the other hand, in Latin America—where improvisation, randomness, corruption, and venality were the order of the day—everything was possible. In a place where a communist nation coexisted with modern capitalist cities, feudally exploitative if not enslaving plantations, and jungles where history had frozen in the times of the cavemen, European detectives weren’t worth a thing. It was that brutally simple. In those Amazonian, Andean, or Caribbean worlds, detectives such as Dupin, Holmes, or Poirot would find their dazzling deductive powers failing to clear matters up. The crux of the problem was that the North’s logic simply didn’t apply in Latin America. Nor would Miss Marple, Marlowe, or Sam Spade find any success.
    Detectives are like wine, Cayetano thought, like wine, rum, tequila or beer, children of their own land and climate, and anyone who forgot this would inevitably fail. Could anyone imagine Philip Marlowe in front of the cathedral in Havana? The two o’clock sun would burn his skin, and he’d be stripped of his hat and raincoat without realizing it. Or Miss Marple, walking with the slow, distinguished pace of an elderly lady, through downtown Lima? She’d getdrunk off the first ceviche she tried, and sinister cabdrivers would stray from their route to the airport to a hovel where delinquents crouched in wait. They wouldn’t even find her well-crafted dentures. And how about the affected Hercule Poirot crossing Cardonal Market in Valparaíso with his tight rump and white-gloved hands? They’d steal his walking stick, his pocket watch with its gold chain, and even his bowler hat. People would mock them to their face, stray dogs would chase them with their fangs bared, and