The garden of Casa Azul was hung with lights in the shape of red stars and yellow skulls, as was fitting for a holiday halfway between May Day and the Day of the Dead. Hundreds of people were making the sound of Barlow’s heart. He talked with a polite stranger, who turned out to be the Canadian cultural attaché, an attractive, sandy-haired Ottawan named John French. They compared notes on Mexican food. Had Barlow tried chapulines? Yes, and more: the Tepuztecs ate silkworm grubs. “My god, grubs! What do they taste like?” “Like snake, only mealier,” Barlow said, smiling. “But, when in Guerrero!” French gave Barlow his card and said they must have lunch. “You can be my Virgil in the underworld of the tortilla,” he said. Why does everyone want me to be their Virgil? Barlow didn’t say. Why can’t I be Dante, for once? He looked for Diego Rivera and found Dolores del Río, the film actress, who was shorter than he expected, and mostly covered in a gray shawl. He kissed her hand ceremoniously. She was one of the few people who would be capable of receiving the gesture unironically, Barlow thought, and he was right. He felt himself growing closer to that blessed within he was always looking for. “I have a friend named del Río,” he said, “Don Pablo, the illustrious anthropologist?” “Oh, yes, he was my cousin-in-law,” Dolores said, her eyes wide with remembered empathy. “My first husband, Jaime, admired him very much. He was so macho. Always climbing mountains, or fighting wars. How do you know him?” “We teach together at Mexico City College,” Barlow said, and a little of the light went out of Dolores’s face. “So many studious people!” she said. “I wish you all well, but my heart is with those who do.” “Teaching is doing,” Barlow said. He was immediately sorry he’d said it. This was his problem: when he felt himself being pushed away, he got angry and broke things. But Dolores del Río was looking at him with interest. “What do you mean?” she asked. Barlow undertook a vehement, confused account of his literacy project. Dolores listened with interest; then she took Barlow’s hand and kissed it. “I take back what I said,” she said. “My heart is with anyone who has passion. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find my friend.”
She left Barlow in the dark of his incensed spirit. He wanted to thank Rivera and go home, but instead, unpleasantly, Dean Murray appeared. He had very clearly come up to Barlow but acted like someone who had been importuned. “Good evening, Professor Barlow,” he sighed. Murray had played football in high school and come to Mexico with the Catholic Charities. He was completely out of place in this bohemian crowd. “Was that Dolores del Río?” he asked. “Yes,” Barlow said. “What illustrious friends you have,” Dean Murray said, although he didn’t seem at all envious. “You know,” he went on, lowering his voice, “three-quarters of the people here are Communists.” Barlow couldn’t help giggling. “Chez Diego Rivera,” he said, “what can you expect?” Murray frowned, unsure whether he was being laughed with or at. “Yes, exactly,” he said. “It’s a pity that so many intelligent people should have gone over to the other side. But then, this is a nation of peasants.” He took Barlow’s arm. “Robert,” he said, “what would you say if I told you that I work for the United States government?” “I’d say you must hold an appointed office, rather than an elected one,” Barlow said. He had no idea why he was even speaking. His lips were numb, and his body itched with impatience to be somewhere else. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “Ha, ha,” Murray said, “the Barlovian wit, sharp as ever. Robert, I’m serious. Now that the Soviets have the bomb, it’s an entirely different game we’re playing here. Did you know that an atomic explosion turns sand to glass?” Barlow did know that. He’d read about it in Amazing Stories, in the mid-’30s, years before the bomb was invented. When El Diario printed the news about Hiroshima, Barlow had been sickened but not surprised. “Deserts of glass,” Murray was saying, “think of it, Robert. The variety of creation reduced to a single, terrible thing. That’s the Soviet ideal, wouldn’t you say?” “What about Coke?” Barlow said. “What about Fanta?” “Phantoms?” Murray said, confused. “The orange-flavored soft drink,” Barlow said. “Oh, yes, Fanta. What about it?” “Soft drinks have replaced horchata and tepache almost completely in the Mexican market,” Barlow said. “Seventy-eight percent penetration, if I’m not mistaken.” Murray shook his head. “Robert,” he said, “the time when we can afford to quibble amongst ourselves is long past.” But just then someone started playing the accordion, and someone else was playing an upright bass and singing. Barlow pulled his arm free of Murray’s grip. “Excuse me,” he said.
