Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

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

  “You know what I believe?” I said. “I believe you’re a vandal in a moth-eaten suit.” But was that the case? Did I not in fact know that these embalmed feet had just come from muddying a threshold more terrible and alluring than any I would ever cross on earth? “I also believe that, whoever you are, today you did something unconscionable.”

  “Breaking a promise to one’s creator is likewise unconscionable.”

  Whatever the intruder’s real identity, I sensed he was telling the truth about the novelette collection. The project was dead. There was actually a bright side to this calamity. Now I didn’t have to finish ‘Liquid Infinity,’ which meant I wouldn’t be inadvertently evoking Ibarra Rojo in the future.

  “As you might imagine, I’m quite fond of the mummy trilogy,” Popoca continued. “Ángel Di Stefani is a gifted pantomime actor. My favorite is La Momia Azteca contra el Robot Humano. Luis Castañeda makes a perfect mad scientist.” Fixing me with his inert eyes, he limped across the garden. “Carlos said to tell you he took no pleasure in sending me to terrorize your editor, and he regrets that his actions will hurt you financially. And now, señor, I bid you adios.”

  The intruder lurched into the kitchen and disappeared from view. For a full minute I remained standing amid the April orchids, wondering how much stranger the world would get before I died.

  Later that evening, having exhausted my supplies of alcohol and food, I walked to La Casa del Sol, where I appropriated the booth in which Gloria and I had dined following our antics in the Centro Histórico and El Parque de Chapultepec. I requested half a roasted chicken and a tumbler of tequila. Waiting for my order, I took comfort in my recent conversation with Yvonne. My new project made little sense to her, and yet she’d given it her blessing.

  No sooner had I savored the first morsel of chicken than a veiled woman sidled toward my booth, her skeletal form enswathed in a heavy black cloak and tattered mourning dress. Upon assuming the bench oppositeme, she lifted her mantilla to reveal a grief-struck yet oddly enchanting face. Tears of blood haloed her eyes.

  “¡Oh, hijos míos, ya ha llegado vuestra destrucción!” she wailed in the voice of a suicidal lark. Oh, my children, your destruction is nigh. “¿Dónde os llevaré?” Where can I take you? “Me llamo—”

  “Llorona,” I said. “The Crying Woman.”

  “Doomed to wander the earth for eternity.”

  “You play the part very well, señora. I’m afraid I’ve never seen your movies. Were you in La Herencia de la Llorona? La Maldición de la Llorona?”

  “Hear me out, Señor Belasco.”

  Reaching inside her cloak, my uninvited guest produced a carving knife, then set it on the table like a planchette on a Ouija board. As she continued speaking, her voice grew more mournful still, and I realized that, though I could not accept her claim to be a ghost, I did believe in her sorrow.

  “Yesterday I visited Señor Mallery in his Brooklyn office,” she said. “‘You will publish no more Ibarra Rojo stories,’ I told him. ‘But I’ve scheduled one for the summer issue,’ he replied, and so I flashed my knife and said, ‘If you don’t terminate the series, I’ll carve a grin in your throat.’ I now had his complete attention. He agreed to my demands. I know what’s on your mind, señor. You’re wondering—”

  “I’m wondering whether you used that same knife to—”

  “To kill my children?” said the Crying Woman, rising. “A plausible theory, but, no, I am locked into the legend of myself. La Llorona drowned her sons and daughters in Lake Texcoco. But please know this: I do not ask for sympathy—from you or anyone else.” She retrieved her weapon and began gliding away. “I bear a message from Carlos. He regrets never thanking you for bringing him into existence.”

  “Tell him I accept his gratitude.”

  “¡Oh, hijos míos!” cried La Llorona, and then she vanished into the crowd of patrons waiting for a booth.

  I finished my chicken, drained my tumbler, and set out for the Teatro Zapata. Not only was I determined to catch the midnight screening of PARC Pictures’ famous Pathécolor B-movie about a thought-vampire (which I’d never seen in any language), but I furthermore reasoned that my creature’s confederates would have trouble finding me in a darkened theater.

