The Fugitivities

by Jesse McCarthy

  “Don’t move.”

  “Okay.”

  She put her lips to his softly. And as he started to kiss her back, she took his hand in her own and placed it against her breast. When she had felt what she needed, she got up and led him to the bathroom where they undressed. She held him against her body as they waited for the water to rise. When it was ready, she turned off the faucet, threw down a pile of towels for her comfort and, having smoothed them to her satisfaction, turned to confront him with her sex. Afterward, they slipped into the hot water; the tub sang like a whale as they slid against its hull.

  It wasn’t until they were drying off that Jonah even thought to inquire about Salvador, and he was alarmed to learn that the owner of the house had been there the entire time, painting in his studio upstairs. Laura was nonchalant.

  “I told him you might come by and he agreed to meet with you if you did. Why don’t you go upstairs and you two can get acquainted? I’ll be ready and have something for us to eat this evening when you come down.”

  After he’d dressed again, Laura led him through the inner courtyard, and over to a stone staircase that wound around itself. The air outside was immensely pleasant, and dramatic pinkish light was coloring streaks of high cloud above. She motioned for him to go up, then turned and headed back inside the main residence.

  * * *

  —

  The studio of Salvador Aussaresses occupied an entire wing on the second floor. Jonah found himself on a landing with a small window adorned with a box of bougainvillea. He made his way across a short hall and found himself immediately facing the great open space of the studio itself. The chipped ceramic floor tiles were covered in rust-colored drips, and on what looked like a drafting table there were piles of soiled canvas rags. Paintings in various stages of completion were stacked together haphazardly along the walls. The stinging smell of oils hung in the air.

  In the very center of the room, a man sat on a thick wooden stool squinting at the mounted canvas before him. He wore a pair of khaki shorts with a braided leather belt, flip-flops, and nothing else. He was tanned, the effect of his tall, angular build somewhat belied by a leathery neck and tufts of white hair sprouting at his shoulder blades. The column of his spine popped out to accommodate his spry corpulence as he leaned forward to apply the nib of his brush. Directly in his sights was a very pale naked girl reclining on a taupe divan, one arm draped along a wad of ragged throw pillows.

  Jonah instinctively froze in his tracks and was about to turn and back out when the artist, without turning to acknowledge him, made a loud snort and motioned him in with the back of his free hand. The reclining model tried to look over at Jonah with her eyes, but at the quiver of her neck Salvador made an abrupt hissing sound and she became fixed in stone again. Jonah could tell that she was an adolescent, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. She had a mousy face, concentrated in an expression that might have been intended to convey coquetry but that suggested something more like masked terror. The artist continued his work uninterrupted. The model tried to sneak another look.

  “Mírame,” Salvador muttered under his breath. But the incident had broken his momentum. “Please sit down, pull up a chair,” he ordered without taking his eyes off the canvas. His English was impeccable, with a touch of Oxbridge in the accents. There was a stool by the wall. Jonah pulled it over and sat toward the quarter of the room behind the painter so that they both faced the scene of subjection.

  “So…you are the young man my Laura has been telling me about. I’m glad you came. I knew from the moment she told me that you would. As I’m sure you can see, Laura is a beautiful woman. We have a good understanding, she and I. She knows my nature, and I, in turn, know hers.”

  He paused at this, considering the exposed model on the makeshift couch.

  “Tell me, young man, do you care for painting?”

  “Painting? Sure.”

  “What part of her do you like best? What part catches your eye? Do you like her breasts? It’s okay, you know, you can say so.”

  “I like the hands.”

  “Ah! The hands. Good, that’s very good. Did you know that human hands are the hardest thing to paint? One hand alone, if a painter wanted to get it perfectly done, would take a year to paint…Even Rembrandt struggled to paint a good hand. But, the hands of the father in the Return of the Prodigal Son…now there is a hand painted in pure truth, the truth of our greatest fear…the fear of our own choices. I will tell you a little secret. Do you know which Rembrandt contains the greatest hand of all?”

  “No.”

  “The Slaughtered Ox. Musée du Louvre, in the Richelieu gallery. A genuine masterpiece. Maybe his greatest work. True, it not a painting of a human hand. It is far greater, more ambitious than that. It is a painting of the hand of God.”

