Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino

by Julián Herbert

  If the sublime is an aesthetic value that is not a gift of Nature but something that must be learned through technique, then the only plausible means of producing sublime art is by producing parodies. Parody is the sublime. The sublime is parody. Except that most of us believe that the sacred exists and that, as Pedro Almodóvar said in an interview, “technique is an illusion.” Even atheists (I’m an atheist) know that language is sacred. If you don’t believe me, take a lit cigarette and a picture of your daughter and burn the eyes out.

  This is where Greek and contemporary treatise writers go down the drain, where the only thing left to tie us to the world is the irrationality of parody and the sublime. To give one example: Barry White’s voice when he sings “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.” No one believes that voice to be true. But we all know that it’s the voice of Truth.

  A Barry White song is playing: “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.” It’s midafternoon. An olive-green two-door Maverick ’74 is heading west along an empty desert highway. It passes a sign reading “Bernal NMex.”

  “Twenty-five miles,” says Gildardo grouchily from the driver’s seat.

  “Stop complaining, just drive,” replies Rosendo, who is sitting in the passenger seat, attempting to match his words to the rhythm of the song while moving his torso in some graceless form of dance.

  Both men are wearing dark glasses to protect their eyes from the strong direct sunlight.

  “A twenty-fucking-five-mile detour to Bernal,” repeats Gildardo.

  Rosendo ignores him and continues gyrating to Barry White.

  “And another twenty-five back to Route 66. Fifty miles there and back.”

  “Take it easy, man. When you get a taste of the pizzas and the mezcal, you’re gonna say, ‘Oh my gosh,’ like the bitch you are.”

  Gildardo drives in silence for a few seconds then asks:

  “Who recommended it?”

  “My cousin Matías, the hired gun. He used to guard shipments of Oaxaca crystal traveling from Pinotepa to Piedras Negras on 57 Norte. Down there in Oaxaca he got a taste for mezcal and discovered this shit: paplometl distilled in clay pots. Fifty-four percent alcohol. Every shot with more of a kick than three lines.”

  “And then?”

  “And then what?”

  “Wasn’t there a broad in the picture?”

  “You’re a horny bastard. There was a broad. A black-haired woman by the name of Silvana. She was going with my cousin but then she left him for a chef called Renato. He makes the pizzas.”

  “Well, your cousin’s a moron. If a chick left me for some Italian fairy, they’d both feel my Magnum where the sun don’t shine.”

  “Argentinian.”

  “What?”

  “Renato is Argentinian.”

  “Square dick in a round hole.”

  “Matías says he liked the kid and they ended up buddies. Then Renato got in deep shit with the immigration dudes and my cousin helped him to come north and open a pizzeria. Silvana shuttles back and forth from Oaxaca with the mezcal. There’s no shortage. Mezcal and pizza, dude: it’s the future. To hell with the frigging cargos of crystal and blow.”

  It’s sundown. The Maverick enters a small town. Gildardo parks in front of a bar with an unlit neon sign that says “Pinotepa Nacional” and “mezcal&pizza.” Rosendo gets out of the car. In one hand he holds an iPod Classic, in the other a portable speaker from which comes the voice of Barry White, now singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

  Gildardo turns off the ignition, gets out, locks the doors, and looks around. Opposite the bar is a billboard that announces: “Welcome to Bernal, Land of Friendship.”

  “Goddamn Bernal,” says Gildardo.

  They go into the pizzeria. It’s extremely small: two tables and a counter. At the back is a barely visible kitchen area and a piece of cardboard with an arrow drawn in crayon pointing to the left and, under the arrow, also written in crayon, the letters “W.C.”

  A gringo-gringo just over thirty with the swaggering air of an overgrown teenage ranchero welcomes them from behind the counter.

  “Hello, folks!”

  Rosendo puts his iPod Classic and the speaker on one of the two tables. “Never Gonna Give You Up” is still playing.

  “Are you Renato?” asks Rosendo.

  “Nope,” replies Gringo-Gringo.

  “Do you speak Spanish?” asks Gildardo.

