by Grant Buday
Along with churches and shops there were cantinas, and inevitably Gilbert led the way through a set of swinging doors to a table set with a shaker of cayenne and a plate of quartered oranges. Mescal and beer arrived. The drill was basic: shake cayenne onto orange, bang back mescal, bite orange, gulp beer. On their third round Cyril began to feel like a beached raft being refloated on an incoming tide. For the first time in days he was able to forget his misery and look around, and what he discovered was that no one in the cantina had any shoelaces, or rather that one man had them all. He was a fat man at his own table in the middle of the room, with a heap of laces before him, and he was now regarding the newcomers with interest. With a downward wave of his fingers he indicated that Cyril and Gilbert were to join him.
“Give to me your shoelace,” he said to Cyril.
“Why?”
“Give to me your shoelace.”
Cyril looked to Gilbert who, for once, had no advice. Anxious not to offend in a foreign country, Cyril took the lace from one of his Converse All Stars.
“You are strong?” enquired the Mexican.
“No stronger than anyone else, I guess.”
The fat man had heavy-lidded eyes and a smooth face and a long black moustache and black hair that hung straight down. “You can break your shoelace I give to you two dollar. I can break your shoelace you give to me two dollar. Is a new shoelace, yes?”
Cyril had got them recently. He nodded.
“Bueno. Try.”
It occurred to Cyril that either way he ended up with a broken shoelace, nonetheless he wound the end of the lace around each hand, took a breath and yanked. The lace held. The Mexican laughed the long low laugh of a man who knew his territory. He had beautiful white teeth, not one of them gold.
“Con permiso.” He took the shoelace, looped an end around each forefinger, held the lace up for Cyril and Gilbert to see, then popped it. He did this simply, easily, with a mere toss of his wrists. “Two dollar.”
Cyril paid and they rose to leave taking the broken halves of his lace, but the man said that it was now Gilbert’s turn. When Gilbert had tried, failed, and paid, it was Cyril’s turn to try again. “No, no, you win.”
The man was sad. “But you are in Rome. You must do as the Romans do. It is the rule. Do you not go by the rule? Everyone here has gone by the rule. You are too good for the rule?” Cyril looked around at the other drinkers who were watching with shy interest, their laceless shoes loose on their feet. The fat man wore white pants, a white shirt, and a red sash for a belt. And he was, Cyril noted, wearing sandals that required no laces.
When they departed, eight dollars poorer, shuffling their feet so as not to lose their shoes, it was evening and shadows filled the streets.
Five days later they reached Mexico City. The cars were foul but the people were gracious and the architecture grand. Cyril’s mother had urged him to go to the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, on the hill where a Mexican Indian convert had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. He and Gilbert dutifully took one of the VW Beetle taxis. The driver was unimpressed by Gilbert’s attempt to bond over the fact that they were both cab drivers, perhaps suspecting Gilbert of trying to get a reduced fare.
Cyril sat in a pew and watched worshippers approach the altar on their knees and thought of his childhood catechism classes where he learned of saints and martyrs who put stones in their shoes or crawled over gravel so as to share the agony of Christ. He remembered Father Krasniuk saying each of them had their own guardian angel. “He’s there to protect you,” he assured them. “You can’t see him, but he’s there.” Father K was young and brisk and smiled a lot and Cyril had liked him. A picture book in catechism class showed a man in a cauldron of boiling oil. There he stood, relaxed, leaning one elbow on the cauldron’s edge, chatting with an astonished Roman centurion. Another showed Daniel in the lions’ den, the lions as meek as kittens. “That’s faith,” said Father K, “that’s God. He protects His children, and we’re all His children.” He smiled broadly as he related this Truth. “Have faith. He’s looking out for us.”
But even at the age of nine Cyril had been doubtful, for if God and the guardian angels were looking out for us then why had they let Stalin come to power? Why had God and His helpers permitted the Holodomor during which millions of Ukrainians starved to death? He was about to ask about this when Frank Stepanik barfed, diverting everyone’s attention. Cyril went home and asked his mother but her answer was to grow teary and embrace him so tightly that Cyril very nearly suffocated, as if she was trying to squeeze the very question out of him for he was better off without it.
