by R. M. Koster
I nod.
He fidgets from one foot to the other. “Look, Kiki. I’m not going to make any deal with Pepe. Forget I mentioned it.”
I nod.
“You need anything?”
I shake my head.
“Look, Kiki. I have to get to my office. Where do you …”
“Send. Me. Jaime.”
“All right.” He keeps staring tragically at me, as though he wants to pick me up in his arms. Life is simpler for me than for Alfonso.
“Look, Kiki. I’ll see you this afternoon. Tell Elena hello for me when she gets up.”
I nod, and he makes that pursed-lipped smile and steps by my chair, out of my field of vision.
16
Alfonso didn’t notice me until that wrestling match. All the while we lived at Aunt Beatrix’s and even after he left for Harvard, I was invisible. Even when my torpid elbow sent one of Aunt Beatrix’s precious objets—a Lalique piece like an outsized ice cube with a draped Persephone imprisoned inside—smithering to the tile floor of the living room, she failed to see me and howled over my head at the poltergeist she believed to be to blame. Uncle Erasmo saw me once, one Saturday afternoon just before my fourteenth birthday when he was on his way to play chess at Don Felix Ardilla’s house, but he took me for one of the street boys who prowl the better quarters of the capital seeking odd jobs and pressed a ten centavo piece into my hand, saying that he was taking his car but that I could wash it the following morning. My invisibility extended to my personal belongings, even to my food and silverware, so that no one had to endure the hallucination of forks levitating themselves to dump rice into thin air and guests could admire my Aunt Beatrix’s Wedgwood plates, her Ming figurine, her Baccarat goblet (from the 1909 exposition) while I stood between them and the breakfront which sheltered them.
At first I believed that my Aunt Beatrix was unable to see me because her mind was totally occupied with the knowledge that she was an Anguila and, more than an Anguila, which was a great deal, an Anguila Ahumada, families more august and anointed than the Hapsburgs or the Hohenzollerns. Everyone knew that Ahumada females conceived parthenogenetically by dispensation of the Holy Ghost and that the Anguilas, instead of shitting like ordinary mortals, produced milk-white turds with a faint aroma of wild jasmine. And Pope Benedict XV, in respect for Aunt Beatrix’s genealogy, had arranged for her soul to be raised into heaven even while her body remained on earth, thus insuring against a permanent taint from her union with Uncle Erasmo. She paraded her ancestors like saints on feast days. Each morning the gem-encrusted effigy of her father, Don Fermín Anguila, in his uniform of Knight of the Holy Sepulcher, was carried three times around the patio to the beat of a funereal drum and the swing of incense chasers, while Aunt Beatrix extolled his virtues for the edification of Uncle Erasmo and Alfonso. Her hysterical monotone was not aimed my way only because she couldn’t see me, but Uncle Erasmo, who had made her brother President of the Republic, who had been President himself, who had earned a fortune at law and founded four newspapers, was so wary of it that he trembled lest the faintest spiral from his havana leak from his study to defile her forebears’ shrine.
He couldn’t see me because he was absorbed in his law practice and his newspapers and the intrigues attendant upon his becoming a justice of the Supreme Court. Or so I thought for a while, but what, then, was Alfonso’s excuse? In the end I had to admit I had become invisible. This caused me anxiety at first; then I came to take a perverse pleasure in it, like a cockroach when the kitchen light goes off, as soon as I realized that I had not ceased to exist and would someday return dramatically to view.
The only place where my invisibility was not in force was the Reservation Y.M.C.A., a scarred brick building off Washington Avenue with a lobby full of ping-pong tables and a slimy indoor swimming pool and an auditorium in which six Unitarians assembled every Sunday at ten-thirty and a basketball court where poorly chaperoned dances were held on Friday nights and a wrestling room whose mildewed mats were soaked in the onionpungent scents of straining groins and armpits, whose random litter of barbells (the relics of four or five broken sets) was pitted by rust. Dick Angel, the retired master sergeant who was athletic director, saw me the moment I wandered in dragging my book bag. He seemed, in fact, to be waiting for me, holding a position of attention, fists braced against his hips, while suspended from the hand rings which hung from a beam near the ceiling.
“What you want, kid?”
“I want to be strong.”
“You come to the right place, but stay off the mats with your street shoes.”
