Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  Juan Carlos countered that the cholera vaccine was only about 60 percent effective and that he hadn’t realized that a dealer in farm equipment led such an adventurous life. (Switters had passed himself off as an international sales representative for John Deere tractors.) Furthermore, he would bet Switters another glass of pisco—”Not on your life, pal”—that his grandmother was already in remorse over her decision to return her longtime pet to the wild, and that if Switters went through with such a rash exercise, he eventually would join his dear relation in profound and protracted regret. Juan Carlos was adamant about his sense of impending tragedy, and to convince his foolish client, he begged him to come along on a brief drive. Switters agreed, if only to avoid a second pisco.

  They motored to the posh neighborhood of Miraflores, parked, slipped through a hedge, crossed an overgrown garden—stirring up in the process a bloodthirsty billow of bugs—and tiptoed onto a patio, from where they might peer through the windows of an elderly, distant relative of Juan Carlos. This scene, naked parrot, merciless mosquitoes and all, has already been described.

  If the guide expected that a peepshow of a feeble widow and her feeble bird, blinking and stumbling toward the grave in each other’s company, expected that a stolen exhibition of enduring and everlasting owner-pet fidelity would melt his client’s heart and move said client to facilitate a joyous reunion between grandmother and ill-advisedly emancipated parrot, then he was mistaken.

  However, the first thing Switters did when he got back to the hotel was to go on-line and check his box. An e-mail message from a repentant Maestra canceling her instructions and insisting that Sailor be returned to her care with all due haste? No, not surprisingly, there was nothing of the sort. Maestra would never be counted among those millions who permitted loneliness to compromise their principles, their judgment, their taste.

  The single message on the screen was a coded one from the spookmeister at Langley, reminding Switters to “obey protocol” and inform the Lima station of his presence and intent in the city. Well, he’d think about it. The word obey, from the archaic French obéir and the earlier Latin obedire, meaning “to give ear,” entered the English language around 1250, the year in which the goose quill began to be used for writing—and to this day, should one give ear, one can detect the stiff scratch of the goose quill in its last syllable. For his part, Switters associated obey with oy vay, the Yiddish cry of woe or dismay, and while there was absolutely no etymological justification for it, it did provide a hint that obey was not the kind of word to make him glad.

  “Sorry, pal,” Switters said to Sailor as the bird watched him apply calamine lotion to a galaxy of mosquito bites. “I’d love to spend some quality time with you, but duty calls.” No sooner did he exchange his C.R.A.F.T. Club T-shirt for a fresh one in solid violet, splash on some Jungle Desire cologne, and dilute the pisco aftertaste with a gargle of mouthwash than he was out the door.

  A pothole-spelunking minicab carried him to a modest steakhouse in the Barranco, a district popular with students and bohemians. Hector Sumac was seated at table, sipping a North American beer.

  “You dig the Yankee brewski?” asked Switters.

  “This Bud’s for you,” answered Hector.

  Thus was mutual identity established.

  Hector Sumac proved to be a nerdy-looking fellow, pale for a Peruvian, with a shaggy pageboy haircut (Beatles, circa 1964) and those dinky little wire-rimmed spectacles commonly referred to as “granny glasses.” (Switters’s granny, by contrast, wore an outsized, owlishly round, horn-rimmed pair that made her look rather exactly like the late theatrical agent, Swifty Lazar.) Even sitting down, however, young Hector betrayed a fluid, athletic grace, and though he lacked bulk, he might be quick and tough enough, Switters thought, to give a good account of himself on the rugby field.

  Switters ordered a Yankee beer as well, and the two men whipped up small talk, first about the unusually warm day and then about cybernetics. Hector was surprised—even impressed and amused—when Switters confessed that he used a computer only when it became unavoidable for efficiency’s sake.

  “What interests me are the post-Newtonian, extrabiologic implications of a human species able to think and act using clusters of electrons: light, in other words. If the opening act of the evolutionary drama involved a descent from light into matter and language, then it only makes sense that in the closing act, so to speak, we reunite with our photonic progenitor. The role that language—the word—will play in our light-driven metamorphosis is the furry little question that cranks my squirrel cage. Say, didn’t the guinea pig originate in the Peruvian Andes?”

