Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Do we need to?”

  “No. She is expecting me.”

  “And who will you say that I am?”

  “An American friend who works for the State Department.”

  “You will tell her that you, a Communist, associate with Americans in the State Department?”

  “She has no interest in politics.”

  “Chevi, it is impossible for me to go.”

  He began to laugh. “I have not told her anything. I will merely say you are an American with lots of money and could soon be parted from it.”

  “And if I wanted to buy her services?”

  “They are not services. They are offerings.”

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you would not mind if I purchased her services?”

  “She is a courtesan. That is the reality. I accept it.”

  “Well, if she is a courtesan, I can’t afford her.”

  “I would think not.”

  Kittredge, we actually speak to each other in this fashion. By the book, one is not supposed to be this friendly, but it is where we have evolved. Actually, he knows and I know that while I may go to a brothel once in a while—do not sneer at this simple need—I would never dare to get into the kind of precipitous financial transaction a woman of this sort could induce. Moreover, it’s potentially compromising. We have something of a file on her, courtesy of Western Hemisphere Division, enough to know that in Havana she had links to both sides, Batista and the Castro underground. Yet this piebald set of allegiances is what decides me to accompany my agent on a visit. Hunt tends to be positive. He likes to go with a promising action. I can always tell Howard I went along to check her out. If she has any leftist sympathies that are still active, we need to know more about that. Contemplate the twists or kinks she could put into Peones’ mind if she is half as powerful as advertised.

  So we went over. She lived in another high-rise building a little beyond the apartment house where Boris and Zenia dwell. I am bewildered by the impulse that drives so many people who can afford something better to choose these blank high-rise habitations that look out over a placid, dun-colored sea—but do not quarrel with the high-rise impulse. It gets you up to the tenth floor, at least. Hers is the sixteenth floor, and a penthouse, no less.

  On the way over, Chevi is in a most unusual mood, full of sudden impulses, nasty vapors. He has, for instance, insisted on our crossing of the Rambla against all the high-speed traffic, a dubious endeavor by daylight and downright dangerous at night, yet, he still feels righteous enough after all those self-induced perils to turn around and shriek at a driver who has certainly passed too close: “Con más distinguidos sentimientos!” sticking his middle finger into the heavens to accompany this wail of malediction. I wonder if he thinks it is effective curse-work? Then he insists we take off our footgear, and we scuffle along the beach, cuffs rolled up, toting our shoes, path lit by the moon, and the well-domiciled surf rolling in on thin luminescent ripples of foam. I wonder why he is taking this detour until I realize he is going to describe sexual relations between Libertad La Lengua and Pedro Peones. For that, no ordinary setting will do.

  “She said once,” Chevi now tells me, “‘No woman can know men so well as myself. I approach my visitor as an enigma in logic, a labyrinth. Each man has a lock to which only I can locate the key.’”

  “Chevi,” I protest, “Libertad cannot possibly talk that way.”

  “Well, in fact, she does. One reason is that I have taught her much. I have introduced her to the work of Borges. Do you read Borges?”

  “No.”

  “You must never read him. In five pages, in any of his five pages, he will summarize for you the meaninglessness of the next ten years of your life. Your life, particularly.”

  I was sufficiently put out to reply, “Enjoy the absurdity of your life, and I will manage with mine.” He roared with laughter. He had tweaked the short hairs of the Colossus of the North.

  Well, I still did not believe Libertad spoke of locks and labyrinths. “Borges or no,” I told him, “one human being cannot calculate another so closely.”

  “She can,” said Chevi.

  “How does she make love to you?”

  “That is sacrosanct.”

  “So you choose not to prove your case.”

  “I will tell you how she makes love to Pedro Peones.”

  “Yes, how?”

  He roared again. He kicked gobs of damp wet clay with his bare feet. He then proceeded to tell me in detail!