After the Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe they went to Trotsky’s house and saw the desk where he was ice picked in the back of the head. Trotsky had come to Mexico to escape Stalin, but as Cyril’s mother had said—and said again—no one escaped Stalin. He recalled how, back in 1963, when the Free World was mourning the assassination of JFK, his mother wore the grim smile of the vindicated. The Russians may have withdrawn their missiles yet they’d countered with Lee Harvey Oswald, and only the naive could have expected anything less. And clearly the Americans were naive, out maneuvered by the serpent Stalin operating from beyond the grave via Kruschev who, she had no doubt, was in communion with the arch Soviet Satan by seance and every other Rasputin-like medium who had slithered up from the Moscow sewers.
They were staying in a hotel whose floors were slanted due to earthquake damage and whose ceiling fan squeaked like tormented mice. The one window was tall and narrow with slatted wooden shutters. It offered a view of construction cranes as well as battered billboards left over from the Olympic Games four years earlier. Cyril had brought a sketchbook but so far had been too depressed to open it. What he did was walk. He walked the streets from church to church and gallery to gallery, sometimes with and sometimes without Gilbert, trying not to brood over Connie, which was as impossible as turning his back to his own mind, though at least the sights, sounds, and smells of the strange city kept him half a step ahead of it as it taunted him like a spurned beggar.
One afternoon he wandered into an exhibition of Goya etchings and studied the peasants and witches and soldiers, moved by the squat and awkward figures. In a second-hand bookshop with a gritty stone floor and dark wood walls he found an old edition of Da Vinci’s drawings. Though the book was discoloured and musty with decay, Cyril bought it and took it back to the hotel room where he stared at the master’s drawings as if at a math problem. Such majestic confidence in the lines, each one a gesture of absolute command. Had he worked quickly or with patience? Had he hunched close to the paper or stood back? Had his hand done the work or his head? He stared as if to imprint individual lines into his mind so that he might reproduce them like lines of verse. Experimenting, Cyril found he could draw dynamic lines like whiplashes, stinging with energy, yet how to control them? When he went for control he lost verve and the lines were timid.
Next to the hotel was a desiccated park and across from it a shop that sold Bibles, Virgins, and crucifixes plus it had a life-sized Christ made of clear glass standing in the window. Next to this shop was a bakery. One morning Cyril went in and bought a box of pan dulces then sat in the park feeding them to the birds whose flit and murmur diverted him from thoughts of Connie. Two nuns stopped before the window of the religious shop and admired the glass Christ. They leaned close, stepped back, put their heads together and nodded in agreement as if to say yes this was the Saviour for them. Cyril had a pencil but had left his sketchbook so drew the nuns on the lid of the pan dulce box. He found himself coordinating each line with either an exhalation or an inhalation, and was cautiously pleased with the results. Usually he held his breath when he drew.
Gilbert joined him, a bottle of Fanta in one hand and a Styrofoam container of tripe and salsa in the other. He held it tantalizingly under Cyril’s nose.
“No.”
Leaning to admire the sketch of the nuns, Gilbert nodded his approval and then t
old Cyril, not for the first time, that he should go into forgery.
“You think so?’
“You’re never going to make any money selling nuns. Unless they’re fucking. Let me show you something.”
Cyril accompanied him down the cobbled street to a shop that sold birds. There were parrots, minahs, and macaws. “They’d cost a fortune back in Vancouver.”
Cyril did not debate this because for one thing he assumed it was obvious and for another he didn’t really care; he was more interested in the way the wire converged in such perfect lines at the tops of the cages.
“I could ship them home and sell them,” said Gilbert.
Cyril did not debate that either, because he was busy admiring the lines of the feathers, arranged in perfectly tapering patterns, thinking that if you were looking for proof of a divine Being—a Being with an artistic eye—you’d do better to consider those feathers than stories of guardian angels.
“Birds,” said Gilbert, nodding slowly, nodding knowingly, as if it had been clear all along.
Lines, thought Cyril.
