Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  “Way up north, in the borough of Brooklyn, a man named Mallery puts together a quarterly magazine called Cinesthesia. The issue containing ‘The Asylum of Doctor Varglom’ appears early next year, and I’m pretty sure this same editor will snap up ‘City of Wax.’”

  “I can understand why a writer might wish to see his story published,” said Ibarra Rojo. “Ah, but that is not for us, is it, darling? Our relationship is such a beautiful thing. Why soil it with commerce?”

  I decided against taking another sip of mezcal, endeavoring instead to still my throbbing brain. Though the creature I’d brought into being wasn’t exactly a monster, he was indubitably an aesthete. “Your purity is admirable, señor, and it’s possible you might convince me to leave our collaboration unsullied.”

  “It’s not just a matter of purity. I am happy in my obscurity. I require nothing beyond the cheers and applause I receive when performing.”

  Oh, how I wished I’d never had him forbid his friends to publish an Ibarra Rojo chapbook. If only I’d imagined him suspending his principles and joining the Academia de Letrán. “I fear that if we pursue the topic right now, the result will be a terrible argument.”

  The phantom nodded, rose, and, as if holding an invisible dancing partner, waltzed nimbly across the garden to the balustrade. “The evening is young”—he swept his arm east to west in a gesture encompassing the whole of the coruscating metropolis—“and all around us lies the liveliest, wickedest, maddest city on earth. Let us descend, you and I, and learn what dark marvels we might encounter in Tenochtitlán!”

  “The audience for ‘La Ciudad de Cera’ won’t be sober,” I said, refilling my glass with mezcal, “so the players might as well be drunk too.” I took a long swallow, then fixed on the agave worm in the bottle. My bones grew hot, simmering the meat in my skull. “May I eat the worm?”

  “Por supuesto, darling!” shouted Ibarra Rojo. “Even as we speak, strange creatures walk the streets. Popoca in his tattered bandages, hunting down those who defiled the tomb of Princess Xochitl!”

  I poured myself another shot, draining the bottle. “La Llorona, weeping for her dead children, even as she murders each man she meets, mistaking him for her unfaithful husband …”

  “Solares, El Demonio del Volcán, incinerating those who plunder Aztec tombs …”

  “The Headless Conquistador …”

  “The Were-Jaguar of Xochimilco …”

  “Of Zacatecas,” said Ibarra Rojo, correcting me.

  “The Succubus of Zacatecas …”

  “Of Xochimilco,” said the phantom.

  Upending the bottle, I shook the worm into my palm. A forlorn being, sodden, brittle, dead—and obviously indifferent to my intentions. I popped it into my mouth and crunched it between my teeth. I swallowed. The worm tasted like the most savory sentence on which Carlos Ibarra Rojo and I had ever collaborated.

  Uncertain of step, muzzy of mind, I staggered down the moonlit Calle Moctezuma, breathing deeply to avoid vomiting on my shoes. As the phantom drew abreast of me, clutching the satchel containing the translation, he outlined his plans for the world premiere of “La Ciudad de Cera.” He argued that, whereas I was ideally suited to the role of Garrick Bloom, he was the logical choice to read Anton Varglom’s dialogue, likewise the lines belonging to Baron Stradegorst. As for Sonya Dagunzar, naturally we must cast a woman in the part.

  “Luckily for us, the required actress is staying at the Hotel Paraíso, a mere two blocks away,” said Ibarra Rojo. “I feel certain this vivacious and alluring señora will help us bring our drama to life.”

  I had no idea how Gloria would react when Ibarra Rojo and I appeared at her hotel and proposed that she join us for an evening of carousing, literary conversation, and barroom theatrics. Although she agreed to stroll with us as far as the Centro Histórico, she refused to believe that the man with whom she’d arranged to have lunch tomorrow was a hypothetical nineteenth-century author coaxed into actuality through the machinations of her annoying husband and ludicrous brothers-in-law. But by now I could speak of the phenomenon with considerable conviction, even as Ibarra Rojo himself, exuding charm, glamour, and a touch of madness, verified our fantastic contentions by his very presence. Not long after we crossed the Plaza de la Constitución, Gloria closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and announced that she was prepared to play our game.

