Don Pablo was the last of Barlow’s fathers, and the best. He took Barlow to lunch at the Jockey Club: an impersonation, he explained, of the Paris institution, of which he was also a member. Over a bottle of Sauternes—Don Pablo liked sweet wine, which, he readily admitted, was a blemish on his character—he whispered to Barlow about the failings of the Mexican aristocracy: this one was feebleminded and that one, a bigamist; most of them were stealing from Alemán’s government, and more than a few were stealing from one another. An old man glaring at his consommé had once had sex with a sheepdog. Don Pablo hated them all amiably; it broke his heart to see the Revolution come to this. Barlow, drunk, felt a thrill of insideness. He was out of his depth, but at least he was among the initiated. Don Pablo offered to put him up for membership in the Jockey Club, but Barlow was wise enough to refuse. “I’m more comfortable around dead people,” he said. Don Pablo roared with laughter. “Robert, these are dead people!” he said. But he didn’t make the offer again.
In December 1949, there was a period of cold rain, and a new student appeared in Barlow’s Mexico at the Time of the Conquest class, soaked, with water dripping from the brim of his gray hat. His name was Bill, and he’d briefly done something vague in the army, which entitled him to an allowance of seventy-five dollars a month, so long as he was enrolled in an accredited university. Mexico City College catered tacitly to his kind: it was common knowledge among the faculty that if all the enrolled G.I.s showed up for class, there wouldn’t be room for them. Leeches like Bill kept the institution going. But here he was in Barlow’s classroom, wearing a sodden gray double-breasted suit, and asking, in a remote voice, as though he were talking back to the radio, whether it was possible to see a human sacrifice anywhere in Mexico. A few of Barlow’s students stifled giggles. “This is a class in history,” Barlow said. “If you’re looking for sensation of that kind, may I suggest that you read the newspaper.” “Wel-l,” Bill said, “I could do that, but I like to take a running start at the present. If the answer is no, just say so. I don’t mind disappointment.” Barlow looked at him again. A gaunt kid, or not a kid, with round spectacles: he looked the way Barlow imagined himself looking, if he were taller, and dead. “They happen every day, on every street in Mexico City,” he said. “Just keep your eyes open, and you’re sure to see one.” There was a flash of exchanged consciousness between them: Barlow couldn’t put it any other way. Bill came up after the class was over. “Enjoyed that,” he said. “Sorry if I caused you any trouble.” Immediately, without warning, Barlow was in a sexual panic. “Not at all,” he said, gripping his notes. “As a matter of fact, I think you’re right. There’s a lot of past in the present. And,” he added, without really knowing what he was saying, “there are surprisingly forward-looking moments in the past, too. The Christians call them prefiguration, but I like to think of them as signs that humanity does, now and then, make a correct guess about something.” He’d never actually thought of it before. Bill smiled in an absent way. “You go deep,” he said. “Most of the philosophers I know are drinking men. How about you?” Barlow blushed. “If you plan to take my class,” he said, “please get yourself a copy of Bernal Díaz’s Annals of the Conquest of Mexico.” But the name of the book was True History.
