Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Boy, I hear that’s one splendiferous pile,” said Howard.

  “Formidable presentation of czarist-era wealth,” replied Varkhov.

  We wandered about in these four medium-grand rooms with their high ceilings, extrusive gilt-painted moldings, solemnly profound old carpets, parquet floors, rococo chairs with faded champagne seats, and all the many portraits of Lenin, Stalin—still prominent was Stalin!—Khrushchev, Bulganin, Peter the Great, and hunting scenes. I found myself looking into Lenin’s eyes and they kept looking back at me until I recognized that I was drunk on vodka.

  More vodka followed. Toast upon toast: To summit meetings! To friendship between nations! To peace on earth! Hoorah, we yelled. After all, there had been so many years of supporting the weight of one another. Tonight, on a river of vodka, we had solved a myriad of problems that would be there again tomorrow, but for tonight, hurrah, we were in the Russian Embassy.

  Hunt kept teasing Varkhov. “Georgey, these rooms are for the tourists. Give us the real trip. Let’s see the dishes in the sink.”

  “Oh, cannot. No dishes in sink. Soviet sink clean.”

  “You just bet your Uncle Ezra on that,” said Howard, and Dorothy explained, “It’s a figure of speech,” since Varkhov was already inquiring, “Uncle Ezra? Is cousin of Uncle Sam?”

  Hunt finally got his way. We were taken on a tour through a few of the back offices, which had heavy Russian-made office furniture, but were otherwise not all that distinguishable from ours. As we went along, Masarov had a moment when he was standing nearby long enough to send a wink my way, a quick acknowledgment, I could only suppose, of the grief he had bestowed with his picnic note. As if we had been engaged in a practice sufficiently embarrassing on that Sunday afternoon never to make reference to it again, Boris had proffered no more invitations, and Zenia treated me like a stranger once more, which is to say she revealed again her abstract but nearly overwhelming sexual side, exactly what I had not been favored with in her home where she had been naught but maternal. In public, her sexuality was always saying: “You, a man, cannot begin to comprehend how magical, wondrous, and occult is the labyrinth of my power,” but, it was, as I say, an abstract sexuality. You could have been approaching a large city at night from so great a distance that you had to be content with a view of the sky glow.

  Now, Masarov gave his wink, and that was all, and we continued to straggle along with glasses in our hands through office rooms, becoming sufficiently separated from one another to leave me, for perhaps thirty seconds, alone in one of their cubicles with Sally Porringer, who was by now just pregnant enough to be looking prettier than ever, and Sally, with what had to be an accurate sense of the time it would take for the next person to reach our small quarters, proceeded to sit down, rock back in her chair, raise her knees and spread her thighs. She was wearing no panties, and my eyes, in consequence, were able to feast on the lost lands below. Then, with timing as precise as a dancing master, she put down her skirt and lowered her legs just as Sherman came along with Dorothy Hunt, but in that suspended interval, while showing herself to me, there had been time enough for Sally to whisper, “It’s crazy being in these people’s rooms,” and I could have leaped across to her. The impulse to spring was so powerful that I was racked for days. I actually telephoned her. In fact, I made a fool of myself. She had touched some fatal spot between the navel and the groin. For the first time, I was tortured at not being able to have her, and Sally, in turn, kept assuring me through the receiver, “I won’t bother to see you. Sherman is surprising merry hell out of me todas las noches.”

  “Sally, I just might be eating my heart out,” I told her.

  “Well, keep eating,” she said, and laughed merrily. What a stomper her rodeo dad must have been.

  26

  I HAD NEVER HAD SUCH NEED OF SEX BEFORE. ONE NIGHT, I ENDED UP going with—who else could it be?—Sherman Porringer to his favorite brothel, an eighty-year-old emporium in the Old City full of chandeliers and walnut-paneled walls. “Been remiss with the señoritas lately,” he confided to me, “but that’s because old Sally eats nothing but chili peppers these days.”

