“Blind?”
“After I got my cataracts removed!”
“Dear Father, you do like to dream!”
“Won’t we ever escape this nightmare?”
“Who knows?”
“You’ve got doubts?”
“I’m not saying a thing.”
“You’ve never known any other life—you’re resigned to your fate.”
“You, too, Daddy!”
“I know how other people live. I know how different things could be.”
“You envy them? I don’t envy the rich.”
“So who do you envy?”
“A bird! Singing on the branch of a tree.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’re here.”
An Indian and his woman were asleep under a blanket in the doorway. The funereal girl and owlish blind man wriggled past. The nuns’ bell clanged for the dead.
V
Slurping wine over his lips and drinking deep of tender eyes, Nacho Veguillas rests his head on his strumpet’s bosom and sings in the Green Boudoir, “Love me, my lily in the mud!”
The harlot swooned. “My cinnamon boy! And you say you aren’t romantic!”
“Purest angel of love, my inspiration, my love! I’ll save you from the abyss. I’ll redeem your virgin soul! Taracena! Taracena!”
“Don’t make such a racket, Nachito! Leave Madame alone. She’s in no mood to hear your complaints.”
The girl on the game covered his drunken mouth with her ringed fingers. Nachito sat up. “Taracena! I’ll pay everything you owe to this lily trapped in the vile mud of your trade!”
“Shuddup! Don’t set yourself up!”
Tears dripped from Nachito’s cruet nose. He turned to the whore. “Slake my thirst for the ideal, angel with broken wings! Soothe my brow with your hand. My brain is burning in a lava sea!”
“Where have I heard music like that before? Those same words, Nachito, I heard them right here!”
Nachito was jealous. “Some asshole!”
“Or maybe not. Tonight it seems like everything’s happened before. Must be the Blessed Spirits...! Like everything happens before it really does!”
“In lonely dreams I called to you. Your gaze draws me like a magnet! Kiss me, my love!”
“Nachito, don’t be so silly. Leave me alone to pray to the Spirits.”
“Kiss me, Jarifa! Kiss me, shameless innocent! A chaste, virginal kiss! I was alone in the desert of life when an oasis of love appeared on the horizon where now I rest my brow!”
Nachito sobbed. The girl’s lips were painted like a valentine. She pressed them against his—a sweet kiss right out of a novelette. “Ohhh, you’re such a silly!”
VI
The altar of the Blessed Spirits quivered. Flickering reflections rent the walls of the Green Boudoir. The door opened and without ceremony little Colonel de la Gándara walked in. Veguillas turned his cruet nose with a doe-eyed look: “‘Dainty’ Domiciano, don’t profane the idyll of two souls!”
“Master V, you need a dose of ammoniac. Look at me, free of the vapors. Guadalupe, why don’t you splash some holy water on him?”
Colonel de la Gándara stamped around and the candles on the little altar went crazy, while the irreverent clatter of his silver spurs set up a heretical, symphonic accompaniment. The colonel had changed: his breeches were tucked into his riding boots, his belt was pulled tight, his machete hung at his side, his beard was freshly cut, and a shining black lock was combed down over his brow. “Veguillas, pal, lend me twenty sols. You cleaned up at the gaming table. I’ll pay you back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!”
The word vanishes into the room’s green penumbra. Nachito stands and gapes. A distant bell chimes. The altar lights grow dim and trembly. The jet-black harlot in the pink shirt crossed herself behind the curtains. Little Colonel de la Gándara droned on. “Tomorrow. Or when I die!”
Nachito moaned. “Death is never far away. Domiciano, come to your senses. Money’s not going to help.”
The strumpet strutted out from behind the curtains, lacing her corset. Her breasts were naked. A pink garter pulled her nylon stockings tight. “Domiciano, save yourself! This jerk’s not talking, but he knows you’re on Tyrant Banderas’s wanted list.”
The colonel stared at Veguillas. Veguillas threw up his arms in shock. “Evil angel!” he shouted. “Bio-magnetic viper! Your intoxicating kisses sucked out my thoughts.”
