Tactile values. Movement. The ground chalked and blocked.
And Lupi himself converted into both a character and a viewer, at whose back stretched many rows of unoccupied seats, while what he faced were skies of cinema impromptu; the world as nickelodeon, it had stood him safe passage through from the simplest discomfiture to moments of pandemonium, like that once in Turin where the riot reached its peak and he discovered himself at the center of the melee helping to turn this van over, to cram a shirt, lit as a torch, into its gas tank.
Movie always had a wit and will to take circumstance and improve its potential for romance, adapt it, make it seem more human (was this a contradiction in terms?)—it helped with the ritual tedium unto death of firing up his stove to get the water boiling for the rice. It helped him through those times when he was all alone in his small flat where the cobbles outside were drowned under rat-brown winter as the whistles of the trains were heard coming in and leaving the station whose acres of tracks spread across the street beneath his window, until steam fogged the window up. It was a spice, an elixir, a principle, a charm, and its style varied with the mood of what it was meant to transform. Hollywood was there, but so was Wim Wenders or Bergman, Fellini if he felt like it, Tati. Chaplin, Brando, Latin lover Rossano Brazzi, but also the simplest hacks from Bud Spencer, the big Neapolitan swimmer, to blue-eyed Terence Hill—the giant heroes of classic spaghettis like Lo chiamavano Trinità and Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità —all were models for movies, were movieable. Crises, denouements … more crises, more denouements.
Movie itself flowed beyond, deep into a half-world which no screen could ever reflect and whose sounds could never be heard.
Now, denying reality was a periodic necessity. This was a very different act than movie as it provided nothing by way of entertainment, and was far more an exercise of deliberate self-deception. Yet the central thing he had seen, the thing it was incumbent upon him to bear witness to and to validate if necessary, to vouch before Owen Berkeley for its existence with all the authority of firsthand knowledge—this he could not really bring himself to understand. It was a thin line, he thought. Item, he knew what he had seen in the village.
Item, he knew what he had experienced.
Item, the water was cold and the women’s legs were as muscular as the men’s. And the men’s legs were as naked, smooth, and brown as the women’s.
Item, the parrot swore in three languages. He even knew what they were. Latin, Spanish, and Poton. He knew he could only make out the Latin, but what the parrot said was skillfully bawdy. And moreover, he had to admit, none of this was movie, not the parrot, not the villagers whose genitals he could see so clearly from under the baptismal water of the spring, not the shaman, and assuredly not the war, which was a basic problem, since wars are best kept on screens—though battles are staged in theaters and ammunition, like film, is kept in canisters until it, like film, is needed to shoot someone.
Regardless, he found it hard to believe it had all taken place without someone’s elaborate preparation. It had gone too well, and too easily. Here he was, being paid to accompany the old man from a point in Honduras to another point on the Hudson River. A stopover in New York. Simple enough, and remunerative. He was asked to carry a parcel, make a presentation of the materials and evidence, to smile (Krieger had demonstrated how to make just the right smile) and let the quality of the product “speak for itself.” José Martí, the Cuban revolutionary, had told the story of what it was like to live, as he put it, in the bowels of a monster. Lupi, who lived the better part of his life in rigorous, if foggy, opposition to America and Americans (all an amorphous mass of evil that stirred his heart when he was young and Vietnam was raging), felt he had entered the monster’s very blood. Like any good monster’s, this blood was green.
The last thing he wanted to know (although, because Krieger already told him, more or less, he did) was the precise nature of the contents of this parcel and why it was Owen Berkeley needed the old man. Bad for personal welfare. Get yourself in trouble. Nor should he have shown any interest in knowing about those who placed these responsibilities in his hands, or those who would take them on at the other end. These were fundamental strictures and yet so far he had not done well abiding by them. Kill the messenger. He knew that one, too—but try as he might he found it almost impossible to recognize those circumstances when it would be better to study his own shoelaces.
