A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  There were two more rooms off the kitchen and dining area, one with a large bed with many pillows, decorated in what Avendaño obviously considered a “Moorish” style—tapestries and walls festooned with gauzy fabrics, candles and teardrop-shaped hanging lanterns, ottomans and curving and mosque-shaped electric lamps draped with more fabric—surely the man was entranced with legends of Sir Richard Burton (not the actor married to Elizabeth Taylor, but the partner of the discoverer of the headwaters of the Nile) and Saladin, and the mystique of perfumed lovemaking among Arabic geometries and expensive tiles. It was the bedroom of a man forty years his junior. A man with a high estimation of his own sexual prowess. He might have been old, he might have lost his eye, but he was not dead. Or so the room seemed to be screaming at me.

  The other bedroom was full of boxes—books, trinkets, papers, old clothing, a toaster, a radio, what looked like a black-and-white television. Under the boxes, a single bed. I saw no cats, anywhere.

  I poured myself a brandy from his bar, sat on the balcony’s single chair, and watched the ships sail in and out of the Málaga harbor. The Eye had left no instructions as to the apartment’s upkeep other than to tidy up his books if I felt like it. I didn’t. I finished my drink and went home.

  * * *

  It was almost two weeks later before I returned. I’d been seeing a teacher’s assistant fresh out of university in Madrid and after one of our dates (when she asked how I could afford the meal—wine, frutti di mare, chocolate y churros) I hesitantly told her of The Eye and our agreement. Claudia insisted she see the “famous poet’s” apartment and after a walk on the beach, I took her there.

  A pile of mail awaited me just inside the door.

  “Oh my,” Claudia whispered, looking about. She walked farther into the space. “This is amazing.”

  “What, the books?” I said, flipping through the envelopes.

  No bills. Various correspondences from far-flung postmarks—two letters from America, one from France, two from Germany, three from the UK. There were two from Magera. Those were addressed to Rafe Daño, which made some sense, though I got the impression from everything I knew about Avendaño that it was an uneven and one-sided subterfuge. The Eye was a man too proud of himself to hide behind an alias. I was tempted to open them—to pilfer his private life—but I already felt somewhat intrusive being in his apartment, despite the fact I obviously was enjoying the money he’d already paid me to be there. Sometimes I make less sense than the greater world around me.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Claudia stage-whispered.

  I looked up from the letters, half expecting her to be holding some rare book, or piece of ancient pornography. Instead I found her opening the dry bar and withdrawing a bottle of tequila.

  The next morning, I had a more intimate understanding of The Eye and his worldview.

  I woke up in his bed, with Claudia beside me. Head pounding. It was a very nice bed, and the sheets felt luxurious just to the touch. The Moroccan tile was both more and less pleasing to me from that vantage. Claudia (who had been vigorous and receptive by turns and all at once and more than I can express with any clarity, since my memories of the night before were brilliantly muddy and opaquely full of pleasure) did not stir when I rose and went to find coffee.

  I had not rummaged through many cupboards by the time I found a tin of cheap coffee and a percolator and began brewing. Head ripped asunder. The half-empty bottle of tequila glared accusingly from atop the dry bar. I banished it below. There was a single egg in the refrigerator and cheap bagels in the rimed icebox. I put them on the counter and then found it all too much to heat the bread or fry the egg.

  I waited, grimacing, until the coffee had brewed and poured a cup; went back to the refrigerator and smelled the cream to see if it was acceptable. It was, I hoped. Once my coffee was the proper color, I slunk out to the balcony and peered out at the sea and the threatening clouds scuttling across the sky to deal with my conflicting emotions of elation and fright that Claudia was still here with me.

  I could almost sense The Eye laughing at me, halfway across the world. It began to rain.

  After an hour of staring at the rain-speckled sea and listening to Claudia’s faint snores, I put on clothes, found an umbrella, and left. I visited the local grocery and bought the stuff of life—butter, eggs, fresh bread, milk, jamon, pasta, rice. At the market: rosemary, thyme, garlic, onions, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, antennae-spiked prawns, shining mackerel. Twine-bound bundles of crocuses and narcissus blooms.