Bill never returned to Barlow’s class, but Barlow saw him hanging around the bars of the Colonia Roma, always in a suit, often the same suit, looking like the world’s filthiest junior partner in a law firm. Once, Barlow waved at him, and Bill looked up, incuriously, and went back to his conversation with one of the other leeches. His folded legs didn’t quite fit under the table, Barlow noticed. After that he tried to avoid seeing Bill, and even changed the streets on which he walked, so he wouldn’t pass any of the bars where Bill might be found. But one morning Barlow was reading the paper in a café called Lola’s, around the corner from the college, when Bill came in and sat down next to him at the counter. He smelled like he’d urinated on himself. “Morning, Professor,” he said. “Good morning,” Barlow said stiffly. “Haven’t seen you in school much.” “And yet I have been learning,” Bill said. “Cosmic secrets disclose themselves to me on a near-daily basis.” He didn’t say what they were, though. He just sat there with his elbows on the counter, looking placidly at Barlow, as if he had caught him in a butterfly net. “Where are you from?” he asked. “All over,” Barlow said, “but my people are from Kansas City.” “Kansas, or Missouri?” Bill asked. “Missouri,” Barlow said. “I’m from Saint Louis, myself,” Bill said. He clucked his tongue. The sound was like a coin falling into a vending machine. “Say,” he said, “did you ever run across a fellow named Herb Wiggers? I knew him in Saint Louis, but I think he was in Kansas City before that.” Wiggers, Bill said, had been a dentist, only he collected all the teeth he pulled and kept them in teak boxes, lined with green felt. Once a month he drove the boxes to a hotel in Chicago, where he swapped them with other tooth collectors. “Looking for rare ones, mostly,” Bill said, “abnormal teeth with the wrong number of roots. Or animal teeth. You’d be surprised how many people have one or two animal teeth. It’s a holdover from the earliest days of mankind. Crocodile teeth, even snake teeth. He had quite a collection. I wonder if you ever saw ’em.” “No,” Barlow said. He was sure Bill was lying, but wanted to see where his story would go. “Pity,” Bill said. “With your interest in history, I think you would have found Herb Wiggers’s collection enlightening.” He coughed: another coin. “Actually, in Chicago, it wasn’t just tooth collectors,” he said. “There was a podiatrist with a lovely collection of little toes, pickled in formaldehyde. The gems of his collection were a pair of toes from a fellow with webbed feet, like a duck. The poor man couldn’t wear shoes. But the tragic thing, Wiggers told me, was that the guy was afraid of water, and never learned to swim.” Bill coughed. “The other fellow Wiggers liked to talk about was Dr. Benway, the famous Chicago proctologist. Maybe you’ve heard of him? No? Well, Wiggers said, his collection was a sight to behold . . .” Bill had a coughing fit. When it passed, he took a paper napkin from the dispenser and blew his nose. “Suppose I’ve taken up enough of your time,” he said. “Would you buy me a beer before you leave?” Barlow summoned the counterman and ordered Bill a beer. Bill followed the transaction with wide eyes. “You speak Spanish?” he asked. “We’re in Mexico,” Barlow said. “Sure,” Bill said, “but you don’t need it.”
Barlow left Lola’s thinking that Bill was a horrible clown who must have come to Mexico to die. But at the end of the day he walked by the restaurant again, drawn by a desire, the outlines of which he already more or less knew. Bill was draped over a backward chair, looking at his hat, which had fallen to the ground. The other chair at his table was occupied by a stocky, dark-haired man named Dave Tercero, who wore two heavy silver bracelets on his wrist. He was talking about a plan to import television sets into Mexico and make a fortune selling them to the city’s America-loving upper class. “They’ll go crazy for television,” he said. “As soon as one of them has a set, they’ll all have to get one.” When Barlow came in, Bill smiled at him with a kind of warmth but didn’t say anything. He looked like he was about to die of boredom. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Barlow said, “but don’t you think it would be a good idea to wait until Mexico has a television station?” Dave glared at him. “Hell,” he said, “I don’t think it matters much. They can just look at ’em while they listen to the radio. Anyway, who are you?” Barlow was about to introduce himself when Bill took a .45 automatic from his coat pocket. “How many shots do you think it takes to kill a hat?” he asked. “Fuck, Bill,” Dave said, “put that away.” “I should think one shot would do it,” Barlow said, “provided it was well placed.” “I reckon that’s true,” Bill said, “but it would require an unusual caliber of marksmanship. For your average citizen, how many shots would it take? To be sure?” He rested the automatic’s barrel on his forearm and took aim at the hat. Dave said, “I’ve got a police record. Take care, you two.” He walked th
e length of the bar, growing shorter and darker with every step. Bill was still looking at the hat. “Fire!” he said, and pulled the trigger, but the safety was on. He shrugged and put the gun in his pocket. “How much money have you got?” he asked Barlow.