  Some supernatural weeks ensued. Supernatural was the word. Loose at last in Montevideo’s brothels, enjoying such forays more than I expected, I found myself fulfilling whole panels of Kittredge’s imagination, and often became as fond of the whore I took for a night as I had ever been of Sally. In the relief of knowing that it was sex I loved, Sally, poor girl—for I was now as mean in my memory of her as she to me—began to be remembered, poor Sally, as a randy mustang who would be honored best for introducing me to my true and natural estate, which was to love women at large. Kittredge might once have scorned my descriptions of Alpha and Omega at sex and in love, but my old thesis certainly seemed to fit the new life. Alpha sported with prostitutes, and Omega became the keeper of the dream, yes, Omega might still be in love with the exceptional Mrs. Montague, but that made me no sexual fascist, merely the wise proprietor of a home for two strikingly different individuals, the romantic lover who needed no more than a letter to keep love warm, and the sportsman who could hunt as intently as his father for female flesh.

  Of course, flesh was not hard to find in the brothels of Montevideo. I knew the beginner’s joy of unlimited game. There was a month or two when it was just so simple as that. Engraved on my retina, and imprinted on my loins, was the emblem of Sally’s bare ass on a Soviet chair, and this conjunction of the superpowers was there to offer its libidinous funds.

  Porringer was my guide for the first night, and gave a running commentary on all the girls, “That squatty dark one is better than she looks, has a twat will like to jerk you off, it’s got a grip,” at which the short squatty one gave me a broad grin showing two gold teeth, and of another, “Has the prettiest pussy you will ever see but she only takes it up the dirt track”—a lithe, slim, and sullen girl whose buttocks were her most salient feature—“although, goddamnit,” said Porringer, “why not?”—and poked me with his elbow as a tall beauty with the falsest color of purple-red hair came down the stairs. “This one’s got nothing to offer but her mouth, can’t touch her down below, she’s diseased, but the mouth is worth the rest, and penicillin will keep you blessed,” whereupon he began to guffaw and slugged his beer. He was a ranch hand in a brothel. His family had been out there in Oklahoma before the 1889 land-grab—as I was to learn on this night in the Arboleda de Mujeres, what a Female Grove!—and I even had an insight into Sally and Oatsie’s roots, generation unto generation living on those long, mean plains where the hound of austerity rode in with the dust (or so I conceived it, knowing nothing of Oklahoma but the little I knew), yet, as I saw it, simple human greed had been so deprived of satisfaction out in those lands that it worked itself all the way back to the last human nerve, the one that leads to our soul. Greed, after generations of being denied, had erupted into the hog, Porringer, and the sow, Sally, yes, I was not kind about the wounds I had taken, but my sentiments would hardly bother Sherman. He saw himself, good yeoman legionnaire of the American empire, as owning the females in the countries through which he traveled, good finger-licking food for his omnivorous cock. Or was I, all regional differences to the side, close to describing myself as well?

  Even as I was buying my hour from one girl that night, and a second woman for a second hour, and feeling freer with these strangers than in all my twenty-five years of Park Avenue, Knickerbocker Grays, Matty Saints, punch bowl at Mory’s, et cetera, et cetera, maybe the taproot where my greed was stored was pouring out at last into the American Century, and I too was out there copulating for the flag. Greed having transmuted itself into a more noble emotion, I felt a glow of inner power, as if I were finally attached to the great wheeling scheme of things.

  During this spell of nightlife, I went to mansions that must once have been as grand as the Russian Embassy, and to sheds on the edge of shack towns where the streets were unpaved and the loose tin roofs offered percussive effects when th
e wind blew. I visited parlors with bedrooms in high-rise apartment houses out near Pocitos Beach, and once, coming home from Hunt’s villa in Carrasco, I found a well-appointed brothel in the shadow of the famous Carrasco Casino and Hotel where the girls looked as lovely to me as Hollywood starlets, even if the one I chose (because her nipples pointed most astonishingly toward the stars) offered but an austere Spanish sense of reciprocity and approached no earthquake force with me.

