Kissinger stormed angrily into the secret office of the Chinese Affairs Committee, not far from the Oval Office, but hidden from view of any non-Entente personnel.
"He fell asleep," the Secretary of State bellowed.
Arnold fell asleep.
His collaborators did not know what he was referring to.
Kissinger assumed that other mortals gauged circumstances with the same speed.
Arnold was his secret special envoy, outside official contacts
, to exchange messages with Zu Enlai, Mao's lieutenant.
Zu and Arnold had attended a Peking Opera performance based on the life of Chiang Jing, Mao's wife.
Arnold Schewp,
the special and secret envoy, had clearly fallen asleep in the middle of the performance
, in the front row.
The news reached Kissinger through a special Chinese official in the USA, in turn communicated originally by Zu Enlai himself.
He was the voice of Mao.
Except for Mao, Zu and Kissinger,
Arnold in China was justified as a “cultural attaché”, the classic nickname of spies
: Kissinger had not believed it necessary, in the context of the fluidity of his relationship with Mao, to assign him a more sophisticated cover.
But that he had fallen so visibly asleep, in front of the billion Chinese, snubbing Mao's wife - it didn't matter that the dictator felt nothing but hatred for her, but it was a matter of state -, Mao himself, and putting endangering Zu Enlai, their host, who could even be accused of having allowed Arnold to fall asleep,
represented a diplomatic disaster
.
Kissinger himself had suffered one of those narcotic operas, a story of an indecipherable baroque style that mixed a 1st century Emperor with the Maoist Cultural Revolution of 1966. Kissinger had used his enormous behavioral resources to keep from yawning.
He went to the extent of not blinking.
Lowering your eyelids in these circumstances represented an unapproachable risk
.
Arnold
should have taken the necessary precautions: or at least a stimulant
.
There was no shortage of them in China or America.
He ipso facto
fired him
from his position.
He would return directly, except for the stopover in New York, from Beijing to Maryland: he would spend the rest of his life in front of a professor's desk.
Having lost that asset, Kissinger turned to his transmission chain - which he called the Appalachians - so that his message would reach Zu Enlai directly:
how did Mao want that offense to be repaired?
Five months passed before he received a response.
A couple of years ago Mao had revealed to him that he could wait a hundred years to recover the island of Formosa;
Five months was an incalculably infinitesimal measure from that perspective.
The strange reparation that Mao demanded
was that an Argentine, Maoist writer, be invited to China - the entire operation organized and financed by the USA -, participate as a specialized spectator of the November opera - the story of a peasant cured of a terminal illness thanks to to his devotion to Mao's Red Book, and his celebratory article was published in
Foreign Affairs
, the international politics newspaper subsidized by the State Department.
Kissinger sent for information about the aforementioned.
The first indication, which Kissinger retrospectively deduced, about Mao's willingness to dialogue with the USA, had been the tyrant's decision to sit next to him, during the review of a parade, the American Maoist writer Edgar Snow, in 1970.
Now it placed a Latin American author in the Peking Opera,
sealing China's relations with the Third World
, especially with Latin America, while solidifying its geopolitical alliance with the American “paper tiger.”
But who was Alcides Bedoya, the Argentine Maoist writer whom Mao wanted as a spectator and commentator?
His name was not Alcides nor his last name was Bedoya
, the confidential CIA report revealed: his real name and surname were Jacobo Runtein.
He had published his first fiction book,
Cuentos del Bajo Fondo Buenos Aires
, as Bedoya.
Apparently, the brief memo continued,
the objective is to deny their Jewish identity
.
He speaks Chinese perfectly;
but he hides that he knows Hebrew even better, and Yiddish, the mother tongue and everyday language of his parents.
She embraces worship of Mao as his grandfather read the Torah.
He has just published a book about his recent trip to China, titled
The Endless Revolution
, perhaps a deliberate paraphrase of Trotsky's concept of Permanent Revolution.
The CIA agent, a Peruvian living in Buenos Aires, allowed himself a funny detail: only a gesture of avant-garde experimental literature could explain the mammoth of his Maoist book.
He is a good storyteller, but
the book about China seems written by an individual with comprehension problems
, to whom unintelligible content is dictated.
He celebrates Mao even in the way he brushes his teeth
.
It reproduces contradictory testimonies from militants in charge of factories, cleaning staff, university professors, who narrate minor quarrels, with trivial but delirious ideological nuances, for which they threw each other from the stairs or out of the window, sent each other to camps. forced labor, families were separated forever, or they committed suicide.
I suspect that
if Bedoya himself read this book in his capacity as a writer, he would throw it in the trash can
.
I can't think of any other explanation than that some Chinese official ordered it in the name of Mao himself, and dictated it word for word.
The wife, Marita Jiménez de Bedoya, who accompanied the writer from the pro-Soviet PC in his split to the PCR, the pro-Chinese Communist Party, has just been discovered by the spouse himself as a spy for the Moscow Communist Party: she transmitted each of his words and movements since the political break, in 1968, until approximately a month ago.
However, Bedoya did not dissolve the marriage or cohabitation.
She suffers from a notorious and unfathomable sadness.
Kissinger finished reading the report, holding his chin.
He couldn't spare more than a few seconds.
They knocked on the door.
A special envoy, a French academic, carried disturbing data about his dialogue with North Vietnamese leaders, and even worse about the situation on the ground.
Kissinger dialed a number from his telephone intercom:
green light for Operation Bedoya
.
In the weeks that followed, the world seemed to collapse on the Secretary of State's head.
The “Vietnamization” of the war that he had tried to orchestrate together with Nixon, executing an “honorable” withdrawal of North American troops, was stalling, much more due to the complications imposed by Congress than due to the inefficiency of the South Vietnamese military.
At the same time, and tacitly arguing reasons of “honor,” Sadat had attacked Israel, along with the Syrian dictator.
But in his brain compartmentalized like cells in a honeycomb, Kissinger listened to Bedoya's course toward Beijing.
A few days after the American war effort in Vietnam was reorganized, and what would be known as the Yom Kippur War closed with an auspicious armistice and the salvation of the Egyptian Third Army, Brad Halleck, Kissinger's new star and secret advisor in his Chinese channel, entered the Pentagon office without knocking.
Livid.
He raised his eyebrows as if unable to put the verdict into words.
- Did he also fall asleep?
Kissinger asked devastated.
"When the show ended," Brad tried to describe.
Zu Enlai grabbed him by the shoulder, and Bedoya's head fell on his own chest.
He has been buried in Peking, according to her widow's wishes.
- Died...?
Did he die of boredom?
-Kissinger was heard asking.
Brad opened his arms in a gesture of ignorance and bewilderment.
Perplexed, Kissinger seemed to pray to a wall in his official office:
- No one will say Kaddish for him.