  The poor model, who hadn’t moved an inch, sneezed. The light in the studio was failing. She must have been getting cold. Salvador dipped his brush in a jar of water and wiped it down carefully in a cloth. With a nod of the head, he dismissed the girl. It took her a moment to get up. Her legs seemed to have fallen asleep and she stumbled like a lame animal to a corner of the room and began hurriedly dressing. Salvador Aussaresses now turned his attention fully upon his visitor.

  “Egon Schiele. There is a great painter of hands! I’m very fond of Austrian art, you know…Before I found this place, I thought about moving there. Had quite a few friends who left for Austria in ’83. But I haven’t kept in touch. I just want to paint. I just want to live quietly and enjoy the time that I have left. You’ll see, when you get to be my age, you see things differently. I’m more sensitive to time now, how little of it there truly is. And I’ve become greedy, in a way. I want to be surrounded by beauty. I want to paint the perfect hand, a hand so sublime that one day it will hang in the Museo Nacional!” Salvador laughed, so hard that it pitched him into a brutal fit of coughing. Then he was composed again. “I’ll be saved, you see,” he went on. “I’ll be saved by the curators. The critics. After you and I are long dead and gone, they will need careers and reputations, and then I will be rediscovered, celebrated—an overlooked, neglected master.”

  “Maybe, but then again, maybe not. I don’t think my generation even believes in the idea of artistic greatness.”

  “You’re a sharp little monkey, aren’t you?”

  “What did you say?”

  “Don’t think you impress me. You’re still just a boy. I, however, am a man. I have struggled. I have known what it is to believe in something, to do whatever it takes even to achieve small, pitiful victories. You haven’t struggled for anything in your life. It was all handed to you. And what have you done with it? Your entire generation…grown up with the whole thing handed to you. The war over, the dust settled. You’re decadent, flabby. You forget that you are living in the world we won for you. We fought the Communists! We were the ones who eliminated them, so that you could come of age with all the world at your fingertips, playing with your new gadgets, shopping, living it up. How old are you? What do you know about anything?”

  Jonah got up to leave, but the old man surprised him, crying out for him to stay, pleading with him pathetically over a sudden coughing fit. As Jonah wavered, Salvador fished under his easel amid a pile of rags and produced a bottle of whiskey. He took a couple of jars over to a sink in the far corner of the room and rinsed them out. The studio was getting dark. Jonah felt paralyzed. He looked around for a light to switch on, or a lamp, but there was none. When Salvador returned, he poured them each a large glass and sat down again in silence. Jonah realized he could barely see the painter’s face now, just the deep bluish outline of his features, a glint of arctic sheen.

  “Do you know what I like about painting?” Salvador began again, resuming his philosophical tone. Jonah put the glass of whiskey to his lips as Salvador continued.

  “I like its faithfulness. All a good painting requires is f
aithfulness. Looking steadfastly at the abyss and accepting the world for what it is. Not just tolerating it. Weak men can do that. But taking it whole, as the greatest artists do. I have struggled my whole life to do it. But I have not yet succeeded. Now I have so few years left. One day, you will understand this. Or perhaps you won’t. I was born in a time of war. I lived the wars of my time. There is only one law of human life. The permanence of war. And I faced it. I didn’t grow up behind a screen.”

  Salvador carefully lit the end of a cigarette. The hot eye drifted in the gloam as the old man took a deep drag. He offered one, and Jonah accepted. When his own smoke was lit, he was ready with a reply.

  “Maybe there’s something more powerful,” Jonah said. “Something real in the world, that escapes your law of war. Always and everywhere. And maybe it’s just that you need to believe in war because the things you needed to figure out in your life, you’ve always left empty.”

