“My reports from the screening room,” I said, handing a manila envelope to Oswald’s outspoken secretary, Merle Dexter. “I was hoping to include some snapshots from Cuernavaca”—I inflicted a petulant grin on Waldo—“but it was closed for repairs.”
“If things go according to plan,” said Oswald, rubbing a hand lasciviously across the top edge of the occluded one-sheet, “we’ll soon be out of the taco-flicks game.”
“Stop calling them that,” said Merle.
“In fact, we’ll be forsaking drive-in trash entirely,” Oswald continued. “From now on, PARC Pictures makes only quality horror films.”
“Maybe we should change our name,” said Merle. “How about Distributors League of Glendale? Spell it backward and you get GOLD.”
“DLOG Pictures?” said Waldo, taking a drag on his Raleigh. “That’s not even pronounceable.”
“You just did,” said Merle.
Oswald asked me, “I don’t suppose you read Daily Variety?”
“Only Daily Racing Form. I’ve got a hundred bucks on a mudder called Teenage Necrophile running at Hialeah tomorrow.”
“There’s a new kind of monster movie out there, little brother, and they’re all operating in the boffo zone,” said Oswald, puffing on his Lucky Strike. “Ever hear of Hammer Films? English outfit. Their first Gothic extravaganza, The Curse of Frankenstein, made back its production costs seventy times over, seventy times, and then they did Horror of Dracula, more actors in waistcoats, plus blood and bodices, another hit. On our side of the pond, meanwhile, A.I.P. has been investing in an Edgar Allan Poe cycle cooked up by dear old Roger Corman. House of Usher hit pay dirt, and so did The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Premature Burial is up next.”
“Here’s a little quiz for you,” said Waldo. “What three elements do we find in Hammer movies and the Poe adaptations that we’ve never tried at PARC Pictures?”
“Good writing, competent acting, and decent musical scores?” I suggested.
Merle giggled and put a hand to her mouth.
“Period settings, color cinematography, and literary cachet,” said Waldo.
“By which you mean cheap literary cachet, right?” I said. “Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker are in the public domain, and so is our friend Mr. Poe.”
Oswald said, “Cheap cachet, public domain, exactly—just like the oeuvre of a nineteenth-century Mexican writer named Carlos Ibarra Rojo, whose legendary unpublished horror stories are about to become a series of upmarket Pathécolor chillers from PARC Pictures!”
“Carlos who?” I asked.
“Ibarra Rojo.”
“Never heard of him. May I assume he was known only to a small coterie?”
“A very small coterie,” said Waldo. “Actually, the main reason you’ve never heard of him is that he never existed,” said Oswald. “We invented him.”
“Won’t the public know that?” I said.
“The public doesn’t know shit, Lucius. Behold!”
In an unbroken flourish my elder brother seized the yellow scarf and pulled it free of the one-sheet, which touted a movie called The Asylum of Doctor Varglom. Of course, the potboiler in question didn’t exist yet. Like most of their fellow moguls, Oswald and Waldo routinely commissioned posters for films that were still in preproduction. Even when the iconography was wildly at odds with the content of the final script, it still made sense to run such artwork in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, as a way to appropriate the cinematic territory in question and maybe generate some word-of-mouth interest. The Doctor Varglom one-sheet featured a color portrait of the ubiquitous Vincent Price superimposed over a fortress-like edifice rising from a dark mountain. My eye gravitated to the tagline, emblazoned across the top of the poster in ninety-point red type, and suddenly I appreciated the literary-cachet component of my brothers’ scheme.
FROM THE DEMENTED PEN OF CARLOS IBARRA ROJO, MEXICO’S MASTER OF THE MACABRE …
“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to adapt a real writer?” I asked.
“We thought of the reality option,” said Oswald, “but Lovecraft’s executor wouldn’t play ball, and we couldn’t wrap our minds around Monk Lewis or Charles Brockden Brown. We needed a mystique—know what I mean?—a cult thing. We needed Mexico’s master of the macabre.”
“And you also got Vincent Price?” I asked. “I’m impressed.”
Oswald said, “He loved the poster, and when we offered him some biographical nuggets about Ibarra Rojo—”
“In other words, you lied to him.”
“When we offered him some nuggets, he immediately got the mystique factor. For some reason Vincent’s not doing Premature Burial—the part went to Ray Milland, a contractual thing I don’t understand—so he promised to work on Doctor Varglom for as long as we can afford to pay him.”
“That would be about five hours, right?” I said.
“Twenty shooting days, maybe twenty-five,” said Waldo. “Principal photography starts next month in an abandoned Pasadena loony bin. We’re betting the farm on this one, Lucius.” He flourished a screenplay, its hundred-odd pages secured with brass fasteners. “The script’s in great shape. Vincent found it delectable.”
“No, he didn’t,” said Oswald.
“He found it adequate beyond his wildest dreams,” said Waldo.
“‘Based on the classic story by Carlos Ibarra Rojo,’” I recited, reading from the one-sheet.
