Far South

by David Enrique Spellman

  ‘These take seconds to cook,’ she said.

  I felt a deep sense of relief when Francesca brushed her fingertips against my face as she slid past me to sit on the windowsill again.

  ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’ Francesca said. ‘We have some delicious Brunello.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’d like that.’

  We were back on safe ground for a moment… theater, lunch… but they’d left me with a lot of unanswered questions. You know what? I didn’t go to the rehearsal that night. The lunch left me too tense. There was a strange chemistry in that house and I wasn’t yet absorbed into it. It wasn’t just the politics. They had a bond that I didn’t share yet. When a group of people gets together to create something on the stage… or on film… they share a vision, a reality that doesn’t let outsiders in very easily.

  So that night, I had dinner alone again. I spent the rest of the evening with my sketchbook and diary, drawing from memory some of the gargoyles from the church roof that I’d seen that day. I drew late into the night and I developed a story sequence and, in one panel, I tried to capture that rapturous expression that Francesca had on her face when the priest raised the host at the consecration. I didn’t think I got it right at all. I was too tired. I sketched in a profile of Bernini’s Saint Theresa in Ecstasy. That came out pretty good. Then I left the boards strewn all around the room and I crawled into bed.

  About nine thirty the next morning, there was a knock on the door. I pulled on a pair of jeans. When I opened the door of my hotel room, Francesca was standing there.

  ‘Have you had breakfast?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Would you like to?’ she asked me.

  I was a bit disoriented, and stripped to the half. I invited her in. I pulled a clean t-shirt out of the rucksack. And there was the storyboard on the floor with the half-finished drawing of Francesca. She picked it up. She was holding the board in her hands. I was holding the t-shirt in mine.

  ‘You make fumetti,’ she said.

  I told her I liked picture stories; that I’d been working on these panels for years; that they worked like a diary in some ways.

  ‘Do I really look like this?’ she asked me.

  ‘It will when I’ve finished,’ I said.

  ‘I’m a painter, too,’ she said.

  ‘You can show me your work some time,’ I said, ‘your paintings.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said in that strange high voice of hers, ‘when we go back to Rome.’

  Was that an invitation? I thought. I felt a bit jittery, then. I really wanted to go with her to Rome. I couldn’t say anything for a moment. I turned away from her. I draped the t-shirt over the foot of the bed, went over to the sink, ran some water, and splashed some on my face and under my arms, and over my chest. I dried off with the hotel towel and pulled on the t-shirt. I was mad at myself for being so tongue-tied. Or maybe I was being sensible. I couldn’t tell which.

  She’d got the boards in her hands and she was looking at the panels where her face was surrounded by the dog-faced demons and lions with the serpent’s tails and a pelican pecking at its breast to feed its chicks with its own blood.

  ‘This is fascinating,’ she said.

  ‘You’re a true believer,’ I said, trying to make it sound light.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m a radical believer.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ I said.

  She put down the boards and sat on the edge of the bed.

  I pocketed my wallet and picked up my keys, leaned back against the sink.

  ‘When I lived in Argentina, I became involved in the liberation theology movement,’ she said.

  That was the difference between me and her; I’d read about liberation theology when I was fourteen. She’d been immersed in it.

  I asked her if Gerardo had been involved.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘Gerardo, no. But it is why he had to get out of South America. He knew me and my friends, you see, and we were in his theater group and we were involved in liberation theology… so it wasn’t safe for him after some of us were questioned… were picked up. The military, they wanted names, and… and they made us give them names…’

  At this moment, I felt my body temperature drop.

  I was in a hotel room in Tuscany, the full morning sunshine slanting in through the shutters and leaving stripes across her back and her hair and her face, and I felt my blood had leached away from the surface of my skin. I had a sensation of dread. I had no conception at all as to what Francesca might have been through but I feared even to hear about it. I was there in Italy. I’d traveled through India and Nepal, I was a comic book artist, and an unemployed, just-qualified English teacher, and I could sense that this woman was about to reveal to me something that I knew was way beyond anything I’d ever experienced; something no one would ever want to experience.

  ‘In Buenos Aires,’ she said, ‘I studied drama, of course, and I became a member of the company… But some of us were quite… concerned about how things were… the military in power… we were young… we believed in social justice… we had things we could accomplish… we knew we could. And the dictatorship had to end… the oppression… the way the CIA controlled the governments in Latin America. I’d become part of the struggle… but I didn’t fit in with the communists… I did believe in direct action… There was a Jesuit priest, a Father Ignacio. I went to him for confession… we talked a lot about the struggle against the military dictatorship… about Christ’s message that the poor gave us the opportunity for a particular way for the grace of God to manifest in the world…’

  The way Francesca’s face lit up then was just like that moment I saw her at the consecration in the mass… ecstatic… it seemed to me… in a kind of rapture…

  ‘Father Ignacio was very charismatic. I was even a little in love with him. Do you know about the charismatic movement?’ she asked me.

  I knew enough. These were Catholics who opened themselves up to possession by the Holy Spirit. I thought, Oh no, I’m all for altered states but when you call an altered state ‘possession by God Himself,’ I’m a bit wary.

