A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Bemused, I turned back to the entryway. There were only two new pieces of mail, one obviously an advertisement. The other was addressed to me. I opened it.

  Dearest Isabel,

  I’ve arrived safe in Buenos Aires, and have bought a cheap Volkswagen Beetle like one I had long ago, before the heavens fell. I thought I might rent a Jeep, but no one here in Argentina will rent to a one-eyed man intending to travel to Magera. There is much anti-Vidal sentiment and very dark rumors of ANI and the influence of Vidal’s secret police extending beyond borders. Ever since Alfonsín took over after the junta government, Argentina has come to its senses and eyes its neighbor with great suspicion.

  I’m writing you now from Córdoba, where my wife’s family is from. They have not heard from her since the coup, so many years ago. I have a rather mixed reputation here in Argentina, and am not very welcome, so I must continue on. I leave tomorrow for the push into Magera. I must decide whether to try and cross near Santaverde or take a more northern route and cross over the mountains near Cascavel. I am favoring the latter, since word has it that the border near Santaverde teems with carabineros with a direct line to the secret police.

  I would like to schedule a phone call with you for November 12, at six p.m. I will call my apartment. If you would be there to answer, I would appreciate it. There is a telephone beneath my bed, and a jack for it in the kitchen.

  Whatever mail you find, please open. I’m expecting some checks from my publishers, and you may deposit them in the Bank of Barcelona on the Calle Passasuego. Just bring your identification; I’ve left word with them you will be acting as my agent.

  I miss our conversations and our time together.

  Feed the cat, for your protection. If you read my books, do not be too hard on me. There are manuscripts in my apartment that should remain unread, now that I think about it. Some knowledge is better off unknown.

  Your friend,

  The man was outrageously annoying and endearing by turns, I decided, but I worried for him. ANI was rumored to have killed thousands and tortured ten times that. And he was driving toward them.

  I went through his other mail. My English is passable, my German weak, and my French deplorable. However, it was not hard to make sense of the correspondences. One of the letters from America was from another Mageran exile, a poet and scholar who obviously had a great friendship and familiarity with the supposedly dead Avendaño, writing for advice on how to advance his career. The second letter was friendly as well. Possibly overly friendly. It came from a woman who was quite explicit in the erotic actions she wished to perform upon The Eye. From context I inferred they had a long and robust correspondence. Her heartfelt and lascivious entreaties were working toward a meeting, if Avendaño would only see it. He probably did. There were three checks from publishers nestled among labyrinthine sales reports—one from France, one from Germany, and the other from Britain—totaling over twenty thousand pesetas. More adverts and promotions.

  The two letters from Magera, addressed to Rafe Daño, I opened last. The first was a response from the Magera Minister of Licenses and Business Permits, a José Blanco, stating there was no record of Bella Avendaño, Isabella Avendaño, or Isabella Campos. But, Señor Blanco wrote, he would love for Rafe Daño to come to his office so they might discuss his interests in missing persons more in depth.

  I shivered. Something about the phrasing affected me on a physical level.

  Putting that aside, I opened the last letter. It contained a single slip of paper.

  -20.518097, -67.65773

  Alejandra

  * * *

  I never really returned to my life before meeting The Eye, such as it was. With the arrival of his letter, my connection to Málaga, the university, and everything else in Spain became tenuous. I taught classes, but just as a way of marking the days until the twelfth of November. I found myself spending more and more time at Avendaño’s apartment and less at my own. I bought tuna and kibble for the cat; I withdrew the phone from under his bed and plugged it in in the kitchen. I deposited his checks and was surprised when the teller directed me to a handsome woman’s office, where I was greeted warmly and handed ten thousand pesetas (roughly one thousand American dollars) in an envelope, stating it was the standing instructions of Rafael Avendaño that his agent receive a monthly stipend.

