A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  * * *

  We spent the next five days basking in each other’s company. Whatever distance had grown between us was gone during that time. Food, sex, liquor; laughter, lightness, music. We watched television late at night, and I took her to see a Mexican luchador film at the Cinema la Playa, where the masked Toro fought a number of voodoo-possessed zombies who seemed intent on molesting Toro’s busty aunt, Maria. Claudia laughed throughout the screening, and I couldn’t help but compare her sense of humor to Avendaño’s. They would like each other, I thought. Or hate each other. But they’d definitely be quite a bit more than I could handle as a pair.

  One afternoon, the post arrived and we were just recovering from a postlunch siesta in which very little sleeping occurred. I roused myself to collect the letters and sat in the kitchen with a cigarette flipping through envelopes. One had no return address.

  I opened it and withdrew a torn piece of yellow legal paper.

  -19.569912, -70.197901

  Rafael

  “What’s that?” Claudia asked. She stood at the bedroom door, in a T-shirt and nothing else.

  I slipped the paper back into the envelope. “Nothing. Just junk for Avendaño,” I said.

  She kissed the back of my neck. “I might be hungry again,” she said.

  “You’re always hungry.”

  “This is true,” Claudia said, and nothing else. I liked that about her. She didn’t feel the need to add Hungry for you or quote Police or Rolling Stones lyrics. I put down the mail and returned her attentions.

  On the sixth day of our time together, I woke before Claudia, as usual, dressed in jeans, boots, and a black T-shirt, and pulled my hair back in a severe knot. Taking a piece of paper, I wrote:

  Claudia—

  I have left word with the landlord that you will be staying here for the duration, if you so wish. The Bank of Barcelona will have a 10,000-peseta-a-month stipend for the person who watches over Avendaño’s apartment and I’d rather it be you than anyone else. The rent, of course, is already paid. It is a wonderful apartment and I’m grateful for the time we spent together here. I think there will even be enough room for Laura, if you wish. She is very lovely, and I think you’ll be happy together.

  Do not fret yourself about my departure; I doubt very much you will, anyway. It doesn’t seem within your character. Just as my character will not allow me to let Avendaño join the ranks of the disappeared without at least trying to find him.

  I will return.

  Feed the cat, for your protection.

  Isabel

  Leaving the note and keys on the kitchen table, I grabbed my backpack stuffed with clothes, manuscripts, photographs, and let myself out into the steaming Málaga morning. In my back pocket, a plane ticket, and in my wallet, two torn pieces of legal paper bearing the names Alejandra and Rafael.

  Within the hour, I was at the Costa del Sol Airport.

  By early morning, I was in Madrid, and before noon I was a thousand miles away, over the Atlantic, flying west to Buenos Aires.

  7

  Green patchwork on copper-brown fields. Brilliant standing water flashing from the sun after the long refraction of blue sea. We had crossed the Atlantic, along with the equator, and more than anything, something about the quality of light indicated to me I was closer to my childhood home. Magnetic fields from the innards of the earth tugging upon my belly; the subtle twinges of the Coriolis effect on the inner ear maybe; the secret calendar that my body kept, all these long years since I had been in Spain, indicated something was wrong, that the seasons were off, the sun was in the wrong place, and it was hot when it should be cold. Just as Málaga was heading into the swelter and sway of summer, in Buenos Aires autumnal light filtered into the cabin—ochre, russet, copper, ecru, carmine, blood-red. The stewardesses of the Iberia Airlines flight from Barcelona to Buenos Aires directed us to buckle our seat belts, finish our drinks, and extinguish our cigarettes, and after twenty-four hours, we obeyed all instructions with alacrity. From the window, I watched miniature trucks cast rich dust in long tails on dirt roads veining the fields surrounding the airport, growing larger, growing. Black wheels lowered, pneumatics cranked ailerons into awkward angles, and the dusky land rose to meet the plane with a screeching kiss and shudder.