  Another night in a cellar whorehouse on a medium-poor street where the oak tables were bumpy with the welts of initials carved across the grain of other initials, I ended up with a short, fat, merry girl whose black eyes gleamed with expert mischief. She was delighted she had caught herself an American and proceeded to explore with her tongue every crevice I had counted as my own and a few I did not even know were there, until even Omega was stirred out of his Kittredge-loving quarters, and I felt as if I were coming all over town and knew afterward as I held that merry little fatso in my arms how men could end up married to girls with but a single skill.

  I loved the decor of the brothels. They could be clean or dirty, lavish or bare, bars or sitting rooms, but the lights were invariably soft, and the jukeboxes, which were almost always an extravaganza of colored bulbs and cascades of neon tubing, looked like little frontier towns unto themselves. You could gamble with your money, your heart, your ego, and your health. In the months that followed, I would come down with gonorrhea twice and syphilis once, but Montevideo was not Berlin, and you could trust any doctor on any street to treat you without a report. In Berlin every adventure had seemed to bear a likely cost, payment virtually in advance—here, in a part of the world where silt-filled tides lapped quietly on the shore, infection was the concomitant of a good tour.

  Needless to say, this exploration night after night was only possible because a part of me was now more in love with Kittredge than ever. Since I no longer deceived her with one hard-as-clay little American cheerleader, but rather surrounded her with a full chorus of her own sex—even if they were, for the most part, poor and South American—I felt no shame. On the contrary, I was full of interest, for I was proceeding on the assumption that women who looked alike would make love in similar fashion—and it may be as good a hypothesis as any other. I could even tell myself that this quickly acquired loss of innocence would be excellent for my future work in the Agency. Knowledge of people was part of the power, after all, to do one’s job.

  If I did have an initial period on going into brothels alone with my courage racing as fast as my heart, full of fear that I, as a CIA officer, was open to kidnapping, ambush, torture, or entrapment, such anxiety was soon replaced by the recognition that vice and violence were commercially antipathetic—nowhere in the world was a bad drunk more unpopular than in a Montevidean brothel. If I had also learned the low trick of tipping the bouncer, that merely certified I was knowledgeable and American. The true peril, as I soon discovered, was not peril but loneliness, corrosive visits to loneliness. Soon enough, it began to arrive in the middle of a drunken spree. There was one such night in a cheap whorehouse called El Cielo de Húsar near the docks, and this Hussar’s Heaven was a dilapidated and very old house of the early nineteenth century which must once have kept horses in the living room, and so reminded me of the Stable in Georgetown. Here, however, were gaps in the molding and rat portals in the walls; the swaybacked beds had dirty blankets at the foot; the whores were morose. If I was there on that night, it was because my mood was no better, and I made love to my girl in a surprisingly perfunctory performance considering how seriously I took the act by dint of paying for it (penurious were the Hubbard habits concerning the hard and the crisp). Usually I tried to choose women who brought a modicum of art or ceremony to this possible desecration of eternal sacraments—you could take the boy out of the chapel, I said to myself, but you could not take St. Matthew’s out of the boy, I was as alone as all that, drink notwithstanding. On the same afternoon, I had actually been curdled enough in my judgment to wonder whether Sally Porringer and I could, all hazards recognized, be able to live as man, woman, and new child, no, that was smashed on the thought of my child’s head dented by the last phallic acts of the previous husband, Porringer, just so morbid had my thoughts become, and were still with me that night in the Hussar’s Heaven, while banging away on a piece of flesh. I decided that depravity had you in its grip when flesh felt equal to rubber in your mitts. Trying to force the semi-demoralized troops of my loins up one more drunken hill, I could hear from the bedrooms on either side of me the long professional wail of two whores as they came in unison with their clients, or pretended to, their voices crying out into the chill of the South American night—the whore on my left screaming, “Hijo, hijo, hijo,” while the one to my right kept grunting, “Ya, ya, ya.” It was then I knew how it felt to be the loneliest man in the world. Laboring up the bare knoll of pleasure reserved for me on this night, I dressed quickly, and went downstairs for a drink at the bar, which I did not finish—I was obviously coming to the end of my youth when drinks I had paid for would not be finished—and left El Cielo de Húsar to walk to the garage where I had taken the precaution to leave my car.