  When I returned to Avendaño’s apartment, Claudia was still asleep. I placed the flowers in jars and pitchers I found in cupboards, placed the food in the refrigerator. There was a turntable and vinyl albums below the bookcases. The Eye seemed to favor jazz, and classical music, so I put on an ebullient Charles Trenet album at low volume and began cooking breakfast.

  Claudia, when she woke, greeted me tentatively, which was, as I was coming to understand, not precisely part of her makeup—timidity. Finally, she kissed me and we became distracted until it grew obvious we would have all the time we wanted for that. Our stomachs worked on different timelines.

  I served her toast and butter, ham and eggs, and tomato slices with olive oil and basil. She fell to the food with much enthusiasm and we listened to Trenet’s trumpeting voice and chatted about school and the vagaries of being cogs within the great machine of trivium and quadrivium. In this I had more experience than she and offered her recommendations in ways to navigate the currents of faculty and administration. But there was something of her that reminded me of The Eye—she was so assured in her own importance and knowledge, you could not tell her anything. I sighed. She’d have to find out for herself.

  Claudia rose, poured herself more coffee, and took one of Avendaño’s books of poetry down from his shelf. She moved away from the dining table—I had hastily rearranged the typewriters and shoved papers aside to make room for our breakfast—and placed herself in an overstuffed and well-used chair near the stereo. She lit a cigarette and flipped through the slim volume. I began looking through The Eye’s papers on the table.

  “I like him!” she said. “He’s got a real hard-on for authority.”

  “He’s a lovely old codger. But I don’t really care for his poetry,” I said. Our relationship was so newborn as to be tenuous still, and I did not want to argue. But I saw no reason to lie to please her. “It’s shallow. I can’t help but think half of the poems are odes to his dick.”

  “Listen to this,” she said, ignoring me, holding the book in her hands. It was Dark Clouds over Santaverde. “It’s titled ‘We Stand Beneath an Enormous Sky,’ and begins like this: ‘You dress in a sweater against the chill, and we watch the clouds drift over the barren plain. The Atacama rusty and lifeless, abandoned by all except us. Are you hungry, I say. There is lamb. And you say, no, touching your flat belly, then your hair.’” Claudia flipped pages. “He understands subtext, at least.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette and rose. She looked in the fridge. “Did you get tomato juice?” Something about the question irked me. There had been no thanks from her, for anything. The breakfast. The date. The lovemaking—not that I demand assurances. But she was ungracious.

  “I think you should go,” I said. “I’ve got work to do here.”

  She turned to look at me, incredulous. I ignored her, picking up the manuscript of Below, Behind, Beneath, Between. “Okay,” she said. She disappeared into The Eye’s bedroom. When she emerged, she had her purse and was putting on her earrings. “See you at school,” she said, and left unceremoniously.

  I sighed. I felt as if a great weight had lifted. Surely, Sartre had it right. Hell is other people. I found myself holding Avendaño’s secret manuscript.

  I opened it and began to read.

  Avendaño

  I was sleeping with a student activist at the time. Alejandra Llamos, I think her name was, though it has been so long and, as they say, so much water underneath that partic
ular bridge. I suspect I’ve blocked full memory of our relationship and her, purposefully. And I was not with her for her name—I remember her hair, her silhouette backlit by sunshine and lamplight. Her form is indistinct, but the taste of her skin still burns on my tongue, when the salt-sea air would cool upon it. The flavor and feel of her body, soixante-neuf. I vaguely recall, like a boy at his mother’s bosom, her breasts. They were modest. I recall the timbre of her voice raised in anger. She reminded me of Nivia, my wife. My ex-wife. Which is probably why I treated her so poorly. If I were a moral man, and not Avendaño, I might feel bad about admitting that. But there it is. Her name, though. I’m sure it was Alejandra Llamos. It’s what I shall call her, anyway.

  Do not think poorly of me. You will see.

