Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Fenomenal,” said Libertad.

  “All right,” said Hunt. “Today, in Carrasco, two streets from my house, lives Colonel Jacobo Arbenz, who has recently returned from the Iron Curtain country of Czechoslovakia. I speak of him because I helped to overthrow him and his Communist-sympathizing government in Guatemala four years ago.”

  “Qué golpe, maestro,” breathed Libertad.

  “Now Colonel Arbenz and I nod to each other at the golf club. These are curious and would-be liberal times, but I will never agree that that gentleman with his Communist sympathies can be my true neighbor. I always think of his father. Colonel Arbenz’s father, you see, committed suicide. He filled his mouth with water, raised a pistol to his lips, and pulled the trigger. This mode of self-destruction guarantees the most prodigious disarray of after-effect.” (I translate, Kittredge, from Hunt’s Spanish—el desarreglo prodigioso después del hecho—a linguistic display!) I must say Howard could not keep a grin off his face, but then Libertad actually made a low noise in her throat.

  “Señores, señorita, I relate this fact not to take pleasure in Colonel Arbenz’s family misfortunes, but to point out that the differences between our fathers is kin to the difference between the separate philosophies of freedom and authoritarianism.

  “So I say to you, Dr. Saavedra, that I reject your notion that my country would ever wish to deprive you and the various peoples and nations you claim to represent of anything remotely resembling that inviolable human essence, honor itself. No, sir. My father, you see, brought me to the Greeks, and thereby, in college, to the study of the classics. He even obliged me to memorize one great statement by Aristotle. Yessir, Aristotle told me that there is a life out there higher than humanity: Men can only find it by discovering that particular something in themselves which is divine. Are any of you feeling sober enough to keep up with this? I quote: ‘Do not listen to those who exhort you to keep to modest human thoughts. No. Live, instead, according to the highest thing in you. For small though it may be in power and worth, it is high above the rest!’”

  Chevi roused himself for one last charge. “No, sir, it is we, not you, who subscribe to the wisdom of Aristotle, for he is a Greek, that is to say, a human from the dark side suffused with reason and light.”

  Hunt went for his watch with that, called for the bill, added it carefully, put in his quarter of the share while I laid down mine, waited for me to sprinkle some small change for our half of the tip, saluted Chevi, kissed Libertad on the hand, said, “You have a good, firm hand, my dear,” and walked out with me, but not so quickly that I could avoid a last look from Libertad. She showed no suggestion that she would ever care to hear from me again.

  We stopped at a café to drink three cups of espresso each, followed by two tablets of Sen-Sen, but I will not pretend much work was done by either of us after we returned to the Embassy. By five, I managed to phone Chevi at his law office, woke him up, and told him to meet me at the law library, which, by our understanding, is nothing less than the safe house we keep in the high-rise above the Rambla. I can promise you that a few disclosures are to follow, so I will continue with another letter tomorrow.

  Yours, as ever,

  Harry

  30

  April 17, 1958

  Dearest Kittredge,

  The encounter with Chevi at the safe house went on for hours, but I will spare you the early portion, which consisted of my belaboring him not only verbally but actually coming close at times to hitting him physically. He is absolutely maddening. He tried to excuse himself for coming along with Libertad on the ground that he was there to protect me. “It would,” he kept saying, “have been a disaster for Hunt to commence anything with her,” and he nodded vigorously. “I will yet explain. She is not what she seems to be.” Then he would say nothing for a while.

  Yes, I could have killed him. I would have if I had not been too miserably hung over and too quickly sobered up, and it was all of an hour before I could feel enough human interest to ask Chevi where he had picked up his Greek erudition. It turned out that he had spent a few hours stuffing himself with quotations. “A whim,” he said, “I did not wish to arrive empty-handed.”

  “But how did you know he would not speak to you in Greek? He studied it in college.”

  “He is a janissary. Janissaries retain no culture.”

  “You are mad.”

  “It was worth the chance.”

