I was hungry, but not hungry enough to stand the torture of having her whole family stare at me while I ate. “Gee, thanks a lot. But not today. I’m really in a hurry.”
She pointed a finger at me. “I expect you to come with some more rent by Friday. Remember, you owe me $14,760.”
“How could I ever forget it, Mrs. O’Donnell? Have a nice day. It’s nice to see you.”
As I slunk off down the aisle, she called out, “Santiago, pray for me that I can pay the Con Ed bill.”
Mr. O’Donnell was in the kitchen in a carnivorous mood. He stood frozen by the refrigerator waiting for a mythic mouse to show up. He was so engrossed in his hunt that he glanced at me long enough to make eye contact, but that was all. “Suit yourself, ingrate, if you prefer dead mouse meat to my company,” I said, somewhat hurt. I went to check my messages. No one had called. I sat down at my desk and went through the mail. It was all trash, except for an envelope that contained a newsletter with the ominous title the Colombian Report. It was eighty-eight pages long and written in English. I leafed through it; every item in it was about guerilla warfare in Colombia. Oh great, I thought, this is just what I need, to get on the mailing list of a terrorist group. What if the police raided my apartment and found subversive literature in my possession? I shook my head to expel these paranoid thoughts from my brain. This is New York, not Colombia, I reminded myself. My conscience was clear, I thought. And yet, regular guys did not keep pounds of cocaine stashed in their kitchens or illegal guns in their toilet tanks.
I started pacing the apartment. It was so hot and humid that I felt as if I were swimming against the current in a huge river of lukewarm pea soup. I thought about going to the park, to spend the afternoon cooling off under a tree. But Central Park in July is dustier than a ghost town in a western. At least Mr. O’Donnell seems okay, I thought. Otherwise he would not be so intent upon catching that mouse. The phone rang.
“Santiago, pick up. I know you’re there,” said the sonorous voice of Ben Ami Burztyn.
“Hi, Ben,” I said, picking up. “When did you get back in town?”
“Screening your calls, ha?” he said gruffly. “Hiding from Mrs. O’Donnell.”
“Oh, man. I wish I could hide from that woman. I just saw her. So what’s happening?”
“I’m calling to invite you to dine with me, on the off chance,” he said sarcastically, “that you’re free tonight.”
“Sure,” I said, delighted at the prospect since Ben Ami only ate at the very best restaurants.
“Meet me at Rupert’s at seven-thirty.” He gave me the address. “And look nice, will you? Wear a jacket and tie. Do you have a presentable tie?”
“Wait till you see me in the suit Mother gave me. I look like a million bucks.”
“Humm,” Ben said. “Anyway, please don’t be late.”
“Not a second late, I promise.”
Benjamin chuckled at the other end. “See you tonight, chico.”
“Ciao.”
Ben’s call had put me in a good mood. I knew it would be a great dinner. Besides, I hadn’t seen Ben in a few months. Suddenly feeling energized, I changed into my shorts and a T-shirt. I decided to go to the pier on Forty-third Street to catch some rays, read, and maybe work on my Columbus poem. The river always made me feel as if I were in one of the caravels. I was just going out the door when the phone rang. It was Tim Colby, my literary agent.
“Santiago, I’m at the corner with coffee and doughnuts. Are you home?”
I told him where I was heading and invited him to come along.
“I’m game,” Tim said.
Tim was waiting for me downstairs, perspiring, as if he had been doing a lot of walking. He was loaded with a briefcase, shopping bags, and large manila envelopes.
“You look like a Caribbean surfer,” he said smiling.
“You can leave all that stuff upstairs if you want,” I said, referring to the portable stationery store he was saddled with.
“That’s okay. Just help me with the coffee and doughnuts.”
Taking the paper bags from him, I said, “Let’s get the hell out of here before the crack people see me going out of the building dressed like this.”
Tim glanced in the direction of Paradise Alley. “They’re taking over my neighborhood too. These people reproduce quicker than roaches.”
At the corner of Forty-third, we turned west, heading for the Hudson.