He was traveling under psychological inertia, through a plane in space that was more dangerous than he felt equipped to answer to and, he averred, caught upon this bum reel where there seemed no alternative but to conform to the course established—moon orbiting an earth long since burnt out. Item, again. Could he trust that he had even reached New York—was that what this was? Probably yes. No, he could trust that much, yes. Okay, place to start. He was the alien here, not these other people; he liked Hannah, liked the old Indian: he was the one who was out of place, not them. But why had these people, this group, this loose pattern of contacts (that was the phrase used by that guy Bernhardt back in Zurich)—Bernhardt, the fat one, Krieger, all those characters he suspected had to be actors, perhaps even professional pornographers—why had they entrusted him, Lupi, an outsider, to make the crucial connection? And how could he who as a boy had the hobby of indexing reliquaries of all the most famous cathedrals to find out if there was another crusty old metatarsal of St. Catherine there behind the glass, one he could add to his census (seven such holy objects he had tabulated by his fourteenth birthday, several in Tuscany alone)—how could he be expected to believe the old man was really four hundred and eighty years old?
Even a few days ago high in the blue Nicaraguan sierras, packing a trail with his two guides, frail boys in torn cotton pajamas who marched before and after him, taciturn, sullen, escorting him up through the wet red ribbons of foot-wide paths, he had had his doubts and found himself already beginning to wish he’d turned Bernhardt down when the proposition was first made—Bernhardt with his ironed T-shirt; just insane.
“You like cigarettes?” he asked the youth who walked behind the skinny withers and swishing brown-gray tail of the mule. He had dismounted. He was sore from rocking on the thin back of the animal, saddleless, for so long; he fell in step beside the boy, taking in the landscape and waiting for something to happen. “Cigarettes?—these?”
The boy took two of the cigarettes from his pack, and tucked them into his shirt pocket. He kept walking.
“You don’t want to smoke it? Non lo fumi? Fumare?” he mimed, two fingers pressed V-shaped to his lips, and inhaled exaggeratedly, moving his hand away to the side of his face to exhale. “Smoke? see, like this?”
The boy shook his head from shoulder to shoulder.
“What’s your name?” but getting no response he tried in Italian. “Tuo nome? Ch’ é?”
“¿Mi nombre? me llamo Bautista.”
The boy was offered but would accept no more cigarettes, nor the square of half-melted chocolate, pocketknife, nor even the bulky gold ring with the two ruby-eyed intertwined dragons. And they’re acting as if it’s my trustworthiness that’s in question, Lupi thought, almost snapping out at Bautista. He must have been losing his mind to have proffered the ring—which was gaudy, true, but had been a present from Nini, her uncle’s, or grandfather’s, an heirloom that he declared would never leave his person—with some edgy, unformed thought of coaxing some clues about what he could expect ahead here, as if knowing about anything in advance would make it easier to get through.
Ridiculous idea. Another conceit. He bridled back the horse, got on its back again and rode, reciting multiplication tables to kill time. Bautista had taken the lead, and at the sharp downward bend in the trail, so narrow the party was reduced to single file with Lupi at the middle, they dropped into a green, shaded crevice and picked their way down to the rope-lashed wood bridge which spanned the white water breaking on the rocks. The gorge echoed and reechoed, a continuous needling applause.
When he saw the faces, aloft in the green, spectral, floating in the darkness above the successful artifice of their camouflage uniforms, that roar converted to a wistful pulsing silence. Lupi fell like dead weight down over the horse’s head and grabbed with his mud-smeared hands for the rifle the boy toted out before him. Though he caught the cylinder it would not come away from the boy, held by a wide strap over his shoulder. Bautista reeled around suddenly pointing it in Lupi’s face. He looked from the cold metal anus of the rifle’s bore to Bautista’s chipped teeth and back. With his arms outstretched he whispered but to no avail since the boy, who withdrew half a pace, couldn’t understand him. The boy tried to make him stand up, jerking his chin, but he refused, pointing out into the foliage where the ash-blackened faces appeared. The faces could be heard crying out, and Bautista ducked down just before the blast of fire cut through overhead. Lupi felt the congealment of fluids spread like hardening fans in his cheeks—carmine fans—as bullets cut branches and distorted air about his head.