  “But personally you do not boot up?”

  “Sure I do, pal. E-mail’s a wonderful convenience—even when it’s goddamn hacked, but that’s another story. What I’m saying is I’m not gonna sit around for hours every day having nonorgasmic sex with a computer or a TV set. These machines will fuck the life right out of you if you give ’em half a chance.”

  “I log on five or six hours a day,” admitted Hector somewhat sheepishly. “But I am always happy when I have the chance to read a good book.”

  “Yeah? What do you read?”

  “I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.”

  “Good luck to you, pal. That’s a search these days.”

  For the third time, an impatient waiter cruised up to their table. “This place is good for meat,” Hector said. “What is your favorite dish?”

  Switters stared wistfully into space. “Spring lamb Roman Polanski,” he said.

  “It is not on the menu, I am afraid.”

  “Just as well. It’s an acquired taste.”

  With gusto, Hector Sumac polished off a mixed grill of beef heart and kidney, a dish he had missed during his recent three years of scholarship in Miami. As for Switters, despite his professed hunger for baby lamb cakes, he was primarily a consumer of fish and vegetables, so he swam against the kitchen and ordered ceviche, picking warily at it, for, predictably, it was not the dewiest ceviche in town.

  It was over dessert—fruited cornmeal pudding for each of them—that the two men got down to business. Having jumped to the conclusion that Hector had reneged on the arrangement with Langley due to late-blooming reservations about the CIA’s history of illegal interference in Latin American affairs, particularly, perhaps, its heinous behavior in Guatemala and El Salvador, not to mention Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua, Switters had come armed with a response, an argument that would neither defend nor condemn Langley’s murderous hanky-panky but that would convince the recruit of the validity and necessity of his service. Ah, but when Hector explained his change of mind, his reason was of an entirely different tenor.

  “Our federal administration is thoroughly corrupt . . .”

  Yours and everybody else’s, thought Switters, but he didn’t wish to belabor the obvious.

  “. . . and even though I now am employed in its Ministry of Communication, I cannot support it. On the other hand, the Sendero Luminoso is brutal and self-serving, so I cannot support revolution. Your—what is your soft name for it?”

  “Company.”

  “Yes. Right. Your ‘company’ has assured me that never would I be put in the position of betraying my people, my native land. . . .”

  Heh! thought Switters, imitating, in his cranial echo chamber, Maestra’s ejaculation of incredulousness.

  “. . . so I do not have the strong political objection to the surreptitious work for your ‘company.’ But, Agent Switter, I want very much to be completely honest in my dealing with you and your superiors, and the honest truth is, I, personally, could never fit in with your ‘company.’ I am of a different character.”

  “What character’s that, pal?”

  “Well,” said Hector, a tinge of reddening in his cheeks, susurration in his tone, “the shameful but honest truth is, what I am most interested in in life is sex, drugs, and roc
k ’n’ roll.”

  Thanks to various misunderstandings, rugby scrums, fender-benders, and occupational hazards, Switters was left with only eleven whole and healthy teeth. The inside of his mouth, in his opinion, so resembled a dental Stonehenge that he refrained from smiling broadly “for fear,” as he put it, “of attracting Druids.” Now, however, Hector’s guilty admission elicited a wide, open-mouthed grin that no amount of self-consciousness could censor—although much of what might have been revealed was obscured by pudding.

  “Perfect,” he said. “That’s just perfect, Hector.”

  The Peruvian was perplexed. “Please, what do you mean?”

  “I mean that you’ll have a great deal in common with your new colleagues. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll are enormously popular in the CIA.”

  “You are joking with me.”

  “Not among the administrators, naturally, and not with all the agents in the field, but with the good ones, the brightest and the best. You see, unlike the U.S. Forest Service or the Department of Energy, just to mention two of the worst, the CIA is not entirely an organization of bureaucratic meatballs.”