  As I sat in the baroque but decrepit movie palace, watching a subtitled print of El Sanatorio de Doctor Varglom, it occurred to me that Carlos had probably also targeted my brothers for spectral intimidation. The thought of Oswald getting into an argument with Popoca or La Llorona simultaneously amused and terrified me. Tomorrow morning I must phone PARC Pictures from the farmacia and tell the twins to beware of actors portraying Mexican avengers.

  I quickly apprehended why The Asylum of Doctor Varglom had found such a large audience. My brothers had fashioned as satisfying a melodrama as might be imagined, Vincent Price having the time of his life creeping around his phantasmagoric madhouse opening up his patients’ skulls, consuming the contents of these bony tureens (each such banquet occurred tastefully offscreen), and relishing the exotic mental landscapes that accrued to his unholy craving. This creepshow was sexy as well, for many of Varglom’s victims were gorgeous and impressively proportioned women wearing diaphanous nightgowns.

  True to one of Oswald’s many affectations, the credits were spliced onto the end of the picture. I stayed for every frame of the final reel, mostly so I could read “based on a story by Carlos Ibarra Rojo” and hear the last measures of Les Baxter’s fine score. By the time the lights came up, only two people were left in the theater, myself and a hunched figure seated two rows in front of me. My fellow credit watcher turned toward the projection booth, and I shuddered.

  His eye sockets seemed to extend to the back of his skull and beyond, like adjacent burrows fashioned by demented moles. Pinprick beacons, red as the blood from La Llorona’s orbs, flashed in the cavities. Black, bubbled, and in a perpetual state of migration, his flesh suggested molten pitch oozing down the sides of a crucible.

  “Call me Solares,” he said in a voice made of embers and pumice.

  “El Demonio del Volcán?”

  “At your service.”

  “Not my service, Solares. You have one and only one master.”

  “True enough, señor. When Carlos told me to set fire to your brothers’ gigantic motion-picture set, I immediately departed for Hacienda Heights.”

  “Set fire to it?!” I moaned, and suddenly I was in my ramshackle Calle Moctezuma elevator, plummeting inexorably, the cable having snapped. “Jesus!”

  “Even as we speak, Ekelstadt is burning!” cried El Demonio del Volcán. “The fire departments are helpless! I am Solares! I breathe fire and eat bitumen! Flames shoot from my eyes! Would you like a demonstration?”

  I’ve never hated anyone as much as I hated Carlos Ibarra Rojo just then. “Your master is a fiend!” I cried, leaping to my feet.

  “At times his assessment of you is equally negative,” said Solares as I raced out of the theater. “And yet his parting directive tome was rather poignant. ‘Tell my creator I think about him every day.’”

  I chartered a rogue taxi to the Aeropuerto Central, then took the first available flight—a red-eye special—to the City of Angels. Upon landing at LAX, I rented a sedan from Hertz, and by noon I was in Hacienda Heights.

  With fearful determination I elbowed my way through the thinning ranks of the morbidly curious. Solares had performed his mission with great efficiency. Mounds of ash rose everywhere. Skeins of smoke hung in the air. Charred timbers pointed in all directions like the bones of an immolated dinosaur. Of the immense, brooding, towering asylum, nothing remained but a matrix of blackened girders and melted rebar.

  Having drifted toward what had obviously once been the village square, my brothers were walking in dazed circles around a charred collar of stone mar
king a community well. I didn’t expect that my appearance would please them—how could anything please them at this moment?—but I attempted a cheerful demeanor and began the conversation with an upbeat remark.

  “You can start rebuilding as soon as the first check arrives from the insurance company,” I said, laying a presumably reassuring hand on Oswald’s shoulder.

  “We don’t have insurance,” he moaned.

  “Mierda,” I said.

  “It seemed like a good way to balance the budget,” said Oswald. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “A long story,” I said.

  “This catastrophe is actually worse than it looks,” said Waldo. “Shooting was supposed to start in two days, so we’d just moved everything into the asylum. Camera, lights, cables, props, costumes, film stock, you name it. Our inventory is nothing but cinders now. If I ever catch the arsonist, I’ll borrow Roger Corman’s pendulum and slice his pecker into canapés.”