  I could say that it was my relationship to her that brought Vidal’s men to our door. That is what they said. But it wasn’t true. The Vidalistas were always going to come for me. Because Pávez was my friend and patron, as he was to all poets and writers. I never bought, wholesale, the socialist agenda, though my sympathies tended toward that direction, but they at least respected the written word, and knew writers, poets, journalists were a part of the fabric of commerce, of culture. My mistake was that I had praised him too highly in op-ed pieces in La Sirena and La Trompeta. Pávez was a man strong enough for dissent, though he and I did not agree on routes for the common man’s empowerment. I praised the arts, and education, and while he supported them, his focus was on industry and the collective power of men unified against the interests of the wealthy. Now, in the remove of years, I know how this drew the attention of Nixon, and even worse, Kissinger, and their minions, their money, their influence. The whiff of Communism distasteful to them. Their noxious pressure moved in vast, invisible arteries in the atmosphere. They plotted to overthrow my homeland.

  And they were always going to come for me.

  Because I open doors without knowing why.

  I open doors without understanding the possible consequences.

  My publisher had just paid me for my last book, and I had taken a house for the summer in Santo Isodoro on the southern Magera coast, near Chile, in a small fishing village called Nazaré near a little river of the same name. November to April, through the temperate summer months. I was to write my novel, the one I had been planning. The great novel of Avendaño! Oxblood prose, steaming in the night air! My Argentinian publisher was excited. My lover was happy, if lonely for the company of other students, adrift without the firebrands to whom she preached Marxism and the Gospel of Guevara.

  It was heady . . . but for me, the words would not come.

  The distractions were too easy, or too intriguing, to pass up. When Ángel Ilabaca, my predecessor as the chair of history and literature at the Universidad Católica de Santaverde, died unexpectedly—and since he considered me his protégé—he left me the lion’s share of his books, many of which were rare and very old. His widow brought them to me in Santaverde, crying. I took them solemnly, promising to uphold his legacy. She did not know what to do, telling me if I found something valuable, to please bring it to her children. I said I would.

  The boxes of books came with me south, to the shore, and at night I found myself preoccupied with reading and indexing their contents, instead of writing. During the days, Alejandra and I would sleep in, eat sardines, and drink the rich, dry Argentinian wines and smoke the reefer we had bought in Santaverde before our three-day drive south.

  And then I’d read.

  “He loved Neruda,” Alejandra said, the second night in Nazaré. She flipped through a box of books.

  “Who does not?” I said. “He is a treasure and the father of us all.”

  She shrugged, sniffing. “He’s an imperialist puppet.”

  I said, “There has never been a greater voice for South America!”

  “For Chile, maybe. But not for everyone.”

  She closed the box, and moved to sit by me, relighting the joint we had partially smoked earlier. Living with Alejandra was like living with a big cat—loving and playful one moment, biting and clawing the next. She handed the joint to me and I inhaled the smoke, holding it in as long as I was able. She pulled a book from the box I was rummaging through. “Tomás Lago.” She flipped it open, riffling through the pages. She tossed it aside and withdrew another. “Nicanor Parra. I have always loved him.” Also tossed aside. “The Magus. Dune. Cosmicomics. The Cherry Orchard. The Death of Artemio Cruz.” Each book tossed on top of a growing pile. “Odd. This one is unmarked, as is this.” She flipped the first open, wrinkling her nose at the smell of mold. “I can’t even read this shit. The Lesser Key? What nonsense.” She took up the other volume, holding it as she might an occupied rat trap. She opened it with a look of pure disgust on her face. “Something something, Eibon,” she said. She tossed it on top of all the others and wiped her hands on her thighs. “It’s a whole lot of rotting wood pulp.”

  “Look at this,” I said, withdrawing a thick leather-bound portfolio.

  Opening it caused Alejandra to snicker. “Now we get to the good stuff.”