  ‘I joined the Montoneros,’ Francesca said. ‘We were waiting for General Perón to return from Europe to take control away from the military. Father Ignacio was convinced that Perón would sweep us into power and make a just and Catholic Argentine society.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And it never happened.’

  ‘Literally millions of Argentines were at Ezeiza airport to welcome Perón when he flew back from Spain,’ Francesca said. ‘I was there with Father Ignacio. All of us were waiting to hear Perón speak. Then the fascists opened fire on the Montoneros. It was the Triple A, the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. There was a stampede. Guns going off everywhere. So many people killed. We ran into the fields and hid in a ditch. When the shooting stopped we went back to the city. We were terrified that the military would track us down and kill us, too. Perón had betrayed us. He wanted to eradicate us. What could we do but fight back?’

  I could see the rapture in Francesca’s eyes… I was so aware of the danger of this mad metaphysic she believed in that could lead to unimaginable violence… but you should have seen the energy that possessed and vitalized the beautiful body of this woman: the charismatic grace of God that took her over. And you know what… it was so visceral, seductive… it was dangerous… magnetizing, it drew me to her. I can still hear that little girlish voice of hers, so high, like she was a lethal little bird, twittering away in my hotel room.

  ‘In our group,’ she said, ‘I fell in love with a boy called Antonio. The Montonero boys were so much more handsome than the communists. I thought all communists were just pimply kids, too intellectual. They were so boring… all their boring dialectical arguments. Our arguments were whether it was justifiable as Catholics to kill the members of the armed forces who were oppressing the people, the poor. We decided that it was our duty. That Christ wanted us to take up arms for
the oppressed.’

  I think it was safe to say that she was crazy with religion.

  At that point, I thought the obvious thought: Yes, of course… you can justify anything, can’t you, with the Bible?

  She sat on the edge of my bed with sun and shadow laying light and dark bars across her blond hair and her slightly curved back and crazy as she was, I wanted to make love to her, there and then, but I couldn’t make the move. This may sound neurotic but I felt as if I just wasn’t worthy of her. She’d been through so much that my experience compared to hers seemed to be pathetic. I found something terribly seductive in the way that she’d been so close to death. This woman was a mixture of sexuality, violence, mysticism, and left-wing political passion; and that, to me, was just about irresistible. I thought that if I could only make love with her perhaps I could experience that rapture; and I didn’t know whether I desired her because I wanted to feel like I’d conquered her, or that I wanted to be consumed by her.

  ‘What happened to Antonio?’ I asked her.

  ‘He was killed,’ she said, ‘in a raid on a country police station to get arms. He was shot.’

  Jesus Christ. Had she ever killed anybody? I was afraid to ask her.

  ‘Let’s go out,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

  She got up and kissed me on the mouth, a light kiss; and then led the way out of the room as if nothing had happened. Maybe for her nothing had happened, I thought. She’d had a boyfriend who’d been killed in a shoot-out with the police. I mean for romance that even beat the death of Michael Furey in that James Joyce story, The Dead. You know, the guy who froze himself to death for the love of his girl who was off to a convent school. You see the parallel? I did.

  I have a diary from back then. It became a kind of homage to the comic book artists I discovered at that time: Hugo Pratt, Milo Manara, Vittorio Giardino… I developed my own style… a kind of collage… I picked up a photo from a magazine, drew it in pencil, abstracted the lines… colored with aquarelle. So I made this diary in the form of a comic book. I never meant to try and publish it. I took a little poetic license with it, you understand. I didn’t want to make it exactly how things happened, so I left out a couple of details here and there. Compressed a few things. But it’s mostly pretty accurate. It starts off more or less as I told you about Liliana, then it goes on. A lot of strange things happened around Gerardo and Francesca. You can see for yourself in my diary. Here, you can read it.

  THE FRANCESCA DIARY

  A Collage

  Damien Kennedy

  1982

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 11th 2006

  Hours: 23:30 to 00:45

  I closed Kennedy’s comic book diary and handed it back to him.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s a pretty strange work.’

  ‘Those were strange times,’ Kennedy said. ‘Gerardo is someone special. It dawned on me later that being in the company meant so much to me… more even than the love affair that I was having with Francesca. It was shocking to think that… for Gerardo, too… the company was the focus of everything he did… more than any love affair he might have… and that he cared for every member of the company as much as, or more than, he cared for himself. You might find that difficult to believe but I believe it. The company was everything to us. And you know what? It still is. But we’re all of us like that… all of us in the company… and Gerardo gave us that.’

  He looked me straight in the eye as he said it. The wrinkles on his face, the slight sag of his jowls, the scruffy hair-do, didn’t completely hide the similarities with the character in the panels of his comic book. It had been strange to see images of this man – and Gerardo Fischer – as they might have been twenty-five years previously.