Red stars, yellow skulls. Barlow spun and jumped, waving his arms, until the people around him clapped with amusement. He knew he was acting like a fool, but, he thought, like a holy fool. He was doing it so no one else had to. I am the center, he thought; then he thought, I am the sacrifice, offered every year at this time to Xiuhtecuhtli, the old fire god. He kicked his heels together. He’d go gladly if it would save anything, but finally he was exhausted. He staggered to a chair under a tree. Something man-sized and black hung by a rope from its limb. Had there been an execution? Had he been spared? “Are you all right, my friend?” someone asked: a friendly giant in a tweed jacket and gray shirt. “Yes,” Barlow said, then for some reason he started crying. “What is it?” the enormous man asked. “It’s just so much work,” Barlow said. The man gestured and a woman came up. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why is he crying?” “He’s an artist,” the man said. “I don’t know who he is, or what he does, but he’s an artist.” “Pobrecito,” the woman said, and patted Barlow’s head. Barlow pressed his face against her thigh, which was encased in hard, buckled leather, like armor, and wept. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know what’s happening.” “It’s all right,” the woman said. “You’re just lucky you’re here. I tell Diego, this is the best place to cry in all of Mexico.” “Oh,” Barlow said. He wiped his nose. “Er, yes. I’m sorry.” “It’s all right!” The woman laughed. “But if you’re feeling better, I’m going to keep the rest of our guests from breaking down.”
After a while, Barlow stood up. He felt as if he should feel like an idiot, but he didn’t. Instead, he felt radiant and rather proud of himself. He circled the crowd and got a plate of grilled pork and rice. He was sitting by the garden wall, chewing, when Murray found him again. “Are you all right?” Murray asked. “Mm,” Barlow said. He didn’t stand up: couldn’t. And didn’t want to. Murray said, “I wish you wouldn’t call attention to yourself like that.” Barlow wondered if sitting on the ground was really calling attention to yourself, then he understood that Murray was referring to his dancing. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me.” “Well, be careful,” Murray said. “You already have a reputation.” “I do?” Barlow wiped his fingers on the dirt and stood. “I don’t enjoy repeating stories,” Murray said, “but I’ve heard that you have been seen with our Mr. Burroughs.” “Yes?” Barlow said. “You know he’s a morphine addict,” Murray said, “and a homosexual?” “I had no idea,” Barlow said. “He took an interest in Bernal Díaz, and I’ve been trying to give him some context. I like to do that, especially for our veterans.” “Stop it, Robert,” Murray said. “Don’t you think we owe it to our fighting men?” Barlow asked. Murray looked at the ground and shook his head. “Please,” he mumbled, “try to see the bigger picture. Wasn’t your father a colonel in the army?”
Barlow was about to say something true but blasphemous about his father, when a bell rang out. Rivera was standing on a chair, by the tree at the other end of the garden. “Friends,” he said, “you know we are here to mourn, but also to celebrate. We mourn the death of a great man, a great thinker, a great lover of the poor, who could have set the world on a better path than it now follows.” “Lover!” Murray coughed into his hand. “The man led the Red Army!” “Ssh!” someone hissed. “We mourn the triumph of the stupid and the mean. But we also celebrate their impotence. No great man can be killed, friends, no great man is ever truly dead!” With that, Rivera pulled the black cloth from th
e thing that hung in the tree: a three-quarter-scale replica of Trotsky in papier-mâché, sculpted by Rivera himself, with wild white hair and a goatee and the eternal round glasses. The pants of his brown suit were tucked into high gray socks. “No one who gives, dies!” Rivera shouted. “No one! They give and give!” As he spoke, people ran up out of the crowd with axes, Barlow would never know where the axes had come from, and, truly, it didn’t matter; they jumped in the air and struck Trotsky’s shins, his arms, his buttocks and stomach, and as they beat him, his body fell apart, and small red lozenges tumbled from it: candy and firecrackers. The garden exploded. People were dancing. Barlow slipped away from Murray and walked quietly to his car, afraid to make a noise or even a gesture that would disturb the sudden perfection of the world.