He dropped from his knees in a heap to the shallow mud. He lay on his side. His hands touched his cheeks, mouth, neck, forehead, but when he pulled his palms away to see, there was no blood. Bautista left them beside the trail after the fusillade ceased. Birds went silent, but soon sang on as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. Perhaps nothing had, Lupi commented to himself as he attended other explosions down the pass, though there too, in the rocky, narrow gorge, sweet sounds reechoed afterward.
Bautista returned half an hour later, and spoke to the other boy rapidly in Spanish. They signaled for Lupi to get back on the horse. He was conducted to an outpost two hours’ distance from the site of the skirmish. He asked questions, was disdainfully ignored by both his escorts, and a third boy—a wiry, older figure—who appeared to live in this small house, a farmer. After a supper of orange-yolked eggs mixed with tomatoes, a toasted cob of corn, rice, heavy black coffee, he was left to sleep on a rug-draped board cot. A new guide took him the next morning back to the village where he had begun the day before.
Lupi dismounted, cursing, and was led into the low building with blue graffitied walls.
“What are you doing back here,” said the fat man, whose skin, the color of an overripe green olive, bulged into rotundity where it was visible at the extremities of his tired suit. Even the deep, insincere voice conveyed an essential unctuousness as it contended with his lips, continually moistened by his tongue.
“You tell me.” A girl came to the table. “Una cerveza,” he said, and she left.
“Por favor,” the Nicaraguan added. He drank a clear liquor that smelled of mesquite from the tumbler and his hand, marvelously spherical so bloated it was, replaced the glass on the table. Lupi could hear a game of pool being played in another room. Ivory clicked, the balls caroming over the felt-covered slate.
“So, I quit.”
“You quit,” returned blankly, in the same tone as the por favor, meant as a comment on the lack of manners.
“Look, I’ve wasted all this time sitting waiting listening to you, day after day you telling me nothing. Telling me all this stuff about how great Somoza was despite the death squads, the kaibiles, the guardias, the CIA. All your theories on this and that, what do I care? Now I spend the day riding around only to be sent right back? I’m giving back the advance Bernhardt gave me.”
Counterpoint of balls and the men’s voices mouthing obscenities, advice about strategies to the players, bets, insults, jokes. The girl returned with a bottle and set it on the table. The bottle had no label.
“What did you do that you are back here?” The edges of his smile pressed down.
“Nothing, I rode, I walked. I followed your Bautista.”
“What else, señor. You don’t go up and come back to me so fast and tell me you did not do anything. What did you do, something you must have done besides enjoy your ride.”
“I made sure not to step in the caca after the donkey.”
“Why did you give a cigarette, such kindness to strangers?” He put his tumbler before him and stared at his fingernails with a grimace, as if he were infuriated by them. “Well, you see, you have your answer already. You wanted to make friends, right. And what are friends for? They are willing to shield us from criticism, to hide our errors, so? and your error, no need to go into it—but you know what would’ve happened if you fired that rifle, hit somebody, then you would be in the war, we all would be in the war.”
“I mean I thought they were going to ambush—”
“Stupid, just stupid. I ask Bernhardt for a man with two qualities, no more, that he be virgin, and that he be smart. No record and intelligent, reliable. But look at this. No good at all. Have you ever heard of a position called the iguana?”
“Position of what?”
“Very popular in Honduras. They tie you up hands and feet together behind your back. They use strips of rubber taken from inner tubes so as to leave no marks. They like to strip you naked and if your, how to put?—credentials—if your credentials are suspicious they hang you all night from the ceiling in the cellar. It can go on for months before you’re disappeared.”
“So?”
The fat man pushed his chair back from the square-topped table (whose surface was a palimpsest of burn marks, carved initials, crude images) and got to his feet. “You stay here.” He pulled a watch out of his pocket, pressed the button that popped the burnished cover away to reveal its face. Nicotine-yellowed fingers snapped it shut and slid it off their tips into the pocket. “You just wait here, have another of those, be polite, huh? say per favore.”
