Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Some months ago, Roger came in with a big one. Eusebio “Chevi” Fuertes popped up at the drama group. Chevi is almost as good looking as Valentino, Roger assured us, at least if you are ready to discount a somewhat chewed-up Latin street face. Fuertes, who comes out of Uruguayan working-class stock, went to the University of the Republic here, then married up into a middle-class family of local lawyers and doctors, part of the Montevideo radical establishment.

  At present, Fuertes is a member in good standing of the PCU, ditto his wife. He is, however, no stable hardworking Communist, but, on the contrary, is somewhat taken with himself, and is pulled in many directions. For example, he quit his university studies some years ago, and with no money went off to New York. (Only agreed to marry his wife after he came back a year later.) She is apparently a wholehearted party-liner who has already risen high in the local ranks. Everyone, including her husband, expects her to become one of the PCU’s national leaders in ten years. She’s a lawyer, polemicist, functionary, and her family has, as I say, an old radical tradition.

  Chevi, by contrast, pretends to be a loyal member but secretly can’t bear whole aspects of the Party, the discipline, the self-sacrifice, and the patience required to obtain power. The year he spent in New York seems to have affected him eccentrically. He returned to Uruguay admiring America and hating it, but cocky from the experience. It seems among other stints as dishwasher and short-order cook and waiter, he was also some kind of unwilling consort—“never a pimp,” he assures Roger—to a Harlem whore.

  All this has been learned by Clarkson and passed on to us. It seems he and Fuertes get along famously. They have even double-dated a couple of the ladies in the Montevideo Players. To use a phrase I’ve recently learned—they run together. Roger, who remains agreeably modest concerning his cachet with the local actresses, explained that studs (speaking of new words!) often run in parallel. So, Clarkson and Fuertes are fascinated with each other.

  I confess to equal fascination. I’m learning how much you can pick up about a man by studying reports. Clarkson, who keeps a tidy ship, has been feeding detailed memos to the Station after each evening spent with Fuertes, and I, having been assigned to take over when he leaves for America (which is just a couple of weeks away), read everything Roger turns in as if it were “Gerontion” or Remembrance of Things Past. Clarkson’s no stylist—he’s not, dear God, supposed to be!—but the material, considering my oncoming relation to it, certainly proves stimulating. Fuertes, very clever and very suspicious, is always on the alert against manipulation. He has startling insights into Clarkson, then spasms of rage against American imperialism which alternate with gouts of vitriol against Uruguayan Communists. He most respectfully declares his love for his powerful wife, but soon allows that he resents and detests her. He loves Clarkson yet hints he’ll leave a knife in him someday should Clarkson ever betray him, that is, prove to be a CIA agent. This is Fuertes’ declared suspicion of our Roger. In a bar, on their last meeting after rehearsal (the Montevideo Players are now doing Paul Osborn’s The Vinegar Tree), Chevi not only accused Clarkson of working for the Agency but stated that he must be in the CIA since it was well known that 50 percent of the Agency’s contract people were employed by American public relations firms.

  All this while, Chevi, despite such outbursts, has been drawing closer to Roger. Chevi’s real desire, he now announces, is to talk over his problems—as between men. Those problems, he declares, are acute in the region of emotion. (Don’t you enjoy the formal turn Latins bring to English?) His hatred of the Communist Party in Uruguay is una enormidad, he confesses. Of course, on other days, it is the Soviet Union that gets berated. They have betrayed the world revolution. Next night, he goes back to blaming the lust for power of the Uruguayan leaders, and the stupidity of the rank and file. They are not revolutionary, but bourgeois, he declares. Communism in South America has degenerated into a hobby of the intelligentsia, a virulent fever of the decaying middle classes. The villains of every revolution, from Robespierre to the present, have revealed their attachment to the middle-class umbilicus. There are times, Roger allows, when he can’t keep up with Fuertes.

  Should Clarkson try, however, to put in a good word for the U.S., Chevi bombards him with polemical abuse. Capitalism feeds on the excrement of progress. The people of the United States are dispossessed of their souls. Capitalists are pigs. Pigs in limousines. He says at the end of one of these sessions, “Since I know you work for the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, and are aware that my wife and I are members of the Partido Comunista de Uruguay, and that I am unhappy in such a role, why do you offer no proposition?”