  “Trust me,” she said. “Mister Avendaño can afford to be generous.” I took the money. How easy it was to travel down that road. Had The Eye dressed up in a scarlet suit, pitchfork aloft, leaping to a rooftop to be illuminated by fire and twirling his mustache, he could not have corrupted me more easily. Hell must be filled with poor academics.

  On the twelfth, I waited in his kitchen, watching the hands of the clock slowly turn. At six, the phone remained silent.

  I called in sick to work the next day and remained at Avendaño’s, waiting expectantly for the phone to ring. I went to the landlord and arranged for him to telephone the apartment while I was there, to check and see if the ringer worked. While I was out, I had an anxious dread that the phone would ring while I was gone. When I returned, even though I had arranged the call with the landlord, I nearly screamed from the sound of the rotary’s bell, I was wound so tight. My unease regarding my friend increased.

  Part of The Eye must have leached into his apartment. I began smoking more frequently—something I rarely did—and drinking even in the day. I bought a message machine for when I left the apartment to teach classes. I rarely went to my office at the university and returned to my own room only to pack my belongings and move them into Avendaño’s. I warred with myself: agitated yet distracted, worried yet conflicted, lonely yet connected to this strange, foolish old man.

  Again and again, I found myself returning to his writings. I continued the translation Avendaño had begun, since my Latin was fresher than his, despite my having never translated Metamorphoses whole. I searched his apartment for his Ovid manuscript but, failing to find it, settled for reading The Eye’s poetry and A Little Night Work. The latter was gruesome and disturbing in ways I cannot, even to this day, put into words. Of the themes contained (as far as I could tell) in that work, two stood very prominent:

  The first was that of sacrifice, of blood, of life, of innocence. Of value. I began to understand why it had been hidden inside a sheaf of pornography. I am no dullard; I recognized this was a profane book, a book that would have been destroyed or locked away by the Catholic Church (or any other) if they had come across it. Those with it in their possession would have found themselves excommunicated, swiftly and without any red tape. A Little Night Work hid its true nature in oblique verse, and stilted and antiquated Latin, but it was most definitely a book of witchcraft, or black magic. The stories contained within, and their rudimentary yet evocative illustrations, were more like primers for bargaining with unseen forces rather than spells.

  And while sacrifice was the predominant theme, the secondary theme was that the fruit of sacrifice was one of entry. “Ingressus” was used over and over. As was “liminal.” The descriptions of violence, and incest, and self-mutilation became like wounds in my mind, festering. At night, I could not sleep, and in the day, I moved through the streets of Málaga in a dreamlike state, as I had not slept the night before, cotton-headed and dull.

  I found myself wondering how Avendaño had come by the photographs of the prints of A Little Night Work, since he’d been arrested by the Vidalistas on that night so long ago.

  One thing leads to another. By resuming A Little Night Work, I was led back to Below, Behind, Beneath, Between, Avendaño’s strange testament. I needed to understand how the two manuscripts were related to each other, and to the man who had introduced them to me. And he had not called when he said he would. A pressure was building inside me, and I could not express it properly without knowing the full story.

  I began to read once more.

  Avendaño 2

  Take down my name, write it with obsidian ink

  Like
the black waves upon stone shores of Magera

  Where the sea meets the land

  And the sky teems with terns and gulls

  Gliding upon the currents of air.

  No man stands tall in such a prison,

  And his weakness is on display

  For any creature that passes by.

  —Guillermo Benedición, Nuestra Guerra Celestial

  There are poets who think they are angels, that their words are sent from some divine power greater than themselves. Other poets feel they’re daemons, giving voice to the molten words of the subconscious, spewing the hot stuff of psyche out into the world. As I passed in and out of consciousness, my face swelling, the words of both angels and daemons came to me—Camila Araya, Guillermo Benedición, Yesenia Pinilla, and, above all, our great father Neruda—whispering to me as I lay in the twilight between lucidity and oblivion. Warm socks, the appearance of the hordes, fixed ideas that make me read with obscene attention a few psychologists, our heavenly war, I do not love you, I love the jealousy I have for you, the breaking clouds, the breaking sky. A thousand voices caromed in my head. From such a remove, I can see now it was just the tugging of the flesh, trying to find something to grasp on to to protect itself, the quivers of an organism in distress sorting through experience and conditioning. My life up until then was just a fabric of verse and poems.

