A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Surely not Avendaño. He can’t be Avendaño. Look at him. A shadow of a man.

  This is not Avendaño.

  And I wasn’t. Avendaño was gone. That wastrel man, so full of pride, died in his cell.

  When I could talk, I sent the men to my old flat near the university, to retrieve my checks, and what money I had there. They came back with the checks, but no cash. A locker full of clothes. Vidal and his generals did not have the foresight to confiscate the belongings of enemies of the state. At least not then. I told the men there was nothing in my possession they could not have. I left them a small fortune. They laughed and fed me lamb stew and salmon and poured wine into chipped glasses in their small houses. The sea called outside. A reminder. The junta and Vidal seemed very far away.

  They placed me, clad in rough-spun laborer’s garb, on a container ship, holds full of copper wire, bound for Cape Town, then Nouakchott, and then Lisbon. I spent those yawing days at sea wondering if I still inhabited the miasma, or if I’d ever left.

  I found, eventually, warmer shores.

  Now I am well, and my family money—I never had much want—has been transferred to me here. My publishers know I’m alive, but not many others. I have kept few contacts in Magera. To what end? Vidal’s arm is long. I dare not return home, I dare not publish again. I don’t think I can write poetry anymore.

  A poet sees what the world offers and gives voice to its wonderful strangeness. We look at the world, and all those who move within it, with frank stares and brutal words. It was not just an eye I gave up, in that cell on the mountainside. It was so much more than that.

  This manuscript will remain secret, until the time comes for all to be known.

  I am content. As content as I can be.

  Some knowledge forbids happiness. Some knowledge makes action impossible. I spend my days trying to find what pleasure I can. They’re filled with garlic prawns and polenta and lovely rich wines, and my nights are replete with aromatic smoke and pisco and sweets, soft music, and the smell of the Alboran Sea.

  And forgotten dreams of the things I have done. And what was done to me.

  Forgive me for forgetting your name.

  Forgive me for forgetting.

  Forgive me, Alejandra.

  5

  The Eye was, most assuredly, insane. Possibly the stress of being an exile had driven him to this particular psychosis. As Magerans, we are all prone to paranoia, by either experience or necessity. And this manuscript—apparently the only writing Avendaño had done since the coup—stood as testament to that. The man’s demented imagination was prodigious and disgusting by turns. Whatever injury that had occurred to his eye during Vidal’s coup (and I do believe that part, at least, the injury), it could have resulted in an infection that spread to his brain, leading to a fevered perception of reality. The rampant horde of imagery: body parts, blood, outrage, loss, guilt, mutilation, fecal matter, chiaroscuro, food. The terrifying realization of madness crept in as I read—breathless and stunned, galloping down dark paths, a pornography of excruciating psychic pain—if not by him, then by me, as his audience.

  The stress of being a fugitive alone would have broken most men and some women. His time in the hands of Vidal’s secret police had shattered him—left him with a burden of guilt it was not wholly clear he deserved. It became muddy the further along the testament went. But despite all that, it did give me an idea of what might have happened to my mother. And for that, I was grateful, however much it hurt.

  One thing was clear, he could not be abandoned and forgotten. If I abandoned him, left him to whatever end he found in his enfeebled and deranged mental state, I would be forsaking any right I had to return home. Avendaño was like an infection—I had spent many years not thinking about my homeland, and now it was forefront in my mind. Mother came to me unbidden, and my father, before the drink took him, had become mingled in my mind with The Eye. Avendaño would vanish back into that forgotten landscape. One of the disappeared. I could not allow it, for my own sanity’s sake.

  I had to find Avendaño and help him.

  * * *

  Claudia did not call.

  The semester had wound down to its inevitable end—papers, grading, wheedling students, the desolation of faculty offices, vacant cafeterias, and eventually a two-week stint of barren campus before it was all to start up again. And I came to a conclusion regarding The Eye. He had never contacted me, nor had he contacted the bank. Something would have to be done.