  “But the ‘company’—the CIA, if I’m allowed to say that now—does not actually condone—”

  “Officially, no. But there’s little it can do about it. Experienced recruiters understand completely what type of person makes the best operative or agent: a person who is very smart, educated, young, self-reliant, healthy, unencumbered, and relatively fearless. Well, a guy who’s smart, educated, young, self-reliant, healthy, unencumbered, and fearless is a guy who, chances are, is going to reserve a big place in his affections for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It goes with the territory. And it’s tolerated. Sure, from time to time there’re cowboys who slip through the net. . . .”

  “Cowboys?”

  “You know: flag-wavers and Bible-thumpers. Trigger-happy patriots. They’re the ones who create the international incidents, who’re always embarrassing the CIA and the United States and getting innocent people killed. Of course, they tend to win promotions because basically they’re the same kind of dour-faced, stiff-minded, suck-butt, kick-butt, buzz-cut, macho dickheads who oversee the company as political appointees, but anyone who truly understands the art and science of intelligence and counterintelligence will tell you that the cowboys mostly just get in the way. The gods dropped ’em in our midst to generate misery and gum up the works. You’re aware, are you not, Hector, that the gods are tireless fans of slapstick?”

  It was Hector’s turn to smile. “You have a festive manner of speech, Agent Switter. If you are at all typical, and if you are not pulling my legs, I think I am going to enjoy very much my association with this CIA.”

  “Atta boy.”

  “And so, dinner is complete, yet the night is still ahead. Tell me, Agent Switter, do you like to dance?”

  “Why, yes, I do. Just a couple of days ago, as a matter of fact, I danced for hours without a break.” He neglected to mention that he was alone at the time.

  Hector Sumac’s drug of choice, at least for that October evening, was a clean, beige, relatively mild form of Andean cocaine. Switters wanted no part of it. “Thanks, pal, but I tend to avoid any substance that makes me feel smarter, stronger, or better looking than I know I actually am.” There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs; and on a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger. Should he ever aspire to become voluntarily delusional, then good old-fashioned alcohol would do the job effectively and inexpensively, thank you, and without the dubious bonus of jaw-clenching jitters.

  Nevertheless, Switters sat with Hector while he snorted a few lines. They sat in Hector’s ‘97 Honda. The vehicle was still immaculate, but if Lima didn’t hasten to allot a few billion nuevos soles to street repair—the tyranny of maintenance—it wouldn’t be long before Hector’s proud chariot would be shaken and beaten into a spring-sprung tumbleweed of automotive nerves. At present, however, it exuded that peachy, creamy, new-car aroma, and inhaling it, Switters was led to wonder if part of the appeal of young girls wasn’t the fact that they gave off the organic equivalent, the biological equivalent—okay, the genital equivalent—of a new-car smell.

  When Hector was sufficiently tootered up, he ejected the Soundgarden cassette to which they’d been listening, and the two men walked the block and a half to the Club Ambos Mundos, arriving shortly before eleven o’clock. Five nights a week, the Ambos Mundos, like most clubs in Lima, featured live Creole music, but each Monday it was taken over by a hipster deejay who played the latest rock hits from the U.S. and Great Britain. Blue lights apulse, the place was rocking to Pearl Jam when they made their entrance.

  Switters’s broad, tanned, big-boned face was at all times abuzz with an activity, a radiance, of randomly spaced scars, which, though delicate as sand shrimp and variable as snowflakes, created an impression of hard history; and which, when combined with the intensity in and around his emerald orbs, caused him to look potentially dangerous. That impression was offset, however, by the irrefutable sweetness of his smile, a smile that possessed the capacity to dazzle even when held in check to hide chipped teeth, which it usually was. (Since every time he had them fixed, it seemed his teeth just got abused again, he had made a vow to abstain from further dental work until his forty-fifth birthday.) So, perhaps dangerous is not quite the right word for his countenance. Maybe disconcerting or conflicted or unpredictable would be more accurate—although for some drab souls, unpredictable and dangerous are synonymous. At any rate, women did not find his appearance unintriguing, and when the muscular gringo stepped—jaunty, yet somehow dignified—through the door in his white suit and guarded smile, two or three bamboo-colored curls snailing out from under his Panama hat, there was a sudden quickening of more than one female pulse.