The colonel reached the door in a single leap. He was on the lookout, alert. He shut the door and locked it, planting his legs firmly apart and pulling out his machete. “Lupita, bring the basin. We’ll bleed this doctor gratis.”
The corseted strumpet pushed herself between the two men. “Take it easy, Domiciano. Before you get to him, you’ll have to run me through. What were you trying to do? What’s this all about? You’re in danger? So—run for your life!”
Colonel de la Gándara tweaked his mustache contemptuously. “Who’s betrayed me, Veguillas? What’s the big threat? Tell me, or I’ll turn over your passport to the Blessed Spirits. Come on!”
Cringing by the wall and feeling sorry for himself, Veguillas tried to pull on his trousers. His hands shook. He moaned in terror. “Buddy, the old camp follower with the little stall next to the frog game informed on you. It’s her!”
“Bloody bitch!”
“If you didn’t always like to get so drunk and pushy—”
“I’m going to flay the old bitch for a drum skin!”
“Kid Santos made a deal with her to give you a whipping.”
The whore was insistent. “Domiciano, don’t waste time!”
“Shut up, Lupita! This nice friend of yours is now going to tell me who’s tried and convicted me.”
Veguillas squirmed. “Domiciano, don’t fuck up. It’s not like you don’t know how things work here.”
VII
The little colonel waved his gleaming machete in the air. The whore, in her pink nightgown, shut her eyes tight and waved her arms. Veguillas, in his undershirt, was cringing by the wall with his pants in his hands. The colonel snatched them away. “Fuck your pants! What have they sentenced me to?”
Nachito shrunk up, his cruet nose grazing his navel. “Brother, stop asking questions! Every word is like a bullet... I’m committing suicide! If it’s not you, it’ll be me.”
“But what is it? And who decided?”
The whore was in despair, kneeling before the candlelit altar. “Save your skin! If you don’t go, Major del Valle will come and arrest you!”
Nachito was terrified. “Foul, foul hag!”
He curled up in a ball, his feet under the tail of his shirt. The colonel picked him up by his hair. Veguillas flailed wildly, his shirt yanked north of his navel. The colonel bellowed, “Is del Valle under orders to arrest me? Out with it.”
Veguillas’s tongue was hanging out. “I have committed suicide!”
Book Three
<
id="heading_id_46">A Touch of Guignol
>
I
It was like a movie chase! As soon as the colonel hits the street he spots the rifles of the patrol advancing along the Portuguese Mothers Arcade: Major del Valle on the way to arrest him. Heart racing like mad, he drops to the ground and crawls across the street. A half-naked Indian with a bandaged chest cracks a door open. He slips through. Veguillas follows, sucked into the cycle of absurd coincidences. Stooped like a rider, the colonel dashes upstairs. Nachito, scrabbling behind, is dazzled by the glare of his spurs. Under the attic skylight the colonel waits outside a door, panting. A servant girl, with a broom, opens it. Arms flailing in panic, she sees the two fugitives hurl themselves into the corridor. She screams, then the sharp glint of a blade puts a brake on her tongue.
II
At the end of the passage a student’s bedroom. A young man, pale from reading, pores over an open book, elbows on his desk. The lamp smokes. His window is open to th
e evening star. The colonel walks in, points. “What’s out the window?”
Shaking with shock the student turns to the window. Without waiting for a reply, the colonel puts his legs over the sill. “Come on, you bastard!” he shouts mischievously.
Nachito is frantic. “Fuck your mother!”
“Whoopee!” the colonel yells and lets go.
He hurtles through the air. Falls on a small roof. Smashes roof tiles. Crawls away. Nachito peers out, tears dripping from his cruet nose, his face a mass of wrinkles. “O to be a cat!”
III
Major del Valle flashes his saber through the cathouse’s bedrooms. He races from room to room, followed by his soldiers, spurs flashing and tinkling: at his side Big Mamma buoys her buttocks, sighs, and ponders, a flower behind one ear and slippers on her feet. “Chief, I’m from Cadiz and I never lie! My word is as good as the king of Spain’s! Only a second ago Colonel Gandarita said, ‘I’m off!’ He came and went. Just now. It’s a miracle you didn’t run into him! He’d just gone three steps when your soldiers dashed through the door!”