Then he let go of the rings and floated down—white tennis shoes, white wool socks, white duck trousers, white undershirt with white cotton tufts of hair blossoming from the neck—to teach me how to exercise and weightlift and handbalance and box and wrestle. He taught me wrestling last, as though he knew that was what I would like best. I worked out with soldiers and marines on their way to Saipan and Tarawa and sailors back from Savo Island and the Coral Sea, anyone remotely near my weight, and had my first bout at fifteen with a merchant seaman who tried to bugger me in the showers. I took him down with a standing switch and tired him with a cross-body ride—scene off a Greek vase, one naked athlete on his knees, another snaked across his back from one leg to the opposite arm—and sprained his shoulder decisively with a chicken-wing lock; thank you, Dick, because I wasn’t yet strong enough to break his arm. That night I materialized briefly to Alfonso while walking across his bedroom on my hands, but when I flipped over onto my feet to tell the story, he lost sight of me and went back to his homework. The next time he saw me was five years later in Cambridge.
Alfonso got his exercise dancing to boleros like “Flores Negras” and “Bésame Mucho” on terraces hung with Japanese lanterns and shielded from the moonlight by mango trees, and also copulating with the maids Aunt Beatrix brought from the interior. Each spring she brought a new girl to train to wait at table, and each fall Alfonso sent the girl back to her village pregnant, though this was always brought off without Aunt Beatrix’s knowledge and in collusion with Uncle Erasmo. The girl was given a little money and told to go home, while Aunt Beatrix grumbled about the sloth and ingratitude of the peasantry. Uncle Erasmo underwrote the system because it was annoying to his wife, safer than having Alfonso debauch girls of good family, and on the whole cheaper than sending him to a whorehouse. What with the boleros and the maids and his close collaborations with Uncle Erasmo, Alfonso so mastered the graces of society, the arts of love, and the ways of the world that by eighteen he was the most accomplished young fop in Tinieblas, a distinction he proved during the vacation between his freshman and sophomore years by becoming the second of three favored men to take the virginity of Irene Manta. The first was her father, Don Reynaldo Manta; the third was Nacho Hormiga, who married her. Irene and other girls of her class throughout Latin America were able, Venus-like, to renew their innocence through the skill and sympathy of a Buenos Aires surgeon who specialized in vulcanizing punctured pudenda. Alfonso destroyed one of his finest pieces of work and was so impressed he fell in love for the first and last time. My first intimation that Alfonso was in love came when I was awakened one very sultry night by the silence of the bedsprings in the maid’s room below my own. I assumed Alfonso was sick, but found him singing through his shaving lather the next morning. I followed him into his room and learned (second sign) that he had been keeping a diary. He read aloud from it to himself while I stood invisible in the doorway: “Some virgins seem gifted by God with amatory skills a courtesan might envy. Ah, Irene, my Irene! So innocent and yet so wise!” Then he looked through me into the hallway, his face wreathed in an idiot’s beatific grin (third signal), and sighed, “Puta, madre! Qué cosa más sabrosa!”
From that morning, nourished by the rays of love, Alfonso began to grow. Normally he was a couple inches short of six feet and slender, but by the Fourth of July three weeks later he was as tall and sturdy as the picked men of the Marin
e color guard who translated the Stars and Stripes from Fort Shafter to the Plaza Inchado. His chest broadened, his shoulders swelled, even his soul grew tumescent, overflowing in such profusion that wherever he walked men stared at him and women bit their lips in desire. He cultivated a pencil mustache, and when he took Irene to see his idol Errol Flynn as El Halcón del Mar he was mobbed in front of the Teatro Trópico by screaming adolescents who took him for the great man. Our cousin Raquel, Aunt Beatrix’s immaculately conceived daughter, returned from finishing school in Washington with a diploma written in French and a Bolivian diplomat’s son on a velvet leash, and the night of their wedding, which was the high point of Alfonso’s love affair with Irene Manta, he stood six feet three inches tall and radiant as Lucifer. All six bridesmaids had orgasms when they danced with him, fluttering limply to the dance floor like wounded butterflies, while the Bolivian gnawed his leash in envy and Raquel prepared to spend her marriage haunted by longings for him. And when he took Irene in his arms and tangoed her off into the darkness at the back of the patio, Don Reynaldo Manta fainted from jealousy and came to weeping from the knowledge that his first daughter was forever lost to him while his second was only nine years old. Long after the last guest had departed and the orchestra had folded their music stands and packed their instruments, when the humid air was freshened by breezes from the gulf and the moon hung wan and sallow in a fading sky, I climbed to my room to find Alfonso lying there laved by a golden haze while Irene Manta knelt naked on the bed beside him, her lips sleepwalking across his abdomen. I slung a hammock on the upstairs screened porch and slept no more in my bed that summer, for when I went to it the next evening the sheets were still scalding to my touch.