“That’s where you come in, little brother,” said Oswald. “Last week we had a visitor from the east, Desmond Mallery of Cinesthesia—ever hear of it? Very tony rag, slick paper, quarterly, editorial offices in Brooklyn, for horror buffs who’ve outgrown Famous Monsters of Filmland. We did an interview over lunch, and we told him all about our great literary discovery from south of the border.”
“So you lied to him too,” I said.
“Desmond believes we stumbled on a strongbox full of original Ibarra Rojo manuscripts,” Oswald continued. “In our boy’s lifetime no publisher would take a chance on his stuff—too outré, too decadent, too disturbing—but all six novelettes were circulated underground.”
“See what we mean about mystique?” said Waldo.
“I believe I can get through the day without hearing that word again,” I said.
“After our boy died, the manuscripts disappeared,” said Oswald. “Everybody thought they were lost forever. You can imagine how excited Desmond got. He wants to publish an English translation of the novelette that inspired The Asylum of Doctor Varglom, complete with production stills. It’ll be fabulous publicity.”
“You’ll be good at this, Lucius,” said Waldo. “You know all about Mexico.”
“I was there for only three days,” I said.
“Dante never went to hell, but he wrote about it,” said Waldo.
“How does what’s-his-name define ‘novelette’?” I asked.
“Desmond,” said Waldo. “I don’t know, maybe sixteen thousand words.”
“I can’t knock that out by Monday.”
“Relax, kid,” said Oswald. “He won’t run your story till his winter issue, which will hit the newsstands just as we’re releasing the movie.”
“So I’ve got till December?”
“Desmond needs the manuscript by the beginning of August, so he can make other plans on the off chance he hates it.”
“He won’t hate it,” I said.
“Take all the artistic leeway you want. Your Doctor Varglom needn’t be terribly faithful to our Doctor Varglom.”
Merle said, “In fact, if your Varglom was faithful, people would get suspicious—right, boys?—since Hollywood routinely desecrates literary properties.”
; “Here’s your starting point,” said Waldo, handing me his screenplay. “All we require is that you use the same title and keep the main characters, or at least their names.”
“As for the plot, do whatever you want, so long as it takes place in a Mitteleuropa insane asylum,” said Oswald. “We figured you’d dig that setting. That writer you like so much, Fritz Kafka—”
“Friedrich,” I said, and Merle snickered.
“Friedrich Kafka, didn’t he write a whole novel about a land surveyor moping around outside a huge asylum nobody’s allowed to enter?”
“The novel was called The Castle,” I said.
“Funny name for a story about an insane asylum,” said Oswald.
“How much will this Desmond person pay me?”
“We asked for six hundred,” said Waldo. “He dickered at first, but then we explained that PARC Pictures would be covering the translation fee.”
“There is no translation fee,” I said.
“Every penny from Desmond goes right to you—less ten percent, since PARC Pictures is essentially the agent for this deal.”
“I already have an agent.”
“Not out here you don’t. Naturally, we’re suspending your salary, but we’ll give you two hundred bucks to write the press release and—”
“And to keep mum about this hoax?” I said.
“If you’re not happy working for us,” said Oswald, “you can always take your delicate ass back to New York and write Carnage Pastorale Strikes Again.”
“I’m happy enough,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve never done ghostwriting before.”
“But this isn’t ghostwriting. Every goddamn Carlos Ibarra Rojo story was composed by him and him alone—never forget that.”
“Hold up your end of things,” said Waldo, “and Desmond might want to publish another chef d’oeuvre from our trove. This could be a regular golden goose for you.”
“More like a rubber chicken,” I muttered.
“Don’t look a gift goose in the mouth, kid,” said Oswald, obscuring the one-sheet with the silk veil, and I realized I was in no position to argue.
The next day I checked into a fleabag motel in Culver City, unpacked my portable Remington, installed a new ribbon, and, after cleaning the ink off my fingers, got to work. Writing the press release—that is to say, concocting a nineteenth-century Mexican writer whose friends and colleagues thought him a genius—proved more fun than I’d anticipated, especially after I realized that, far from frustrating me, the parameters laid down by my brothers were keeping my imagination from running amok. After twelve continuous hours of pounding the keys, chain-smoking Chesterfields, drinking lime-filliped Coronas, and gulping coffee, I had in hand a ten-page biographical essay, “Ambassador to the Beyond.” The thing cried out for cutting, being too long for submission to newspapers and too explicit about my subject’s sex life, but I believed I’d successfully inserted Carlos Ibarra Rojo into the annals of plausible nonexistence, and I loved him no less than I did Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Jack Kerouac, or any of my other heroes.
On the 31st of October, 1847, the first day of the obliquely Christian Día de los Muertos celebrations held throughout southern Mexico, a beautiful and robust child emerged from his mother’s womb in the town of Guanajuato. Carlos Ibarra Rojo never knew his father, who abandoned the family shortly after the boy’s birth. When his mother died of consumption, five-year-old Carlos was sent by an uncle to live at La Casa de Santa Maria, a foundling home in Acámbaro. He quickly became a favorite with the nuns, who recognized his intelligence, taught him how to read Spanish, tutored him in English, and encouraged his talent for storytelling. By age eight, Carlos was alternately regaling and terrifying the other children with his outlandish narratives, including weird and occasionally gory bedtime stories that remained with his listeners all their lives.