  I had checked no baggage. At a counter, I exchanged half of my money to Argentinian pesos, and the rest to Mageran ones. Moving through the airport, I pressed through the crowds, listening to the rounded syllables and long vowels—the liquid, mellifluous accents of Argentinian Spanish speakers. I had been gone so long, even the same language sounded different. Weary from the flight yet exhilarated—it was just midday—I made my way out onto the street. Hustlers and grifters stalked the shoals of travelers, looking for a score—a shifting school of hawkers, escorts, chaperones, panders, facilitators. Catcalls and propositions, blaring beats from cassette players, cries of salesmen. A deluge of penetrating noise. Beyond the line of men, taxis cruised the surf like sharks. I hailed the most official-looking one, a black-and-yellow radio taxi, but the car just continued trawling for fares, ignoring me.

  “Allow me. You might be a little too short to be seen over this crowd,” a man said. I found him standing closer than I was comfortable with. I stepped away to get a good look at him and to prevent him from touching me. He wore a black suit that, despite its natty cheapness, fit his lean frame very well. His accent was harsh, his vowels long when they should be short, and short when they should be long; the sum of all the little parts of him—his hair, his nails, his complexion, and his tie, his shoes—told me he was American.

  Having read Avendaño’s testament, the fact he was American made me very nervous.

  “Hey,” he said, seeing my expression and body language. He held up his hands, not to hail but to prove his innocence in some way. “I’m just trying to help.”

  “I’ll hail my own taxi,” I said.

  “I’m happy to—”

  I turned abruptly and walked away from him at a brisk pace, not looking back, breath coming fast. At any moment I was sure his hand would fall on my backpack and jerk me off my feet.

  It did not.

  When I was near the northern end of the platform, I was able to get the attention of a radio taxi and instructed the driver to get us away from the airport and take me to a hotel near any commerce center. He dropped me at a newer hotel, close to the city center, towering twenty-five stories tall. I took a room, paying cash. It was expensive, but I couldn’t bring myself to hunt for something cheaper. I drank water from the sink, uncaring if it was safe, and fell into bed. I do not remember closing my eyes.

  * * *

  I woke in the dark, not knowing where I was.

  “Tomás?” I said, sitting up.

  The cat was not there. He was an ocean—a world—away.

  A shadow was, though. It loomed in the far corner of the room, near the dull shark’s eye of the television.

  “All right then, fucker,” I said. Tensing, I reached out and turned on the side-table light . . .

  Nothing. White stucco walls, puce-stained furniture a mockery of mahogany, green-and-yellow-patterned drapes. A hideous sfumato landscape above the bed.

  I had no watch and the clock near the television was unplugged, stalled on 3:12. The sky, from the window, looked blue-black; morning was hours away. I smoked and flipped through the Buenos Aires telephone book until I found the page I was looking for. Moto Mejor Real, motorcycle and moped sales. I tore the onionskin page from the book, neatly folding it and storing it in my bag.

  Afterward, I sat cross-legged on the bed and arrayed the photos and translations of A Little Night Work all around me, hoping the sight of them might keep my mind occupied, or, failing that, send me back into a slumber. I wanted some vodka but knew that would be hard to come by at this time of the morning. Other travelers, more prepared travelers, would have had a flask or have taken some of the tiny airplane bottles in preparation for this. I had not. I contented myself with toba
cco.

  The phone rang, extremely loud in the quiet of the room. I jerked, turning to look at the phone as if it were a rattling snake.

  I stretched out my hand, twitching when the phone rang again.

  I picked up the receiver and placed it to my ear.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Silence except for crackling. It sounded like the hiss and noise of an album once it has wound down, needle plowing through the uncharted inner center of vinyl.

  “Hello?” I said again. “Avendaño? Is that you?”

  Nothing.

  Feeling foolish and ignoring all the hairs standing up on my arm, I hung up the phone. A wrong number. It was a new hotel, and the switchboards were automated, I thought. A misfire of electrical impulses, triggering the ringer, dead air on the receiver. Simple.

  I spent the rest of the morning at the window, watching for the first light of dawn.