7.
A week later, Barlow drove to Oaxaca. He stayed for three days in the mountains, in the house of a weaver he’d met the summer before; then he drove the terrifying road to the ocean, where he rented a cottage on the beach, a mile from town. He had brought Revueltas’s Los Días Terrenales but couldn’t read it. He didn’t remember ever having been this tired. He’d put off the next issue of Tlalocan and was trying to shift Meso-American Notes onto the back of his student Fernando Horcasitas, who was becoming a promising anthropologist in his own right. Meanwhile, Barlow had been writing an article on the Aspects of Tlaloc in the Late Postclassic Era for months. There wasn’t anything difficult about it: only another crossing of another wide sea of fact. Was he ill? Dr. Márquez said no and prescribed Seconal. You must treat yourself gently, Márquez said, and here he was, flat on his back, unable to rest or read. Was someone coming up the beach? Barlow felt as though he was waiting for someone but he wasn’t. He was just desperate for interruption. And, frustratingly, everything around him was unbroken: the yellow-white sand curved gently north and south; the flat Pacific reflected a cloudless sky. Beneath it, he thought, lay Tlalocan: a peaceful place, where no one asked you to do anything. A boy was coming up from the town, dragging a sack of coconuts. He approached Barlow slowly, like a figure in a nightmare. “¿Coco, señor?” “¿Porque no?” Barlow dug in his pockets but all his money was back in the house. “Disculpe,” he said, angry at himself. The boy shrugged and went on, his sack making a broad slug trail in the sand behind him, although so far as Barlow knew, there were no more houses in that direction. He, Barlow, lay on his blanket and closed his eyes. He thought about inviting the boy to his house and slipped into a lascivious dream of what might happen if he did. But the boy did not come back. After a long time, Barlow stood up, folded his blanket, and with Los Días Terrenales tucked under his arm, returned to the house. He lit the stove and heated the pot of beans he’d left soaking that morning. He ate them out of the pot and smoked a cigarette. The ocean turned pink, then deep blue. As soon as it was dark, Barlow lay on the corn-husk mattress his host had grudgingly provided and fell asleep.
In September, Barlow took up his classes and departmental duties with a reluctance that bordered on repugnance, as if he had put on a coat that belonged to a person recently dead. Don Pablo was organizing another expedition in search of Ice Age remains; Horcasitas was supposed to have been reading manuscripts all summer, but hadn’t read any of them. And Dean Murray invited Barlow to sit on the Student Life Committee, which was tasked with finding ways to keep the students from killing themselves in car accidents. Would it help if the college threw more parties? Should alcohol be served? And if not, what was to be done? Theatrical presentations? Parlor games? Barlow wondered if Murray had been testing him at Rivera’s party, feeling him out for some completely different role. Only what would he have been testing? Scratch a professor and you find a paranoiac, Barlow thought. But scratch a dean and you find a con artist. He went to the committee’s inaugural meeting: after two and a half hours, it was decided that the students would put on some short plays by Tennessee Williams.