  I was angry again. “Do not tell yourself that you are out of trouble,” I said.

  “I recognize that I am not.”

  “You are going to relinquish Libertad.”

  “Oh,” he said, “that is not truly necessary.”

  “It is completely necessary. Your fundamental relationship is with the Agency.”

  “Yes. You are my first and only.”

  “Let’s be done with all this,” I shouted. “You will give the lady up.”

  “May we discuss it tomorrow?”

  “Hell, no,” I shouted. “If you do not observe the absolute letter of this ruling, your termination is inescapable.” I nodded profoundly. “Toward those who betray us, our justice is unstinting.”

  Actually, to terminate the relationship means I’ll be bombed by the Groogs. Why? they will ask. All the same, Chevi does not see through me. The use of such a word as unstinting certainly strikes fear into a compromised heart.

  “I will see her no more,” he states suddenly. “I give her up as of this moment.” I have no idea if he is telling the truth. It is as sudden as if a wall had collapsed. “I am going to tell you the truth and then you will see that I have indeed protected you.”

  I am thinking that we could turn him over to Pedro Peones. I am startled by how large my heart can feel when it is ice-cold. For the size of the fury I’m containing, I might as well have a boulder in my chest. Something in his lies disturbs me profoundly.

  “You cannot begin to give her up,” I say, “until you tell the truth about her.”

  He looks into my eyes. Our staring contest goes on for many moments and each of us takes turns at growing stronger than the other, or, should I say, less of a liar—I do not know. Finally, he says, “You do not know the truth, or you would never have asked for this meeting today.”

  “Until you tell me, I cannot compare your knowledge with mine.”

  He smiles at this evasion, but wanly. He is even more exhausted than myself. “I will tell you,” he says, “because the objective reality is now clear. I must denude myself of her.”

  “Denude?”

  “Desnudar . . . privar . . .” He finds it. “Divest myself of her. Indeed, I should not have supported her request to meet Hunt. When all is said, she is too impossible a whore.”

  Now he wraps his arms mournfully around me in a full abrazo, as if we are brothers embracing at a wake, and says, “Libertad is not a woman, but the female transformation of what was once un hermafrodito.” He sighs so audibly that I receive all of his breath and the dead smell of onerous responsibilities carried too long. Since I have shown little response—I think he is speaking in metaphors—he adds, “true and profound change. Metamorfosis quirúrgica.”

  “Surgical transformation?” I ask.

  “Sí.”

  “Where?”

  “In Sweden.”

  “Have you . . .?” I want to ask if there is a passage. Stupid questions jostle for position in my brain. “You have a good firm hand, my dear,” I can remember Hunt saying.

  “She can assume the fundamental position,” Chevi says mournfully. “But only in the dark. She plays a deception with her fingers. She oils them. She performs some magic with her knuckles. She bragged to me once that she had seventy men in Las Vegas in thirty days, and not one was aware that he had not in fact entered her. That it was only un juego de manos.”

  “A sleight of hand?”

  “Yes. Prestidigitación.”

  “Her breasts?”

  “Hermaphrodites have breasts. In addition, she takes
hormones.”

  “All right. I’ve heard enough,” I said. In fact, I had been continuing the conversation because I knew that the moment I ceased asking questions, I would have to believe all that he said, and then I might be ill.

  My emotions were so exceptionally crossed at this point that, Kittredge, I swear I could feel the simultaneous existence of Alpha and Omega, yes, Alpha, our own manly case officer out in the world of operations and paperwork had to wonder: Was he, himself, a homosexual? That stands out, doesn’t it? To be so attracted to a transvestite, or whatever else you could call it—a transsexual? I writhe in the bonds of embarrassment as I write this.

  Yet, another part of me knows that Libertad, no matter how low and sordid she may be, is nonetheless an evocation of the female spirit. Somewhere out there between he and she, Libertad has managed to absorb the quintessence of femininity! She is not a woman, but she has become a creature replete with beauty. She is all the beautiful women put together! By Omega’s generosity of view, I could tell myself that I was not homosexual, but devoted to beauty, the beauty of women. Can you conceive of feeling such opposed emotions at once? Yes, of course you can, you are the only one who could.