“Didn’t he say where he was heading?”
“He shot out like a thunderbolt! If he’s not after booze, he’ll be looking for a bed.”
The major looked at the bawd and called to his sergeant, “Search the house. If I find smuggled goods, Baby Roach, it’ll be a hundred lashes.”
“Kid, you ain’t gonna find a thing.”
Big Mamma rattled her keys. The major tugged his goatee uneasily. He decided to go to the lounge to wait. In dawn’s ashen light, the cathouse was full of fear, screams, furtive dashes, rude ditties. Lupita loomed in the Green Boudoir’s arch, high-heeled, a new beauty spot on her cheek, cigarette smoke billowing from her lipstick valentine. “Abilio, I really like you!”
“I’m off.”
“Hey, do you still think Domiciano’s hiding here? Your rattrap missed him. Now you’ll have to send out the dogs!”
IV
And Nachito Veguillas is still standing by the student’s window looking grim. Time seems frozen; every action hangs absurdly on the poised second, stupefied, crystallized, bright, unreal, like under marijuana. Awake, his hair a mess, the student looks on in astonishment from behind his books and desk. Nachito stands opposite, his mouth agape, his hands covering his ears. “I’ve committed suicide!”
The student looks more deathly by the moment. “Have you escaped from Santa Mónica?”
Nachito rubs his eyes. “This is all so crazy...My friend, I’m not running away from anyone. I’m just here. Take a look at me. I’m not on the run...I’m not guilty. I’m only in tow...If you want to know why I’m here, it’s hard to know what to say. I don’t even know where I am! I rushed up here on impulse, swept along by that other guy. Take my word. This whole thing is just too much. Bio-magnetism!”
The student is in a quandary, unable to decipher the nightmarish imbroglio he’d glimpsed on the glaring face of the guy who flung himself out the airy window that had stayed open all night, with the inertia of an inanimate object, waiting for that minute of low melodrama. Nachito sobs and whimpers uncontrollably. “So here I am, young sir. Please can I have a drop of water? I need to calm down. This must be a dream.”
But the words stick in his craw. Voices and weapons clatter down the passage. Clutching a revolver, Major Abilio del Valle fills the doorway. Behind him soldiers point their rifles. “Hands up!”
V
Another door opens on a barefoot giantess in petticoat and scarf. Lion tresses. Jet-black eyes and brows that smolder like embers in her face. A mighty bulging-biceped Old Testament figure with the pathos of a baroque sculpture. And now she rushes in, Doña Rosita Pintado, a whirlwind of angry cries, gestures, scowls. “What are you doing in my house? Are you thinking of taking my boy? Who’s in command here? Take me then! Is this what you call legal?”
Major del Valle spoke: “Don’t make me laugh, Doña Rosita. This tender shoot needs to come and make a statement right away. I guarantee he’ll be back once that’s done—if he’s not implicated. Don’t be afraid. Under the circumstances, it’s the least I can do. The boy will be back, at least if he’s blameless, I promise.”
The youngster glanced at his mother, scowling at her to shut up. The giantess quivered with misery and ran to hug him. Her son stopped her in her tracks. “Be quiet, Mamma. Don’t put your foot in it. Arguing won’t get us anywhere.”
His mother brayed, “You’ll be the death of me, you Guinean black!”
“I’ll be safe enough!”
Stunned, the giantess sank down into a dark sea of doubt and alarm. “Major del Valle, what’s this all about—!”
The boy broke in: “A fugitive from the law escaped through my window.”
“And what did you say to him?”
“I didn’t even see his face—”
Major del Valle interrupted. “All you have to do is say as much in the proper place and that will be that.”
The giantess folded her arms. “Do we know who it was?”
Nachito spoke out of an alcoholic haze: “Colonel de la Gándara!”
Glistening with tears, cowering between two soldiers, Nachito shot snot from his dripping cruet. Bewildered and dismayed, Doña Rosita stared at him. “What are you crying about?”
“I’ve committed suicide!”
Major del Valle raises his saber; the squad closes ranks around Nachito and the student and moves off.