  “You know what really pisses me off?” said Oswald. “When I heard the set was on fire, I figured, ‘OK, we’ll have the village burn instead of melting,’ so I got Floyd out of bed, and he grabbed his 35mm Mitchell and the loaded magazine he keeps for emergencies, but by the time we got here, there was no fucking inferno left to shoot.”

  “Last night I saw a midnight show of El Sanatorio de Doctor Varglom in Cuauhtémoc,” I said. “Marvelous picture, boys.”

  “Fuck you, Lucius.”

  “Now that you have money flowing in from foreign markets,” I persisted, “might that be enough to—?”

  “Not flowing, little brother, trickling,” said Oswald. “It’ll never accumulate fast enough to put this production back on its feet.”

  “While we’re on the topic of lousy news,” said Waldo, “yesterday morning we got a call from Mrs. Knox. Looks like they’re deep-sixing the Ibarra Rojo collection. No explanation.”

  “See what I mean about New York publishing being as capricious as Hollywood?” said Oswald. “Sorry, kid. I know you were counting on the money.”

  “Capricious, yes,” I muttered, and I couldn’t help adding, “next you’ll be telling me Desmond Mallery won’t be running the Grand Guignol story.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Psychopath in a mantilla.”

  I fixed on a pile of carbonized beams that curiously resembled a compass rose. So where should I go now? West? The movie business had never enchanted me half as much as it did my brothers. East? I was sick of Gloria’s impossibly high standards for husbands. North? After a year of living in the subtropics, I’d developed an aversion to bad weather. South? Despite yesterday’s distressing encounters with Mexican folklore, that sad and sunny country was the place I loved best.

  “There’s only one way this disaster can play out,” Oswald told me, his voice cracking. “Waldo and I go back to making schlock.”

  “The best schlock poverty can buy,” said Waldo, his eyes growing moist.

  “City of Wax would’ve been a great picture,” I said.

  “The greatest,” said Oswald, tears rolling down his cheeks, and I realized I’d never before seen my brothers weep.

  Unorthodox though his tactics were—unorthodox, rash, crude, and brutal—Carlos Ibarra Rojo succeeded in erasing himself from history. I’m almost eighty now, and my cerebral arteries are a lot harder than my erections, but I know all about databases and online encyclopedias, and I can confidently assert that you couldn’t fill a Munchkin’s thimble with digitalized information about Mexico’s master of the macabre. If you like, you can humiliate your search engine by sending it off in quest of Ibarra Rojo facts, but his name is to be found only in the credits for a generally forgotten (though profitable) movie titled The Asylum of Doctor Varglom and in two back issues of a defunct (but fondly remembered) periodical called Cinesthesia. Through the intervention of a mummy, a Mexican Medea, and a volcano demon, the phantom canceled his cult.

  And what of my brothers? They might have been sleazy, but they were survivors. The late sixties and early seventies were something of a golden age for drive-in garbage and grindhouse drivel, and the Belasco Brothers were on the job, filling double bills with biker flicks, James Bond rip-offs, zombie jamborees, serial-killer bloodbaths, and other pap to which Oswald and Waldo were not quite ashamed to put their names.

  As for Gloria Belasco, now Gloria Jenkins, our divorce became final on the same day Roger Corman signed Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone to star in Tales of Terror (another Poe film, my brothers having reluctantly released them from their PARC Pictures contracts). Gloria’s creative partnership with Joshua Logan never went anywhere. The last I heard, she was teaching playwriting at Yale and still getting her elliptical psychodramas produced Off-Off-Broadway.

  You will perhaps be surprised to learn that, in the post–Ibarra Rojo phase of my career, I adopted a philosophy not terribly different from the phantom’s. Literary celebrity no longer mattered to me. What counted was the tale I had to tell, whether of a headless conquistador, lonely were-jaguar, insatiable succubus, weeping revenant, or moldering mummy. (For obvious reasons, I refused to write about volcano demons.) True, I continued to bristle at Carlos’s fatuous notions of artistic purity, his windy insistence that commerce was automatically corrupting. I’m not convinced that his disdain for popular taste was anything more than the stance of a poseur. Show me a story by Mexico’s maestro de lo macabro, and I’ll show you an awfully good time. All art is entertainment (but not the other way around), all drama is melodrama (ditto), and nobody appreciated those truths better than Carlos Ibarra Rojo.