No wonder, amid such excitement, that Barlow often found himself thinking of Bill. He hadn’t seen him since the beginning of the summer, when Bill came to the office to collect a box of inhalers and accepted Barlow’s invitation to dinner. He had been living in Mexico City for half a year at that point but had never eaten Mexican food, unless you counted steak a la Mexicana. So, after they’d had a few drinks, Barlow herded him to his favorite taquería, at the edge of the Barrio Chino. It was nearly eleven o’clock, but the bright yellow restaurant was full of families eating dinner: beefy, placid men not letting go of the necks of their beer bottles, for fear that they would be swept away in the table’s general chaos; women darting their heads from side to side, like birds; plump children sipping from goblets of lime agua fresca, or, more often, from wasp-waisted bottles of Fanta and Coke. The meal was not a success. Bill picked at the mound of carnitas on his plate, smoked a cigarette, and, when Barlow had paid the check, sprang up from his chair and strode out into the night, his head down, his legs pulling straight forward, like a bank robber walking away from a heist. Barlow ran after him. “Didn’t you like it?” he asked, pathetically. “Sure,” Bill said, “I’m just careful of what I eat, on account of worms. Did I ever tell you about my friend who had tapeworm? The way he knew he had it was, he was eating four steaks a day, and still losing weight. So he went to the croaker, and the croaker said, Either it’s cancer or you have la tenia, and there’s an easy way to find out. He told my friend to pull his pants down, and spread his cheeks, which, obligingly, he did. Then the croaker reached into his pocket and took out a little piece of cheese, and held it in front of my friend’s asshole. Just stay still, he said. And, sure enough, within five minutes, the worm stuck its head out, to see what was going on. So the croaker grabs a pair of tongs . . .” They were walking toward the Alameda Central. As soon as they stepped into the park Bill pressed his mouth to Barlow’s. He had thin lips, and tasted of vodka. They stumbled across the dark lawn, into a thicket, where they had sex. Then they lay on the dirt and thought separately. “Thanks for the tour,” Bill said, finally, standing up. “You want to give me a lift home?” Barlow dropped him outside a nondescript apartment house on the Calle Monterrey, where his wife either was or wasn’t sleeping, if he really did have a wife; then he drove back to Azcapotzalco. Juan the Nahua boy woke up when he came in and leered. “Where have you been, señor?” he asked. “Working,” Barlow said, stiffly. “In the garden?” Juan asked. Barlow looked at him. “You have leaves on your jacket,” Juan said, and giggled.
Thinking, in Barlow’s experience, rarely made anything happen; but at the beginning of October, Bill came to his office. He was even thinner than he had been in the spring, and his hair was greasy. “Howdy, Professor,” he said, in a skeletal voice. “How’s the world treating you?” “It leaves me alone,” Barlow said. “Don’t it?” Bill said. Then, without any other preface, he asked, “Are you still in touch with that doctor friend of yours?” “Your wife is suffering?” Barlow asked, somewhat acidly. “Wel-l,” Bill said, “to be straight with you, Professor, it’s more for myself. I’m having trouble getting H of any quality.” “H?” Barlow said. “Horse,” Bill said, “heroin, junk. Nobody’ll write for me, except a Chinaman, whose scripts are only good in your more disreputable pharmacies. The quality suffers, as you can imagine.” Barlow stiffened. “Mr. Burroughs,” he said, “I’m an anthropologist, not a drug runner. Isn’t there someone else who can help you?” “We’re all in the same boat, Professor,” Bill said. “They’re cracking down. What we need is someone who comes on as a legitimate medical patient. Someone with dysentery, for example. Or if you could pull off an abscess? I knew a guy once, in Houston, who could fake an abscess. He learned the trick in Calcutta—” “What you need?” Barlow interrupted. “How many of you are there?” “Just me and Old Dave, primarily,” Bill said. “Dave’s old lady has a habit, but we can leave her out.” “No,” Barlow said. “Even if it could be done, I wouldn’t do it. You need to cure yourself of your addiction.” “Heard that from a lot of people,” Bill said. “Did
n’t think I’d hear it from you.” He looked at Barlow with unfocused curiosity. “Say, Professor,” he said, “you aren’t putting the bite on me, are you?” Barlow was furious. How could Bill think he wanted money? “You’d better leave,” he said, “and, please, don’t come to my office again. I don’t wish to have any further contact with you.” He was paraphrasing Clark Ashton Smith, but felt quickly that wielding the meat cleaver was little better than being struck by it. Unfathomably, Bill sat where he was, his legs folded at an angle to Barlow’s desk. “You probably think I’m some disgusting addict,” Bill said. “But, Professor, I want you to know that I’d kick H in a second if there was anything better out there.” He looked at Barlow, as if he expected him to say what that better thing was.
