Bellacosa realized he had tracked in mud and felt embarrassed. He walked back out the entrance, where on the porch was Josie very stoically listening to the tall, thin, serf-owning-looking man. He seemed agitated, like he was registering a complaint. His mustache crawled as he tacked his words together and gesticulated the way angry businessmen do in silent films.
Bellacosa made eye contact with Josie and shot her a smile that expressed sympathy and a plea for forgiveness, as if he was associated with this man.
He wiped the mud off in a thick patch of dewy grass and managed to chuckle as he saw the 7900 Rig once again. When he walked back Josie and the serf-owner were gone. He made sure the mud stains on the rug weren’t much, then saw a middle-aged lady with volcano-brown hair and a spray bottle, who had cleaned his mess. She smiled at Bellacosa as if they were old playground friends, which threw him off and left him speechless. She seemed a gentle soul, out of place there. He thanked her quietly and didn’t quite make out the words she mouthed as he made his way back to the lounging room.
NINE
The two men resembling grungy artists who were the last to arrive were having white wine and laughing boisterously in front of a rectangular glass case propped up at waist level by the crackling fireplace. Bellacosa picked up vibes from the serf-owner that he was disturbed by the presence of these men. The serf-owner gave airs of being above not only them, but the other guests as well. He hovered by the fireplace and red velvet couches, the kind you see naked Renaissance ladies lying on in paintings. His son was finishing off his tallboy and admiring a work of art on a panoramic canvas, an image seemingly of the American frontier: cowboys driving cattle across a shallow stream in a junglelike terrain with red snakes coiled around sharinga rubber trees. The setting was very unlike the landscape of Texas, or the old west.
“That’s a rough life and a half,” Bellacosa heard the young man say, staring deeply at the painting.
The serf-owner was making direct eye contact with Bellacosa. Instinctively, Bellacosa almost introduced himself, then remembered the rules, and merely shook the serf-owner’s hand. The three of them exchanged mild formalities, then there was a moment when they gazed at the painting, as if it was a window and the cattle drive was happening in front of them.
Bellacosa moved toward the rectangular glass case where the grungy artists were standing, and saw what they were laughing at. There were five shrunken heads with dark brown skin tones, done in the traditional way attributed to the Aranaña tribe, with the actual skulls also shrunken. They were the size of softballs and looked like skinned squirrels with their mouths sewn shut, rather than humans. All the shrunken heads had their weblike, frizzed hair hanging about a foot down and each was accompanied by a bronze plaque with a golden border. They had their eyes shut in lamentation, their mouths stitched using huarango thorns in the cicatrix pattern, and seemed to be holding a séance filled with eternal supplication, their souls’ own purgatory trapped inside each skull. The plaques all read that the men who these heads belonged to were pure-blooded warrior descendants of the Mapuche Indians in South America. Bellacosa had never heard of such a thing. They must’ve carried an immense street value.
The bearded, grungy man said to Bellacosa, “Can you believe they trust people not to steal the heads of these savages right out of here? Who’s got a hammer?”
Bellacosa felt a fine-grained horror. Sagrado horror, as his ancestors would say. It struck him as more sinister than ever that the reports in the papers and media about the shrunken heads concerned real people. The media was also just people reporting on people, and it was people getting their heads cut off, it was real people doing the cutting, then the shrinking, then the smuggling, and selling. It wasn’t some monster or cheap science-fiction alien conquest, but people creating all the horror, enslaving one another at all cost in a world where more and more syndicates and absolute power reigned supreme.
The grungy men were making racist jokes about the Mapuche Indians and the heads. One of them said, “They sew their mouths shut while they’re alive, to keep their souls inside before beheading them, but these wetbacks don’t have a soul. The people collecting them don’t know what they’re doing, we oughta steal them just to teach them a lesson. I don’t even mind skipping the stupid meal, let’s just pick up a pizza.”
