Woes of the True Policeman

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.
    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,