  Poor Chevi. Libertad is an agent in the world of women, and he is an agent in the world of men. So he can assuage his loneliness—for who could be lonelier than Chevi?—by being close to her. I was now forbidding that.

  I returned his abrazo, full of feeling for him, and we had a drink while he showed me the pictures of his wife and son that he carried in his wallet. Both are sturdy, both are dark, his wife a woman of olive eyes and raven hair. The gloom of the gargantuan tasks that lie upon the Communist world are fully in her expression. She has monumental breasts, a woman who would run weighty operations—whether in a factory, a family, or a Party cell. At least, such were Harry Hubbard’s concealed editorial sentiments. Chevi sighed again while looking at her—she was all he was going to have for a while. I felt a shiver in my soul. For both of us.

  No doubt you will find a surfeit of bathos in this. I do myself. Be certain I was content to drive him home without further ado, but it all returned with a headache so soon as I had reached my hotel. The question was how much to divulge to Hunt next day at the office.

  Let me break for dinner. A little churrasco, sausage, and black pudding will build me up for the last mile.

  Later

  The next day, Wednesday, did not go quite as expected. I was prepared for a horrendous session with Howard, which, if he considered AV/OCADO compromised, could bring on a thirty-six-hour stint with the Groogs on the Encoder-Decoder, but he was not at the office. Mid-morning, he called in to tell Nancy Waterston that he was going to accompany Nardone on a campaign swing for the next twenty-four hours.

  “As for the rest of us,” Porringer muttered, “we just keep to the usual dumb and daily.”

  Sherman was an unlikely ally, but, then, the virtue of a hangover may be that it freshens old clichés. Any port in a storm! Porringer, whatever his flaws, is not stupid.

  We went out to one of those sprawling ubiquitous sidewalk cafés. Dusty metal chairs, coffee-sticky eating surfaces, ads for aperitifs on the awnings, ill-dressed housewives eating gritty ice cream, adolescents playing hooky from their lycée. I think the only place in the world where outdoor cafés really make sense is in Paris, but ours, alas, is not in Paris, but Montevideo, although it is named Café Trouville, no less, and must have forty or fifty dingy little round white metal tables sitting on the sidewalk of the Bulevar General Artigas. That, as you would expect, is an artery of traffic. Such conduits in South America get named after generals. Avenida de General Aorta, Bulevar de General Carótida, Avenida del Almirante Cloaca. If these misrepresentations are needlessly cruel to Montevideo, a city which has never done me any harm, it is because on mornings such as this, a second-rate seaport can certainly serve as the representative cloaca of our filthy world. Or is this describing my awful mood?

  After the first twenty minutes (which consisted of listening to Porringer vent his gripes about Hunt), I got down to business. What does he, Porringer, know about Libertad?

  “There’s very little I don’t know about her,” he states, and actually pats his stomach. “So, you open.”

  Yes, he has all the hincty nasalities of a successful graduate student who is sitting on more bibliographical references than you can ever muster.

  I decide to take a chance and prime his pump. That will probably get him to pool his information. It is always difficult for Porringer to hold back on command of a subject.

  I tell him, therefore, what Chevi told me about the sex change.

  “Yes,” he said, “I was debating whether to warn you about Chevi.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  He shifted his seat. “He’s your agent. I don’t leave my farts in every lark’s nest.”

  I was thinking he must have been waiting for AV/OCADO to blow up in my face.

  As if he had read my mind, he added, “I didn’t want to get the Station in a stir about Libertad. Nor do you.”

  “Can you tell me what you know about her?”