  Now my life was no longer mine.

  The soldiers stripped me to my underwear, bound my hands and feet with duct tape, and placed me on hard wooden planks in the back of a truck. I knew there was unrest in Magera, and a great hatred of Pávez by the rich, elite men who had made their fortunes on the backs of the poor. And our distant northern neighbor, that looming storm front—Estado Unidos, the American vastness—hated socialist and Marxist movements. They had killed Guevara. It might have been Bolivian carabineros, but certainly shadowmen stood by them and their rifles were made of metal cast in America. At that time, I was apolitical, concerned solely with the ways of the flesh and the soul. Yet I was not an ostrich; I was aware of some of the hidden currents of unrest in Magera, thanks to Alejandra. And so, as I rattled in the back of the truck for hours, those periods when I was awake, I was filled with great foreboding and disturbing thoughts, not just for myself, not just for Alejandra, but for my country.

  The soldiers smoked American cigarettes and spoke in hushed voices over me. The smell of their smoldering tobacco came as a burnt offering, ash and cinder, falling lightly on me as if I were a bound sacrificial lamb. The stink of the cigarettes—Pall Malls, or Winstons, or Marlboros, shipped south out of Texas on some cursed diesel container-barge to brave the gulf and then the Atlantic down the coast to Argentina, off-loaded by sun-drenched stevedores in Buenos Aires beneath wheeling seagulls shrieking at the sky and loathsome shore; crates of cartons loaded unceremoniously on truck beds by calloused hands and then driven west over mountains to finally bring their cancerous stench here, to me, in the hands of soldiers; a gift maybe, from an American governmental operative; a bribe, a lagniappe for doing business with the anti-Marxist blond-haired, blue-eyed giant looming so far north, its breath stinking and foul—the smell settled upon me, lying raw and delirious, as the truck rattled north and west, away from the shore. After some interminable time where I floated, insensate, suspended within the cloud of pain, we came to a stop. I was awake then and aching. Of all the pains my body endured, my head was the worst, but the skin of my legs, arms, and chest was bloody and abraded by the planks. Worse, the outrage to my pride and security. What had become of Alejandra? My nostrils were full of caked blood and the salt-sweat smell of men and stale cigarettes. The soldiers made crude jokes about my belly, poking me with the bores of their rifles. The skin on my face, especially near my eye, felt as sausages cooking over a fire, full of juice and ready to spit. They removed me from the truck without binding my face or covering my eyes, and this terrified me—they did not care if I knew where I was. For an instant, I had fresh air filling my nose, the scent of foliage and plant life blooming, sunlight streaming—I caught sight of a building, its roof and courtyard wall, beyond that a tree, even farther than that a sliver of sky and mountain. Magera. Guillermo Benedición called my beloved country a long petal of sea, wine, and snow. I knew the sky. I knew the snow-peaked mountains. If I wasn’t in Santaverde, I was very close. Even if I had been blindfolded, I would have known. I could smell the brown shallow water of the Mapacho River, running to the thick Palas, itself running to the sea.

  I am a Mageran and I did not require sight to know I was home. And the carabineros did not care if I knew. What terrible things had occurred since I had left?

  They took me into the building. It was full of the silence that comes from the cessation of loud, painful noise. A hush. Two soldiers hefted me by the armpits, and my bare feet, still bound, dragged behind. It was cold here; thick stone walls provided some insulation, but not enough. They carried me through an eerily quiet room full of people, all nude, who stared at me with hollow eyes. Carabineros watched them silently, their weapons unwavering. The abruptness of soldiers’ laughter echoed loudly down the stone halls.