Despite his popularity at La Casa de Santa Maria, Carlos detested the place, and shortly after turning ten, on the day he was to celebrate his first communion, he ran away to Mexico City, where he lived an Oliver Twist existence well into his adolescence. When not picking pockets or begging for centavos, the nascent writer focused on educating himself, sneaking into the Biblioteca Nacional at night and making off with works by Miguel de Cervantes, José de Espronceda, and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, plus Spanish translations of Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was an honorable thief, never filching a volume until he’d returned his previous such illicit acquisition.
Throughout his twenties and thirties, Ibarra Rojo worked as groundskeeper of the Cementerio Nacional in Coyoacán borough, a job that gave him sufficient free time to pursue his great passion, composing horror stories on the Sholes and Glidden typewriter he’d stolen from the American Embassy. His early, inchoate efforts drew upon indigenous Mexican legends: Popoca, the Aztec Mummy, guarding his princess’s tomb from brigands; La Llorona, the Crying Woman, who murdered her own children to spite their adulterous father; Solares, the Volcano Demon, rising from the lava of Montaña Hueca with scorched flesh and pyromaniacal intentions; Ramírez, the Headless Conquistador, decapitating random strangers in hopes of finding his own lost head. But Ibarra Rojo’s imagination soon sprawled beyond the bounds of his heritage, and he began producing a cycle of Poe-inflected, Rimbaud-flavored masterpieces. In time he became a familiar figure in the nocturnal cantinas of the Centro Histórico, reading his tales aloud amidst the jagged shadows cast by kerosene lanterns and guttering candles, each flamboyant recitation fueled by an amalgam of wine, mezcal, peyote, and marijuana.
Although Ibarra Rojo insisted that his work could not be understood apart from la teología católica and el misterio del Cristo, he was a severe critic of the church, and his immediate circle regarded himas an atheist. Equally paradoxical was his personal aesthetic, his theory of “the destabilized reader.” According to this oddball poetics, through the astute deployment of “decadent syntax and subconscious semantic associations,” anyone who consumed an Ibarra Rojo tale could be made to feel that its actual author was the reader’s own insane doppelgänger.
One can surely discount the rumor that, owing to the extreme suspense and sudden shocks of the author’s tales, listeners occasionally suffered heart attacks during his public performances. By contrast, reports on his carnal proclivities are credible. He displayed his appetite for men as openly as his ardor for women, and it can be counted a small miracle that these exhibitions never landed him in prison.
As he entered his third decade of life, the author’s friends and devotees convened a kind of subterranean lending library, passing the infamous manuscripts from hand to hand. Eventually the Ibarra Rojo cult attracted the attention of the respected and accomplished Romantic novelist Guillermo Prieto, who persuaded the prestigious Academia de Letrán to invite the horror writer into their ranks on the strength of three unpublished novelettes, “El Sanatorio de Doctor Varglom,” “El Beso Diabólico,” and “La Nave de los Monstruos.” Characteristically, Ibarra Rojo not only turned down the solicitation, he publicly insulted his patron.
“I shall always be a dog of the streets, hungry, feral, and free,” he told Prieto. “No pedigree can redeem me. Unlike you and your fellow snivelers, I have never jumped into anyone’s lap.”
Not surprisingly, Ibarra Rojo’s early death—on the 10th of August, 1884—could be traced to his dissolute ways. Seeking inspiration in the cemetery he’d once tended, he staggered amidst the vaults and tombs in a mezcal haze until, in a misadventure so symbolically freighted his friends did not at first believe it, he was fatally trampled by a horse-drawn hearse. He was thirty-seven years old. A score of alcoholic poets, jailbird novelists, and unhinged painters attended the funeral, the rank cream of th
e Mexico City demimonde, but the event went unreported in the newspapers. There is no truth to the speculation that, in fulfillment of the writer’s most frequently voiced desire, his friends arranged for his body to be submerged in sulfuric acid and his skeleton paraded about on El Día de los Muertos.
Ibarra Rojo’s literary legacy died with him. Despite his friends’ willingness to publish a chapbook of his best stories, he’d always withheld permission, claiming they were never intended for “promiscuous consumption by a random readership.” As for the fabled typescripts, they all vanished without a trace.
In the spring of 1961, while scouting locations in Acámbaro, two Hollywood B-movie producers, Oswald and Waldo Belasco, had a barroom encounter with an excitable and possibly deranged student named Raúl Hernández Alfaro. Upon learning of their interest in occult matters, the young man insisted that, shortly before his lethal encounter with the hearse, the infamous writer Carlos Ibarra Rojo had entrusted a strongbox to his mistress, a locally famous beauty named Consuelo Portillo Madero, whom Raúl would ultimately claim as his great-grandmother. For generations the family had guarded the box, never daring to open it, for they knew of the legend whereby a terrible misfortune would befall any mortal who cast an eye on the manuscripts that lay therein.
“Perhaps you should simply give the box away,” Oswald Belasco had suggested.
“Do you know anyone foolish enough to accept it?” asked Raúl.
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 2