The two stout men in white suits were going around again with another round of the notorious dodo gizzards. Bellacosa felt sick to his stomach and reluctantly grabbed another. He looked over at Paco Herbert and saw him waving one sauce-dipped gizzard at him, like a baby’s arm saying hello. Bellacosa averted his eyes from the aquarium of dodos to the left of Paco Herbert as he bit into the fried gizzard, ignoring also the ongoing slurs between the grungy men.
The girl in the pastel dress and the old man in the epaulet were at a farther end of the house, sitting at a small obsidian table. They were playing the card game speed bathhouse, and were slapping the table in rapid succession as the girl dealt the cards. A dark blue-and-black eel about a foot thick and ten feet long was mounted on an attractive varnished oak frame above them. It had morbid yellow eyes, and Bellacosa moved toward the creature’s head as he held on to the rest of his dodo-gizzard strip.
“She’s already got twenty-five bucks on me,” the old man said to Bellacosa in a playful yet worried manner, while dealing the cards. “I don’t know how she got so good at the game.” He was slightly sweating as the girl in the pastel dress petted the Trufflepig on the table by her side.
“I told you, Father. The street-hustle tutorials at the public library. I’m a third-level street hustler already, and getting better. Me and Veronica have been going two days a week.”
“I’ll never understand kids these days.”
“What is it you don’t understand? I can explain it to you. Anybody can do it if they dedicate as much time as Veronica and I have. Bathhouse!” she exclaimed, slapping one hand down on the table. “I win again.”
“Oh, I’ll wire you the money when we get to the house.”
Everybody, with the exception of Paco Herbert and Bellacosa, had taken a seat somewhere in the lounge area by now. Paco Herbert moved on to the shrunken-head display in the glass case, reading the plaques.
Bellacosa, with his eyes on the dodos that resembled a mad hatter’s windup toys, thought that if there was a hell and he was sent there, he hoped it wouldn’t be for eating this fried filtered dodo. He chewed and swallowed once again. It was actually delicious. He checked in with his bowels. They’d been agreeable with everything thus far, to which he felt grateful.
Maybe God is the mad hatter, Bellacosa thought. We are all his windup toys.
Josie rang a dinner bell and in a few moments all the guests were directed to the back section of the house, where the dining area was located. Twelve chairs lined up on the outer rim of a strange table shaped like a boomerang. Michaela filled water and wineglasses as the twelve guests all took their seats. The silverware was from the Romanov Dynasty. Each guest had a silver chalice that depicted a different scene from the life of Alexander Nevsky, which they used to drink Bordeaux from the vineyard of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Every guest was given their own bottle for themselves.
Bellacosa sat at the last seat farthest from the door, and to his left sat a very detached and introspective Paco Herbert. At the opposite end of the table, the girl in the pastel dress sat on the first chair, her father next to her. The middle-aged couple sat to her father’s right, then the two grungy types, then the gray-haired man and his wife, then the serf-owner with his son to Paco Herbert’s immediate left. The place looked like a Hollywood movie set, and not a cheap one. A dim, medieval chandelier hung from a thick chain in the middle of the ceiling; the flames of the candles placed around the room floated as if held by invisible hands in a vigil. Panoramic pastoral paintings hung from two of the walls, and a couple of abstracts surrounded the door.
Michaela and the suited servers carried out the Spanish chef’s recipe for Galapagos Gumbo, which
was reportedly the most highly coveted black-market dish. What gave it the Cajun twist, Michaela noted, was the newly perfected Carpathian trench bass, killed off the coast of Louisiana during the Industrial Revolution. Its spices were also derived from the king conch tortoise. Each bowl was served in an authentic tortoise shell.