They bussed down to the coast and found a fishing village by a river where flamingos strutted and flocks of small green parrots burst from the jungle on one bank and disappeared into the jungle on the other bank. During the afternoon heat everything went quiet; even the sunlight on the water settled into a molten slumber. By evening the mosquitos swarmed and the bats tumbled, and at night the jungle woke with whoops and shrieks and the ringing of cicadas; by dawn they were replaced by the yelps and trills of warblers and gulls along with the dry-throated squawk of grackles. All morning, pelicans glided silently along the line of the breaking surf.
They rented a house with a corrugated metal roof, mud walls, and a packed sand floor. A bare bulb dangled from a wire, there was a hotplate, and when they were thirsty they drank boiled river water cooled in a stone cistern with a wooden lid. Nearby stood a thatch outhouse twitchy with rats.
One evening as they swayed in their hammocks Cyril asked, “Can we change?” He’d voiced the question as much to the night as to Gilbert and expected no answer from either.
“No, but we can become more deeply ourselves.”
Gilbert’s response had come so quickly, with such assurance, that Cyril set his bare feet on the ground on either side of the hammock and sat up to look at him. It was too dark but he could hear Gilbert’s hammock rope strain against the post like ship’s rigging.
“What?” asked Gilbert, sensing Cyril’s gaze.
“Is that a quote?”
“What’s-her-nuts used to say it.”
Cyril lay back in the dark and contemplated Gilbert’s grandmother buried with that pistol. “Was she deeply herself?”
For a long time Gilbert said nothing and Cyril assumed he’d fallen asleep until his voice came out of the black. “After grandpa offed himself she was.”
“How do you know?”
“She said so.”
Cyril tried to imagine such a conversation with his own mother. “Did she ever say why he did it?”
“Battle fatigue. Shell shock.”
“But it was so long ago.”
“What the fuck, Cyril I don’t know. Anyway, why do you want to change?” He yawned and scratched his chest luxuriously with both hands.
“Don’t you want to make money?” asked Cyril.
“I don’t have to change to do that.”
“You’re broke.”
“Wheels are turning,” he said contentedly.
Cyril wondered if Gilbert was profound or an idiot. Where did such easy confidence come from? Was it like hair colour or height, something you were simply born with? There seemed no logic to who had it and who didn’t.
Gilbert took a boat trip up the river—financed by Cyril—and returned with a parrot in a cage made of saplings. The bird’s eyes were red and wrinkled as if it had been weeping. Soon there were two more parrots, then a toucan with a beak as long and sharp as shears, and Gilbert had to hire a carpenter—with money borrowed from Cyril—to build a bigger cage.
“It’s cruel,” said Cyril.
“It’s commerce,” said Gilbert, as if Cyril was committing the all too common error of confusing categories and getting moral where morality had no business.
Cyril drew the birds. He also drew the fishing boats, the row boats, the wharf, the canoes and the palm trees and the crab shells and the huts and the sleeping dogs and the church as well as the red ’53 Buick of Don Antonio Martin Smolenski, whose grandfather came from Krakow. He drew Don Antonio’s antique Spanish rifle with the trumpet-shaped barrel, and drew the dusty iguanas that sat as still as baked clay. He sharpened his pencils with a knife and soon he was working with nothing but a nub on butcher paper. They bussed up the coast to Puerta Vallarta where Gilbert looked into shipping rates for sending the birds north and Cyril bought paper, pencils, and a box of charcoal sticks from a charcoal burner who lived amid sacks of briquets and whose face and knuckles were seamed with soot. They spent the night in a hotel five blocks from the beach and in the morning, before catching their bus, strolled through the town feeling superior to the tourists.
Five months they stayed in San Vicente del Mar, Gilbert acquiring more birds and Cyril drawing more than he had in years. He experimented at using no lines at all, only shades of grey. He went through his own cubist phase, rendering everything in blocks and cylinders. For a while he gave up on representation altogether, devoting all his attention to the character of the line, wide and bold, light and tenuous, thin and sinister, tightly coiled, gently looping.