  Over the next ninety minutes, Switters danced with an assortment of women, local and foreign, but by midnight—the hour when myth’s black cat pounces on time’s mechanical mouse—one in particular was in orbit around him. Her name was Gloria, she was Peruvian, and she was drinking too much too fast. Saucy and petite, Gloria wore her short hair in bangs, similar, in fact, to Hector; and her eyes were like chocolate-dipped cherry bombs with their fuses lit. In her mid-twenties, she was a tad old for his specialized taste, but when she pressed her pelvis against his during the slow dances, when she poked holes in his breath with a vodka-heated tongue, his body forgot about Suzy, and beer by beer, his mind followed suit.

  He was experiencing a growing appetite for Gloriapussy, and he figured that her alcohol consumption was not dimming his prospects. Indeed, she had become so disheveled, wild-eyed, and flushed that she would have looked more at home in a tangle of sweat-soaked bedsheets than there on the crowded dance floor. Nevertheless, he was surprised when she whispered wetly in his ear, “I desire you to chew my nipples.”

  Dancing away from her, he executed a twirl. When they came face-to-face again she said rather loudly and with a giggle, “I desire you to eat my breasts.”

  Chew? Eat? Perhaps it was a language problem. Perhaps Gloria meant lick or suck or nibble—oral activities in which he might have been a willing participant—but lacked the English for it. “You have a festive manner of speaking,” he said, borrowing a line from Hector, and led her back to their table.

  Hector sat across from them, an urbanized, dyed-blond Indian girl on his lap. He seemed alert and under control. Langley would approve. Switters felt the urge to talk shop with him, to impart, perhaps, Switters’s somewhat novel notion that the CIA was on the verge of evolving into a kind of autonomous secret society (a larger, better funded, better organized version of the C.R.A.F.T. Club), a reverse hierarchy whose fundamental function was to work behind the scenes to distract the powerful and covertly thwart their ambitions so that intelligence (true intelligence, which is always in the service of serenity, beauty, novelty, and mirth) might actually flourish in t
he world, and some shard of humanity’s primal innocence be preserved. Alas, the music was too loud, and Gloria was tugging at his sleeve.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I desire you to fuck me in the culo.”

  At first he thought she said “cooler,” and he had a vision of them entwined on the frosty, bloodstained cement of one of those refrigerated lockers, with waxy yellow and red sides of beef swinging from iron hooks all around them, their exhalations condensing the instant they panted or sighed so that they kissed through a mutually generated cloud and could not see each other’s faces.

  “I desire you to fill up my ass,” she elaborated.

  Well, he thought, that’s South America for you.

  “With premium or regular?” he asked.

  As Gloria giggled uncomprehendingly, he rose on an impulse, retrieved his hat, and gave Hector an affectionate squeeze of the shoulder.

  “No! Please! You are not leaving?”

  “Afraid so. It’s getting vivid in here, if you catch my drift. Good luck, pal. Ha sido estupenda. I’ll be in touch.”

  As he headed for the exit, he called, “Order Gloria there a pot of coffee. And don’t forget to put it on your expense account. The company’s a mile-high Santa Claus with an elastic sack.”

  On the taxi ride back to the Centro, he passed one of the cathedrals he had visited earlier that day. It was the one with the statue of the angel on its porch. Once while playing Ping-Pong with Suzy—one of the rare times he was left alone with her—he had asked her what language she thought the angels spoke. “Oh,” she answered, without missing a stroke, “probably the same one Jesus speaks.”

  “The historical Jesus is believed to have spoken Aramaic. Of all the possible languages, why would the heavenly hosts choose to converse in a long-dead Semitic dialect from southwest Asia? Do you suppose.”