  To this day I can recall only a few vignettes from our sybaritic night in Tenochtitlán. I’m certain we staged an unrehearsed but heartfelt performance of “La Ciudad de Cera” in a cantina called La Serpiente Áurea, jammed to its adobe walls with poets, painters, musicians, and well-read Communists. Having grown weary of saxophonists playing jazz and exhibitionists declaiming blank verse, the audience embraced our offering for its sheer novelty. The darkly comedic scenes of the villagers feigning lunacy elicited gratifyingly nervous laughter. Gloria brought a singular passion to the episode of the poisoned, dying Sonya painting her dead lover into the mural and thus delivering him from the grave. Perhaps I was deluding myself, but it seemed to me that in resurrecting Garrick with such ardor, her eyes flashing like the orbs of El Demonio del Volcán, her throat emitting cries like the threnodies of La Llorona, Gloria was saying that she wanted to give our marriage a second chance.

  Our troupe advanced to another venue, El Diablo Clavel, fully intending to perform the show all over again, but instead we yielded to the synaptically subversive commodities available on the premises, which included not only tequila and weed but also a narcótico diabólico called moon beans, frijoles de luna. Consumed in the form of orange pellets, this peyote derivative transported me to zones I’d never visited before: forgotten grottoes, black lagoons, uncharted seas, lost continents—destinations that Ibarra Rojo had doubtless toured on previous such occasions, but terrae incognitae for his creator.

  In retrospect it seems inevitable that our explorations would have borne us to a place Eros called his own. I’m not sure, but we probably took a taxi. The sign on the gate said LA PARQUE DE CHAPULTEPEC. It was closed for the evening. Empowered by frijoles de luna, we scaled the black iron palisades. At some point, Sarita, a lovely young poet from El Diablo Clavel, had attached herself to our party, along with her consorts, the sulking Rodolfo and the zaftig Aurora. The six of us gamboled down to the shores of El Lago de Chapultepec, where we secluded ourselves in a cypress grove and shed our garments like burlesque artistes at the Palacio de los Pechos. The promises extended by the clothed contours of Sarita and Aurora found complete fulfillment in nakedness. We lost no time making oblations to our libidos. It’s possible all fifteen potential connections occurred that night (twenty-one if we allow for Onan’s innovation), but I’m not a reliable historian of the orgy in question. Primarily I remember a sensation of being waterborne, drifting through eddies of pleasure and the very tidepool in which copulation had first occurred to our invertebrate ancestors.

  Dawn found the cast of “La Ciudad de Cera” in Iztapalapa borough, wandering through the Cementerio Nacional, where Carlos was once employed as groundskeeper. Sarita, Rodolfo, and Aurora had declined to come along, preferring to continue their romp beside El Lago de Chapultepec.

  “I died not far from here,” the phantom told Gloria. “Your husband arranged for a horse-drawn hearse to run me down. I would have preferred a more subtle demise.”

  “In life Lucius usually settles for the obvious,” said Gloria, “but his fiction isn’t normally so shameless.”

  “I was under time pressure,” I said.

  Ever the magician, Carlos produced from his satchel a bottle of sangria and three paper cups, an acquisition from El Diablo Clavel, and, upon providing himself and his fellow troupers with splashes of wine, offered a toast to the sunrise.

  “¡Al amanecer! ¡Al amanecer!” he cried, raising his cup.

&
nbsp; “Amanecida!” shouted Gloria and I in unison.

  “Mis amigos, I fear I’m losing my grip on the world,” said Carlos after we’d saluted la salida del sol.

  “Truly you are the most valuable creature Lucius and his brothers ever invented,” said Gloria.

  “Tal vez,” said Carlos. “But in any event I must now break invisible bread with the Aztec Mummy, plant a fleshless kiss on La Llorona’s cheek, cross gossamer swords with the Headless Conquistador, and drink ethereal beer with El Demonio del Volcán.”

  “Gloria wishes she could go with you,” I said in as sardonic a tone as my intoxicated tongue could manage.

  “Would such a journey be possible?” she asked.

  I couldn’t tell if she was eager to join her new friend or merely curious about the workings of the web in which we were ensnared.

  “No,” said Carlos, “and I would not bring you with me even if the cosmos permitted it. You will encounter el pozo soon enough, señora. Before our final adios, allow me to praise your Melville scenes, which are true to his spirit if not always his text. If there must be a play of The Confidence-Man, then you are the person to write it.”

