Read Online All Men Are Liars by Alberto Manguel - Free Book Online

disinterested listener such as myself was of a tranquil lake into which one yearns to lob a stone, to cause a ripple or some sort of movement . . . I asked him why it was so strange to run into a woman he had known years before in Buenos Aires, in Madrid.
    â€œNot strange, impossible,” he answered. “La Pájara is dead. They killed her a few weeks before they let me out. I was in the cell when they came to break the news to El Chancho. We were blindfolded. But I remember it because one of the men went up to him and said, ‘Sincere condolences.’”
    The significance of Bevilacqua’s words still eluded me. I told him, in what I hoped was a conclusive tone, that he simply couldn’t be sure of having seen her, at that distance and in that poor light.
    Bevilacqua took my arm: “Brother,” he said, “she followed me.”
    I resigned myself to hearing him out.
    Apparently, Bevilacqua had gone out for a walk around Plaza de Oriente, which in those days was quite a bit shabbier than it is now. It was cold. A chill wind whistled around the bushes, clustering dirty papers around their roots. The occasional hooded figure (I swear that you could still see black capes in Madrid at that time) passed by, hugging the walls of buildings. Bevilacqua suddenly caught sight of her across the square, close by the Campo del Moro. For a long time he stared at her in horror. Then began a game of cat and mouse.
    Bevilacqua tried to lose her by running into the alleys around the Church of San Nicolás. On the other side of the Calle Mayor, he crossed various little squares leading to the San Miguel market, negotiating dead ends and hurrying down porticoes. Perhaps because of the weather, the time of the day, or the fact that it was a religious holiday—or perhaps Bevilacqua imagined all this later—it seemed as if everything were closed: shops, cafés, offices. All he could hear was the wind, and La Pájara’s heels on the cobblestones. Bevilacqua no longer registered the names of the streets through which he was fleeing. He seemed to cross the same square several times, retracing his steps, going up a hill he was sure he had come down a few minutes earlier. The same scene kept repeating itself in monochrome: the black stones, the ashen fog, the marble-colored lampposts. This flight of his seemed to be taking place in the past, as though, rather than running through spaces, he were running back through time. And every time he turned around, there it was, defined against the dusky light, her ever-present, ornithological silhouette. Finally he emerged into the Plaza de las Cortes and, recognizing the columns and steps, realized that he was close to my house.
    I say “my house” because that is what I called it when I lived there, but now that building—with its balconies and long windows, with the imposing front door which, in those days, relied on the services of a nightwatchman, with its pavement forever stained by Bevilacqua’s blood—I think of as belonging to him. If I were superstitious, I would call it a case of satanic possession, of the kind you find in medieval chronicles, because that place, which was mine for such a long time, is inhabited now by the memory of his languid, melancholic, persistent figure. I think I even intuited, during his perorations, this inevitable outcome: that Bevilacqua would eventually take over everything that was mine.
    Anyway, I managed to calm him down. I said that he should return to Andrea’s flat and not worry her with his fantastical stories. “These things,” I said, more out of weariness than conviction, “sort themselves out after a good rest.” I was generous enough to suggest he seek consolation in the arms of that young girl.
    Because, you see, Bevilacqua had taken Andrea, too. Andrea, Quita’s right hand, must have been about twenty-five then. Her mother, a reader of Spanish literature, had