Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Well,” he said, “there are many levels to the truth.”

  Kittredge, it is very late, and I am going to end right here. I did not learn the truth that night, indeed it took a good bit more, but I promise you that the facts, when I acquired them, were not ordinary. Be patient. I will tell you more in a day or two. I suppose I may as well confess to my annoyance that you chose not to tell me about Dracula’s Lair.

  Cheerfully yours,

  Harry

  28

  ONE MORE LIE. THE LETTER HAD NOT BEEN CUT SHORT BY A DESIRE TO chastise Kittredge. I simply did not know how to continue. After all, I had begun with the fabrication that Chevi had phoned me, and ever since, had been attempting to balance my account, a common practice in putting Agency reports together. If, for some reason, you could not send the truth back to Washington—if, for instance, you hired Gordy Morewood to do a specific job after the Groogs had instructed you to let him cool his heels, why, then, you gave Gordy another name, and paid him out of a new file. Double-entry reporting—an art! Rare was the field man who did not practice it on occasion.

  Now Kittredge had been placed on double-entry. I had suppressed a critical passage between Libertad and myself. Wholly at her behest, I expect, Chevi had closeted himself in her gold and marble bathroom for a good twenty minutes during our visit, and in that time Libertad conferred on me one of her royal gifts—fellatio. We had not been alone for a minute before her fingers walked over the buttons on my fly. I will not give the details—suffice it to say that she exhibited such sensitivity to one’s shifting states of tumescence that we did not get to the offering until Chevi had splashed enough water in bowl and washbasin to indicate he would soon be back with us—instead, she took me up and down a steeplechase of long and languorous hoops and loops. I might have discharged with sensations extraordinary enough to be hers forever but some residual Hubbard stubbornness, refusing to hand over the drawbridge to a stranger, was there like a mailed warder and slammed a gate in my soul; I came, to my surprise, painfully. Alpha, taken in whole, must have gone clear over the hurdle; Omega shattered darkly below. My loins ached when I was done and I buttoned myself quickly, whereupon she made a point of licking her plump lips as if seed were cream, gave a squeeze of her hand to mine, and kissed Chevi with considerable passion when he came back to the room. I was not about to pass all this on to Kittredge. Yet I hardly wished to mislead her by too much. That would once again violate the spirit of our correspondence. So I had given a fulsome description of Libertad’s attractions, as if to communicate by that route the depth of the magnetic field her mouth and lips had put upon the nether parts. At its best, I had felt, I confess, like a superbly prepared canvas upon which a truly notable artist was laying the most purposeful strokes. To make up for any real loss in my account of—yes, I now knew the meaning—of such exquisite pleasure, I had exaggerated the initial impact of meeting. In truth, I did not feel in the presence of a goddess until her mouth led me to study the turns of expression on her face. All that beauty! All that hard implacable will to rule the world! I had seen hints of such on many another whore’s face as she gave herself to fellatio, but never with such singularity of mission. As I would realize over the next few days, my iron-bound determination not to introduce her to Hunt was springing a few leaks.

  April 15, 1958

  Dearest Kittredge,

  Libertad must have powers. For months Howard has been promising to take me along to an estancia, but eleven days ago, on Friday morning, directly after my encounter with Señorita La Lengua on Thursday night, he informed me that we would be off on Saturday to the estancia of Don Jaime Saavedra Carbajal. I can now describe such a weekend for you. It did have a few moments, and I believe I’ll tell it as it passes: Travel belongs to the present tense, might you agree?

  All right, then! We take off on schedule, Saturday morning, with Dorothy in the backseat and myself riding shotgun, Howard driving his Cadillac as if it were a Jaguar, seat erect and far back, arms extended and hands in leather driving gloves holding opposite sides of the wheel. We motor north over a variety of inland roads, some in crying need of revampment, but a fast drive all the same of one hundred and fifty miles through South American towns usually sleeping beside a river, usually dusty, and rarely disturbed by any sound larger than our even-breathing Cadillac motor. On either side of us, the pampas begin to seem a veritable outer space of grass. Dorothy, napping in the rear, snores ever so faintly, no more sound to it than one fly meandering in a summer pantry, but Hunt’s nostril quivers at this small public delinquency, and I think of Libertad. Perhaps there is enough of a crack in his marriage, I try to tell myself, to justify the introduction.