They went over to the Bounty, on Calle Monterrey, and drank tequila. The bar’s nautical theme, which consisted of two hurricane lamps and a many-handled wooden ship’s wheel, inspired Bill to talk about The Tempest. Prospero, he said, was the character he admired most in Shakespeare, because he drowned his magic book at the end of the play. “Hell of a way to kick a habit,” Bill said. He wanted to drown his books, but he hadn’t written them yet. He owned some books, but they had been impounded by the New Orleans police. They would have taken his car, too, he said, but he had put it up on blocks. Then, on his lawyer’s advice, he took it down again, and drove straight to Tijuana. His crimes included possession of narcotics and a desire to witness the end of the universe. He had a very clear idea of what it would look like. The Sun would turn to iron, and the Earth would freeze. Crab-like insects would crawl out of their holes with a clattering sound, like ladies in high heels swarming into a department store. The stars would go out. And he, Bill, would button up his coat, make his way to the New Orleans police headquarters, and take a shit in their waiting room. “In my version of that story,” Barlow said, “the last man dies of thirst.”* “Oh?” Bill said. “Thirst, a terrible way to go.” They kept drinking, first at the Bounty, then at a pulquería Barlow knew about, where few Americans went. Waiters came around like morticians, and served them grilled octopus and rice. Bill didn’t eat. “Who are you,” Barlow asked, “Count Dracula?” “I’m from an old American family,” Bill said.
Darkness enfolded the universe. Barlow threw up in a Mexican toilet, which was something he usually tried to avoid. He was leaning on the sink when Bill came in. “Putting on your face?” Bill asked; then, without waiting for an answer, he unbuckled Barlow’s pants. “What are you doing?” Barlow asked. Bill propped him against the wall. “Life-saving procedure,” he said. He knelt and took out Barlow’s cock. “Talk to me in Spanish,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what it would be like to suck a Mexican’s cock, but I haven’t got around to it yet.” So Barlow said something in Spanish, about the tribute Cortés had demanded from Montezuma; then, because he hadn’t come yet, and because he could, he continued his monologue in Nahuatl. He was Montezuma, consulting his priests: Should they give Cortés what he had asked for? Could they get rid of him with inferior goods? Then he was the priest of Tlaloc, the rain god, counseling Montezuma not to give Cortés anything. “Your only safety lies in absolute refusal, my lord,” he said. “From this point forward, I counsel you to practice absolute silence, and absolute refusal.” Finally, Barlow came, although not powerfully. Bill patted his crotch. “You speak that lingo beautifully, whatever it was,” he said. “I am the best of them that speak this speech,” Barlow said, “were I but where ’tis spoken.”
He didn’t see Bill again for weeks, then Bill appeared suddenly outside the college’s main building, on Calle San Luis Potosí, and fell into step alongside him. “My wife is sick,” he said. Barlow had never heard that Bill had a wife. “She has terrible asthma,” Bill said, “and she needs the Smith, Kline and French inhalers, but they don’t sell ’em here.” “That’s too bad,” Barlow said. He was sure Bill was about to ask him for money, and he had the sour feeling again. Life used you. There was no part of it that didn’t take something away. “I was wondering if you happen to know a good American doctor,” Bill said. “Somebody who could order her inhalers from the States. Only, he’d have to do it under someone else’s name. Neither of us is supposed to be here. There are warrants out for us in New Orleans, I think I told you that.” He smiled sweetly at Barlow, as if they were pals in some Huckleberry Finn–type novel, doing mischief on a summer river. “I’ll pay whatever it costs,” he said. “I just want her to be all right.” Barlow felt as if he had been embraced. Some trust was possible, some caring. “I know a doctor named Márquez who might be able to help you,” he said. “He isn’t American, but he knows where to find things like that.” Of course he did: he was Martín’s doctor. “If you tell me how many you need, I’ll see if he can get them for you.” “As many as he can get,” Bill said. “She goes through ’em. The air here isn’t what you’d call high-quality.” Suspicion flickered through Barlow’s mind: if Bill’s wife was an asthmatic, why had they come here? But so many forces pressed on a person’s life. Why had Howard lived in Providence, when he couldn’t stand the cold? People rarely chose the easy way for themselves. “Do you need cash up front?” Bill asked. “I’ll tell you what they come to,” Barlow said. “Solid, Professor, thanks,” Bill said. “Hope to see you around.”
