Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand
Page 4
“An hour on the ground, and already you’ve got a date?”
“You must get used to the idea of my seeing other people.”
A cord of dread twisted through me, thickening my throat and constricting my bowels. “Let me guess. Your new friend looks like Brando playing Zapata.”
“Even handsomer.”
“Shame on you, Gloria. Tonight I’m sending you to bed without any straight lines.”
“There’s a cozy restorán, La Casa del Sol, across the street from my hotel. Meet me at seven o’clock. Adiós.”
As Gloria sashayed away, I decided that, rather than reading her Melville scenes, I would resume work on my story. Thinking a change of venue might help, I decamped to the rooftop garden, which conveniently included a white wrought-iron table and two matching chairs. After equipping the terrace with the Remington and a cooler of Coronas, I sat down, lit a cigarette, and, as the primordial scents of a dozen subtropical flower species mingled in my delighted nostrils, attempted to bedaub a vacant sheet with prose.
It soon became apparent that the fact of my wife’s new literary boyfriend had depressed me beyond all telling. Obviously I wasn’t going to get anything done on either “City of Wax” or Gloria’s scenes, so I laid a tarp over my Remington—the radio forecast had predicted a sunny afternoon, but why take chances?—then left my al fresco workspace unattended and set out for the Teatro Regio, vaguely convinced that the Edgar Allan Poe triple-header would give me the energy I needed to pump some blood into my languishing novelette.
Roger Corman’s La Caída de la Casa de Usher didn’t do much for me, but I figured maybe something had gotten lost in the dubbing. The actor who’d looped Roderick Usher enunciated clearly enough—an asset that, given my equivocal Spanish, I much appreciated—but he sounded more like Spencer Tracy than Vincent Price. El Entierro Prematuro also failed to get under my skin, despite a riveting dream sequence in which the protagonist’s carefully-rigged contraptions for avoiding untimely entombment go haywire one by one. Ah, but El Pozo y el Péndulo—now there was a hell of a horror movie!
Set in Renaissance Spain a generation after the Inquisition has imposed its obscene will on countless heretics, this gaudy melodrama remained delectably unpredictable throughout its eighty-five-minute running time. The frenzied climax, staged in the expressionistic pit of the title, found the crazed Nicholas Medina (who now fancies himself his own inquisitor father) subjecting the young hero, Francis Barnard, to Poe’s famous oscillating cleaver, but not before sharing with Francis his nihilistic thoughts on “the condition of man,” la condición del hombre. By Nicholas’s philosophy we are all marooned on “an island from which no person could ever hope to escape,” each of us “surrounded by the menacing pit of hell” even as the “inexorable pendulum of fate,” ever descending, slashes and slices the air above our pinioned bodies. “¡Atrapado en una isla sin esperanzas de escapar!” screamed Nicholas, rolling his eyes toward the razoredged blade. “¡Rodeado por el amenazante abismo del infierno! ¡Sometido al inexorable péndulo del destino!”
Although El Pozo y el Péndulo failed to awaken my dormant muse, I came away from the theater with some notions for the third act of “City of Wax.” It occurred to me that Baron Stradegorst, the sorcerer who’d painted the cyclorama, might still be alive after all these years, though his demiurgic powers have so corrupted him that now he takes pleasure in the thought of Ekelstadt’s dissolution. By threatening the baron with some Inquisition-caliber torture or other (perhaps the Kafkaesque rack I’d invented for the previous story), Doctor Varglom convinces the sorcerer to join himin the subsubbasement and attempt to rehabilitate the mural. In deference to Ibarra Rojo’s sensibility, however, I would not supply a happy ending. Although Stradegorst retouches the cyclorama with some perfunctory brushstrokes, he soon breaks his promise to the doctor and attacks his creation with acid, thereby annihilating the entire village, including Krogskrafte Sanatorium.