  “Because I’m goddamned if I can trust you!”

  Roger is not only bold enough to make that reply, but is forthcoming enough—or is it scrupulously responsible enough?—to include it in his Summary of Jan. 2 Meeting with AV/OCADO. (Needless to say, Sonderstrom does not leave that little speech uncensored on its way to Argentina-Uruguay Desk, God, they would have thrown the book at Clarkson.)

  Roger was accoutered with a sneaky that night. Of course, his recording was garbled a bit, but Clarkson, like a good soldier, filled in some of the blanks. He claims to have respectable ability at recalling conversation, and calls the result “fortified transcription.” For certain, he has produced a document that I think enough of to reproduce for you.

  AV/OCADO: You do not comprehend me. You are too insulated. That is how Americans fulfill their soul-destroying functions.

  AV/UNCULAR: Why don’t you just cut the crap?

  AV/OCADO: Sí, Señor, I am full of crap. But how may I cut it? You desire to make an offer to me, yet you dare not.

  AV/UNCULAR: Have a heart, friend. How am I to begin? You don’t trust yourself.

  AV/OCADO: That is no less than the truth. I am a man who lives in an anguish that is self-perpetuated. I am lacking in pundonor. Do you comprehend pundonor?

  AV/UNCULAR: You are never lacking in pundonor. You, amigo, have death-guts.

  AV/OCADO: I thank you for the sentiment. You speak like a friend. But I cannot trust the authority of your sentiments because in the cono del sur, a man must live for his pundonor. He must be prepared for mortal confrontation. Yes, every day of his life. Do you know? It is a comedy. Uruguayans live to be eighty. Whether or not we face our death-guts, we live to be eighty. We are cómico, my friend. (Long pause.) You do not comprehend me. What can be the value of a friend if he is not the generous spirit of comprehension? You, however, are a North American. You are looking for an edge. A grip on me. Go fuck yourself.

  AV/UNCULAR: Hey, let’s have another drink. It’ll make you more mellow.

  AV/OCADO: For people such as you, I must spell it out.

  AV/UNCULAR: Have it your way.

  AV/OCADO: Spell it out, or spit it out. These are the established modes of communication for Americans, verdad?

  AV/UNCULAR: We’re no good.

  AV/OCADO: Now I know it. You are CIA. It is in the logic of your responses. I utter scathing insults upon you and your country, and you, a proud and virile North American, do not challenge me to step outside this bar.

  AV/UNCULAR: Would you challenge me if I insulted Uruguay?

  AV/OCADO: There would be no alternative.

  Kittredge, this is the clearest part of the conversation. Over the next ten minutes, it became too garbled for Clarkson to restore. Then, he must have shifted his seat, because their exchanges now came through again loud and strong. Here is more of the fortified transcription.

  AV/OCADO: I have always stationed myself on the barricades of independent thought. I do not have a group mind, my friend, nor predesigned sentiments due to lack of inner subjectivity. So, at present, I am drenched in the poisons of humiliation.

  AV/UNCULAR: Explain it to me. I want to listen.

  AV/OCADO: I am a lawyer who serves clients who are too poor to pay their bills. I am a husband who attracts less respect in public than his wife. I may be more intell
igent than my spouse, but my ideas veer too far to the right, then too far to the left. That is because I lack sufficient foundation to hold them in place.

  AV/UNCULAR: What do you require, then?

  AV/OCADO: A salary large enough to give ballast to the discord in myself. I need commercial focus. I am like all the other shits. I want money.

