by R. M. Koster
Fangosa Island, with Mito. We march through the jungle, two figures in an endless file of stumbling prisoners dissolving before and behind us in the steamy gloom of the trail.
“Is it much farther, Papi?” Mito looks up at me with his timid, trusting smile, but I cannot answer, for my mouth is full of dead moths.
Now we sit on the sandy mud, and a guard, a chocolate-skinned cholo, shirtless with a shiny, hairless chest, comes to take Mito up the hill.
“I don’t want to go, Papi!”
I look up at the guard with the cold stare I’ve seen men wilt at, but he isn’t afraid of me. He drags Mito to his feet. I try to rise, but I am paralyzed. Mito whimpers and presses his face against the guard’s bare chest.
I say, “I’m sorry, Mito,” but it comes out pig grunts, and Mito goes off holding the guard’s hand.
I lie alone and naked, face-down in that filthy swamp, while fat brown crabs crawl over me. But now I can raise my head, and a tunnel opens before me through the jungle, a dark tunnel under arched trees draped with vines and moist hangings, and at the end of it bright sky, and the foaming, pounding sea, and my eyes are full of tears of deliverance, and I cry, “Mito! Mito! My journey to the sea!”
29
I am playing tennis on the grass court within the compound of the British Embassy residence. A white-jacketed butler comes to the base line with a pasteboard invitation on a silver tray. But not an invitation, though it is elegantly engraved and has my name scripted on it in violet ink:
DR. MALCOLM LOVEJOY, M.D., F.R.C.S.
HAS THE HONOR TO CERTIFY THAT
MR. César E. Sancudo M.
HAS BEEN COMPLETELY AND PERMANENTLY CURED
OF GONOCOCCAL INFECTION
I take the card, and it splits in two layers. On the second, a cramped scrawl warns that the bearer is suffering from acute, infectious, incurable tertiary syphilis.
“Why bring me this?” I ask the butler. “I had this dream years ago.”
“Pardon me, sir. I just hand them around, sir.”
“Well, who sent it?”
“Mr. Espino, sir. He said it’s for your birthday.”
My twenty-second birthday, the day I met faithful Ñato.
I had been tumbling around Europe for three months with a gymnast from the French team, a fine, healthy girl whom I took like a nerve tonic on nights before important matches at Helsinki. She had the idea of us putting together a nightclub act, had cluttered up her mind with full-color posters of the two of us, me in dancer’s tights and my Olympic gold medal, she with her sweetmeats bulging from a tricolor bikini. I recall a practice session at Cannes, she balanced on one hand on my head while I strolled the sand reading a newspaper. Admiring gapes from the beachmasters, but I couldn’t get interested in it, and all we did besides exercise was make contortive love in hotel rooms. Every two weeks or so I’d grow bored and tell her to meet me the following Thursday in the station at Brussels or at such-and-such hotel (I’d get a name from Guide Michelin) in Lausanne. She was always waiting. Like most Frenchwomen she took an intense, simian joy in grooming blackheads from my temples, and she chattered—fine for tuning my French but on the whole annoying—and though reasonably tough would sniffle when I translated her Neruda’s lines:
I like you when you’re silent
because it’s as if you weren’t here.
At length I got fed up with myself for being with her, told her I’d meet her in Vienna, and went instead to Athens. I sometimes imagine her still lingering in the Bahnhof (completely reconstructed save for the bench she sits on), keeping a shrewd gallic eye on her disintegrating suitcase, while two decades paunch beneath her chin and she waits for a long-extinct Kiki to come handspringing across the marble into her arms.
So on the eve of my birthday I took my boredom on the streetcar to Piraeus and joined the human sewage that sloshes through port cities and, like a style of interior decoration, gives all dockside bars the same look: the dipsomaniacal Swedish first officer who peers blue-eyed into a tumbler of gin; the hairy-armed Bremen oiler with brace of whores fumbling at the blutworst in his trousers; the gringo white-hat with his billfold tucked in the waistband of his arrogantly tight pants. I drank from bar to bar among such types and sometime after midnight got to a place called the John Bull and entered the men’s room.
The first thing I saw was a gringo sailor standing by the urinal —a stretch of tiled wall with a drain and a pipe which dripped a little water—with his heel on a purple Tinieblan passport. At the far end two other sailors, big burly louts, one with red hair clipped en brosse, the other with a high, sweeping wave built up over his forehead, had hammerlocks on a flat-nosed fellow in a sharkskin suit. The nose bled into the toilet bowl, toward which the sailors were bending Sharkskin’s head. They weren’t pushing hard, more enjoying Sharkskin’s anticipation, for the bowl brimmed with the kind of droppings one could expect from the clientele of a busy if not fastidious bar in a country where the staples are greasy lamb and ripe olives.