Irene Manta was tall and slim like a young palm, as wild and lithe and ruttish as an otter, with golden eyes and lips like an unopened rose, and that slight separation between her two front teeth which the Arab sages knew as a mark of lasciviousness. She and Alfonso made love in her friend Orlando Logarto’s studio and on the front seat of her cousin Tito Avispa’s 1936 Packard coupe and on the moist fairways of the Club Campestre and standing up in a corner of the card room at the Club Mercantil while a dance was going on outside and in all the rooms of Aunt Beatrix’s house, even in Aunt Beatrix’s bed one afternoon while she and Irene’s mother and two other ladies played mah-jongg in the living room, even in the bathroom, once in the tub and once on the toilet, Alfonso sitting and Irene straddled over him. They drove all the way to La Yegua to make love in the pastures, and that year the cows dropped triplets and an old stud bull who had been consigned to the slaughterhouse regained his powers and sired more calves than ever before. On the way back they stopped to make love in a drought-seared ricefield in Salinas Province, and that night the drought broke and it rained for forty days and the crops were saved.
But after my cousin Raquel’s wedding, Irene’s ardor cooled. She was accustomed, even at eighteen, to have men at her feet, and now Alfonso could have any woman in the country and was beginning to undervalue her. She knew without considering it, in the uterine wisdom of women given over to love, that it was either her or Alfonso, so she grew less avid and then began rejecting his advances, and in ten days Alfonso had shrunk back to his normal size. With this she saw that Alfonso was just an ordinary man and, besides, neither old nor rich enough to make a good husband, so she neglected him more and, as he started to whine and plead, went out with other men, principally Nacho Hormiga, though she did not go to bed with Nacho for the excellent reason that she wanted to marry him. Then Alfonso accused her of betraying him and threatened violence on himself, on her, on his rival or rivals, on the whole country, the entire world, and she laughed at him, a delicate laugh like the tinkling of ice cubes in a Cuba libre. As she laughed, Alfonso shriveled and shrunk, so that he became shorter than I was and thinner than I had been before I started working out and very pale, so pale it seemed that he might become invisible too. Still he continued to hope and plead until Irene told him publicly she did not love him.
This was at the funeral of Tito Avispa’s Packard. Tito was ready to get a new car when the war started, but of course there were none to be had then, and for nearly two years after the Japanese surrendered no new cars arrived in Tinieblas, and all this time the Packard served faithfully, its tires accepting retread after retread while its fenders decayed and its grill tarnished in the rigors of our tropical climate. Then, when the new models finally came in on the Galactic Fruit steamers that summer of 1947, Tito’s cousin Irene Manta began going out with Alfonso, who had no car, and begged the Packard. Its springs strained over potholed backroads and its cushions bore the buffets of love, yet it rolled on, uncomplaining, until Irene, after a particularly sloppy argument with Alfonso, drove it into a ditch. The broken axle could have been repaired, but Irene had no real need for the car now that she was seeing so much of Nacho Hormiga, who had bought my father’s excellent Daimler after he went into exile, while Tito saw the wreck only as an excuse for a party. Thus the following announcement appeared, bordered in black, in all the newspapers:
DON ALBERTO AVISPA MANTA
IS GRIEVED TO ANNOUNCE THE PASSING
OF HIS BELOVED PACKARD COUPE,
WHICH WILL BE LAID TO REST AT THE FINCA “LA PERFECTA”
RÍO TIBIO, PROVINCE OF TINIEBLAS,
AT ELEVEN OF THE FORENOON, SATURDAY, 22ND JULY.