  Sonderstrom, Porringer, and myself, after meeting with Roger, are obviously of two minds about whether to take on the two opposed spirits of Eusebio “Chevi” Fuertes. He hates his wife and the PCU enough to work for us—on that we all agree. But will he gear into the job? Will he begin to make something of himself in the Party and take on PCU tasks so diligently that he becomes a high Party functionary? I argue that to achieve equality with his wife would be a real and powerful motivation for him. In that case, what a probe we would have. The breadth of this possibility pushes us into taking him on, but, oh, the tremors. Sonderstrom, who has experience, after all, in these matters, says Chevi is selling himself so hard he could be a dangle. Roger, however, disbelieves that Fuertes is a gift of the KGB. “He’s not a good enough actor to orchestrate all that confusion,” says Roger. “Over at the Montevideo Players, we see him as a ham.”

  What aggravates the problem, of course, is Roger’s pending return to the States. As of two months ago, his contract was already concluded. Given the potential importance of AV/OCADO, he has delayed his departure twice, but now Roger has given the Station final notice. He is getting married to his childhood sweetheart—one plain Jane by her photographs—and plans to work for her father. This does not make much sense, given the importance of what he’s doing for us here—why can’t the bride come down to Uruguay? Then we are treated to the subtext: The childhood sweetheart is going to inherit a fortune. She may be plain-looking, but has enough temper for an ugly duchess. Roger does not dare to keep her waiting. Her father, you see, is an advertising tycoon with a hell of a job for Roger. In a week, Clarkson is definitely departing.

  It’s not the best of situations to insert me at this point, but where’s the choice? Roger is not going to kiss Miss Moneybags good-bye.

  Sonderstrom, for all his faults, is, I’m beginning to recognize, not the worst den mother. He knows how to put a reasonable face on things. “Your situation could turn out satisfactorily,” Gus says to me at the end of the meeting. “With a new case officer in place, AV/ OCADO might shape up more quickly. A stranger can be effective in situations like this. AV/OCADO obviously likes to torture his friends.”

  Succinct enough, but I’m the one in the passenger seat next week.

  This time I won’t tell you how late it is. Will just sign off. My new cryptonym, specially crafted for the new job, is—I must say they save the tasty ones for me—AV/AILABLE.

  Humbly yours,

  Available Hubbard

  P.S. Did you ever get the brooch?

  6

  Jan. 18, 1957

  Harry, dear,

  It’s my turn to make a confession. I kept wanting to acknowledge the brooch, but couldn’t. You see, I’ve lost it.

  There was the most unsettling premonition when I opened your little package—so small, so carefully wrapped, obviously your Christmas gift—and beheld that breast pin. I knew it had belonged once to some particularly nasty old family who suffered some horrid disaster.

  I’ve always had psychic powers there was no sense talking about. They proved no use to me, and usually came at the oddest times and for the most inconsequential reasons. I even wondered why I possessed this one milligram of magic so altogether unconnected to the other hundred and twenty pounds of me. Since Christopher has been born, however, it’s come to focus. It’s a gift, a power of maternity, if you will. I developed an exceptional sense of what to have in our house for Christopher, and what should not be there. Dear Herrick, when I opened your package, I wondered if you had gone in for the cruelest kind of joke. It was as if I started to bite into a scrumptious éclair and a roach came swimming up out of the cream. I almost shrieked. That brooch was loathsome. I could not understand how you and I, so close in so many ways, could be so far apart on this one matter. I didn’t even want to keep your gift in the house. Yet, given my feelings, I couldn’t pass it on to a friend, and it’s dangerous, my instincts tell me, to throw away any object you consider evil. (Measure my true regard for you by the honesty of these remarks!) I decided finally to sell it. Filthy lucre can, at least, demagnetize the aura of awful things—after all, isn’t that what they invented money for? I thought I might wash that cash through another transaction or two, and get it back to you. Such was my plan. Instead, I discovered this morning that the brooch is gone. It has disappeared from the box I kept in a corner of the bookshelf. I can’t believe the nurse or the cleaning woman stole it. I’m in a state as I write this, and now hear the baby crying. I’ll have to continue in a while.