  I can see why Dorothy sleeps. The land is flat. One can cover five miles before topping the low ridge that originally appeared to be but a half mile off; to divert myself, I keep estimating such distance while listening to Hunt expatiate. He is full of Fidel Castro these days. Western Hemisphere Division is receiving analyses to the effect that Castro may yet overthrow Batista, and Hunt is grumbling over the State Department’s general lack of concern. “There’s a Castro lieutenant called Guevara, Che Guevara, whom we gave safe passage to out of Guatemala along with Arbenz. That boy is more of a lefty than Lefty O’Doul.”

  I am counting the miles to the horizon. By mid-afternoon we arrive at the gate to the estancia, which announces itself by means of two mournful stone columns, each twenty feet high and twenty feet apart, there to honor, I suppose, the pitted dirt road that takes us a long slow way to the hacienda. A thirty-six-hour party is commencing. Don Jaime, the wealthiest landowner in Paysandú province, is a powerful, sturdy man with a ram’s horn mustache who exudes hospitality while his wife, cold and gracious, soon steers me into paying court to the young Uruguayan ladies present, much as if I were a nineteenth-century artillery officer at a tea party. Any romance with these protected señoritas would take three years of Sundays, however. Even the wives would cost you a year! Still, I flirt assiduously with the female folk of local ranch owners, local hidalgos, and local grain, feed, and mill owners as we all (that is, the men) get drunk. I’m surprised at the low level of the guests, which is to say that the money seems to have accumulated faster than the old family manners I had been expecting, but still there are gardens around the house, and agreeable half-wild copses of woods with paths, vineyards, arbors—it’s easy to take our drinking into the evening. They imbibe prodigiously out here in the pampas, wine and Uruguayan cognac, rum, and—touch of class—Scotch. Don Jaime Saavedra Carbajal’s house is low and sprawling, with cowhide for chair covering, and steers’ horns for arms and backs. Of course, there’s also dark Victorian stuff, long English hunting tables, mournful stuffed sofas, mahogany cabinets, and atrociously second-rate family portraits. The carpets are old orientals topped with Brazilian jaguar skins, antique rifles are mounted above the fireplaces, the windows are small with many panes, and the ceilings are low. Yet the house is kind of imposing. I can’t say how. It does sit ten miles back of its own gate, and you pass thousands of cattle in the endless meadows on the way from the gate to here, not to mention guest houses, gardens, sheds, and barns.

  The male company spends a good part of Saturday evening talking about horses, and Sunday morning we all go out for a pickup polo game in a surprisingly well-groomed, close-cropped meadow with goalposts. I have all I can do to get out alive. The competition, while spotty—one or two real polo players, in addition to several fine horsemen of whom Hunt, I have to tell you, is one—are filled out by a string of substitutes like myself who are brought in and removed more quickly than the polo ponies. Howard, if you recall, had given me some elementary instruction on the polo field in Carrasco, but under game pressure I am in trouble. I can get mallet to ball with my forehand, but am just about hopeless for backhands. Hunt takes me aside to whisper, “Don’t try to hit anything on your left. Just go stirrup to stirrup with the other fellow’s mount and ride him out of the play.”

  I follow his
advice and discover that if not always successful, at least I’m beginning to have fun. This is the most rough exercise I’ve taken on in more than a year, and I love it. I can feel my father’s combative blood (which, for me, may be what happiness is all about). The moment I’m maneuvered off the ball, I gallop gung-ho all over the place trying to find the man who cut me off. These epiphanies of martial lust, horse to horse, man to man, come to their climax when I’m chucked from my steed pretty abruptly and land on my back, all the wind knocked out, a most curious sensation of choking passively as chargers veer overhead, their hooves going by like sledgehammers. God, even in my breathless state I saw the eyes of the horse who came closest to running me over. He, too, had a divided heart, half in panic that he would hurt himself, half in a fury to charge right through my supine feast of torso.