Bellacosa didn’t know that the king conch tortoise was known for its peculiar concave shape, like a Spanish knight’s helmet. He admired its texture and the way it rested on the table. The soup was served with diced radishes, green onions, and a wedge of parsley. The steam from the Galapagos Gumbo floated around the room in the shape of many hands, with fingers that elongated and multiplied, making everyone’s mouths water. Bellacosa waited until the others started in. The girl in pastel was the first to taste its broth. Paco Herbert was the second. Shortly after, everybody was finished with the Galapagos Gumbo and ready for the next course. All their faces were glowing with splendor. Bellacosa and Paco Herbert simply smiled as the others engaged in their own conversations and statements of approval. Michaela went around refilling drinks when the main course came out, the sixteen-ounce Steak Charlemagne, cooked with the Pampa blue-billed-goose butter and served with the Mayan scallops and green beans in a large, eggshell-colored plate.
Josie hovered over the entire dinner and the hidden, grumbling kitchen in the back of the house. She paced in and out of rooms and whispered into her headset with stiff ventriloquist lips. She walked to the front door with a big smile at one point, looked around the lawn and the darkness, signaled to somebody from afar, then walked back to the guests like a woman who could make a fortune on the stage.
Michaela was either on drugs or born to be a server—her movements and reflexes were fluid, and she responded to needs on the spot. The serf-owner was really making her dance, repeatedly asking her for napkins, requesting more ice cubes, complaining of cork pieces floating in his bottle of Bordeaux, which nobody else could see. A replacement wine was brought anyway, just to appease him. He wiped his mouth gently and darted nasty looks at the grungy types when they chewed or spoke loudly. Even when they proposed a toast to everybody in the room the serf-owner appeared annoyed.
Every time Bellacosa would look up he’d catch the girl in the pastel dress staring his way. Perhaps he was mistaken and she was looking at a decoration hanging behind him, but there was nothing interesting on that part of the wall when he looked. He felt nothing at all sexual in their communication, and took the whole thing rather lightly. Then he couldn’t help for a moment but think about his dead daughter and his wife. He remembered what an old friend had told him about grief when the time came to bury his daughter, Yadira: the dead, for the rest of our lives, will keep following us, finding ways to tell us they are still among us, lending the living a hand. Then after his wife passed away he’d notice gestures or expressions in strange women, a smile or gaze that took him back to the woman he loved for many years and then buried. It’d been almost ten years since Yadira had died, and the strangest thing about the girl in the pastel dress was that in her eyes he saw not only his wife, Lupita, but also the spirit of his daughter.
Bellacosa ate his meal thinking of pleasant things, too, and drank the finest red wine he’d ever had. It must’ve truly been the blood of Christ. One day it will happen, he thought. It is only a matter of time before they bring Christ back through the filtering process, and we will kill him over many times just to keep bottling his blood. They’ll use it to cook the meat instead of olive oil, and afterward to get plastered drunk. Bellacosa looked around for the Trufflepig but didn’t see it anywhere. The girl in the pastel dress smiled, in a half-mocking manner this time, as if she could read his thoughts. He cut and chewed the Steak Charlemagne. The goose butter was melted like a sun over the tender meat, pink in the middle to perfection, the kind of steak that grew on trees in the days of Adam and Eve. The scallops and green beans were also exceptional. Thinking of the Trufflepig again, Bellacosa wondered if that was the name assigned by Adam himself, and laughed. He turned to Paco Herbert, who also seemed to be enjoying the meal. For a second he almost told him the joke, then simply waved his fork and forgot all about it.
The first to order dessert were the middle-aged couple and the girl in the pastel dress. There were three options, Michaela informed them: the Chevalier Royale Cheesecake, the House Flan, made from the eggs of Moroccan quail and topped with Scandinavian caramel, and the Chef’s Crema Catalana. Bellacosa requested the Chevalier Royale Cheesecake to go, since he felt quite full, and Paco Herbert the Crema Catalana.