Tito’s finca lay just past the Guardia Civil checkpoint to the north of the capital, and mourners began arriving there at around ten o’clock. Tito greeted them in the large thatch-roofed pavilion, behind which the departed lay in state, its body festooned with black crepe and its swooping swan radiator cap hung with a simple gardenia wreath. Besides five cases of Pirata Morgan White Tinieblas Rum, Coca-Cola, and two large cakes of ice, the pavilion contained a sixteen-piece Mexican mariachi band which was playing an engagement at the Hotel Excelsior that month. The day was overcast and muggy, and before the wake had been long in progress, a fine rain began to drool pathetically on the drinkers and dancers who could not squeeze under the pavilion’s roof. It was an affair that straddled social frontiers. The best families had sent the generation born between 1915 and 1930, but the married men, no doubt by previous agreement, left their wives at home and brought their concubines, while the unmarried brought dates and fiancées who were very often the younger sisters of the wives left at home. The result of this experiment in democracy was to make the concubines feel respectable and the girls of good family thrillingly dissolute. Guchi Oruga left both his wife, who was Tito’s sister, and his concubine, and brought two jello-breasted Dominican whores from a brothel called Lo Que El Víento se Llevó, the premier whorehouse of Central America until it was wrecked by a contingent of Puerto Rican soldiers returning from Korea six years later. The two were in great demand once the dancing started, especially as there were many young solo males like Alfonso, with whom Irene Manta had refused to come. She arrived with Nacho and another couple and was gayer than ever, flirting with everyone but Alfonso, who squatted under the weeping eaves, drinking straight rum from a paper cup and mooning out at the soggy meadow where Irene Manta danced barefoot in the warm rain.
Sometime before noon Tito had the mariachis play a fanfare, and Orlando Lagarto, who was expelled from a French seminary the year Tito bought the Packard, stepped out beside it with a soutane on over his bathing suit and carrying a large crucifix, and in a high, squeaky voice like that of Monseñor Irribarri, the Spanish Basque who was Archbishop of Tinieblas, began:
“In nomine Grouchi et Chici et Harpi, amen!” Then he spoke of the Packard’s ample windows, out of which so many drunks had vomited, and its noble lines, by which so many streetwalkers had been captivated, and its generous seats, on which so many bastards had been sired, and its mighty engine, which had outdistanced so many Reservation MP’s, and its firm and upright gearshift, which was an example to the young men of Tinieblas—all this to cheers and catcalls from men who had stripped off their shirts and in some cas
es their trousers and giggles from girls whose thin dresses were rain-plastered to their flesh and raucous toots from Tito’s brother Meco who had taken a horn from one of the musicians. Then he turned and held the crucifix out before him and marched solemnly away toward the huge pit Tito had had dug, and all the men, all save Alfonso, who stayed inside the pavilion drinking, began pushing the Packard after him, with Tito steering with his right arm through the left window and the girls skipping alongside and the band trudging in the rear playing “La Golondrina,” and when they had the car next to the pit, Orlando stood on the other side praying (“Hail Maisy, full of grease, the lard is with you …”), while they rocked it until it tipped over and crashed, roof down, into the ground. Then they covered it with empty rum bottles and a little dirt and trooped hack to the pavilion.
As they returned, Alfonso slouched out into the rain and took Irene Manta by the arm and dragged her away from Nacho, though this looked in no way menacing for by this time he was no larger than she, and whined something to her, and she laughed and said, clearly, so that everyone nearby turned around, “But I don’t love you.”
Alfonso shrank three inches before everyone’s eyes and sat down on the ground and stayed there, not bothering to wipe the rain from his eyes, so like it was to his tears, until Lino Piojo took him home. He was no bigger than a dwarf when he arrived, and he stayed in his room, not eating or sleeping or bathing or shaving or opening the invitation to the formal party at the Club Mercantil where Don Reynaldo Manta announced the engagement of his daughter Irene to Ignacio Hormiga. Irene danced at a number of parties in her honor, and then flew off to the Argentine to have her womb scraped clean of Alfonso’s child and her hymen reconstructed for Nacho. On the day after the operation Alfonso ate the egg Aunt Beatrix sent up to him, and the next day he came down to dinner, and then he began growing again, so that by the time of Irene’s and Nacho’s wedding early in September he was his normal size, and that same night a whining of bedsprings in the maid’s room certified his recovery. As I passed his room the next morning I saw him writing in his diary. He put down the pen and read aloud: “I have been in love. Once is enough.” Then he looked through me into the hallway, his face gnarled by a sardonic smile, and sighed, “Puta, madre! Qué cosa más pendeja!”