  “I have to take a leave of absence,” I said to Matilda Orés, my faculty head. “Just for the summer.”

  “You won’t come back,” she said, shaking her head.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Word is you’ve got some patron keeping you in style now. An old lech,” she said.

  Whatever contortions my expression went through, she realized I was not taking that well.

  “I’m going back to Magera. A family emergency,” I said.

  “Magera?” she said. “Santa Maria, you’re really asking for it.”

  “I just want to know if I’ll have my position when I return,” I said.

  Matilda shrugged. “Filling your classes this summer—even though it’s a light load—will be difficult. What’s the emergency?”

  “My uncle is dying,” I said. “Cancer. I’m the only living family member.” I can lie with facility if I have enough preparation.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. She didn’t sound it.

  “We’re all sorry,” I said.

  She produced an official Universidad de Málaga faculty absentee form, sat me down, and had me fill it out. When I was finished, she picked it up, looked at it, and slipped it in an envelope, addressed it to the board.

  “Your advisees need to be shifted to someone else, and any clubs or groups you supervise will need to be adjusted. Are you on any committees of master’s or doctoral candidates?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Let me be honest. You don’t have any close friends here who could take up your slack. If you were beloved by the faculty, they’d jump in, but—”

  “I’m not,” I said. I looked down at myself. “I eat alone. I wear black.”

  “That is apropos of nothing. Yet it is true,” Matilda said, nodding. “I can’t tell you much other than your job probably won’t be here when you get back. If we have to replace you for a summer, we might as well just replace you,” she said, shrugging. “Not a lot I can do about it. But you’re young,” she said, as if that meant loss, or change, did not affect me as much. And maybe she was right. “And it’s possible we won’t find a replacement. So check in. If things go sour sooner than you expect—” She realized what she was saying, shook her head, and then nervously began packing up her papers and stuffing them into a briefcase. “Call or send a letter. You’ve got my number.” She stopped and looked at me. “You’re a good teacher and I don’t want to lose you, but more and more, this university is run like a business and I have people I have to answer to. So . . . I’ll do what I can.”

  Afterward, I went to the bank. “I need to withdraw all of my money.” A hundred thousand pesetas that Avendaño paid me, and more. I never managed to burn through my own pay plus the monthly stipend. It was the first time in my life I was flush.

  The bank manager counted out more money than I had ever seen or held before, and I signed for it. I found myself clutching my bag to my chest on the way home.

  Back at the apartment, I checked the message machine. There were two calls, both around a minute of crackling silence. No Avendaño. No Claudia. I erased them. After calling information, I contacted a local travel agent about a flight to Buenos Aires and she said she could have an itinerary by the end of the week.

  That night, I turned my attention to the photographs of Opusculus Noctis, since they figured so prominently in Avendaño’s testament. I compared my translations with his writing in the testament and continued on, focusing on the photo I had come to think of as
A Passage to Dreams. His “doorway” out of his cell. Maybe the photograph held some inkling as to the source of The Eye’s madness. Knowing it, I could know his mind. Still Claudia did not call. I worked through the Latin, Quam alibi, ex solis luce refulgens. Caro referta regia mundi et villae multa cubicula iure pretium, pretium clarissimae licet adhuc in atriis gallerys paris . . . there are other worlds than these, and with the right payment, one can move through the universe’s rooms and halls. The pretium is dear.

  After setting out tuna for Tomás, as I began to think of him, I poured vodka over ice for myself, sat at the kitchen table, and began smoking, poring over the photographs, surrounded by typewriters.