  “Nope,” replies Gringo-Gringo. “But if you want, I can make you a pizza,” he continues in English. “Piz-za,” he repeats in an overdone Italian accent. “The Sopranos, know what I mean?”

  Gildardo flops into one of the chairs, doubled over with laughter. Rosendo sits down opposite his partner. He seems disconcerted.

  “So?” asks Gringo-Gringo. “To pizza or not to pizza?”

  Rosendo nods. Gringo-Gringo moves to the kitchen. Still laughing, Gildardo says:

  “Twenty-five miles. And twenty-five back to the natural route. I’ll tell you something, dude. Seems to me this is something I knew, then forgot, and just remembered again.”

  Rosendo steps up to the counter. On the other side, behind a curtain, Gringo-Gringo can be seen preparing the pizza dough, rolling it out on a board.

  “And the Argentinian? And his Mexican woman?” Rosendo asks.

  “Don’t know nothing about no Argentinians,” replies Gringo-Gringo. “I might have seen someone with a big nose but I can’t say if he was Italian or Jewish. I did see the woman: she transferred the business to me. I don’t think she was Mexican. Too cute an ass to be Mexican, and she had no belly. I’d say she was Indian. Maybe Navajo or Puebla.”

  “Oaxaqueña.”

  “Could be. To my way of thinking, those people don’t have a race, you know. They’re all stray dogs.”

  Rosendo returns to his seat. Gildardo attempts to stifle a fresh burst of laughter. Gringo-Gringo comes out from behind the curtain and asks:

  “Something to drink?”

  Looking nowhere in particular, Rosendo suggests:

  “Mezcal.”

  “Never heard of it. I’ve got Corona and Tecate.”

  “Two Tecates,” says Gildardo.

  Gringo-Gringo moves away, but Rosendo insists:

  “Aguardiente? Snake bite? Didn’t the last owners leave a single bottle?”

  Gringo-Gringo comes back to the table with a disapproving expression.

  “I might have three or four bottles of that colorless, no-label shit in the cupboard. Can’t think why a white man would risk drinking it, not even a white Mexican. But I’ll fetch some for you if that’s what you want.”

  Night has fallen. The portable speaker and the iPod are still playing quietly: now it’s “I’ve Got So Much to Give.” Rosendo and Gildardo look halfway drunk. They glance at each other, cackle: it’s as if the world is orbiting around them. They clink veladora glasses brimming with mezcal and make a toast.

  “Papalometl agave, pop,” says Rosendo. “Distilled in clay pots. Fifty-four percent alcohol. You won’t find liquor this good anywhere in the American South or northern Mexico.”

  On the table are the remains (in fact, almost all) of a disgustingly greasy-looking deep-dish pizza.

  Rosendo gets to his feet, hugs Gildardo, kisses him on the forehead, makes to clink glasses once more, and observes:

  “If I was your cousin, I’d have killed her. Even if she was real hot and had a cute name. If a woman left me for some Italian fairy, I’d fucking kill her.”

  “Argentinian,” replies Rosendo. “Renato is Argentinian.”

  “Salud,” says Gildardo. “Here’s to life.”

  Gringo-Gringo comes out of the kitchen, stands in front of his clients, arms akimbo, and, with a broad, self-satisfied grin, says: “My dad punched Barry White.”

  Rosendo and Gildardo look at each other in silence. Gringo-Gringo moves closer and, still speaking, slaps their shoulders and backs.

  “Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing racist about it. I mean to say: Ba
rry White was a fucking fat Negro. We can all agree that Barry White was a fucking fat Negro, right? But that’s not the point. To begin with, it was the seventies. Wow: were they hard times. I wasn’t even born. Everyone was stoned out of their minds, sometimes on three or four different drugs at once. But not Dad: Dad was a very sensible young man. He always told us: beer and nothing more. And he practiced what he preached.

  “Dad would have been … what? Twenty-four, twenty-five? He’d always wanted to be a good family man. You know how it is, right? Either you have principles or you let the train flatten you.