“Are those books you’re carrying in the envelopes?” I asked, watching him struggle with the bulky packages, although it occurred to me that dressed in sandals, khaki pants, and a red shirt depicting macaws and coconut trees, he did not look like he was coming from the staid world of publishing.
“No, I’m making deliveries for a friend of mine who works on Wall Street. But I’ll deliver these tomorrow morning.”
“Are you working as a messenger?”
“A couple of days a week to make some extra cash. I work for a friend I met at Princeton. Now he’s a big shot on Wall Street and he helps me out this way. How are you doing?” he asked as we crossed Ninth Avenue. “Getting any writing done?”
“Not in a few weeks. I’m rethinking the whole concept.”
Tim smiled broadly. “I’ve got good news for you.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I met an editor who’s interested in you.”
“In me? Are you kidding? Did he read Lirio del Alba?” I asked, although that sounded improbable.
“She doesn’t read Spanish.”
“How can she be interested in me if she doesn’t read Spanish?”
“I told her I knew an up-and-coming Latin American writer. I told her I was giving her the chance to publish the next great Latin American sensation.”
That hardly sounded like me, but I was flattered nonetheless. “Gee, Tim, thanks. So she wants to publish Christopher Columbus?”
“I said you were writing an exciting book.”
My high spirits sank a bit. “Did you tell her I was writing an epic poem?”
“No. But nobody calls Nabokov’s Pale Fire a poem. It’s called a novel. Anyway,” Tim went on, “we were talking at a reception and she said that she had never read a South American thriller. She said she’d love to publish one.”
“You mean, you want me to turn Christopher Columbus on his Death Bed into a thriller?” I sputtered. “It riles me up how everyone wants me to write what they don’t have the guts to write themselves.”
“Not me, Santiago. I want you to write Christopher Columbus. I really dig that poem. I told you I’ll translate it into English when you finish it.”
Tim’s promise made me feel better since he was such a highly regarded translator. “What’s the editor’s name?” I asked in a conciliatory mood.
He told me her name and the name of the house, both of which meant nothing to me.
Becoming uptight again, I said, “I’m not even sure what a thriller is.”
“You’ve seen thrillers at the movies.”
“But she wants a book, not a movie. You mean, a thriller like Graham Greene’s The Third Man?”
“Yeah.”
I shook my head. “I just don’t think I can turn the discovery of America into a thriller. I don’t think Graham Greene could either.”
“All I’m saying is that she’s keen on publishing a young, unknown, Latin American author. Preferably somebody who’s writing a thriller. You’re kind of young and you’re Latin, so that’s two out of three. Just think about it. Don’t get all worked up. Maybe the two of you could meet, and if you hit it off, who knows?”
We had reached the corner of Eleventh Avenue. A warm marine breeze engulfed us. I breathed in deeply, holding it in my lungs before exhaling. We crossed the avenue and entered the pier through the open gate.
Until quite recently there had been three wonderful old piers. Two were demolished and only Pier 43 remained, although an open-air summer concert hall had been built on it. Fortunately, half of the pier was still
open to the public. It was extremely overcast yet there were a few men in tiny swimming trunks out sunning. The weather was only fit to be cursed but hardcore joggers trotted in slow motion. At the end of the pier a bunch of boys dove into the river and fished for eels; several Chinese men dressed in black, who lived at the Chinese mission on Eleventh Avenue, stood at the edge of the pier, exchanging looks I could not read, looking like conspirators about to blow up the Statue of Liberty or invade New Jersey.
We sat at the edge of the pier, our legs hanging in the air. It was windless and the Hudson seemed static, like a river of glue, but I was happy to be away from the stench of midtown Manhattan in midsummer. Here, at least, the city did not stink like a drunkard’s breath. Tim opened the box of doughnuts and we sipped our warm coffees. Whenever Tim came to visit, he brought me doughnuts and pastries and we indulged in an orgy of sweets. I complimented the freshness of the doughnuts.
“Wall Street doughnuts. Only decent thing about the place,” Tim said.