“Take it easy,” Sharkskin was saying. “You’re hurting me. Don’t put my face in there, you shitty gringos. I’ll kill you all! Give me a chance. We’ll go to the bank in the morning.” On he went, whining, cursing, threatening, pleading, and promising, while the red-haired sailor cooed, “In you go,” and the others giggled.
That’s how I first saw Ñato, aimed head first for the toilet in a bar in Piraeus, Greece.
“Go piss outside,” the small gringo told me. “This place is occupato.”
I hesitated for a moment, making what turned out to be a big decision. I didn’t mind if Sharkskin got his face dunked in the crapper; no doubt he thoroughly deserved it. I felt no sentimental yearnings over our common nationality, nor any animosity against the gringos. It was none of my concern. On the other hand I was bored, and the odds made the situation potentially exciting. I’d lost my gift for second sight and couldn’t put the deal correctly: that I’d be buying some years of laughs and a certain comradeship at the cost of pain and paralysis. So I chose excitement.
Captain B. H. Liddell Hart advises that, when campaigning against a coalition, one should knock out the weakest ally first. I rabbit-punched the little gringo into the urinal.
“What’s going on!” yelled Wavy Hair, letting go of Ñato.
I stepped forward and kicked him with my right foot in the side of the knee. His leg crumpled and he went to the floor on one elbow. I stepped back and leaned some of my weight on the sink and kicked him with my left foot in the side of the head. Red Hair threw Ñato at me and came across Wavy Hair’s body and hit me on the check with a left. He weighed fifty pounds more than I did, and if he hadn’t been off balance he’d have knocked me out. I stumbled to the wall, and Ñato tried to make it out the door, but Red Hair grabbed his coattail and slung him back toward the toilet. That gave me a chance to chop his neck, but I was dizzy and it didn’t hurt him much. So he began to stalk me like Joe Louis, plod, plod, with his left hand out, watching my eyes, while I stepped around, wiggling fingers in his face, waiting for my head to clear and him to commit himself, but there wasn’t much room in there and I was worried he might corner me.
Was Ñato any help? Not him. First I saw him cowering in a corner, and then, when I came around again, he was trying to get through the vent over the toilet, and then, as I tried to get past the sink without tripping over Wavy Hair, he came scuttling on all fours along the wall toward the door. Red Hair reached to stomp his ankle and turned too far. Stab to the throat, chop under the nose, and another between the eyes. He went down and out.
The small gringo began elbowing up from the urinal, but I waved him back with a finger. The two big ones slept side by side near the sink. I gazed at them with the kind of warmth which, ten years later, would come to me when I’d peek in at Mito and Olguita after a midnight prowl, smiled into the mirror at the fine purple star Red Hair’s ring had chiseled on my cheekbone, plucked Ñato’s passport from the tiles, and skipped out the door.
“Sure, sure. Thanks a lot. But I’m in a hurry.”
Didn’t he have time to buy me a drink?
“Sure, sure. But not in there.”
Didn’t he want to go back for his passport?
He searched himself frantically. It was all right. I had his passport.
He followed me across the street into another bar. He sat down, blew his nose carefully, checked the handkerchief for fresh blood, then gave me a grin so insincere it had a kind of reverse-twist honesty.
“Look, man, I’d like to buy you a drink, but I have no money.”
That was all right. I would buy. I ordered us rum and cokes.
“You really know how to fight!”
I nodded.
“It’s necessary in a stinking place like this.”
Nod.
“The people here aren’t human.”
I shook my head.
He launched into a long complaint on the inhumanity of gringo sailors, how he’d done those three a favor, selling a few cases of cigarettes for them without making one drachma for himself, and how they’d accused him of cheating them and bloodied his nose and would certainly have put his face in the toilet if it hadn’t been for me. I let him go on, listening without word or movement, wondering if he’d have an explanation for not helping out in the fight, thinking how much his facial muscles must hurt from so much grinning. Finally his grin faded.
“What do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
He finished his drink and set the glass on the table. I hadn’t touched mine.
“Look, I don’t have any money. You won’t get anything out of it.”
“That’s all right.”
“Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d you help me out? Why’d you fight those three sailors?”
“I felt like it.”
“That’s all?”
I nodded.
He fidgeted on his chair. He looked around the barroom. He kept glancing at the door. He wanted his passport, but he didn’t dare ask for it.
“Don’t you want your drink?”
“You have it.” I pushed it over.
“All right! All right!” He grabbed it and drank half.
Suddenly I felt sorry for him and took out his passport and my own and slapped them against my palm. “I’m Tinieblan too.”
“Ah, ho! That’s it! You’re Tinieblan too!”
I nodded.
“That’s it! That’s it!”
I opened his passport. “‘Jesús Maria Espino Amaro.’”
“They call me Ñato.”
I flipped him mine. He opened and read: “‘César Enrique Sancudo Maldonado.’”
“They call me Kiki.”
“Ah, ho! Alejo’s son! No wonder! No wonder the way you kicked that gringo! And we have the same birthday, not just the day but the year too.”