  Kittredge, it’s shocking stuff, and I’d rather not offer it in his words, which made a point of testing my knowledge not only of Montevidean slum talk, but expressions he’d picked up in Harlem as well, argot like pervy and soft pete, brand and porthole, ass-teriors, bummy, and the latter, believe it or not. The Spanish was at least more functional. Vagón de cola, which I think is caboose, seno de pantalones, an awful image which pretty directly suggests the breasts of the trousers, and one absolute pit, tubo de salida de gases, which I’m sure you can translate, but, if not, exhaust pipe will do. Chevi delivered his description with an ongoing oscillation of giggles and sniggers that shattered my normal sense of his dignity. He was so full of sneaky guilt and glee. I expect it was his Catholic background regurgitating on him, plus all that Latin sense of scorn. God, are these Uruguayans fixed on flesh, and, of course, all flesh leads to the capitol of flesh, the buttocks. I know now where Latins think the Devil hides himself, yes.

  Apparently, Pedro lays himself down on Libertad’s bed, his cheeks exposed. Libertad, dressed in what Chevi describes as “elegant leather,” proceeds to spank him. Pedro Peones, big as a walrus, laying out there on the bed, belly down over two thick pillows so that his backside looks, as Chevi describes it, “como dos melones gigantescos,” and she whips him lightly, stopping only when the pain produces a touch of froth at the corner of his lips. Then she proceeds to bite him, a precise little business which leaves the exposed area scalloped by neatly placed scimitars of teeth markings, after which, just as Pedro is singing away in some melange of sobs, pain, guilt, and pleasure, she croons, “Oh, Pedro, mi peón, mi pene pequeño (little penis, no less), mi perdiz (my partridge), mi perfidia (my perfidy), mi pergamino (my piece of parchment), mi perla (pearl), mi permanganato (yes, pomegranate!), mi perniciosa pedazo de pechuga (my nasty little bit of tit), mi pelado culo (my bald backside), mi pepino persa (my Persian cucumber), mi perseguidor (my pursuer), mi pérsico (my peach), mi pezuña (my cloven-footed beast), mi pétalo (petal), mi peonia (peony), mi pedúnculo (my flower stem), mi peste (my plague), mi petardo (my fraud), mi picarote (my impostor), and with that, having herbified his ears with her alliterations, nipped his cheeks with her teeth, and flicked him with a whip, she bends over, murmurs “Vaya con Dios, ya, ya, ya,” and delivers, yes, Kittredge, one lingering kiss sub cauda, at which point, Peones, according to my informant, gives back in turn one great oath, “Madre del Dios” and wets the pillows with his “emisiones las mas cataratas”—Fuertes’ final flourish upon the proceedings.

  It has been, I fear, all too absorbing a description, and when he is done, I refuse to believe it. Yes, he tells me, these were Libertad’s precise words to Pedro Peones as related by her, on one’s oath as a man, a lover, and a perfidious agent—he does speak in this manner when carried away by a tale, and then adds, “This is your true portrait of the police bully, the master goon Peones, this is his pleasure. This is the tender if hidden face of our sadist.”

  “And you are still in love with Libertad after such practices as these?”

  “She informs me of her acts. That is her avowal of love. Of course, you cannot comprehend. In your country, your religious devotions, such as they are, have been voided of the profound human transaction of confession.”

  Do you know, sometimes I believe Chevi became an American agent so that he would not lose an opportunity to keep us up on his low opinion of American merits, mores, and morals.
>
  Well, I will withhold my description of Libertad no longer. We ascend in the elevator, ring the bell to her door, and there she is. I know only that I am in the presence of a creature. She is extraordinary. If the gleam of a candle’s flame is pale blond, then she is more blond than fire. I see a halo of platinum hair on a heart-shaped dimpled face, her eyes deep and mysterious blue look at me out of fields of dark eye-shadow, and her mouth—ah, that crimson mouth is just a little too plump and too strong—I am staring at an angel with a heart like a honeycomb, full of sugar and greed. Such is my first impression. Jean Harlow is before me. My second is that she walks like no woman I have ever seen. “Hello,” she says in English in a deep and husky voice, “please come in,” and with that, turns from the door and leads us through her living room out to the penthouse patio, where we stand by the balustrade and look down sixteen stories to the sea. She has done this quickly, as if she did not wish me to view her face for long in the light. Perhaps she is older than I expected, perhaps ten years older than Marilyn Monroe, if at least twenty years younger than Mae West, but what a way of walking!—it need give precedence to neither lady. Her calves are exquisite, her thighs leonine. Time takes its own breath when she deigns to move. I speak of Harlow and Monroe and Mae West—she is of their party, that sexual party as sure in its essence as cash is green. Cash says, “I am money, first, last, and always; I am more tangible than all of you who are staring at me.” So Libertad is an avatar of sex. I feel as if I am in the presence of a goddess, and I comprehend for the first time what it must be like to meet a movie star.