I sprinted back to my apartment, ascended to the crepuscular terrace, and strode toward the Remington, at once eager to turn my new ideas into sentences and apprehensive that those same sentences might be terrible—whereupon I received a shock more jolting than anything I’d seen that day at the Teatro Regio.
Somebody had invaded my workspace, subsequently drinking two of my beers, smoking my remaining Chesterfields—the ashtray held the butts and the crushed pack—and covering about thirty sheets of typing paper with English prose. Secured by an empty beer bottle, the intruder’s labors lay in a neat pile on the card table, not far from my unfinished manuscript, stacked beneath the second empty bottle. Gingerly I removed the tarp from my typewriter. The platen displayed a single sheet bearing a protracted fragment—“hidden in lost grottoes and forgotten catacombs, the innards of churches and the underbellies of monasteries, all shapes fading, all pigments dissolving, the cosmos having become an imperiled array of palimpsests on which no printed word or painted effigy would endure beyond the slimmest tick of time”—followed by a period, after which came “The End.”
I assembled a complete version of the novelette, including my own scenes, the intruder’s contributions, and the orphan final page from the Remington. With mounting perplexity I read the third act. The new material employed the same conceit that had come to me while watching El Pozo y el Péndulo. My anonymous collaborator had brought an elderly Baron Stradegorst onstage and cast him as a demiurge whose powers have corroded his soul. But then the writer had carried this vision in a direction I hadn’t anticipated, and the results were at once dramatically engaging and stylistically brilliant.
In the hands of my phantom confederate, Garrick Bloom’s protégé—the mad and beautiful Sonya Dagunzar—emerged as the one artist in the world with talent enough to heal the wounded mural. Not surprisingly, there was considerable sexual chemistry between the painting master and his ethereal pupil, whose brushwork was inspired by energies no less erotic than artistic. In one particularly vivid vignette, Garrick and Sonya made love during her menstrual period, after which she used her blood to paint a portrait of the Devil. I could hear Oswald saying, “Surely you don’t imagine us putting that up on the screen,” and me replying, “It’s hardly more tasteless than Squirm-O-Rama.”
Whatever its wellspring, Sonya’s genius proves sufficient to rescue bits and pieces of Ekelstadt—a house here, a tavern there, a random shop, the occasional bridge—from the ravages of the abyss. Determined to prevent the village’s salvation, the baron secretly administers a poison to Sonya, then stabs Garrick to death with a butcher knife. Though racked by the toxin in her blood, Sonya continues to rehabilitate Ekelstadt. Aided by a pair of models—her lover’s corpse and her own mirrored image—she begins augmenting the cyclorama with meticulous portraits of Garrick and herself, believing she may thereby translate their souls into a Platonic realm of ideal forms. Recalled from the grave by Sonya’s magic, Garrick collaborates with her to complete the portraits. She dies in his arms after adding the final brushstroke, whereupon the despondent Garrick shoots himself, thus joining her on the same arcane plane of reality where immaterial essences reside.
In the story’s final beats, the romantic mood dissipates and everything turns dark again. The baron reveals that the whole of the visible world is sustained by secret cycloramas such as the one in the subsubbasement. The forces of decay have allied themselves against all these murals, and there is nothing mere mortals can do to forestall an imminent and endless night.
Midway through my perusal of these new and extraordinary pages I decided that the phantom in question must be Gloria. By according such prominence to Sonya Dagunzar, a previously minor character, and making her a tragic figure though not a mere victim, to say nothing of the menstrual-blood business, my wife had suffused the manuscript with her particular sensibility. But the
point of her stunt eluded me. Did she hope to demonstrate that her knack for writing skillful trash was greater than mine? In that case, she’d succeeded. Did she mean to suggest that, though romantically incompatible, we should start combining our talents to create lucrative potboilers? Then I intended to disappoint her. If our marriage was beyond salvation, I wanted no consolation prize.