  The night wore on. I boiled eggs, ate them. I made coffee, found it bland, poured myself more vodka. I picked up the phone, recalling Claudia’s number, hand poised over the rotary dial. I hung up without calling her. Reread sections of Below, Behind, Beneath, Between, the ones focusing on Avendaño’s translation. I found myself in that same strange state in which long periods of study for my doctorate left me—dissociative, sleepless, and wrung out. The rucks and runnels of my mind blank except for that which I focused on. Pinching filters from the cigarettes, I twisted their ends until they were puckered little white sausages, stronger now than normal. Their smoke burned when I took it into my lungs. I searched The Eye’s room, looking for I don’t know what. Returning to the kitchen, I found A Little Night Work before me, both The Eye’s typed Latin and the rumpled photographs. The vodka tasted like water, the cigarettes, even filterless, as plain as air. I should be thinking about packing, I thought. I guess I am. What will I need? Warm clothes, boots, gloves, lots of money. Nothing else. I felt some sort of kinship with Avendaño, laboring for Sepúlveda and Cleave, if that really happened—I entered a soporific waking-dream state, head full of grammar and declensions. But also, displaced, lost. I was leaving home, to go home.

  I rolled the Latin over my tongue like a bitter lozenge, sounding the words out. Scribbling over a piece of paper, I took down my interpretation of the words, in Spanish. You can only enter the river once, they say, and I was in it. I placed a Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald disc on the turntable and in some Latinate oblivion, began singing foreign words to “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” that must’ve sounded deranged to the cat if he lurked about, or someone strolling on the street below, passing my open windows.

  I did not notice when the black-clad figure appeared in the room. Holding a photograph of A Passage to Dreams, hunched over, looking at it so closely that my hair fell down on either side of my face, to me the figure was simply a darker lock, a tress hanging indistinct in the corner of my vision. It was this photograph, these words, he read before taking out his own eye. There is a shadow of the photographer, the foot of a chair captured at the image’s corner.

  I was smoking too much, my throat ached, and I was at a state of drunkenness where I felt elated, sober. The room was hazy with blue smoke. The French doors leading to the balcony were cracked, the air was warm, and I could hear conversation from passersby coming from outside, the buzzy honking of mopeds and cars, the cry of cart vendors down off the Paseo Maritimo below, near the shore, mingling with the strains of Louis Armstrong’s pealing horn.

  The record ended, the needle taking its final plunge to the record’s center. The tone arm, through some sensory mechanism, detected this and rose from the vinyl, and seated itself back in its cradle.

  Silence.

  The music, the world outside, the sea, the cars, the passersby. All quiet, as if they never existed.

  My eyes shifted in their sockets; I was arrested with fright yet straining to see. The lights in the apartment flickered and, somehow, I realized all of Málaga’s lights were flickering. Or maybe it wasn’t Málaga’s indecisive and irregular power supply—possibly it was something else pushing in. I could not tell.

  Awareness filtered in. My breath caught, and I turned my head slowly away from the photograph. A cigarette sat with an inch-long ash in the tray, spooling out thin blue-white smoke to the ceiling. Behind that smoke, indistinct and defocused, a man. He seemed as though I observed him through a camera with a long lens, and he was outside my depth of field. At any moment he could snap into focus. Despite the vodka, my heart began to skitter in my chest. My hand found a pencil; I gripped it like a dagger.

  I tilted my head to get a better look, pushing myself away from the table. His appearance warped and wavered, like a shadow puppet from a candle. Somehow, he remained behind smoke. The room darkened and filled with his presence, hazy, muddied. A flash of water, over my head, full of sediment and silt, hair floating in a benthic halo. Then it was gone. Yet the occlusion remained. I wondered if something was on fire, if I left the burner on when I boiled eggs.

  But I wasn’t choking. I could breathe—no smoke, no opalesced water. The shape—the man—seemed to loom larger in the room, a shadow lengthening up a wall.

  Coming closer.

  Then there was another movement, smaller. More centered. Tomás stood inside the open balcony doors, head canted down, so his eyes seemed ominous and veiled at the same time. He took five slow, measured paces into the room, staring unblinking at the shape. The cat made no sound, gave no hiss, but the scarred fur on his back rose in hackles. He placed himself between the dark figure and me.

  The cat’s action snapped me out of whatever it was that held me silent. “Who—” I started. “What do you want?”