In the oppressive heat the tepid coffee was refreshing. Watching the excited boys diving into the river, climbing back up onto the platform and diving off repeatedly, made me think cool thoughts. We chewed and drank in silence. Tim seemed mesmerized by the eel fishers. Amidst much shrieking, the boys killed the eels with their shoes, bricks, or smashing them against the cement. Grossed out, I concentrated on the different crafts going up and down the Hudson. Yet the river’s murky waters made me think of a channel of eel soup. I looked up and saw rain was imminent. I hoped for heavy rain to wash off the thick coat of dust and garbage that had settled upon the city like icing on a cake. The sky was a luminous milky opal, oppressively metallic and hazy. A filmy mist enveloped the world. An ocean liner floating by blew its horn, sounding like a gigantic, moaning cow. This melancholy mood made me want to jump aboard the ship and go off to an exotic island far, far away, a place where I could spend the rest of my life being a beach bum, sipping purple daiquiris at sunset.
“This is really nice,” Tim said, lazily stretching his torso and arms. “You come here often?”
“In the summer I do. I read or write or just look at the boats. It’s like going to the country.”
“It must make you think of Christopher Columbus.”
“Water always reminds me of him.”
“You know what Melville says in Moby Dick?”
“It’s a big book, Tim. He says a mouthful about everything.”
“Melville says that the flood has not subsided; that two-thirds of the world is still under water. Did you know that?”
As it headed toward the sea, the ocean liner made the river heave with ripples that lapped the pillars of the pier, producing a gentle, caressing music.
“So Columbus knew how important it was to discover new land,” I said.
“You make him sound like a land speculator. I’m sure there’s more to it than that. Oh, wow,” Tim exclaimed, “see the Statue of Liberty down there?”
In the distance, emerging from the shroud of gray that wrapped around the landscape, the statue was tiny, like a lit match.
“Did you know that when the French gave it to us it was the highest structure in New York? At that time, because there were no elevators yet, the tallest buildings in the city were only six floors high.”
“So the statue was the first skyscraper.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Tim said, biting into a jelly doughnut. “Santiago, do you think Americans are naïve?” he asked me out of the blue.
I studied him. His tawny hair was longish and he needed to shampoo it and get a haircut. He was in his late thirties, but because of his intense, gleaming eyes and sunny disposition, he looked like a philosopher-child. I was going to say the polite thing. Such as, “Well, no more so than other people.” But I said, “Yes, definitely.”
“Why is that?”
“Who knows, Tim? You’d better ask Octavio Paz or one of those French deconstructionists who know everything. I haven’t got a clue. But what I can’t get over is how the pursuit of happiness is written in the Bill of Rights. I think that’s why Americans are so miserable a lot of the time. They believe happiness is one of their inalienable rights. And, essentially, I agree with Freud that happiness was not written into the contract. You know, momentary happiness yes,” I went on, totally unashamed of my clichés. “Like I’m happy right this minute with you. But if we ever tried to duplicate it … forget it. I think it’s unrepeatable. But happiness as a way of life? How can one be happy in the face of death surrounding us?” I said, thinking about Bobby’s death and the approaching demise of Mr. O’Donnell. “How can one pursue happiness as a main goal in life when there’s so much pain and suffering everywhere? It makes for a nation of blind people. People who search for what doesn’t exist.”
“Shit,” Tim exclaimed. “It’s raining.” There was no place to run for shelter on the pier. He bunched his envelopes and bags and sat on them. The boys swimming and fishing went berserk with joy. It was not rain, but the fireboat going by. It had started a practice drill in front of us, drenching the pier with a cool, abundant spray. The Chinese men ran away screaming as if they were demons being sprayed with holy water. The boat’s many spouts shot sheets of very fine mist. It looked unspeakably beautiful, like a mythological benevolent beast that had risen from the depths of the Hudson to cool and delight us.
Always the man of letters, Tim said, “It looks like … like … like … Moby Dick. Like a white whale with a hundred spouts.”
Indeed, the monumental, splashy ghost going down the swelling river looked as if it were heading out for the open ocean, ready to put out all the fires of the world.
