Woes of the True Policeman

the orchestra level, talking always about cards, cards as nemesis, the great lonely dream of the deck, poker-faced players and players who talk a big game, in an accent that definitely wasn’t Texan, while the eyes of the audience followed him in silence, uncomprehendingly, or so Amalfitano supposed (he didn’t understand, either, and maybe there was nothing to understand). Until suddenly the old man stopped in the middle of an aisle and said all right, here we go, I won’t take up any more of your time.
    What happened next left Amalfitano openmouthed in astonishment. Alexander approached a member of the audience and asked him to check his pocket. The man did as he was told, and when he removed his hand there was a card in it. Immediately the magician urged another person in the same row, much farther down, to do the same. Another card. And then a new card appeared in a different row, and one after another the cards—to the cheers of the audience—began to form a royal flush of hearts. When only two cards were left, the magician looked at Amalfitano and asked him to check his wallet. He’s more than ten feet away, thought Amalfitano, if there’s a trick it must be a good one. In his wallet, between a picture of Rosa at ten and a wrinkled, yellowing slip of paper, he found the card. What card is it, sir? asked the magician, fixing his eyes on Amalfitano and speaking in that peculiar accent that Amalfitano couldn’t quite place. The queen of hearts, said Amalfitano. The magician smiled at him the way his father might have. Perfect, sir, thank you, he said, and before he turned he winked an eye. The eye was neither big nor small, brown with green splotches. Then he strode confidently—triumphantly, one might say—to a row where two children were asleep in their parents’ arms. Do me the favor of removing your son’s shoe, he said. The father, a thin, sinewy man with a friendly smile, removed the child’s shoe. In it was the card. Tears rolled down Amalfitano’s face and Castillo’s fingers delicately brushed his cheek. The king of hearts, said the father. The magician nodded. And now the little girl’s shoe, he said. The father removed his daughter’s shoe and held another card up in the air, so that everyone could see it. And what card is that, sir, if you’ll be so kind? The joker, said the father.

15
    Amalfitano often had nightmares. His dream (one in which Edith Lieberman and Padilla had Chilean elevenses with tea, buns, avocado, tomato jam made by his mother, rolls and homemade butter nearly the color of a sheet of Ingres-Fabriano paper) opened up and let in the nightmare. There, in those lonely latitudes, Che Guevara strolled up and down a dark corridor and in the background huge diamond-crusted glaciers shifted and creaked and seemed to sigh as at the birth of history. Why did I translate the Elizabethans and not Isaac Babel or Boris Pilniak? Amalfitano asked himself, disconsolate, unable to escape the nightmare but still holding scraps of the dream (beyond the glaciers the whole distant horizon was Edith Lieberman and Padilla having their delicious elevenses) in his empty, frozen, nearly transparent hands. Why didn’t I slip like Mighty Mouse through the bars of the Lenin Prizes and the Stalin Prizes and the Korean Women Collecting Signatures for Peace and discover what was there to be discovered, what only the blind couldn’t see? Why didn’t I stand up at one of those oh-so-serious meetings of leftist intellectuals and say the Russians the Chinese the Cubans are making a fucking mess of things? Why didn’t I stand up for the Marxists? Stand up for the pariahs? March in step with history while history was being born? Offer silent assistance at its birth along the way? Somehow, Amalfitano said to himself from the depths of his nightmare, his tone scholarly and his voice unrecognizably hoarse, masochist that I am, I blame myself for crimes that were never committed: by 1967 I had already been expelled from the Chilean Communist Party, my comrades had run me down and turned me out, I was no longer well liked. Why do I blame myself, then? I didn’t kill Isaac Babel. I didn’t destroy Reinaldo Arenas’s life. I wasn’t part of the Cultural Revolution and I didn’t sing the praises of the Gang of Four like other Latin American intellectuals. I was the simple-minded son of Rosa Luxemburg and now I’m an old faggot, in each case the object of mockery and ridicule. So what do I have to blame