  “Muchas gracias,” said Gloria.

  The phantom fixed me with his radiant gaze. “As for you, mi querido, you must promise never to allow our story to become a commodity. Read it aloud in every cantina between Zacatecas and Alaska, but keep it out of your brothers’ greedy hands and the equally venal grasp of that journal editor. Will you give me your word?”

  At that transcendentally outré moment, I was happy to do so. “Every Carlos Ibarra Rojo tale was written for its own sake,” I told him. “Far be it from me to despoil that heritage.”

  “No PARC Pictures adaptation, si? No journal publication.”

  “No adaptation,” I said. “No publication.”

  “Ars gratia artis,” said my creation, and suddenly he was gone, as if the rising sun had burned him into oblivion like pearls of dew on a spiderweb.

  Gloria and I took an early-morning bus back to Cuauhtémoc borough. We exchanged no glances. We remained as mute as the Headless Conquistador. Feeling at once gallant and chagrined, I escorted my wife from the camión stop to the Hotel Paraíso. As we lingered at the entrance, I promised to read her Melville scenes in time for our dinner engagement, then gave her a large and proprietary kiss on the lips.

  I returned to Calle Moctezuma 14, told myself I didn’t own an alarm clock, and collapsed on my mattress. Shortly after two o’clock I awoke, head throbbing with hedonism and dehydration. Mistrustful as always of the public water supply, I retrieved a Coca-Cola from the icebox and chugged it down.

  Although determined to work on Gloria’s Melville scenes, I first needed to strike a bargain with my conscience. The negotiations continued into my third cup of coffee. One fact loomed above all others. While I could comprehend Carlos’s aversion to commodification, likewise the pleasure he took in obscurity, I did not for one instant share those attitudes. Naturally I had no wish to cause my ectoplasmic collaborator distress. Heaven forfend. And yet I could not help noting that, having evidently been obliged to abandon the earthly plane, he would be blissfully ignorant of whatever additional incarnations our novelette might enjoy.

  At peace with my decision, I retrieved the “City of Wax” manuscript from the garden and, with an eye to its presumed publication, did some perfunctory edits: death to dysfunctional adverbs and lazy alliterations, a pox on bizarre synonyms deployed merely to avoid repetition. After obtaining directions from Armando at the farmacia, I walked to the casa de correos and mailed the story to my brothers, along with a note explaining that Merle should type a fair copy and send it along to Desmond Mallery.

  Turning to Gloria’s emerging adaptation of The Confidence-Man, I saw that she (or possibly Joshua Logan) had titled the project Ship of Riddles: an inauspicious choice, I thought, and the further I got into act one, the more my reservations multiplied. Melville’s novel does not defy description—it’s essentially a chronicle of the interactions among multifarious passengers riding a Mississippi River steamboat bound for New Orleans on All Fools’ Day—but it does resist categorization. To call it an allegory would be to betray the buoyant ambiguity and vertiginous complexity of the twenty-four hours Melville’s readers get to spend aboard the Fidèle, an interval during which a parade of swindlers, who are in fact all the same protean person, undertake to dupe naïfs and cynics alike. And yet, sad to say, it was the novel’s Bunyanesque aspects that had evidently beguiled Gloria, a seduction so complete that she’d jettisoned the first half of the book to focus on the confidence man’s most stable avatar, Melville’s “cosmopolitan,” Frank Goodman, who might be a Satan figure, or perhaps a Christ equivalent, or conceivably an avatar of secular doubt, and who the hell cares? The Negro beggar who pretends to be a cripple, the humanitarian who solicits funds for fake charities, the coal-company president who brokers bogus stock, the doctor who peddles gimcrack herbs, the employment agent who hires out nonexistent clients: All of these vivid rogues were lost in the transition from novel to play.

  “If satire is what closes on Saturday night,” I told Gloria as we settled into the restorán booth that evening, “then allegory doesn’t even survive the out-of-town tryouts.”

  “By paring everything down to Frank Goodman, I’m giving the play dramatic unity,” she said, defensively but listlessly.

  “Crummy decision,” I said.

