All Men Are Liars Read Online Free Page A

spider threads known in Argentina as “the devil’s drool.”
    The heart-shaped face of that anonymous actress pervaded his dreams. I think that he must have superimposed her face onto every other woman’s, even years after that first encounter. In his tedious descriptions her features changed, often depending on the context, so that sometimes the hair was black and silky like Loredana’s, sometimes the eyes were smaller and shining like Graciela’s, sometimes the whole face became translucent and hazy, as though it belonged to a woman in his memory who had almost vanished. He searched for that face throughout his adolescence. Once he thought he spotted it in one of those mildly pornographic magazines,
Rico Tipo,
or
Tutti Frutti,
which tend to pile up in the barbershops. After that, he started looking for her among the newspaper sellers of the Puente Saavedra, beneath the pillars of the Pan-American Highway. He never found her again.
    You’ll be wondering how I manage (in spite of reservations) to reproduce these conversations. I confess that during my time in Madrid, when I was not yet fat and my beard not yet white, it did cross my mind to write a novel. The thought of adding my own volume to the universal library was wickedly tempting—as it would be for any other person with a love of books. I had in mind a character, an artist, whose whole life would founder because of one lie. The novel would be set in Buenos Aires and—since I trust my memory more than my imagination—I told myself that these confidences of Bevilacqua’s would come in useful for the creation of my fictional protagonist. Very soon, however, I realized that Bevilacqua’s memories lacked passion and color and, almost without thinking, I began to add to his stories a little fantasy and humor.
    As I’ve said before, Bevilacqua was a stickler for details—which, as you know very well, is a way of avoiding emotion. He protected his secrets by wallowing in minutiae. Between one cigarette and the next, he would get to his feet to show me how the characters involved had behaved, using his saffron-colored fingers to reenact their gestures; he imitated their voices and gave me lists of names, dates, places. Such was his obsession with accuracy and his horror of getting things wrong that Bevilacqua gave the impression of reinventing his past, as though to convince me of its existence.
    I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, dear Terradillos. Nobody has a clear memory of events that happened years ago, unless he has had them photographed and archived for the purpose of reproducing them later. Apparently Balzac did that: he created faces for his characters, tried them out in front of the mirror, then sat down to describe them. It was the same for Bevilacqua. His descriptions of the people in his past were so sharp that I felt I had seen with my own eyes (for example) the little Lennon glasses that Babar wore, his military waistcoats, and his contagious smile. When Bevilacqua was reminiscing, I kept quiet, not wanting to encourage him. But after he had gone, I was left with the feeling of having taken part in some sort of retrospective performance.
    Bevilacqua admired people for whom the world was based on solid facts, on figures and documents. He did not believe in invention. He had discovered his mistrust in appearances very early on. I can put a date on it for you: it was a Sunday in September, after the inevitable Mass. Walking along behind his grandmother, Bevilacqua saw a scruffy old man standing beneath a jacaranda tree on the street corner. In his sermon on charity, the priest had described the archetypal beggar to whom Saint Martin of Tours gave half his cloak on a winter afternoon; this old man’s bushy mustache and threadbare sleeves matched the description of the beggar in the sermon. Bevilacqua saw this apparition as proof of the power of reality, which had come to give substance to the