9 The Interpreter
I hailed a cab in front of the Port Authority building and directed the driver to Rupert’s. Dressed in a snazzy suit, on my way to a fine restaurant, I suddenly felt grand, rich, glamorous. Being around Ben Ami Burztyn led me to fantasize like this. I had met Ben some nine years ago, standing in line to see Todd Browning’s Freaks. A gigantic bearded man of ursine countenance wearing a red aviator’s scarf and a green beret had wheeled around, almost knocking me off the line with his leviathan belly. Abruptly he demanded, “How many times have you seen Freaks?” I told him this was my first time and looked away, not eager to engage in conversations with a stranger. Tapping me on the shoulder, he informed me that he had seen Freaks twenty-eight times. I made up my mind to get away from this weirdo as soon as we entered the theater. I looked away. Ben Ami tapped my shoulder and said, “Is your schedule too busy to talk to me?” I decided to be polite. I said, “No, not really. …”
“I detect an accent. Where are you from?” he asked.
We discovered we had originated in neighboring countries. Ben’s family had arrived in Venezuela from Russia after the revolution. We struck up a rapport and sat together during the film. Ben quoted entire sequences of dialogue as the actors spoke the lines. After the show, he invited me to his apartment for a glass of champagne. Although he looked freaky and acted like a nut, I accepted the invitation—I had few friends in Manhattan and fewer who loved the movies and were South American.
It turned out Ben lived on the third floor above O’Donnell’s bar. At that time, he was the only tenant in the building. Ben opened the door into a pitch dark room and flicked his lighter. He lit a gas lamp on a table, and proceeded to light dozens of candles in an elaborate candelabra.
“What happened to the electricity?” I asked with some apprehension.
“I hate electricity,” was Ben’s curt reply.
The electricity was on in the apartment, but for illumination Ben preferred candles and gas lamps. He pulled a bottle of champagne out of the refrigerator. We sat on a huge bed by one of the windows overlooking Eighth Avenue and drank the champagne. Ben was going through his Edgar Allan Poe period at that time. He produced a couple of first editions of Poe’s poetry and prose, a tattered manuscript of a letter and old, sepia-toned photographs of the author. Over champagne and caviar, Ben
told me a bit about his background. His family was in oil and textiles. Among his childhood friends had been the children of the Kuwaiti royal family. Ben’s parents had wanted him to pursue a business-related career, but he had dropped out of the London School of Economics and moved to New York to write the definitive biography of Poe. He had chosen to reside in Times Square because he felt that was the closest he could get to Poe’s world. When I was about to leave, Ben told me he wanted me to meet his great-grandfather. From under one of the pillows, he removed a human bone. “This is my great-grandfather’s femur,” he said. “He was a general in the Russian army.” I said hello to the bone. Ben kissed it and placed it under a pillow.
We became best friends. It was through Ben that I met Mrs. O’Donnell and moved into the apartment on the fourth floor. A year or so later one of Ben’s maiden aunts died and he came into a large inheritance. He quit researching his Poe biography and moved to Paris, a city he preferred to New York. Over the next few years I saw him during his visits to Manhattan. The nineteenth-century French writer Gerard de Nerval had replaced Poe in his affection. And now that he had lots of dough, he had become a great gourmand who traveled all over the world, eating at the best restaurants. He purchased a duplex at the Museum Tower, where he stayed during his overnight visits to the city. His most recent companion was a belly dancer named Scheherazade, who would break into dance whenever Ben was bored.
The taxi came to a stop; I had arrived at my destination. I gave the driver a three dollar tip. This was the danger of being around Ben—I, too, began to act as if I were rich. The restaurant was rather small and unpretentious in its decor. Inside the door the hostess greeted me. The woman sized me up from the tips of my shoes to the length of my sideburns and deciding, perhaps, that I was a wealthy South American or a coke kingpin (which is what I looked like in the clothes Mother had given me), she greeted me with a hale handshake and a cinemascope smile.
“I’m joining Mr. Benjamin Burztyn’s party,” I informed her.
Hastily, the woman withdrew her hand, as if I had just said, “I have the bubonic plague and want to kiss you on the mouth.” Her fake smile transmogrified into a cold, unfriendly stare. “Follow me,” she said.
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