  Pornographic photography, developed in a home darkroom, judging by the irregular sizes of the prints. Black and white. Men fucking women, women fucking women, men fucking men. The letting of blood. The consumption of bodily fluids. Buggery, sodomy: men and women going back and forth between god and the devil. A long series of photographs featuring a hermaphrodite fornicating with all sorts. Aesthetically, all of the photographs were poor examples of composition and lighting, except for those prints that focused on sexual organs or seed spilled on face, chest. Judging by their wear, most of the photos had been well loved, and pored over.

  Alejandra placed her hand on my crotch.

  “Your reputation precedes you,” Alejandra said, rubbing. “This must be why he left you his books.”

  “Most likely,” I said. “He knew I could be relied upon to not be outraged. Or make any noise about it at the university.”

  “Maybe a little noise,” Alejandra said, her mouth close to my ear.

  “Look at this,” I said, holding up a photo.

  “It’s a picture of what?” she said. “A book? That’s hardly stimulating.”

  “A manuscript, I think. Many pages,” I said, shuffling through the photos. There were fifteen to twenty photos, roughly eight by ten inches, each featuring a relatively well-lit manuscript. The mottled appearance of the paper or vellum seemed to indicate a great age. “Written in Latin and Greek. Why would he hide them within a trove of pornography?”

  “He either wanted them found desperately, or never found at all,” Alejandra said, her hand insistent. “I prefer the fucking.”

  After our lovemaking, later that night, I drank wine and examined the photos of the manuscript without distraction. In a pocket of the leather portfolio, a sheaf of typewritten pages contained Ángel Ilabaca’s beginning passes of a translation of the manuscript. Notes on Latin words, their definitions. Like me, he possessed no Greek, though I found in his notes references to three scholars who could assist in translation to Spanish.

  Ángel’s work was hastily begun and shoddily pursued and followed for only a short time judging by the dearth of research. I went to find my spectacles and returned to the photographs. I held them near the glossy surface of the first image so that the glasses functioned as a makeshift magnifying glass. I began copying the Latin for translation later, working late into the night. When my eyes finally grew so weak as to become blurry, I joined Alejandra in our bed, the sound of the Atlantic a soft hush beyond the stucco walls.

  It was days before I had taken down all of the original text, and once that was complete, it felt extraordinarily good to begin typing my handwritten copy on the Underwood. From there I would begin a translation. It had been many years since my youth, when the abuses of the Catholic clergy were fresh, as were their lessons: The streets of Rome and antiquity seemed immediate; the declensions of verbs sprang easily to mind. Once as a young man in a single fev
ered summer, I had translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Spanish, whole. It was my first attempt at verse, listening to a ghost’s echoes from millennia before.

  Other creatures crawl the earth on all fours, looking downward, only Man lifts his head, majestic, and raises his eyes to the sky and the bright stars above.

  But I am Avendaño! I am an inveterate poet, drawn to the mystery of language. I would never be content to remain simply a translator of verse. I would become a master of it. I would storm heaven and supplant Ovid himself.

  I was precocious and so very young.

  That was then. Now the novel did not budge and this manuscript gave me some satisfaction. Of progress. I was a vehicle mired along a muddy track, taking a different road for progress’s sake. I ignored what Ilabaca had written and started anew, something wholly my own. From everything I could tell from his notes and the photographs the manuscript was titled Opusculus Noctis, which I translated into Spanish as A Little Night Work.

  When I puzzled it out, I laughed, reminded of Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

  I do not know what the mental block was that made me focus on this rather than my novel, but I would have gotten in far less trouble in my life if I understood exactly what drove me toward action and inaction. I am a mystery, even to myself.

  Weeks passed. I spent the nights in the study, nose down, and the days either sleeping or drinking. Alejandra became short.

  “You’re manic,” she said. “And smell terrible. Let’s visit Buenos Aires. Or Castuera. Someplace with a nightclub and a restaurant. I’ve grown tired of cooking for you.” It was early evening, when the shadows began to lengthen toward the sea. She stood in the study door, light behind her, so I could see the outline of her body in her peasant’s dress, but not her face.

  “I’m sure you can take any lover you might wish,” I said, gesturing to the door. “Even one who knows how to cook.”