  “He went to Albuquerque looking for work. Those were dark times. Not just for you Mexicans, and that’s all I have to say: we real Americans have had our dose of suffering, too, since you guys, excuse my language, have become such whiners. I mean no offense, just saying it like it is. So there’s my dad: a pure white in Albuquerque in the midseventies. And what did they give him? A crummy job as a bellboy in the Brighton Hotel, a small old building in the Sandia Valley. At least it had some class. After only a few days my poor dad had a chance to show what he was worth: Barry White arrived for some gala event he was doing that night.

  “Dad says it was one of the high points of his life, watching that big man with his little hat checking in, and then he had the joy of carrying his luggage to his room (he says that while they were going up in the elevator, Barry White was breathing real heavy, like someone kept sticking their finger up his ass), and watching him dry his fucking fat Negro sweat on a white towel.

  “But the trouble started early the next morning. Barry came back from his gig really drunk, lit up, probably high on drugs. First he hit the cab driver who’d brought him back—he didn’t want to pay—then he shouted all sorts of shit at the reception clerk and, without so much as an apology, made for the elevators, where Dad was waiting for him in the dumb page boy outfit and white gloves they used to wear back then.

  “‘Fucking Negro,’ Dad said he was thinking. ‘He’d better not touch me.’

  “He was terrified: Barry White was a real giant of a man.”

  The iPod and the speaker play Barry White singing a version of “Just the Way You Are.”

  “Dad pressed the button for the fourth floor. On the way, Barry White smiled at him. So far so good. When the elevator stopped, Barry exited through the folding door and took out his billfold to give Dad a tip. My dad says that he seemed to him such a fucking lousy fat, drunk Negro that, without giving it a second thought, he punched him on the nose, knocking his ass to the carpet. Just to teach him some respect. My poor dad paid for that light-bulb moment with three months in the can.”

  Rosendo and Gildardo look each other in the eyes. There’s an overlong silence; the only sound is the music from the iPod. Then, as if they have come to an agreement, they throw themselves on Gringo-Gringo. Rosendo gets his right arm around his neck and covers his mouth with his left hand. Gildardo punches him in the gut and pushes him toward the kitchen. They crash into the counter and then the stove. Gildardo holds Gringo-Gringo’s face over one of the burners and lights the gas. He pulls his hand away from the flame, grabs a frying pan hanging on the wall, positions it over one side of Gringo-Gringo’s face, and uses it to force his head onto the flames. Gringo-Gringo howls and twitches, simultaneously begs forgiveness and curses in some unintelligible language. Rosendo pulls one of Gringo-Gringo’s arms toward the kitchen table, takes the wooden rolling pin Gringo-Gringo had used to stretch the pizza dough, and repeatedly brings it down on the bones of his hand and wrist. The two men assault and torture their victim for an indeterminate length of time; they cut him with a kitchen knife, pour salt on the open wounds, smash his elbows and kneecaps …

  Rosendo and Gildardo finally loosen their hold on Gringo-Gringo and his body falls to the floor: he’s bleeding, his face is burned, and several of his bones are broken. His breathing comes in gasps. Rosendo and Gildardo extract identical .357 Magnums from their holsters and empty their cylinders into the defenseless body, without rage, almost playfully.

  It’s dark and the street is mostly in shadows: the only illumination comes from the windows of shops and the few nearby houses. Gildardo is sitting in the driver’s seat of the Maverick ’74. The engine is running.

  “Fifty fucking miles there and back,” he mutters.

  Inside the vehicle, Barry White is still singing.

  Rosendo comes out of the Pinotepa Nacional mezcal&pizza restaurant, whose neon sign is now lit. Smoking a cigarette, he looks to the left and right; the street is silent, empty. His gaze falls on the sign across the street: “Welcome to Bernal, Land of Friendship.”

  “Goddamn Bernal,” he says.

  He throws his cigarette butt to the ground and gets into the car through the front passenger door. The Maverick pulls out and disappears into the New Mexico desert night.