  He nodded to himself as if Judge Porringer, having taken an agreeable recess, might be deciding in favor of the supplicant. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t like this business from the get-go. Peones could have any whore in Montevideo—I mean, he is more dedicated to rank pussy than I am. So what was he looking for in Cuba? It had to be a freak. It had to be. I sent inquiries up to Havana about the lady, and all I got back was cover-up. I checked it out, therefore, with a well-positioned friend in Western Div, but Libertad was back here with Peones before my pal could dispatch the primary material. I did learn that her Havana protector was a big Texas crony of the American Ambassador down there, and that was why we couldn’t squeeze any juice out of Havana Station. A little later, I discovered—just a little too late—that Libertad was one more drag-queen hermaphrodite who had gone to Sweden to get her fire-hose turned inside out.”

  “Inside out?”

  “You mean you are not witting to Swedish chirurgery?”

  “Can’t say that I am.”

  “Live and learn. A Swedish sawbones won’t just chop off your dick and testicles and hold out his hand for payment. These Olafs think they are virtuosos. They remove the inside meat, but save the outer skin of the sac and penis for the humanitarian reason that both swatches of epidermis are loaded with erogenous nerve endings. Then the surgical team cuts a new hole—which, I fear, leads nowhere—and lines it with all this premium tissue. Give me a Social Democrat every time, especially if he’s Swedish.”

  He was like a water buffalo. Impossible to get him moving; once under way, no reason to stop. “I had,” he said, “a few questions of my own. Here we were with Hunt. A Station Chief whose idea of covert action is to own the local cops. Howard is in love with Peones, and Peones is in love with La Lengua. And I am in possession of information that is going to be about as popular as syphilis on a petri dish. But you know me. I still want more. So I ask around in the local bagnios, and, kid you not, brother, they are ready to tell all. In her pre-Havana days, Libertad used to be named Roderigo. Roderigo Durazno, no less. A specialty act. Full penis and testes which he couldn’t use for much, and full set of breasts. Kind of a centerpiece for orgies. You know.” He put down his cup and grimaced. “This coffee is awfully sour.” He waved to the waiter, pointed to his empty espresso, and said, “Roderigo wanted a sea change. Saved his pesos. Went to Sweden. After the operation, she went to Las Vegas to try out the new hole.” (Kittredge, I can’t help it. This is how he speaks. Think of him as a technician in Carnal Engineering.) “Well, Hubbard, her plumbing didn’t function like the Swedish scientists had predicated. The new hole was too delicate to take the guff. Maybe some wires got crossed. And her back hole, which in days of yore in Montevideo had been the old reliable, was now, because of its proximity to the operation, not employable for anything but the evacuative function—which is what God intended in th
e first place until all us dirt farmers came along. So the good old days of taking it up the ass were done. How does she manage now? The whorehouse madams with whom she still pals around tell me she’s got a trick with her hands can fool any man. I find that hard to believe, but there you are. She nailed her Texan in Las Vegas, he took her to Havana, and she kept it secret from him for many a month. He thought he had himself a dynamite blonde who loved to fuck in the dark. I don’t care how much money a man makes, he can still be the stupidest asshole alive, wouldn’t you say? How about a sandwich and a drink? This talk has made me hungry.”

  So we lunched at Café Trouville on tapas and cerveza and watched the traffic grind along. “Any time,” he said, “that a hooker can fool a john by simulating a vagina with a little oil and five good fingers, you can count on it—she will brag. And other whores will brag on her. It must have traveled from Cape Horn to the Caribbean. Havana Station picked it up. Wonderful news for them. They had to tell the American Ambassador that his Texas crony was living with a surgical bombshell scandal. After they all came up for air, the Texan prepared to divest himself. In consequence, Libertad wrote a love letter to Pedro Peones, who used to know her as Roderigo Durazno. Now, when he saw nude photographs of her as a blonde, he went insane. Too bad I only found this out too late. Needless to say, Libertad makes me nervous. Any man born half a woman who gives his nuts and dick to the fishes is not likely to say to the KGB, ‘Go away, you are not a good Christian.’” He nodded. “That’s my take.”

  I now asked the question I had been afraid to ask. “Does Howard know about Libertad?”