As soon as Bill was gone, Barlow wished he hadn’t lost his temper. The two of them were similar people, Barlow thought. They were both unsatisfied, both looking for some mysterious more: so the most ridiculous and catastrophic chapter of Barlow’s life began. He got a prescription from Dr. Márquez, filled it in Cuauhtémoc, and went looking for Bill. He looked in at Lola’s, at the Bounty, at the Hollywood Steakhouse, at the Chimu Bar, a sad gay cantina on Calle Coahuila. Going to these places made him feel claustrophobic. The good thing about pursuing a person who moves in a small orbit, though, is that you are sure to find him sooner or later; and sure enough, on his second night of looking, Barlow found Bill in the inner, darker room of the Bounty, where he was watching two American students, a man and a woman, play chess. They all looked up when Barlow came in. The male student must have recognized him, because he stood up and held out his hand. “Howdy, Professor. Didn’t expect to see you here.” Had he taken one of Barlow’s classes? Impossible to say. Barlow had a policy of forgetting his students’ faces at the end of each quarter. “Hello,” he said, shaking the hand. “Mr. Burroughs, I wonder if you have a moment? I’ve been thinking about the question you asked the other day, about the reliability of Díaz’s source material.” They stared at him. “We’re just coming to the endgame here,” Bill said. “If I don’t give Gene the benefit of my experience, he’ll be mated in a move or three.” He winked to let Barlow know that mated was a pun. “I see,” Barlow said. “I’ll be out front, if you’d care to join me when your game ends.” He went to the other room and ordered a glass of red wine, which the bartender poured from a half-empty bottle. It tasted like vinegar. But then Bill did come out and sat next to Barlow. Immediately Barlow took the bottle of morphine pills from his pocket and dropped it into Bill’s pocket. “Thanks, Professor,” Bill said, and stood up. “Wait,” Barlow said, “that’s it?” “How much?” Bill asked. “No,” Barlow said, “just sit with me for a minute. I want us to be friends.” He tried to explain what he had felt after Bill walked out, how they were both in some essential way unsatisfied. How he, at least, felt as though he had been born missing something that other people had, some film over the eyes that made things bearable. Like the membrane over the eye of a serpent, he said. “Did you know, I used to collect snakes?” “Really?” Bill asked with no interest whatsoever. “Yes, when I lived in Florida . . .” To Barlow’s own disgust, he started talking about Cassia, and Howard. “Yes, that H. P. Lovecraft,” he said. “I was in love with him, if you can believe it. It started with an exchange of letters about our cats . . .” Bill yawned. “Did I ever tell you about the cats we had, back in N’Awleans?” he asked. “There must have been a dozen of them, running wild in and out of the house. I used to tie their paws with string and drop them in the bathtub. You should have heard how they screamed. It was almost human. It got so they’d scream when they saw me coming, scream at me from the top of the stairs. Helen Hinkle, that was Neal Cassady’s girlfriend at the time, used to ask why I did it. Why must you torture those cats, Bill? I said to her, Helen, why does anybody torture anybody? Why did the Gestapo torture its prisoners? I’m trying to extract information. These cats know things, and, by gum, I’m going to find out what.” “Howard also believed that cats possessed secret knowledge,” Barlow said. Saying it felt like a betrayal. Howard had made an effort, however hopeless, to be human. Bill made no effort.
The Night Ocean Page 13