  Well, I had to take the next two chukkers off, but when I returned to the game (which involved getting my will in hand), the wives and daughters and older hidalgos on the sidelines, and the players and the substitutes, all applauded, and Hunt came up to put his arm around my shoulder. Suddenly, I am in love with myself, with risk, with all the revelations of pain. I ache all over and feel virtuous, but it is obviously the high point of my day.

  On Sunday night, however, after the barbecue, is the event of the weekend. Benito Nardone arrives. Possessed of a high forehead, a pronounced widow’s peak, long nose, and sensuous lips, plus dark, V-shaped eyebrows and large, somewhat haunted dark eyes, Nardone was not at all what I expected. At worst, he looked like the classiest gangster on a movie lot. Am I thinking of George Raft?

  Nardone makes his speech in the library as the men gather around brandy and cigars. Atmosphere is solemn—black leather tomes in near-black wooden bookcases. I decide that Nardone, son of the people, his father an Italian longshoreman from the docks of Montevideo, appeals to this group precisely because he is not one of them—he has no money, no family to back him, no title: By their lights, he should be a terrorist or a Communist, but he quit his youthful ties to that left-wing world and has become the leader of the right wing. As he swings into the core of his fund-raising speech, I can see the ball of money rolling downhill with more and more pesos adhering to it, for he knows how to talk to the center of fear and wrath in all these hidalgos and hacendados: They love to hear what they want to hear—I am beginning to think that politics is built exclusively on the comforts of such cant. “In these times,” says Nardone, “a workingman no longer thinks of passing on to his family more than was given to him. On the contrary, the Uruguayan workingman’s most searching inner question today is whether to retire with partial security at the age of thirty-seven, or with full economic protection when he is fifty. Señores, we do not wish to be, nor can we be, the Switzerland or the Sweden of South America. We cannot continue to support a welfare state that encourages such inanition.”

  They applaud him, and applaud a good deal more when he offers as contrast to the lazy, corrupt life of Montevidean officeholders, the hardworking, honorable, virtuous industry of the herders and simple farm people in the pampas, all true Ruralistas. Of course, I have been hearing all year from Colorados in the capital that the farm workers are exploited unconscionably by the landed gentry. This political side of the evening puts me, therefore, in a depression. I am obliged to realize once again how essentially ignorant I am about these matters, and even ask myself why I joined the Company and gave myself to it all these years—more than three years now—when I’m not really interested in politics, and in fact have exactly what I need in the way of understanding: For all our faults, the U.S. is still, I believe, the natural model of government for other countries.

  Nardone may have picked up a whiff of my thoughts since he ended by offering “a salute to that great nation of the north founded and maintained by individual initiative.” He was applauded for this too, of course, but not, I think, so much out of love for the U.S.A. as in recognition of his good manners toward Don Jaime Carbajal’s foreign guests. Nardone, pointing to Hunt, then added, “This most distinguished representative of our friends to the north has often graced my understanding with his thoughts. My friend and fellow horseman, Señor Howard Hunt.”

  “Hola,” cries that crowd.

  After which follow billiards, snooker, and bed. I could have taken the opportunity to talk to Nardone or to Hunt about Libertad, but hesitated—indeed, I have been on edge all weekend with this. Curiosity intrigues me to help her; caution forbids it. Now, in the morning, we return to the city.

  On the drive back, I am down on myself and decide that I have been living a most secluded life in Uruguay, but that is the way I want it. With the exception of the polo game, I did not really enjoy the estancia. The pampas on a daily basis would bore me. Oh, there were quiet vistas where a stream curved around a grove of white-leaved cottonwoods, and the sun gave a pale gold light to the tall grass, but I am also thinking of some of the villages we passed on the way back, shanty poor with tin roofs that banged like loose shutters in every strong breeze. There is a prevailing wind out in these pampas called la bruja (the witch), and it would drive me loco if I had to live out here.