  Two hours later

  Well, he had colic. Full diaper. I submit that baby-doo doth smell as if the little creatures discovered corruption all by themselves—that much to back up Original Sin. Then, I had a salary negotiation with the nurse, who feels she’s underpaid and wishes to rewrite our original understanding. After which, I had to go shopping for formula plus three medallions of beef to show up in the Montagues’ Wellington tonight (two for Hugh), and shallots, and chanterelles—how he adores them! When I came home, I decided to clean Hugh’s study. (Which I hadn’t been near for a week.) First thing I saw was the brooch, hanging from a little metal knob on one of the cubbyhole drawers of his desk. I had never mentioned your gift to him, and now Hugh had appropriated it. He must have thought it was something I picked up in a flea market.

  Harry, it’s odd. The moment I saw your gift among his papers, I knew it was all right. Hugh is so girded about with his own talismans that I believe he can, without having any idea at all of what he is doing, make wise decisions when it comes to handling these indefinables. Your petite Uruguayan monster is absolutely stripped of its powers so long as it is attached to his desk—oh, never believe this, you can’t, but just as I wrote these last words, I had one of those precious little fantasies it’s tempting to call a vision. In part, I saw the history of the brooch. The founder of the family who owned it was either a hanging judge or an executioner—some form of expediter of the bloodier social tasks.

  Well, even as I wrote this, I stood up, crossed to his study, looked again at fearsome Miss Bijou, and realized it has now become a part of the world that communicates with me. Ninety-nine and 99/100 percent of such a world is composed of people, hurrah, but there is a tree here and there, and a bird I recollect from my childhood, as well as a pug my father gave me in adolescence. That dog was an absolute spirit; now, this bloody breast pin. Harry, the brooch just told me that you had better watch your step with your highly disturbed Latin Communist. This Fuertes. Do be careful. He could wreck your career.

  And do forgive the gloves. Your Christmas, I keep reminding myself, is as hot as July.

  Love, Kittredge

  I had bought the brooch on the morning after I began my affair with Sally Porringer. Since I was, at the time of purchase, full of anticipation of a vigorous sexual future, and feeling some guilt toward Kittredge, I picked out the ornament by its price, and had the inner gall to pretend it had been bought on a deep impulse. Had I taken on one more of the mortal debts and curses?

  Jan. 22, 1957

  Dearest Kittredge,

  I am now set up with AV/OCADO, and for the present it’s going a little better than one could have hoped. Sonderstrom was right. The changing of the guard has sobered up our Latin friend. Indeed, the transition went off well. We met in a safe house that the Station is maintaining in a brand-new apartment building on the Rambla above Playa de Los Pocitos. There are a good many similar such high apartment buildings now going up and when they’re finished, I’m sure the Rambla will look like one more bare, bleak version of Lake Shore Drive in Chicago; already you can feel that developer’s aura. In the safe-house flat, takin
g it in from our picture window on the twelfth floor, the cars below seem as small as dog-track rabbits whipping by the wide clay-colored beach and the greenish-brown sea. Half the adolescents of Montevideo seem to be sporting on that beach. Bikinis galore. Even from this distance, big Spanish hips on the girls. Once again, the 238 pounds of beef and pork per capita shows in this registry of buttocks.

  Our safe house is uncomfortably bare. We’re paying whatever our substantial rent must come to, yet have purchased nothing in the way of furniture but for the bed and bureau in the sleeping alcove, and the folding couch-bed, plastic dining table, one armchair, one lamp, and a few bridge chairs set about the living room. Plus one discarded Embassy no-color-left rug. I don’t understand safe-house economics. If we’re anteing up for a luxury apartment, why not make it appealing? (Perhaps this mean agenda has something to do with keeping the agent’s stipend low.)

  In any event, I don’t know how to describe Chevi Fuertes. In advance, I studied photographs of him, and know more of his formal biography than I do, say, of Sonderstrom’s, but I’m still not prepared for his presence. He is so alive that you want to shelter him. My first thought was: Kittredge would adore him. He’s dark, of course, and thin, with a hawklike nose and a full share of the stygian Spanish gloom that always makes me think of the body pits of undertakers—there! I’ve just vented my hitherto unconscious dose of resentment at being stationed here. All the same, Chevi takes you by surprise with his smile. The face picks up lights, and a tender if wicked youth peers out at you from the mask of the gloomy man.