After the dinner, in the lounging area, the middle-aged couple started to tango without any music. The grungy types clapped beats and hooted them on. The girl in the pastel dress requested a dance with her father, and together they danced something very formal and old-fashioned. The middle-aged couple were transported to a ghetto in Buenos Aires where the tango was born, and the girl in the pastel dress and her father to a nineteenth-century Rothschild gala. The grungy types continued to clap time as the dodo chicks ran around in the aquarium like frantic toy soldiers. The serf-owner and his son, the gray-haired man and his wife, and Paco Herbert and Bellacosa, along with the five shrunken Mapuche Indian heads, merely looked on in cold silence.
TEN
Everybody tipped well, had the leftover wines resealed, crossed the empty field in jovial spirits, and ignored the guards scattered around the property in the panther twilight. Bellacosa and Paco Herbert got in the old Jeep, put their dessert and bottles in the back. From a distance the oblong estate looked like a washed-up Noah’s Ark, the thick of it concealed by the darkness in the Valley. The armed men who had greeted them earlier at the gates waved goodnight as the dinner guests’ vehicles drove out. The night had gone over for them without an incident.
Driving once more through the outskirts of Calantula County, Bellacosa turned the stereo up, and the voice of Eddie Cantor was saying, “Many of them risk their lives for victory in the air. Surely the least we can do on the home front is to lend our dollars to Uncle Sam for war bonds. No matter what we’ve done before, we must do more right now. Figure out the total of your family income. Calculate your necessary living expenses and the extra for more war bonds in a savings payroll bank. Yes, figure it out for yourself, and you’ll find you can increase your purchase of war bonds every week or every payday. Your investment in victory and peace.”
Then it went from sounding like an advertisement to something of a radio play, and Eddie Cantor lowered his voice to ominous music: “One of our planes went missing. Two hours overdue. One of our planes went missing with all its soldiers, too. The signals stopped coming. We couldn’t hear a word. And suddenly through the humming: Coming in on a wing and a prayer, coming in on a wing and a prayer. Though there’s one moment gone, we can still carry on, coming in on a wing and a prayer…”
“That animal,” Bellacosa finally said, over the loud stereo. “Did you see the animal again after we started eating?”
Paco Herbert said, “Which animal?” He grabbed and uncorked his leftover wine, took a long chug without spilling a drop, and with his fingers started eating his dessert.
* * *
THEY DISCUSSED their impressions and went over details about the dinner and the guests until they ran out of steam and got back to MacArthur. Bellacosa dropped Paco Herbert off at the place he was staying, and both agreed to meet and discuss further in a few days, after they’d had time to digest everything properly.
Bellacosa started to feel very dehydrated, and the memory of the clear, milky residue that emitted from the Trufflepig’s eyes rained down on him as if from the stars.
He parked along the street in his neighborhood and, walking to his front door, noticed the smell of broth cooking in the air, thick with vegetables and meat. He thought it was probably a bit late for anybody to be cooking, but after the night he’d just had, who the hell was he to tell anybody how to have their dinner?
Impulsively, before he walked into his shack, Bellacosa did a l
ittle stretch. He hadn’t been stretching as regularly as he’d been accustomed to, and this day had really run a number on his back muscles. He leaned forward and touched his toes, bent backward, swiveled side to side, and his back gave a healthy crack that made him groan.
“That was a great dinner,” he said to himself, “but too bad it had to be a dinner.” It was the tongue-in-cheek slogan of the FBI branch in charge of black-market dinners in the state of Texas, usually juxtaposed over an image of a person behind bars. Bellacosa said it without any irony as he jiggled a key into the doorknob and entered his shack.
The smell of the broth was wafting like fog along a harbor inside his place.
Bellacosa thought, Did I leave something on, or what?
He paced rapidly toward the kitchen, leaving the front door wide open. There were vegetables and chicken bones boiling in a big pot, with all the lights of the shack turned off. Looking into the boiling soup, Bellacosa realized he hadn’t cooked a meal in this place probably ever.
Something clicked behind him and he suddenly feared that as soon as he turned around there would be trouble. That an intruder was already plotting to kill him.
Tears of the Trufflepig: A Novel Page 10