  Kittredge, I hope this letter proves satisfying to you. In the pampas, listening to la bruja, I wondered what your situation could be and whether you were in peril, trouble, difficulty, or merely suffering like me from some small dislocation of the soul.

  Cheers, love,

  Harry

  P.S. Dorothy slept again on the way back, and this time I did bring up the subject of Libertad. When I mentioned that I had met her, Hunt’s curiosity was aroused.

  “How did that happen?”

  I improvised a reasonably good tale to the effect that I had been introduced to her at El Águila by AV/ERAGE, our society journalist.

  “I warn you,” I said, “she is looking for an introduction to Benito Nardone.”

  “That is one request she can file in the department of idle dreams,” he answered on the spot, but, a little later, he tapped me on the arm. “On reconsideration,” he said, “I like the idea of looking her over. She may have some input to offer on Fidel Castro. How he disports in camera, so to speak.”

  We decided to make it lunch, Tuesday, in a small restaurant of Hunt’s choosing, far out on the Bulevar Italia. Kittredge, I knew how the place was going to look before I saw it—sufficiently nondescript to ensure that no one Hunt was acquainted with socially would ever be there. In any event, we set it up for the next day, Tuesday, just a week ago. I’ve decided to be the last of the big spenders and will get off another magnum of a letter to you tomorrow night.

  29

  April 16, 1958

  Dearest Kittredge,

  Lunch began with a most unexpected turn that I should have anticipated. Libertad did not, as had been arranged in advance with Chevi, come alone; to the contrary, she walked into the restaurant accompanied by no less a personage than Señor Fuertes himself.

  While Hunt has never met Station’s starring agent, AV/ OCADO (since, thankfully, there has never been a crisis pressing enough to justify bringing them together), I can promise you that I went through a bad moment. Even though Hunt seemed to accept Libertad’s description of her escort—“My friend and translator, Dr. Enrique Saavedra-Morales”—I had to keep issuing injunctions to myself: “Stop seething. Stop seething. Cool down!”

  All the while, Libertad glowed. Hunt may even have melted a drop in the face of such incandescence. “Señorita,” he said in his best Spanish, “I admire your language and choose to speak in it more than is wise for me,” whereupon she laughed encouragingly. “Perhaps my command, such as it is,” he went on, “will dispose of the need for a translator, although I welcome your friend, Dr. Saavedra. I would ask,” he said, turning to Chevi, “whether you are related to Don Jaime Saavedra Carbajal?”

  “A distant relation,” said Chevi. “I do not know whether he would acknowledge this poor branch of the family.”

  I could have been in a heavily loaded airplane which
now, at the very end of the runway, has just managed to take off.

  We ordered. It was precisely the sort of low-priced middle-class restaurant I had foreseen. The menu was limited, the linen, while not quite yellow, had certainly said farewell to white, the tables were occupied by no more than a few local businessmen at one end and two middle-aged ladies of modest income at the other, and the waiter looked to be mired in debt and old lottery tickets—yes, Hunt had chosen an eating place that would be oblivious to the unorthodoxy of our meeting, or any other.

  On the way over he had said, “Does Libertad know my name?”

  “No question of that.”

  “And my function?”

  “I would say so.”

  “Then I will have to inform Peones of the meeting.”

  “Must you? I don’t think she will say a word to him.”

  “No, she won’t, will she? Nothing to gain from that.”

  “No, sir.”

  He clicked his tongue once. “Well, we won’t allow this one to become a folly,” he said.

  Under the circumstances, you can predict how much room he offered Libertad to trot out her better tricks. Obviously, the first item on her agenda was to excite the gallantry of Mr. E. Howard Hunt, but the lady’s charms kept rubbing against the given: Glamour, when unattached to social prominence, has rapidly diminishing impact on Howard.

  After his first speech, therefore, he came down to business quickly. We were hardly into our martinis (which Howard insisted on mixing himself at the table—thank God!) before Miss Paradise was being interrogated.