In this instance the protagonist is the Cuban-American detective Cayetano Brulé, already known from Ampuero's earlier novels. But in The Neruda Case we learn the origin of Brulé's profession: it is Neruda himself who "creates" Brulé as a detective--encouraging him to try on that line of work as just one more disguise in the parade of disguises we all wear in life, as the poet says--and giving him his first case. In his dying days, the repentant poet assigns Brulé the task of searching for someone from Neruda's past, and the search takes Brulé from Chile to Mexico, Cuba, East Germany, and Bolivia before returning to Chile in the final hours of Allende's government. Brulé assumes that his search has to do with alleviating Neruda's cancer, but we learn, along with Brulé, that this particular "cancer" is best understood metaphorically: Neruda is consumed by regrets stemming from his series of lovers--Josie, Maria Antonieta, Delia, Matilde--and wants to achieve a certain peace with his conscience as a dying wish.
The choppy narrative shows us the mistakes and false starts of Brulé's learning curve as a detective, always hinting meta-fictionally at the process of detective-novel writing through Brulé's analyses of the Georges Simenon novels he reads along the way. Neruda has given Brulé the novels, featuring the French detective Jules Maigret, as "how-to" primers for the incipient detective. But both Neruda and Brulé hypothesize the absolute incompetence that the European literary detectives such as Maigret, Holmes, Poirot, Marple, et al would display if forced to operate in their beloved but chaotic Latin America.
Neruda's poetry appears throughout the novel, quoted by admirers and detractors alike. Brulé, often quite frustrated with or disillusioned by Neruda, experiences something of a demystification of the great poet who has so recently (in the narrative's chronology) won the Nobel prize. But chapters written in Neruda's autobiographical voice simply humanize him more than demystify him, and so do the final chapters depicting the near simultaneous demises of the Allende government and of Neruda himself.
An important motif throughout the narrative is "Latin America." At Mexico City's glorious and glorified Museum of History and Anthropology, Brulé has an uncomfortable but profound epiphany: "For the first time, he was clearly aware of the magnitude of disaster dealt to the indigenous people of the Americas by the invasion and domination of white men, whose blood, he could not deny as he glanced at himself in a windowpane, flowed copiously through his veins" (75). He realizes that he could "never again be the same Latin American as he'd been before": proud of the "legendary past of Havana and the vague origins of Valparaíso, [he] now understood that Mexicans, as a people, inhabited a realm unknown to him, rooted in millennial depths unimaginable to someone from an island that had barely five hundred years of recorded history" (75).
Brulé can recognize diversity within the vast geography of Latin America, but also commonality, as in his repeated rejection of European detective methodology as unsuitable in Latin America, or when, sharing the bed of a frank and casual lover in East Berlin, he identifies with "the Latin American school of love, which preferred amorous encounters with tentative beginnings and gradual consummation, wrapped in romanticism, and always initiated by the man." In contrast, his lover's "female emancipation, born of true socialism, made him feel uncomfortable and inhibited." (184).
Brulé is simultaneously undergoing the disintegration of his marriage, and if love is inevitable in a novel about the man who penned Veinte poemas de amor [...], Cien sonetos de amor, etc., then it is depicted here most often as a love of little endurance: Neruda's serial relationships, Brulé's failed attempts to save his marriage, and the tangled love affairs that Brulé must untwine in order to find the information he needs to resolve Neruda's nagging deathbed doubt. I think the novel entertains and engages most as an extended meditation on the ephemeral nature of love, of power, of life itself.