  On the way, I met Chevi Fuertes. It was not a coincidence, but a miracle. So I felt. The sight of his wide and smiling mustache was a providential omen. I was no longer at the end of the first long street of my life, but merely in the middle of a bad evening which had just taken an upward turn. We went off to the next bar to have a drink together and when that, after fifteen minutes, activated the dregs of my professionalism enough to sober me at the thought of being seen together in public, we decided to get into my car and take a drive out to Pocitos Beach to visit a dear friend of his, Miss Libertad La Lengua, who would not be working tonight, Thursday night, he said. I think I should have paid more attention to the way he said Miss Libertad La Lengua.

  27

  April 10, 1958—Late at night

  Dearest Kittredge,

  It’s weeks since I sent a letter, but I feel in no rush to apologize. After all, you keep me on the outside of Dracula’s Lair. I do have, however, something I want to narrate. You see, I have met Libertad La Lengua. The legendary Libertad.

  Let me offer context. I was due to see Chevi Fuertes last Thursday evening, a miserable rainy night one week ago, and feeling so lonely for you I swear I could smell some of those mules who died in your parlor one hundred years ago. How far away Georgetown seemed. One feels at the bottom of the world in Uruguay, or, at least, such were my cheerful thoughts around the time Chevi Fuertes had the unforgivable audacity to call my hotel room. Of course, he put a handkerchief over his pay-phone mouthpiece, so I will admit I didn’t recognize his voice. He’s a scamp. He chose to talk in a lisp as if we were planning a homosexual romp. (God, what if the KGB had a tap? Think of all those fey agents who would be thrown at me in months to come. Hubbard, the jewel of the Andes!)

  Well, it was a joke. Chevi merely wanted a ride out to the safe house in Pocitos Beach. Too long a trip by bus. Could I accommodate him? Kittredge, if I ever train case officers, I’ll tell them to learn game fishing first. You pull in until the moment when you must give slack. This was such a moment. I picked him up at a bar, and out we drove to the safe house.

  It purported to be a routine meeting. Of late, if you recollect, he has, in his own grudging way, been filling us in on the MRO but complains that he is being used as a finger man. Each name he provided of an MRO leader (four in all) was now in a hospital. “I am incommensurably stupid,” Chevi told me. “There is no possibility that Peones and his goon squads are not working for you.”

  When I said, “Peones has his own sources of information,” Chevi began to laugh.

  “I could tell you about Peones,” he said. “I know him well. I grew up with him.”

  “Yes?”

  “In Montevideo everybody grows up with everybody. Peones is an outrageous bully. And a dangerous man.”

  “Yes?”

  “A
t the highest level, he is a fool.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I am going to tell you because I choose to. If I did not so choose, torture would not make me reveal what I know.”

  “I agree.”

  “Por fortuna!” But he was pleased that I took him seriously. “Pedro Peones,” he went on, “is insanely in love with a prostitute who is a friend of mine. He loves her so much that if it came to it, he would betray all of you.”

  “Could it ever come to that?”

  “Who is to say? On the face of it, not likely. The woman, Miss Libertad La Lengua, is a primitive capitalist. The accumulation of capital is all that concerns her. Why should she want Peones to betray any of you?”

  “Businessmen can always fall out.”

  “Muy jocoso.”

  “Jocoso?”

  “Very jocular,” said Chevi. “She would urge him to betray your people only if it were worth her while. If the Russians, for instance, were to make her an offer she could not refuse, she would induce Peones to work with them.”

  “She must be impressive.”

  “Incalculably so. Once you meet her, you will appreciate what I mean. Her powers are unique.”

  “Yes, but when am I to meet her?”

  “Tonight. At her house.” He sat himself down beside the safe-house phone and said, “Peones always visits this lady on Thursday night. Early. He goes to early Mass in the morning, spends the late afternoon with his family, and by evening, cannot wait to be with her for a little while. She receives him at home. Then he leaves. She waits for my call. Shall I use this phone?”