  Except, I must tell the truth. It is not agreeable but exorbitant to find her so unbelievably attractive. For the first time since meeting you at the Keep, I have been wholly overtaken.

  Mind you, all she said was “Please come in.” Now, on the balcony, she reaches into a silver purse that matches her silver lamé gown. (This cannot be the outfit she wears with her whips—no, she must have changed for us.) She can hardly withdraw her cigarette from her purse, however, before Chevi is on her with his lighter. He gives fire. She draws it in. The passage is as continuous as a devotion—I think of an Episcopalian chaplain at St. Matthew’s who used to make the sign of the cross with so great a concentration upon the agony of the Lord (at least such was the chaplain’s expression) that you could feel the selfsame agony in your chest when his outstretched arm drew the horizontal; now, I am overcome at the solemnity of a cigarette lighter brought to a tip of tobacco; I have never been in the company of a woman so profoundly feminine. I feel as if I have an image at last of the high priestesses of antiquity, and so Chevi’s description of her goings-on with Peones appears distorted to me now by the comic violence implicit in such narration. Those were Devil’s sacraments Peones was receiving. I feel as if I am on the edge of betraying myself forever, I know not how. I study her smallest move. The arts of all the attractive women she has ever encountered seem to have been absorbed in her person. She must be wholly an Omega. Where are the nicks and welts of a rough-hewn daily world? For that matter, I cannot take my eyes off her breasts. By the light that reaches to the patio, they seem large and wonderfully well shaped, and mysterious in their cleavage, which is just as deep as her voice.

  Soon enough I am obliged to realize that she is aware of my occupation; it is apparent she ordered Chevi to bring me.

  “Do you like your work?” she asks me. There is a softening of the long i in like. She has a trace of Southern accent. “Your English is good,” I reply.

  “I learned my English from an American,” she says.

  “A wealthy Texan,” adds Chevi, “in Havana. He was her protector.”

  “My protector,” she repeats, as if the man will live forever with such cachet.

  “A friend of the American Ambassador to Cuba,” says Chevi.

  “One of yours,” says Libertad to me.

  “I cannot conceive of any of my countrymen failing to be your protector,” I say, but the remark goes dead. I wonder if her English consists of no more than thirty-eight useful phrases.

  “One of yours,” repeats Libertad.

  “Perhaps she is saying that she would like to meet another,” adds Chevi.

  “Mr. E. Howard Hunt,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say, not without confusion, “he is, at the present moment, very much married.” I confess that the thought of bringing about such an introduction has a sudden but curious appeal to me.

  She shrugs her shoulder, a low gesture accompanied by a turn of the lip, as if to say, “What can that matter?” and she turns back to the living room. It is quite a chamber. She has furnished it in gussied-up copies of Queen Anne, Louis Quatorze, Duncan Phyfe, and Spanish Colonial. Gold leaf has been added to all the wood moldings. Whore cushions of satin are everywhere, and our feet stand on a wildly expensive, brightly hued rug whose only virtuosity can be found in the number of colors—God, what strength is in vulgarity! Her living room looks like a love nest in a furniture store window. Even the ashtrays are as large as fruit bowls.

  She is still fixed on E. Howard Hunt. Is Mr. Hunt not an intimate of Benito Nardone?

  “You are speaking of the politician,” I ask, “who is leader of the Ruralistas?”

  Chevi makes a sound of disgust. “You know very well that he is now running for President of Uruguay.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” I admit.

  Libertad gives a large smile. Her presence still seems a promise of payment. I am beginning to recognize that a courtesan, like an important athlete, is a single-minded force concentrated solely on its objective: She wants to meet E. Howard Hunt who will introduce her to Benito Nardone. Of course.