VI
Bleary-eyed and frazzled, Taracena peered through the barred window. She strove to identify the prisoners, taciturn shadows amid gray crisscrossed bayonets. The sacristan to the nuns poked his head out of the bell tower. Bugles in barracks and forts sounded reveille. The sun made tracks over the sea. Nocturnal itinerants, Indians, entered the city, their llamas laden with fruit from mountain farms. Unruly livestock warmed up in the dawn haze. The port woke to the sound of approaching cowbells; the rifle patrol disappeared with the two prisoners through the Portuguese Mothers Arcade. In the cathouse, Big Mamma shouted at her wards to clean up the mess on the top floor; the pimp with a flower behind his ear was busy changing the soiled sheets. Lupita la Romántica, in pink nightgown, prayed before the candlelit altar in the Green Boudoir. The pimp, with a pin between his lips, contemplated piled-up blankets. “I still haven’t got over the shock!” he mumbled.
Part Four
A Necromantic Amulet
Book One
<
id="heading_id_48">The Escape
>
I
“Dainty” Domiciano de la Gándara was in a fix. But he’d recalled an Indian who owed him a favor. Slowing down so as not to arouse suspicion, he walked through the Portuguese Mothers Arcade and out onto the Rich Peruvian’s Plot.
II
Zacarías San José had a gash on his face so everybody called him Scarface Zac. His shack was in an enormous waterlogged stretch of reeds and dunes that was known as the Rich Peruvian’s Plot: turkey buzzards—the auras of the Andean plains and the zopilotes of the Mexican estuaries—pecked the muddy banks. Horses grazed on the banks of waterways. Meanwhile Zacarías was busy fashioning Chiromayo and Chiromeca tribal funeral deities out of mud. The reeds and dunes seemed to float in the early-morning mist. Pigs wallowed in the mudflats behind the shack. The squatting potter wore a pineapple-leaf sombrero and a long shirt, and he was painting chocolate-brown motifs on pitchers and pots. Taciturn under a cloud of flies, he stared at a dead horse on the far side of the reeds. He felt afraid: a buzzard had got into the roof space, battering it with its black wings, an ill omen. Another ill omen: the paint had run—yellow, meaning bile, and black, meaning jail, or death, had dribbled into each other. And now he remembered: last night his chinita put out the fire and found a salamander under the grindstone...The potter moved his brushes methodically, trapped between thought and action.
III
At the back of the shack, the chinita stows her tit in her loose smock and pushes away the child who lies
bellowing on the ground. She spanks him. She pulls his ears, lifting him as high as the roof. She stands next to her husband, intent on the brushstrokes he paints on the pot.
“Zac, you’re so quiet!”
“What do you want?”
“I haven’t got a cent.”
“I’ll fire the pots today.”
“And in the meantime?”
Zacarías smiled sarcastically. “Don’t nag! You’re meant to fast in Lent.”
His brush hangs in the air. Colonel Domiciano de la Gándara stands at the entrance to the hut: finger at his lips.
IV
The barefoot Indian scurries over to the little colonel. Tentative words by the tentacular agave: “Zac, will you help me in a tight spot?”
“Boss, no need to ask!”
“There’s a smell of gunpowder in the air. Santos Banderas has turned against me. Can you help?”
“Your wish is my command!”
“How do I get hold of a horse?”
“I’d say there are three ways, chief: buy, borrow, or steal.”
“I don’t have any money and I don’t have any friends. So where do I lasso me one? And there’s a posse after me. So tell me, can you take me to Potrero Negrete by canoe?”
“Let’s go, chief. My canoe’s in the reeds.”
“You know you’re risking your skin, Zac.”
“For what that’s worth, boss!”
V
A dog sniffs around the agave’s tentacles; the little kid stands next to his mother under the palm fronds. He’s whining. He wants some tit. Zacarías waves at his wife to come over. “I’m going with the boss!”
Her voice piped, “Is it a big deal?”
“Looks like it.”
“Remember, if you’re held up, I’m dead broke.”
“What am I supposed to do, baby? You can pawn something.”
“Like the blanket off our bed!”
“Pawn your watch.”
“They won’t give me nothing for a watch with a cracked face!”
Tryant Banderas Page 7