Realizing that, unassuaged, my curiosity would keep me up all night, I beat a hasty path to the farmacia phone booth and placed a call to Gloria’s hotel. The clerk I got on the line sounded offended by my expectation that he do his job properly, but he agreed to summon Señora Belasco. Five minutes later, my wife and I found ourselves mired in a fraught and circular conversation during which she emphatically denied having added pages to my unfinished novelette.
“Why would I want to do a ridiculous thing like that?” she asked.
“Doing ridiculous things is a rarity for you, Gloria, no question, but your record isn’t perfect,” I said. “Want to hear a list?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’ll be honest. This whole episode has creeped me out.”
“If you like, I could ask Carlos—”
“Carlos?” Stalactites formed in my stomach. “Carlos who?”
“My new writer friend. I don’t remember his full name. I could ask him if any of his fellow authors are given to invading people’s apartments and finishing their manuscripts for them.”
“Is this Carlos by any chance the caballero you’re having lunch with tomorrow?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Might his name be Carlos Ibarra Rojo?”
“Like I said, I don’t remember. Hey, Lucius, I can tell you’re kind of frazzled right now, but what did you think of my Confidence-Man scenes?”
“I haven’t read them.”
“Why not? Did you spend the afternoon at the movies?”
“Listen, Gloria, Carlos Ibarra Rojo is the name of a nonexistent nineteenth-century Mexican writer my brothers and I invented to give The Asylum of Doctor Varglom some literary cachet.”
“Did I ever tell you how boring I find your brothers’ escapades?”
“Gloria …”
“Nonexistent writer named Carlos? I’d say it’s a coincidence.”
“Your coincidence, my nightmare. ¡Atrapado en una isla sin esperanzas de escapar! I’m not kidding. I think I’ve been visited by a ghost. Or else I’m losing my mind. ¡Rodeado por al amenazante abismo del infierno!”
“Is all this some ploy to win my sympathy?”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.”
Her tone turned suddenly contrite. “I’ll pretend the same. Sorry, Lucius. Really. Do you want me to come over and brew you a cup of tea or something?”
Did I want her to come over? Of course I did—but I had no right to invite her to Calle Moctezuma 14 before determining whether it was haunted.
“Matter of fact, I’m not sure my apartment is safe at the moment. I’ll call you in the morning. And promise me you won’t have lunch tomorrow with that writer—not before you and I talk.”
“I’d be happy to drop by your place now. I’m worried about you.”
“I’m worried about me too, and also about you, but mostly I’m worried about Carlos Ibarra Rojo.”
By the time I’d ascended to my apartment, a full moon had risen over the city. I retrieved a pack of Chesterfields from the kitchen and proceeded to the garden, its leaves and twigs now colonized by singing insects. The complete “City of Wax” manuscript glowed in the lunar light. I approached the wrought-iron table, sat down, and scanned the third act for clues to its author’s identity, even as I fervently hoped that the most plausible theory was as impossible as it sounded.
A male voice, cultured and suave, addressed me in a Latino accent. “I saw you at the cinema today, Lucius. You were arriving as I was leaving. ¡Sometida al inexorable péndulo deldestino!”
Framed by bougainvillea vines, their brightly colored bracts made phosphorescent by the moon, a tall and slender gentleman, no older than thirty, surveyed me with dark, soft eyes. His face was smooth and beautiful. He held a leather satchel in one hand, a walking stick in the other. Dressed in a blue velvet waistcoat and white silk ascot, he radiated a reassuring serenity, and I regarded him with an emotion closer to curiosity than fear.
“Such a clever invention, the cinema.” The presence opened his satchel and removed a bottle of mezcal. “Though I don’t think La Caída de la Casa de Usher did justice to Señor Poe’s achievement, and El Pozo y el Péndulo is guilty of even greater infidelity.”
“Señor Ibarra Rojo?” I stood up and bowed cordially toward my improbable visitor.
The phantom and I shook hands. His palm was dry and warm. From his satchel he produced two small glasses, set them on the table, and casually filled each with agave liquor. “You made me a mezcal connoisseur but not an alcoholic. I appreciate that.”