  “Ah, you think perhaps I am merely a doddering old man. You have the idealism of youth, and yet your life, just as mine was, will be dominated by power. Even more so, yes, even more so. Ha! Look at you! A Negro, or what do you prefer we call you now? Black? You know, I’ve always been curious…how does it feel to be a black? I have often wondered. It seems like it would be quite terrible, if you don’t mind me saying so. It seems like a cruel joke. One even feels sorry for you, up to a point. A people have to know when they are defeated. The Indios, the slaves. You can’t unwrite the history, can you? It isn’t my fault, is it? What has come to pass. You can’t fight the nature of men. The war between us is permanent. Look how your towers have fallen. Dirty wars. Who has the dirt on their hands now? We laugh at the pictures of Abu Ghraib because you Americans are stupid enough to take them. You know what has to be done but you have no maturity, no stomach, no seriousness of purpose. I see by the look on your face that you are shocked by my words. But it is you who is not living in the real world. The real world is the law of violence: directed, organized by the will of men. The strong take violence into their own hands, lead history like a naked man on a leash—when the man yanks, smack him with the stick, and soon enough he learns. The Arabs are stubborn as mules. I admire that. I admire men who are not persuaded by anything but death. Mark my words, the day the terror stops, you will miss them, your Arab terrorists. War is without end. It is also without limit. You will see. These tools will be turned on you and your neighbors. The soldiers will come home and turn on each other. The drones will patrol Colorado and Texas and Virginia. For the blacks, well, I’m sure you can guess how it will go. I’m not fooled, I can see it all clearly. Thank god, I’ll be long gone by then. In my day we fought for principles, for a way of life. But what do I know? I’m just an old painter. I only want the peace of an old man to live out his last days.”

  The old man drank for a time in silence. The studio had slipped into darkness. Jonah could barely make out his own glass.

  “I hear Laura met you over at the Basques’?”

  “Yes, Miguel and Oscar…”

  “Did you enjoy their company?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Did they enjoy yours?”

  “I’m fine with where I’m at, if that’s what you’re asking, but frankly I also don’t plan on sticking around much longer.”

  “Oh no, what about the cuisine—great cooks, eh? Their kind always are, no? Didn’t you like their food?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, I wouldn’t want to have to tell them that you didn’t. Hah! The Basques—they’re liable to blow you up for far less. No, but I like them, I really do. In fact, I fully support them. Lots of good people around here do. They’ve got no better base anywhere in the world than right here in Uruguay. The Spaniards will never conquer the Basques, never I tell you. Spanish intelligence is a joke. Don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Of course they’re a joke. You ever hear of the Spanish Air Force? You can’t have good intelligence without a good air force. As an aviator, I had to learn how to dominate my instincts, in an environment where the slightest mistake, the slightest miscalculation, can be fatal. Omniscience is essential. Perfect eyesight, solid minds that stay cold. The same goes for the other game. We got our terrorists because we understood how to handle them. We wiped them out so badly it will probably be a hundred years before they ever come back. And it would be suicide even then. But something tells me they will come back some day. Those people have a death wish.”

  “No, you have a wish to kill. Because you’re not just a painter, are you? You’re ex-military.”