The local kids came every day to see the birds and to watch Cyril work. Sometimes he drew them and off they’d go, holding their portrait in both hands as if reading a scroll. Don Antonio Martin Smolenski commissioned a portrait, and Cyril devoted two weeks to improving the proud old man’s looks by straightening his nose and ignoring the smallpox scars that dented his complexion. He earned twenty us dollars, a slab of tuna, and a bottle of locally distilled mescal plugged with a twist of rag. His first sale.
Don Antonio held Cyril by the shoulders. “To have talent like yours,” he said wistfully. The richest man in the village, Don Antonio’s bookshelf held works by Albert Camus, José Marti, and Cervantes. He was sixty and had pale blue eyes in a sun-leathered face, and while he’d been to Mexico City and to Vera Cruz he preferred San Vicente.
The village enchanted Cyril. He liked the river’s cool scent, the jungle’s sweet rot, the booming surf, liked sleeping in the afternoon and waking to the spectacle of sunset, but best of all he loved the dawn when the air was almost chill, the sky cinematic, and the world was cleansed not so much of its sins as the muddled chaos of the previous day.
Once a week he shaved in a mirror the size of a playing card propped on two nails driven into a post. If he stepped back his entire face fit in the mirror; up close only his nose, eye, or mouth. It was this fragmented self-scrutiny that started him on a series of self-portraits. He went to Don Antonio Martin Smolenski’s general store to buy a bigger mirror but there wasn’t one, so he bought two more small ones and arranged them on a shelf. From a distance he saw three Cyril’s; up close he saw himself in pieces.
Then there was the moth, tan and grey, the size of a quarter, attracted to the light on the mirrors. Each day the moth lit upon one of Cyril’s reflections. He drew the moth over and over, in pen, pencil, line, shade. The moth was an obedient model, its powdery wings suited to charcoal. He named the moth Gustavo, in honour of Carl Gustav Jung, whose book on dreams he’d once tried to read. It seemed to Cyril that the moth was the unconscious while the butterfly, crass, tacky, superficial in its loud beauty, was the conscious.
Yet in spite of all his efforts, the fear lingered that he was nothing more than a draughtsman, that the fat bastard at the interview had been right. No matter that Don Antonio Martin Smolenski praised him and that the villagers called him el artiste and there were regular requests for his services, the kids wanting caricatures, the f
ishermen usually wanting him to draw their boats, and the girls wishing to look like movie stars.
One of Don Antonio’s daughters looked better than a movie star. She had two different coloured eyes and a voluptuous figure. Gilbert lusted after her. “I’d like to bite her ass,” he said. “If I could unhinge my jaw, like a snake, I’d bite her whole ass.” As if to demonstrate, he opened his mouth as wide as he could.
Cyril looked away. He didn’t want to see down Gilbert’s throat. They were in their hammocks. Chickens worried the dirt while the parrots in their cages worked the kinks from their necks. Cyril informed him that her name was Remedios, and he agreed that biting her ass would be very satisfying. They grew wistful at the thought of Remedios’ ass.
“You realize that Don Antonio’ll cut your nuts off if you even look at her ass much less bite it.”
“Not when he sees how much dinero the birds get me.”
“You think that’s all it would take?”
“That’s all anything takes.”
Cyril hoped he was wrong because in his view Remedios was too good for Gilbert.
One afternoon during a downpour, Gilbert mused on the possibility of collecting and selling rain. “Pure rain water. Not from the ground, but the sky . . . from God! These cat-lickers’ll buy anything if it’s from God.” Gilbert was Scotch Presbyterian and had inherited the view that Roman Catholics were medieval. He stood in the deluge with his arms wide and face upturned as if embracing the rain of wealth. “Then senior Smellyinski’ll pony up what’s her name.”
“Remedios,” said Cyril, irritated. “You’re going to hell.”
“Maybe. But I’ll get there in a Mercedes.”
Remedios and two of her sisters came to gaze at Gilbert’s birds. While Gilbert deployed the full arsenal of his charm, Cyril watched from the hammock, his drawing pad in his lap. The ladies looked queenly and statuesque even though none stood taller than five foot two. They turned as one to Gilbert with the serene if giddy hauteur of adolescent royalty. Even from thirty yards away Cyril could read the dance-like rite of male-female interaction that was unfolding.