I looked down and saw it was true and that we had the same height and weight, the same color eyes and hair.
“Ah, ho! And me without money to buy you a present. You gave me one. You saved my neck, and I can’t buy you a present. I can’t even buy you a drink.” He grimaced in despair and finished mine. “But wait, brother. You like girls, don’t you? How could Alejo’s son not like girls? I’m going to get you a girl like you never had before. Only fifteen, and does things you wouldn’t believe. Even speaks Spanish, so you won’t feel lonely.”
“How much?”
“How much? Why ask how much? She’s a present! I’m giving her to you, brother. You can stay all night, all week if you like. You’re going to think you’re in heaven. Look, brother, you can’t say no. Come on.”
I didn’t think she’d justify the way he smacked his lips and flicked his fingers, but it would have been too cruel to say no. And what else did I have to do at three in the morning in Piraeus, now that I’d rounded the bars and had a good fight and toyed all I cared to with a cowardly buffoon who shared my birthday? I let him lead me through a maze of alleys, while he whined about the cold and praised my birthday present, to a tenement built in the days of Pericles, and up four flights to a door, which, after much pounding, opened just wide enough for me to see two big eyes blinking at the level of my sternum.
“I bring you my brother,” Ñato said signorially. “Treat him well.” Then he slapped me affectionately on the neck. “All week, if you like,” he said. Then he scampered down the stairs.
Ñato’s present came up to my shoulder and was so thin she looked more like twelve than fifteen. She tried to smile as I entered, but her huge eyes had had little practice at it. Her room was like a painter’s studio: the steep roof formed one wall and was gashed by a skylight whose several missing panes let in the salt wind from the harbor. A candle flickering in a niche above the bed writhed our shades onto the empty hallway.
The girl closed the door behind me and pulled her robe about her. “Will your worship take drink?”
“Who taught you Spanish?” I asked, thinking it must have been some mad Cervantophile like Lazarillo Agudo.
“My parents. Will your worship take drink?”
I shook my head. I must have frowned as well.
“Does your worship find me displeasing?”
What with the cold, and her so frail, and that crazy language, I wasn’t much for love, but then I thought: The son of a bitch was right, I haven’t had one like this before, and I smiled and drew her toward the bed.
“Wait. Let me take your worship’s clothes.”
So I waited while she took my jacket and hung it on a chair beside the door, and knelt and untied my shoes and took them off, and opened my trousers, all very respectfully, like the damsels who wait on knights in the old romances, but not without affection, and when I was naked she led me to the bed and dropped her robe and slipped in beside me. You could see every rib on that girl, but her body was warm, and, young as she was, she had wise fingers.
“Your worship is wounded.” She brushed the bruise on my cheek.
“What’s this ‘your worship’ business?”
“That’s how we speak. My people are Sephardic, from Salonika. My ancestors left Málaga four centuries ago, but we still speak Spanish.” All this while touching me.
“Sixteenth-century Spanish.”
She knelt beside me. “I suppose so. But your worship did not come here to talk.”
“No.”
She blew out the candle and bent to me. Timid minnows swam from a sun-warmed sea to nibble at my thighs and belly. Eels wriggled along my flanks. A soft bivalve closed over me. My muscles melted. The cables of my mind parted, and it fell upward into an oval darkness.
Then I got a message like I’d had in prison hunting rats, one I didn’t want to answer. Something was wrong, but I didn’t want to be bothered. I wanted to enjoy the marine life, for now a firmer mollusk was peristalting me inside it. But the warning grew so strong I got angry, and without thinking I heaved the girl off me, tumbling her to the floor, and came over the foot of the bed, my sex jibing like a sloop boom, and ran two steps and raised my bare foot and slammed the door on Ñato Espino’s shoulders as he crawled out into the hall.
I dragged him back by the collar and lifted him under the arms and shook him, flapping his forehead against the wall. He whined, “Ay, ay, ay,” but made no resistance, so after eight or ten shakes I let him drop.
“Light!” standing with my foot on his spine. There was a scuffling by the bed, and the girl lit the candle.
I stood there with my wang pointed at his nape like a dowsing rod; then I reached under him and took my wallet and passport out of his jacket pocket. I tossed them on the chair which held my clothes and pushed the door shut and turned to the girl, who sat cross-legged on the bed with her wrists crossed over her Brillo pad.
“The drink y
ou offered me was drugged, wasn’t it? He brings you sailors, doesn’t he? And you drug them, and he creeps in and robs them, and then he throws them down the stairs.”
Ñato began whimpering and I swung my heel back into his ass. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
I grabbed my pants and pulled them on and stuffed my wallet and passport into a pocket. Just get out of there, and find another woman, and then go back to Athens and sleep, but I was too angry. I picked Ñato up and slung him onto a chair under the skylight.
“You turd!” Slapped his face. “I saved your life, and you try to rob me!”
“What could I do? I need the money.”