  The soldiers placed me in what appeared to have been an office, except that where there once was a window, it had been mortared with brick. A metal chair with a plastic seat sat near an administrator’s desk. A single caged lightbulb on the ceiling cast distorted squares of yellow light. The space smelled of urine and fear, though had I been asked then to define the latter, I would not have been able to answer. And afterward . . .

  Well, we all would be able to.

  I cannot say how long they left me there. I sat in the uncomfortable metal-and-plastic chair. I paced. I pressed my swollen eye to the stone walls, cooling it. I needed to void my bowels and bladder, and was desperately eyeing the corner, when keys clanked in the door and a man entered the office, a carabinero hefting a rifle. He scanned the room and gestured with the bore of his weapon that I was to sit in the chair. I did. Once I was seated, another man entered the office, head down, peering at a clipboard. He read the cover sheet without looking up. He shuffled to the second page and then glanced over his spectacles at me, like an aged professor—except this man wore a Mageran army uniform, not heavily decorated, but with the rank of lieutenant colonel. A stocky man, with a heavy black mustache and deep-set, sleepless eyes. The nametag on his breast read sepúlveda.

  I thought of lunging at the carabinero, gouging his eyes, wresting his gun from him. But I was not young, even then, and near naked. I felt very small.

  “Rafael Avendaño?” he said.

  “Where is Alejandra?” I managed to say.

  Sepúlveda glanced at the soldier. He approached, lifted his rifle, reversed it, and struck me in my already-wounded eye with the weapon’s stock. Such a casual movement. The pain blossomed, so outrageous, the sensation of the blow expanded to suffuse my whole body. It was as if my toe and my palm and my calf and forearm; every pore, every tooth, every hair; my bones and sinew; every bit of me felt the outrage done to my eye, simultaneously. Pain was the sum of my body. I could no longer think of my body in parts. All was one. The air vibrated, electric. I felt all my blood being pushed through the maze of my body’s corridors and passageways, pulsing. And then I felt nothing. I picked myself up off the floor and retook my seat in the chair. It was no longer uncomfortable. A dislocation came with the blow.

  “Rafael Avendaño?” he said.

  It was easier to speak than to nod. “Yes.”

  He made a small mark on his clipboard. “Welcome home,” he said.

  “What—” I said. Sepúlveda raised his eyebrows quizzically in response. “What is going on?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “I imagine you would have some questions. There has been some unrest throughout Magera. The resistance has been very active in recent days.” He removed his spectacles and cleaned the lenses with a white handkerchief. “I’m afraid they managed to kill President Pávez.”

  Despite the pain, my first incl
ination was to laugh at the absurdity of his statement. Pávez was a socialist! Most regarded him as an ally and Pávez’s nephew was an early firebrand in the socialist movement. It was ridiculous.

  Yet I kept my expression still and did not laugh or exclaim.

  Sepúlveda returned his glasses to his face. “Currently, our generals have reestablished order.”

  “Who is in charge?” I asked.

  “It is a commission of equals, of course. But General Vidal is the eldest,” Sepúlveda said.

  “A junta, then,” I said.

  Sepúlveda frowned. “I was hoping that as our guest—a laureled and renowned poet!—you would offer more substantive commentary.” He sighed. “Let us earn a crust, then.” He flipped a page on his clipboard. “Alejandra Llamos has a sister, does she not?”

  Alejandra’s sister? Why would they want—

  “Answer the question, please,” Sepúlveda said. The soldier stepped closer to me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Ofelia.” It is so easy to fall when one is hurt, afraid, and naked. These are things I tell myself now, rather than “Where is she now?” as Sepúlveda asked then.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “Yet she visited you in Santo Isodoro,” he said.

  “She visited Alejandra,” I said. “And I am sleeping with Alejandra. Where is she?” I said before I could stop myself. The soldier raised his rifle to strike me again, but Sepúlveda shook his head imperceptibly, stilling the other man.

  “You will be reunited in time,” he said. “If you are cooperative.”

  “I am a son of Magera,” I said. “You cannot hold me.”