  * * *

  It was a 1981 Yamaha 465 Y2, orange with a blue seat. Racks and webbing for baggage, extra fuel canisters. New, knobby tires and no headlight. An American had ridden it from Southern California to Santo Isodoro in a sort of motorized South American ramble. The salesman—a tall, stubbled man with deep-set eyes and what I had come to think of as a Flock of Seagulls hairdo—wore a nametag that read duque and was ebullient about the machine.

  “You know how to ride?” he asked, shifting his weight back and forth. Maybe he had bad feet. Maybe he had too much energy. “Pretty big bike for someone your size.”

  “I used to ride when I was in—” I started. Stopped. Considered. “A long time ago. I’ll need to get back into the hang of it.”

  “Maybe you’d like to try out this Honda? Or the Suzuki over there? They’re smaller and you should have no trouble handling them.”

  “No,” I said. This was the same motorcycle that Marcia had taught me to ride right here in Buenos Aires, when I was getting my doctorate. I could, I thought, abandon all of this. Go to the shore, toss the photographs of Opusculus Noctis into the sea, and go find Marcia on this motorcycle, and we could ride north, or south. I had money. Anywhere but west. Anywhere but Magera.

  “This is the one,” I said.

  After a short test ride, we struck a bargain. It took almost half of my money (which was a considerable amount, indeed), but in the end he included a black futuristic, aerodynamic helmet that would totally obscure my face, two extra canisters of gasoline for cross-country travel, some heavy-duty riding gloves, and knee-high black motorcycle boots that had once belonged to a fourteen-year-old competitive rider until he hit puberty and outgrew them. It was cool here in Buenos Aires, and once I was on the road with the wind hitting me, it would be even colder. I pulled on the gloves, zipped up my leather jacket to my throat, and mounted the machine. With the blackout helmet on, and the motorcycle beneath me, I felt the urgency of what I was doing. You can walk through life not thinking about your decisions, moving forward down a path and never considering the different forks and choosing that got you to where you are at any point.

  But I was about to very deliberately choose a path.

  One that led to a place I both longed and was loath to go.

  But I was here for Avendaño.

  I kicked the machine to life and moved into traffic.

  I rode out, through the winding streets of the city, a single ink stroke moving through a Clorindo Testa rendering into rough drawings of Spanish civil engineers and back again, letting the machine remind me of the shifting of gears, the throttle and brake, as I passed the soaring, elegant fronts of granite buildings, down long plazas and impossibly wide boulevards, past parks and gardens, now brilliantly colored with the change of season, until the motorcycle didn’t buck and hitch with every gear change. It moved smoothly under me.

  Buenos Aires went on interminably, building stacked on building; the farther I rode, the more destitute and desperate those I passed seemed. Neighborhoods became disordered. Shantytowns and tenements loomed, brightly painted despite their inhabitants’ impoverishment, frilled with clothes on laundry lines strung from balcony to balcony. On the sidewalks, plump women in calico dresses dandled infants on their hips, ignoring the traffic passing so close to where they lived out great swaths of their lives. Their older children loitering on trash-littered stoops, or rampant in filthy, packed-dirt lots kicking footballs, smoking, fighting, cursing. All the fret and decrepit pomp of poverty, flashing by.

  The city passed away, the bay far behind me, the Río de la Plata a forgotten memory.

  North and west, through farmlands still lush, seething, and green, fed by Río Paraná. Combines and harvesters worked fields near mules and sturdy Argentinian ponies. Tawny wheat, green cotton, brilliant sunflower pocked by seed-oil refineries, dense sugarcane drenched in muddy river water. Boundaryless towns flashed by as the sun raced before me, falling westward. A police car followed me at Campana, a single bubble of blue flashing behind me; a small-town officer. I paid his bribe without even removing my helmet and drove on. I had no headlight, so when the pink-and-orange dusk spread itself against the sky, I stopped, spending the night in a picturesque, if decrepit, motel in a town called Cañada de Gómez that had no secure place to store my bike. I waited until no one seemed to be watching and managed to fit the motorcycle through the room’s door to sit, still hot and ticking, filling the space with the scent of four-cylinder exhaust. Still vibrating—an invisible quiver thrumming through my calves, my thighs, my hands, my ass—I ate at the local café, receiving strange looks from the patrons, and quickly retired to my room.