  Following my creature’s example, I performed my stories in cantinas, cafés, and clubs de jazz, accepting whatever coins the crowd might sprinkle at my feet. Sometimes I took my act to the arcade markets and street fairs. For a mere fifty centavos, this American expatriate would sell you a mimeographed copy of a story about a specter from his adopted country. For twenty centavos, he would compose such a tale on the spot and incorporate you into the plot.

  Of course, I had at my fingertips a source of income never available to Carlos, the surprisingly resilient Mexican horror-movie industry. Writing under the pseudónimo of Joaquín Alcayde, I bestowed an entire second trilogy on Popoca, including La Venganza de la Momia Azteca, La Sombra de la Momia Azteca, and La Momia Azteca contra el Poder Satánico, and I also resurrected the undead Count Lavud, placing him at the center of El Castillo del Vampiro, La Sangre del Vampiro, and El Vampiro contra las Lobas. PARC Pictures picked up the entire six-flick package for US distribution, though I heard it barely broke even.

  Beyond ready cash and a certain oblique creative satisfaction, my Popoca efforts brought a third boon into my life. All these pictures featured a witty and comely actress named Rosita del Torres in the role of Princess Xochitl. She once described herself tome as “the only Catholic atheist in Mexico.” We got married on the set of La Sombra de la Momia Azteca, and I’m pleased to report that—except for the occasional horrendous fight, the antagonism between me and her layabout brother, and the intermittent clinical depression she suffered after becoming too old to play princesses—we lived happily ever after.

  It was during a raw October in 1973, right before El Día de los Muertos, that I experienced a sudden and overwhelming desire to see my creature once more. I calculated that to conjure him I need merely create a title page so preposterous that the project to which it pointed would burden me with writer’s block. Eventually I settled on “La Momia Azteca contra Richard Nixon, an Original Screenplay by Carlos Ibarra Rojo.” I removed the sheet from the typewriter (I now had an electric Royal), inserted a fresh page, and, bereft of inspiration, stared at the taunting pale rectangle.

  He appeared within the hour, striding into my cluttered office sporting his usual accessories: wa
lking stick, ascot, bottle of mezcal. When he realized he’d been deceived and that I had no interest in writing a screenplay about Nixon, he was incensed, but then suddenly he mellowed.

  “Darling, I’m touched. You yearned for me.”

  “Up to a point,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  In those days Rosita and I were living in Iztapalapa borough, a few blocks from the Cementerio Nacional. As dusk cloaked the marble forest, Carlos and I strolled about the grounds, occasionally pausing to survey a twilit statue of a saint or a darkening incarnation of La Virgin de Guadalupe. Our conversation touched on art, God, and metaphysics, but mostly we talked of our sins. I averred that deceiving him was “among the basest things I’ve ever done,” and he allowed that his retribution scheme had been “immorally dependent on traumatizing innocent people.”

  “If you’ll absolve me,” I said as we headed toward the main gate, now silvered by the moon, “then I’ll absolve you.”

  Carlos hummed in assent. “I feel especially contrite about causing your brothers such anguish. But did I have a choice, mi querido? Unless a man takes steps to recover his lost happiness, he will make those around him unhappy as well.”

  Headlamps dead, pistons shrieking, the hearse came hurtling out of the night, careening down the narrow lane as its fictional horse-drawn equivalent had done a century earlier. To this day I cannot account for the vehicle. Possibly some intoxicated adolescentes stole the thing and then went joyriding. Carlos threw his arms around me, lurching toward the berm. For a few seconds we stayed on our feet, staggering away from the lane, and then together we plummeted into a freshly dug grave, landing on a mattress of soft earth as the hearse roared away.