Lupi stood up. He hadn’t intended the chair to tip over behind him. “I already said I quit.”
“Right, you wait here,” and turned a broad back on Lupi, who helplessly studied the creases of his suit in the dull yellow of the receding afternoon, the sun having dipped low into naked trees, the sky phlegmatic as he retreated under cones thrown from the ceiling lamps.
He moved with an exquisite laboriousness, diligent, attentive to the oddity of his stout branches and weighty drapery. The effect was as if, caught inside these voluminous clothes, he was swimming, belaboredly, across deep water against clashing undertows. Soon at the far end of the bar, the door came open, and beyond Lupi caught sight of a reassuring backdrop of foliage, the red clay street and a wall of volcanic, gray stone on the side overgrown by lush green succulents, a basking place for lizards. He filled the doorway, left the veranda which fronted the building, whose vines toppled and twisted down the length of supporting posts. Lupi picked up the chair and slumped down into it. Enervated, the sheaths along each of his nerve endings had dissolved in acidity, as if from some source in his chest a constant flow of electric charge was pulsing, radiating across these bare nerves. He tried to concentrate on his breath, in out, in out, tried to slow it, allowed it to penetrate only through his nostrils to the shallow ceilings of his lungs. He tried to think of a joke. He finished the rest of his cerveza.
The girl appeared at the table to take the empty bottle away. She hesitated at his side, worrying her strings of beads.
“You is American?” the beads delicately clattering, and Lupi glanced up sharply, saw the spheres gathering light in smoke, looked down. “You here with this man?” she persisted and Lupi looked again into her casually lazy eyes, surprised at his own paranoia. He had been thinking, when she began to speak, of how the fat man had confiscated his passport from him before he had been sent out with the two boys into the mountains. “Like a little leash, señor Matteo,” and when the girl spoke it was as part of the pyramiding conspiracy—a conspiracy in which he had deemed himself to be partner or at least an employee, until now he began to suspect he might be an object rather than an actor.
“I don’t see any man.”
“This one, this one is just left,” the girl insisted, lifting her hand away from the necklace and pointing in the direction of the door.
“Who cares whether I was or not?” his eyes distracte
d from the renewed play of fingers and beads to the suggestion of breasts under the fabric. The girl saw this, smoothed her pale brown dress, turned away, not indignantly or coquettishly, but with seeming dissatisfaction. He followed the row of buttons down the length of her back to her hips and watched her as she walked, in the artificial twilight of the bar, back through a doorway hung with hemp strands. In his thighs he experienced a pang, like being burned, at considering the smoothness of those thighs, their musculature. It was easy to imagine his face pressed into the folds of her dress at the base of the row of undone buttons, to imagine how she might move under him.
When he attempted to climb to his feet to seek out the rooms hidden behind the curtain he found he couldn’t. His legs were dead on the hard chair. Rapturous, migrant dialogue of the pool players filled the adjoining room. He watched a scrawny dog as it picked its way along the floor, its dry nose spotted black and pink. It sneezed as it wandered forward, tail tightly tucked between bony legs, hipbones alternately rising and falling under the patchy dun coat. It passed into the room where the men were playing. Their dialogue also rose and fell away, unknowingly miming, Lupi saw, the mutt’s hips, up and down—and fell to silence as one of the players took aim, shot, sent the cue ball rolling at its target, effecting some reaction based on the luck of the shot.
“Pobrecito Miguel. Esto es porque su mujer lo pone los cuernos con los soldados,” came a cry. This is the reason his woman’s taken to sleeping with ex-guardias, over at her sister’s house, Libyans, Cubans, cattle rustlers, Contras, don’t matter who it is so long as they got the third leg, a good long red healthy one and two big balls to keep her busy squealing over.
“¿Todo está bien en la casa?” Things all right, honeypie? he asks her after the day picking coffee beans.
“O yo tengo resfriado, tengo un constipado de cabeza.” She has a headache, a toothache, no she’s caught a cold.
“Espero que no sea nada.”
Come Sunday Page 4