  La Casa del Sol was tacky in the extreme, each table appointed with a lighted candle stuck in a straw-basketed Chianti bottle, the walls decorated with autographed eight-by-ten glossies of Producciones Agrasánchez movie stars. For reasons that eluded me, I found the place quite soothing.

  “I made a big mistake coming to Mexico,” said Gloria.

  “No, you didn’t,” I said, taking a gulp of Dos Equis. “Tomorrow we’ll start putting Black Guinea and John Ringman and everybody into your play.”

  “I’m talking about the moon-beans and the shores of El Lago de Chapultepec. Was any of that real, Lucius?”

  “Nothing is real.”

  “Can you be serious for once? Thank God I’m still—”

  “On the pill?”

  “Thank God.”

  “My terrace is the perfect writer’s retreat, but if you prefer we can work in some dreadful dive, El Diablo Clavel, for example.”

  “You know something?” said Gloria, squeezing lime juice into her glass of Corona. “You’re right about my Melville scenes—they’re awful—and Carlos is wrong.”

  “But if we restored Black Guinea—”

  “To tell you the truth, my heart isn’t in this project. It probably never was. I’m flying back to New York tomorrow and breaking the news to Mr. Logan.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t. I love you.”

  “Don’t be tiresome, Lucius.”

  “Tell Mr. Logan your novelist husband thinks The Confidence-Man would work better as a musical, you know, a Show Boat sort of thing.”

  She laughed and said, “What you told Carlos last night, your promise never to sell the story to your brothers or some dopey magazine—that was very noble of you.”

  I took a swallow of Dos Equis and winced internally, weighing my options. Gloria’s illusions, I decided, were best left intact. With any luck, her ignorance would last indefinitely. After all, she certainly never read Cinesthesia, and given her antipathy to mass culture she might not even notice if Oswald and Waldo put “City of Wax” up on the big screen.

  “Please stay in Mexico,” I said.

  “I must admit, you and Carlos cooked up a wonderfully appalling plum pudding,” said Gloria. “To be honest, I liked it better than your novels.” Absently she licked her thumb and index finger, then snuffed the candle flame with the wet skin. “Too bad there’s
never going to be a movie, or I would audition for Sonya.”

  I shall always look back on the winter of 1963 as the season of Carlos Ibarra Rojo. The big news, of course, was the January release of The Asylum of Doctor Varglom, a terrific-looking, Pathécolor, semi-Gothic horror film starring Vincent Price and based on a novelette by a famous writer nobody had ever heard of. Naturally the New York film critics felt obligated to piss on it, snidely observing that the producers were evidently attempting to exploit the same combination of full palette, period decor, and literary pedigree that had of late helped Hammer Films and A.I.P. reap such formidable profits. My brothers spent their last dime on a huge promotional campaign—newspaper ads, magazine gatefolds, radio spots, television teasers—and their gamble paid off, ultimately turning The Asylum of Doctor Varglom into the fourth highest-grossing film of the year.

  Among the spoils of PARC Pictures’ box-office victory was sufficient clout and cash for the twins to start preproduction on a second classy grade-B horror movie. “We’ve signed Vincent again,” Oswald told me over the phone. “Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre are both interested in playing Stradegorst. As for Sonya, it looks like we’ll get Barbara Steele. She was great in Pit and the Pendulum, also Black Sunday. That picture almost got the formula right, two out of three—it had a period setting, plus the cachet factor, Nikolai fucking Gogol, but Mario Bava doesn’t believe in color, an auteur thing, go figure.”

  “Whoa, back up a minute,” I said. “Evidently you’re planning to film ‘City of Wax’?”

  “You bet your ass. We’d like to buy it outright for three thousand dollars.”

  “It’s worth five.”

  “Hey, kid, if you don’t want to play ball, Waldo can always write an original screenplay that eerily resembles your novelette, and then you can spend five thousand dollars suing us unsuccessfully for plagiarism.”

  Not long after the Belasco Brothers took Doctor Varglom out of the downtown movie palaces and put it into general release, they purchased two-page center spreads in both Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter to “proudly announce” that, having acquired the rights to “City of Wax” by horror legend Carlos Ibarra Rojo, they’d recently traveled to Hacienda Heights and broken ground on “one of the largest motion-picture sets” ever constructed in Southern California …