  Perhaps I should narrate my kidnapping as if it were a film script, concentrating on the visuals, sparing myself having to bankroll the unpopularity that comes with reflection. But the thing is that I don’t make movies; I’m just a critic, and that’s my POV. And if Jacobo Montaña hadn’t looked identical to Quentin Tarantino and hadn’t later agreed—from jail—to do the interview that might help explain his strange obsession with decapitating his double, my story would be incapable of inspiring even a shred of morbid interest.

  My writing and the classes I’ve taught on Q always focus on two issues that have nothing to do with technique or even narratology: the axiological question and the Shakespearian nature of the characters. I’m convinced that the depth of his work doesn’t depend simply on the mise-en-scène and the management of temporal elements (two rubrics celebrated by half the human race), but above all on the invention of sublime characters, something that Harold Bloom related to the tension between cognitive power and tragedy.

  Q’s characters inhabit a universe of disordered ethical states. And in this they are not dissimilar to those of the great English-language dramatists, from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter. Any attempt to subsume the creations of these writers under the precepts of realism would be inappropriate: their ethic is purer, their pragmatism has less to do with profit and loss than with attachment to the present in terms of revelation; a sense of the present not as reality but as yearning, something perpetually on the verge of happening; they are Macbethian entities. Whether it’s Jules Winnfield and his exposition on the miracle of the bullets, Vincent Vega in front of the mirror convincing himself not to fuck Mia Wallace (because it’s a matter of principle), Beatrix Kiddo, who at every stage of her vengeance discovers that hatred is the most mature state of love, or Standartenführer Hans Landa, who uses charisma as a tool of psychological terror, Q’s characters are faithful to an epileptic ethics. Honesty, solidarity, discipline, and loyalty are their driving forces, the fuel that has converted them into killing machines. It’s a code of cruelty, not blind cruelty, that makes Lt. Aldo Raine brand Hans Landa’s forehead at the end of his peregrination, and similar scruples cause Butch to return for his father’s gold watch, bear Fabienne’s teasing with patience, pull a fast one on Marsellus Wallace, and be indifferent (or at least seem indifferent) to the death of Floyd, his rival in the boxing ring. The primitive family is the basis of Butch’s ethical code (although the character is also panicked by the prospect of fatherhood, as can be inferred from his erotic dialogue with Fabienne, in the sense that he’d kick her in the belly if she started one, and prefers oral to genital sex), and almost anything outside that order can go to hell—except for violent sodomy, the ultimate negation of family values: that is, of reproduction. This is perhaps why Bruce Willis’s avatar rescues Marsellus Wallace—another family man—when he is being fucked in the ass, that temple of time where, for years, both Butch’s father and Christopher Walken keep the gold watch that represents the boxer’s right to be born. From my POV, it isn’t pity or decency that drives him as he searches for a samurai sword in the stock of the hock shop: it’s his adherence to
the heteropatriarchal code. Protecting the manhood of another male, even if he’s your enemy, guarantees the continued existence of our species, and related to that is a strange double-sided allegory in which the character becomes a representation of his own father raised from the dead; Marsellus Wallace substitutes Captain Koons; Zed and Maynard embody a psychotic version of the Vietcong, and the samurai sword rises up as a redemptive oxymoron of the gold watch. It is a complex web of moral symbols because Tarantino is a born moralist.

  I tried to explain all this to Jacobo Montaña but he became impatient and threatened to kill me. I had to find other, less irritating ways to entertain him. It wasn’t unusual for him to lose his cool, insult me, break things. Nevertheless, I want to be clear that he never physically mistreated me during the twelve days of my abduction. On the contrary, he made sure that every comfort his home offered was available to me: “Whatever you need, champ,” he was in the habit of saying, like someone trying to please a child. Whatever I needed included steam baths, a gymnasium (that I never used), a luxurious bedroom, international cuisine, designer clothing, several pairs of shoes, satellite channels, and the favors of two young prostitutes, whom I ordered from a catalog and who were available twenty-four hours a day in the week before my rescue. Whenever I mention this, the public accuses me of suffering from Stockholm syndrome. I don’t find that judgment unfair: after all, it’s a rare privilege to be kidnapped by the evil twin of your favorite movie director.