Dr. Márquez’s office was on the far side of the city, in the Colonia Merced Balbuena. Barlow took an afternoon to visit him. He still had the Packard, and he liked driving around, finding his way through the city’s mesh. It was the bodily equivalent of learning a language. The more Barlow drove, the more he felt at home, and, at the same time, the more the city disappeared, in the sense that he stopped noticing it. The paradox was well known in anthropology: to see something, you had to be outside of it, but when you were outside of it, you couldn’t see it for what it was. He knew the answer, too; it was Kroeber’s answer. Work. Barlow never stopped wondering if there might be another solution. What, for example, if you didn’t do anything at all? What if you just sat somewhere, and waited, to see what would come? Like a hermit crab in its shell, Barlow thought, although he didn’t know if that was what hermit crabs did. Wait until food was in reach, take it, and put it into your mouth. The rest of the time: rest. He had the feeling that Bill would approve of this way of living, and in a strange way he thought Howard would have approved of it, too. It was gentlemanly. Then the traffic on the Avenida Insurgentes intensified, and Barlow got tired of waiting. When he got to Dr. Márquez’s office, he explained irritably that he was trying to buy inhalers for an asthmatic American friend. Dr. Márquez smiled and said he would arrange for them to be delivered to Barlow’s office. If illness were a grand hotel, Barlow thought, Dr. Márquez would be its concierge. “Would you like me to send something for your nerves, too?” the doctor asked. “Is something wrong with my nerves?” Barlow snapped. “Oh,” Dr. Márquez said, “it was our friend Martín, who said . . .” Barlow scowled. “I’ll be all right.”
When the inhalers arrived, Barlow took one from the box, to see what was in it: pure benzedrine. He doubted Bill’s wife had asthma but declined to pass judgment. Try not to see other people through the lens of your prejudices, he thought. Try to remember that you always do. He wrapped the box in Christmas paper and left it with his secretary: a present out of season, for Mr. Burroughs, who would be calling. He went back to work. The spring departed and the summer came in, hot and dry. Barlow’s garden withered, despite the efforts of the Nahua boy, Juan, who was supposed to be taking care of it. At some point that summer, the tiny magazine Tlalocan, which Barlow had been publishing, more or less single-handedly, since 1944, as part of his slave-like effort to make the Nahua aware of their lordly past, came to the attention of Diego Rivera. Rivera read the first issue of Volume III with great interest, and in August he invited Barlow to the party he threw every year on the anniversary of Leon Trotsky’s assassination. This was the tenth anniversary, and everyone was expecting something spectacular. Barlow wished he could not go. He didn’t want to meet all the personalities who would surely be at the party, didn’t want to compare himself with them and come up, as always, short. He was happiest at the edge of the crowd, looking in. Also, the party was on the twenty-first, the day after Howard’s birthday. Barlow would have liked to drink wine all day and pass out, as he’d done every other year on August 20; but Rivera’s invitation meant he couldn’t.
The result was that on the twenty-first, Barlow was miserable. He drove to the college to catch up on paperwork,
which was what he did when he was miserable, because why would he ruin any other part of his life with paperwork? Dean Murray was talking to a Mexican in a colonel’s uniform in the courtyard. Barlow hurried around them and spent the day writing evaluations of his faculty, who were the most eminent anthropologists in Mexico, although no one at the college seemed to know it. Fulfills his departmental responsibilities thoughtfully, he wrote, his pen drooping with boredom. Complaints that Professor Gaos assigns too much reading are, in my opinion, unjustified. At the end of the day, Barlow went to the men’s room and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked perilously tired, and very young, and washing his face didn’t help with either condition. He rubbed witch hazel on his neck, straightened his tie, and drove south to Coyoacán. A line of taxis and limousines was backed up outside the Casa Azul.* Rather than wait, Barlow circled the block and parked on a quiet, tree-canopied street some distance away, which felt like a defeat. With an angry grunt, he took the inhaler he’d reserved from Bill’s shipment out of the pocket of his linen jacket and pressed it to his lips. Bitter gas filled his lungs, and green spots fluttered in the trees, like luminous parrots. Fuck, Barlow thought. He got out of his car and hurried to the party.
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