  I do not know what I expected. For him—it—to answer I’m from the CIA. Or I’m an ANI assassin. To reveal himself in a puff of diabolical smoke as Vidal himself?

  To show himself as Cleave?

  Tomás took another step, his paw hesitating, as if testing invisible currents in the air. He placed his paw and settled, sphinxlike, on the floor. Oh, he’s resting now? Is this real? I thought. And then I realized that, no, Tomás was readying himself for a pounce. I turned to face the figure, brandishing the pencil. If the cat could attack, then so could I.

  And then the darkness lost cohesion, dissipating. I laughed. Took another drink of vodka. What tricks loneliness and alcohol can play on a person!

  Yet Tomás remained there, silent, still, and watchful, for the rest of the night.

  6

  I bought a military backpack from one of the sports stores that offered hunting and fishing supplies for the adventurous sort and returned to the apartment. I found Claudia pounding on the door, yelling, “Open up! I know you’re in there, Isabel! You can’t hide from me!”

  I said her name and she froze, midstrike upon the door. Her head pivoted toward me on gimbals.

  “You,” she said. “You—” Words failed her.

  I passed her, unlocked the door, opened it. I gestured for her to enter. She looked at me warily.

  I am, after all, very much like my mother. When things escalate, I grow cold, distant. I’m sure my face reflected this. Claudia became more and more agitated.

  After placing the backpack in the bedroom, I set the kettle to boil as Claudia stared at me and huffed and puffed until she grew calm enough to speak.

  “What?” she said. “You were just going to leave? No call? No word?”

  I placed tea bags in a cup, poured steaming water over them, and raised the cup in offering to Claudia. She shook her head, vehemently. A little too vehemently.

  “I didn’t think you’d care, honestly,” I said.

  “Care?” she said. “I don’t just fuck anyone. Of course I’d care.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe you’d be too occupied to notice.”

  “Is this about Laura?” Claudia asked. “Laura is great. You’d like her. We asked you to join us.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it. It would be so easy just to enter into a spat. A little lover’s argument about who said and did what.

  I won’t do that. Can’t do that.

  “There’s more to it than Laura. It’s Avendaño,” I said.

  “You told Tilly that your uncle was dying of cancer.
She’s asking everyone in your department to take over your classes.”

  I ignored that. “He’s gone missing. And I think I might know where he is. But I can’t help him if I don’t go back home,” I said.

  “Who cares? He’s a relic!”

  I wanted to say, I care! He’s Mageran! And the closest thing to family I have, but it would have been hard to explain, even to myself.

  Instead, I said, “It’ll only be for the summer, and I’ll be back.”

  “No, you won’t. You’re going to Magera! I’ve done some reading up on it. The lunatic who’s in charge there tortures and kills students. He ‘disappears’ intellectuals, or anyone his secret police think could be subversive.” She was furious. “And you’ve got subversive written all over you. I can’t imagine that Señor Vidal will spare lesbian professors from his scourging of the country.”

  “I will not wear a sign regarding those I like to kiss,” I said.

  Claudia laughed. “You never have,” and then she was kissing me and I could not think for a long while. From the kitchen to the bedroom, her hands were on me and mine on her. Oblivion through taste, touch, smell.

  When we could breathe again, she said, “I’m glad you reconsidered.”

  “Me too,” I said. I pressed into her body, glad of the closeness and warmth. Tomás entered the bedroom, paced around the bed, hopped on the chair nearby, and watched us for a long while.

  “Here’s a little perv,” Claudia said. “Lookin’ for a show, buddy?”

  I thought about the figure I had conjured, vodka-drunk and translation-fevered, and how Tomás had intervened. How did he know I needed something or someone to play into my imaginary intruder? The alternative was untenable. Could I tell Claudia any of that? She wouldn’t understand and I couldn’t express it in such a way that she wouldn’t want me to be checked out by a psychiatrist.

  So I kissed her.

  Tomás, bored, blinked slowly once, hopped down from the chair, and padded out of the room.