  When the telephone rang, I did not answer it. I simply let it ring in the stillness of the room and examined one of the photographs—La dulce bruma del dolor. The Sweet Miasma of Pain. Cleave had read Avendaño’s translation aloud to The Eye when they first met. It held significance for him. Would there be a voice on the other line if I answered the phone? Would it be Avendaño? Or would it be someone else? Someone speaking in a perfectly cultured Spanish?

  I left at dawn, rolling the Yamaha tail-first out into the blue half-light of morning. I felt as if there was some great reservoir of pressure building behind me, waiting to spew forth into the world. Full of questions and disassociated fear, I could not fix on any one thing. When I gassed up the motorcycle (I didn’t want to deplete my extra canisters while on the road) I noticed a van that seemed familiar from yesterday’s drive passing very slowly in front of the motel and wondered if I was being too paranoid. Cañada de Gómez was a farming town, far from the teeming bustle of Buenos Aires and Córdoba, and an unmarked maroon van shouldn’t have been reason for suspicion.

  Yet . . .

  I was dissatisfied. So I took alleys and many turnings down packed-dirt streets to find myself riding, full-bore, on roads rimmed with irrigation ditches and furiously rutted with mud. If someone watched from the town, I would simply be a rising plume of dust, a spray of muddy water in a rooster’s tail, a buzzing sound diminishing in the distance.

  In the helmet, the Yamaha’s body trapped between my thighs, cocooned in droning sound, I felt as though the white noise took shape around me, a trail, a universal vibration, a cascading particle wave, coterminous with the limits of my perception and the forward motion of the motorcycle. I thought I could feel what Avendaño meant when he described the miasma, but this was possibly its opposite—the movement of the world toward fulfillment, toward healing itself. The inertia of exaltation.

  Possibly it was just the joy of machinery and movement. Of progress.

  I don’t know.

  Never having been there before, I seriously misjudged the size of Córdoba. I thought it would be a remote hamlet, agricultural, some industry. Instead, I found a warren of buildings and what seemed hundreds of thousands of people. I located a cervecería, ordered beer and tortas fritas, and borrowed the bartender’s phone book. It being midday and the place being empty, he placed the house phone on the bar and retreated to the far end to smoke and read a tattered paperback on a barstool in th
e light streaming in from outside.

  There was no Nivia Campos listed, but I hadn’t really expected that. Avendaño had said in his letter she had never returned. There were hundreds of Camposes, however. So I picked the first and called.

  “Hello,” a man answered.

  “Hello,” I said, and gave my name. “I am looking for the family of a woman named Nivia Campos. She’s from here, though she moved to Magera when she married in—” Avendaño told me the year once, in passing, as we were drinking. I could not recall it. “The sixties.”

  “There money involved?” the man said.

  “As in, will I pay you? Um, I had not considered—”

  He hung up.

  The next listing was a young woman who knew three Nivia Camposes and their families, all under the age of twenty. The call after that got me an ancient woman whose voice sounded like rocks clattering down a hill. I asked her about Nivia Campos.

  “There’s a Nivia Alvéz on my cousin’s side,” she said. “But I know every Campos in Córdoba, smacked every bottom, dried every ear.”

  “This Nivia moved to Magera in the sixties to marry. A man named Avendaño. A Mageran poet,” I said.

  The phone disconnected.

  From across the room, the bartender said, “Avendaño? The Avendaño?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He stood, walked down the length of the bar to stand in front of me. “It’ll be a tough day, getting information, then,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “He had a mouth on him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The poet Avendaño was never a friend to Argentina,” he said.

  “It’s a big country,” I said. “Surely he couldn’t have offended all of it.”

  “No,” he admitted. “But let me think. He did call it . . . what was it . . . ‘the wine-colored boil on the ass of South America.’ Also, ‘a desolate nation of whores and drunkards without enough wits to pour water from a boot with the instructions written on the heel,’ I believe.” He laughed. How many other nations did Avendaño offend? The bartender continued: “I don’t care, but a lot of folks remember something like that. And even if they don’t remember what, exactly, he said, they remember they don’t like him.”