  The comic book diary was the work of a man who had lost his senses over an unstable woman; and who had been psychologically overwhelmed by his involvement in this incestuous theater group that was still headed by Gerardo Fischer. What was it about this Gerardo Fischer that made people think that they wanted to be in his theater company so much so that they would happily leave behind all that most people considered normal in the world?

  ‘So you’ve no idea where he might be?’

  Kennedy shook his head.

  ‘Do you know where Francesca is now?’ I said.

  ‘She’s in Buenos Aires,’ he said.

  ‘Buenos Aires: are you still in contact with her?’

  ‘I haven’t seen her for… a long time. I heard where she was from Sara. Francesca visits Sara’s sister down there.’

  ‘Do you think Gerardo might be with her?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Do you have a number for her?’

  ‘For Francesca?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think Francesca’s kept in contact with Gerardo?’

  ‘I’m sure she would have.’

  ‘And you’ve kept in contact with Gerardo ever since those years in Italy?’

  ‘On and off, yes,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘And you’ve been with him this time for around six months?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Working on scenery?’

  ‘That’s what I do,’ he said.

  ‘Right here, in your… diary… the comic book… whatever you call it… Gerardo and Francesca disappeared… I mean what happened?’

  ‘They were gone out of my life. Out of everybody else’s, too. I don’t blame them. Francesca was in trouble. Maybe Gerardo, too. Don’t forget what was going on over here at that time… and those connections with the far right in Italy. I don’t blame them at all.’

  ‘So he’s done this before, Gerardo.’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Disappeared. Maybe of his own volition.’

  Kennedy shrugged. ‘Well, it’s always possible, but… you know… maybe the past finally caught up with him.’

  ‘You, Damien?’

  ‘Me?’

  He laughed. I believed that he wasn’t murderous or jealous enough to do something crazy with Gerardo. I had the feeling that Kennedy… maybe he hadn’t exactly been lying… but… even if he loved to talk… he’d been holding something back.

  ‘Have you any idea at all what might have happened to him? Could he be with Francesca?’

  ‘Anything is possible with Gerardo…’

  ‘What state was he in when you saw him last?’

  ‘State?’

  ‘Mental state.’ I was beginning to think that most of these people were half-crazy.

  ‘Focused,’ Kennedy said, ‘on the rehearsals of the present play… and preparing for the next one, his revival of The Alchemist Bono.’

  ‘Would Francesca be in that?’

  ‘Acting?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He hadn’t got that far, not into casting. I thought maybe he’d get Ana to play the part.’

  ‘So he gave you no hint that he might be about to take off for a while?’

  ‘None.’ Kennedy stared into the space between us as if he were looking into a kaleidoscope of all the possibilities of what Gerardo Fischer might be doing, or where he might be, or what might have happened to him.

  ‘Do you think he took off of his own accord?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘I’d better be going. I may need to talk with you again. Is that okay?’

  ‘Any time.’ He followed me to the door. I raised a hand in a wave and I walked back along the dirt path to the wooded copse and the rest of the colony. It was pitch dark. My eyes took a while to adjust to the lack of light. I should have brought a flashlight of my own. I took out my mobile phone and used it to light the way for a while.

  Fischer could have skipped out on his own. He’d done it before, hadn’t he?

  It was past midnight. When I got to Ana’s cabin it was all locked up. No one at home. Where could she have possibly gone at this time of night? She’d left Damien’s
before we could make any arrangement that I’d come back to her house but I’d assumed she’d be there after I’d talked to him. Had she gone over to Sara’s house? Why hadn’t she told me? Was I just a quick fling for her and now she was dropping me? I was disappointed. I wanted to be with her. Sleeping with her had changed the dynamic, hadn’t it? It wasn’t just a simple client relationship any more. I liked this woman. She had opened up a different world to me. I liked books and movies but she was the kind of person who actually made the things I read and saw. I thought that I’d like to know more about that from the inside. Plus I liked her body. Not just her body: that kind of dynamism that her body expressed. That’s what I’d connected with when we’d made love. Is that what an actor does? Embodies something that they have inside which is what we, the audience, connect with in all its intimacy. It is an intimacy. Maybe that’s what makes a great actor: the capacity to share intimacy with a whole audience. I can see why a lot of actors might crack up… so exposed, so vulnerable. Ana had gone one step further with me. But maybe it had been nothing so special for her. I’d slept with her once. I wanted to sleep with her again. It was no use getting sentimental or too romantic about it.

  I waited a while. Around fifteen minutes, I guess. Maybe a half hour. She didn’t show. I wasn’t going to wait any longer. I walked down the path towards Sara’s house. Getting involved with a client wasn’t always such a good idea. Although I hadn’t actually been paid. A couple of days to arrange to get American dollars in cash, that was okay. No need to get anxious. Not yet, anyway.

  Sara’s dogs started barking: something normal about that. The shutters were closed and there were no lights behind the windows. Why had Ana done that? Was she messing with my head already? These theater people were strange. Did I want to get involved with her? I guess I did. I kept walking up to the parking lot. Maybe Ana and Sara had gone out for dinner together. I’d made no plans with Ana before stopping at Kennedy’s house. Maybe I should have. I wished that I had.