  I reply, knowingly, “Nardone makes many noises now, but has no chance. The Colorados have been winning this election for the last hundred years.”

  “This year,” says Libertad, “the Blanco-Ruralistas will win. Nardone will win. Your Howard Hunt will introduce me to him.”

  Her singularity of purpose is insulting to me. I have to recognize that she sees me as nothing more than one step in a connected series. Of course, her femininity still contains me in its cloud, but I wonder if I am not dealing with a force that is personal in touch, intimate in shift of voice, but, like the wind, there for everyone.

  We are close to an impasse. I ask why she doesn’t obtain her introduction through Peones, but then the answer is so obvious that she merely smiles. Nardone will respect her more if the meeting is brought about by our Chief of Station. So I merely nod ambiguously and stand up to take my departure. To my surprise, Chevi leaves with me. They embrace like old friends, and he pats her most respectfully and tenderly on the behind, then kisses her hand with a sweep of his mustaches. She, in turn, leaves a kiss on the corner of my mouth, at which my cheek becomes as alive as if it had been touched by a bird’s feather. Then I recollect where her mouth has been this evening; my face burns like balefire.

  “You will introduce me to Mr. E. Howard Hunt,” she says.

  “I will see what I can do,” I am weak enough to reply.

  In the elevator going down, I am already furious at Chevi. I contain myself and do not speak until we reach the street, but then I become the one who insists on crossing the Rambla against high-speed traffic. Even after we are across and safe on the sand, I am still laboring to control my temper.

  “How could you have put me in so compromising a position?” I say at last. “You are not my friend.”

  “I,” he says, “am devoted to your interests. I merely wanted you to look upon one of the few rare artifacts my country has produced, a work emblematic of Uruguayan genius—a great whore.”

  “Shut up,” I say. “You are wholly untrustworthy.”

  This anger, to my surprise, leaves him meek. I am wondering if I should have shown such a side of myself months ago. The trouble is that my temper is not a tool in dependable employ. “How could you be so self-centered, so stupid, so careless,” I cry out. “You should be cut off!”

  “You are at
tracting attention,” he says, and points to two lovers sprawled on a beach blanket over a hundred yards away. Are they looking up? “Let us go back to the safe house. I will try to explain.”

  “Just remember that you are not indispensable. You are obliged to explain.”

  He does. We sit there in the safe house. After her living room, these grim government furnishings support me like a good starched shirt. I realize suddenly that my threats of unemployment have put no small fear into Chevi. We are now paying him one hundred dollars a week, which, with expense chits, often comes to one hundred and twenty, or more, and he could hardly afford to give this up. That, however, is but half of his motivation—the other half is obviously connected to Libertad. “It is true,” he says, after I slash through his disclaimers as if I am chopping brush, “it is true. I was attempting to make you of use to me, and, I agree, that is a breach. The fundamental relationship dictates that I must be of use to you. One should not violate the fundamental relationship.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Because she requested the meeting.”

  “Then you have a similar relationship with her?”

  “That is true. Fundamental relations came into collision.”

  He commenced to tell me a story. He had known Libertad for more than half his life. They had gone to school together in La Teja. In his first year at the university they had been lovers. She had adored him. Then he left for New York. By the time he came back, she was a prostitute. Yet on his visits to her, he would never have to pay money. Still, it was awful. Then she decided to become a great prostitute and went to Havana. When she returned, she was no longer in love with him. She merely liked him. He was entrapped. “I despise her,” he said, “but I lack the power to deny her whims in relation to me. She has become una mujer sin alma.”

  I know why he chose to say those words in Spanish. They are not so hopelessly banal as “a soulless woman.”

  Kittredge, I may be developing the instincts one needs for this work. Chevi finished his tale of woe, put his head on our good cheap safe-house shellac-orange maple dining table, and began to weep. I said, “Why don’t you stop lying? We are aware of where Libertad comes from. It is not La Teja.” I was only pretending to be in possession of such a fact but, then, there was something askew in his story. It was full of that South American pathos which invariably depends on lovers who have known each other from childhood.