  “And proud of my service. Proud of my country. When I was a boy, even younger than you, I grew up dreaming of Jorge Newbery. The aviators were admired in those days, they were our celebrities. By the time I joined we were already in the process of national reorganization. The Communists were crawling all over the place like roaches. It was our chance to do something for our country. I volunteered for the counterterrorism missions, most of us did. I operated the Hercules, the C-130s, those big whales we got from America. We would fly out of Morón and hop down to Mar del Plata. We would land before dawn and the jeeps and trucks would come out to meet us on the tarmac. The Hercules is a magnificent aircraft. Up in the cockpit the airframe is so wide you feel like you’re at the helm of a flying cathedral. At Mar del Plata we refueled, and they loaded the cargo. I was always in the cockpit. It was cold out there with the sun about to rise, and cold gusts from the Atlantic pouring over the airfield. I went through my checklists, chatted with the ground crews on the radio. The loading took a long time. Sometimes I would see a chaplain in black robes walking around, talking to the officers on the ground. Everything was very orderly. When I got the signal to go, we would rev up the engines and barrel down the runway straight for the ocean. I would set a cap due east and we would fly out two or three hundred miles. That’s when the second officer would give the signal to take us down on a low pass over the water. I would straighten us out at twenty-five hundred feet. The cargo officer would open the payload doors and then he and some of the Naval Intelligence guys would go into the hold. My job was to keep the plane steady, and that’s what I did. We would fly like that for twenty minutes or so. Then the officers would come back into the cockpit and strap in, and I would take us in a long loop, circling back over the drop zone but this time headed back toward Mar del Plata. There were always dark shadows in the water there, and when I asked the Navy boys about it, they said they were sharks. We did the same sorties two, sometimes even three times a week, for a while. It became routine, boring. On the flights back, we would often discuss the Malvinas and how the war was going. Everyone found positive things to say, but we all knew it was hopeless. England was too powerful, and probably the most stubborn nation on Earth, more stubborn than even the Arabs. One day, when we got back to the base in Morón, as I was heading into the barracks, I realized that I had forgotten my sunglasses in the cockpit. Since the hold was open, I went up through the belly of the plane to get them. The belly of the Hercules is like a train tunnel. I found my glasses in the cockpit, but on my way out I stopped in the hold again to marvel at its size. I shouted a little to hear the echoes. Then I noticed something by my feet. Along the bottom of the hold there were locking gears and grappling hooks for securing cargo to the floor. Tangled in one of the hooks was a large clump of hair. I could tell right away that it was a woman’s, by the length, by its luster and curl. I’m a painter. I’ve always been a close observer of these things. I could tell it was the hair of a young brunette. And as I kept walking, looking closely, I found more clumps of hair caught in the riggings. Hair of different colors, some men and some more clearly women. That’s when I knew. I mean, I knew before then. But that’s when I knew for sure. An officer appeared on the ramp; he must have heard me shouting. He asked me what I was doing. I told him I was just getting my sunglasses and I quickly made some joke and we walked back
across the tarmac together laughing. No one ever asked me any questions. Not until years later.”

  “What did you say when people did finally ask?”

  “Some reporter found me in 1991. He came looking for names. He wanted to know about what he called ‘the death flights.’ I wasn’t concerned. The president pardoned everyone. I was untouchable. But that’s not the reason I kept my trap shut. The reporter offered me money in exchange for names, good money too. But those people don’t get it. They don’t understand there’s no price you can put on loyalty. I’m not a mercenary. I can’t be bought. I faced the reality of my time and I chose sides. And they were believers too. We were all wolves. Was it bad? Yes. They were alive when we dropped them. Drugged but alive. Our will was stronger. We had the virility of youth. We had the great forces of order, the state and the church, and the military on our side. The nation was imperiled. We had to clean our house…We had to reorganize…We had the will and it was a time of wolves when anything was possible and we were young and history was on our side and every sensation every action was vivid and extreme…”

  The artist trailed off and there was an interminable silence. Jonah thought he heard the crack of a door slamming shut somewhere in the courtyard, but it could have been a branch snapping from a tree or a heavy book landing on a tile floor. The jolt should have prompted him to get up, but his muscles locked. The old man stared serenely across the darkness, his quivering lips parted ambiguously, expectantly, faintly amused.

  21

  What Salvador said of him was true. Jonah had never felt touched by the chill of evil. Atrocity and human suffering were spectacles that befell others. They came to him as breaking news, they bothered him, troubled his nerves for a time, but did not even come close to bringing him to the point of naming or even acknowledging anything like a willful, metaphysical malice that might at any moment take the form of a human face committed to irreversible destruction. He had never had a cousin gunned down, lost his family to a local warlord’s political ambitions, a passionate campaign of slaughter, a posse of racists on the hunt, or a man so broken he would put you in the dirt for four hundred dollars, for bragging rights, to defend his wounded honor. Yet these were the most obvious features of life for most people everywhere. Far more obvious than whatever enemy he conjured for himself when he invoked the specter of “late capitalism,” which was the nearest phrase to which he could affix the largest share of blame for the ills of the world while dimly perceiving that it also assured his own procession through it. The wheel of fortune had spared him from having to do truly ugly things. Many ugly things were done on his behalf. And many had also been endured. His body the gift of colossal, unending histories of violence. Salvador knew this, and he reached through the darkness to take Jonah by the hand and show him.