“But you never truly existed,” I said.
“I do now, darling, as do my passions.”
He offered me a lascivious smile and kissed me squarely on the lips.
“I’m afraid I never acquired that taste,” I said, pulling away.
“It’s a congenital taste, actually,” said Ibarra Rojo, throwing his arms around me. “Evidently the angel who bestows such proclivities failed to attend your gestation.”
“Evidently,” I echoed, reciprocating—then breaking—his embrace.
Moving synchronously, we eased ourselves onto the wrought-iron chairs.
“My own gestation was equally lonely,” said my visitor, taking a sip of mezcal. “No sooner had your brothers commissioned their vulgar Doctor Varglom poster than I enjoyed the first crude stirrings of existence. ‘From the demented pen of Mexico’s master of the macabre!’ What a crass locution. Does your era belong exclusively to boors and barbarians?”
“Some people are of that opinion.”
“Shortly after the poster awakened me, my consciousness coalesced around a marvelous essay called ‘Ambassador to the Beyond,’ but complete incarnation eluded me until it became obvious that poor Lucius Belasco needed a collaborator.”
I sampled the—exceptionally fine—mezcal and said, “I could have finished the story on my own.”
“Bullshit,” said the phantom, helping himself to one of my Chesterfields. “Isn’t that what everybody says these days? ‘Bullshit’?”
“Your additions are brilliant, señor. I never would have thought to treat the material as a love story.”
“All stories are love stories, whether the locus of the hero’s desire is a bride, a beast, a god, a place, or an idea.” Ibarra Rojo struck a match, a shooting star in the spangled night, and lit his cigarette. “In me you have wrought a needful being. Owing to our recent collaboration, my artistic urges have been satisfied. Meanwhile, the mezcal is delivering several essential demons to my brain. But, oh, how I long for my mistress, the exquisite Consuelo Portillo Madero. You should have given her more text, dear Lucius. If you had conjured her onto this mortal coil, she and I might be fucking right now.”
“I apologize for my oversight.”
“Instead I’ll have to screw your wife after she and I have lunch tomorrow—or might that occasion some tension between you and me?”
I bit my tongue and said, “Of course it would.” Ibarra Rojo’s joke, if that’s what it was, made me slightly ill, and yet—heaven forgive me—his audacity beguiled me.
“Your Gloria is truly guapísima, and a skillful escritora as well, or so I infer from her Melville pages.” My visitor puffed on his Chesterfield. “How sad that she no longer loves you.”
“Might I suggest we change the subject?”
“They won’t understand it.”
“Of course they will. Our tale is subtle but not opaque.”
“The text is in English.”
Ibarra Rojo reached into his satchel and drew out a sheaf of typing paper, pressing it into my grasp. “While you were talking to your wife on the telephone, I finished this excellent and cadenced translation, ‘La Ciudad de Cera.’ You will have no difficulty deciphering my handwriting as you play your part this evening. How is your Spanish these days?”
“I’ll be able to perform this—with a Jersey City accent, of course—though the audience will understand what I’m saying better than I. God in heaven, did I really create you?”
“Did Melville create Bartleby?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t. By the way, your Remington is a marvelous machine, much easier to use than my old Sholes and Glidden.”
Leafing through the translation, I said, “You should know that beyond tonight’s public reading I have other plans for our story.”
Ibarra Rojo sipped mezcal and steepled his fingers. “Oh? Pray tell.”
“Tomorrow I’m mailing it to my brothers in Hollywood. If they like what they read, Oswald will start rounding up a cast and crew while Waldo turns it into a screenplay.”
“What a revolting idea.”
“I don’t disagree, señor, but I need the money.”
“What good is money to a man who has lost his integrity?”
“What good is integrity to a man who has nothing to eat?”
“Don’t be silly, darling. Your brothers won’t let you starve, but they will make a travesty of our story.”