The walls were closing in. Still, I listened on, hypnotized in horror, as that droning nasal voice led me down into a dark, humid well of nightmarish images, piecing together the unhappy jigsaw puzzle of Narcisa’s past.
Like myself, Narcisa was a bastard child; something she’d never known, according to Doc, until the fateful morning she’d slunk home at dawn, cowering in postcocaine jitters, after being used like a rubber fuck doll all night long by her mother’s drug-peddling cronies. That same day, Doc informed me, the man Narcisa had grown up calling “Daddy” had disowned her for the crime of being born. In the midst of a heated argument, he had revealed that she wasn’t his “real” daughter, but just an accident of birth; the result of some drunken infidelity. Narcisa was only alive, the stepfather shouted, because her mother couldn’t afford an abortion.
As her stepfather dismantled all remaining scraps of her fragile self-worth that day, Narcisa’s mother had stood by in stony, cow-faced silence. That’s when Narcisa officially went Bad Seed. She took to the road with a burning rage in her heart, running like a singed cat from her backward provincial hometown, never to look back.
Again, I found myself relating to her . . . Poor kid! Raped and betrayed by her own fucking people, then tossed out like a used rubber!
I recalled how she had spoken of spending her early teenage years raising hell in the drab interior city of Resende, ransacking cemeteries and conducting satanic rituals with dug-up human skulls and the blood of small animals.
I thought back to her tales of breaking into crypts and Masonic temples. I’d always related to Narcisa’s hilarious juvenile delinquent exploits, having been there and done all that as a homeless, runaway, throwaway street kid myself. Now Doc was giving me the details, filling in all the blanks. After leaving home, she’d gone to look up her biological father and found out a few other things she’d have been better off never knowing. Among them, she’d learned that her real father was dead. Her paternal seed had been an alcoholic; a barfly, a criminal and third-rate drug smuggler, a notorious local cokehead; a stoned-out, womanizing lowlife who’d died in prison, leaving Narcisa without even a proper surname. And he’d known about his daughter all along, but just couldn’t be bothered to contact her before going to hell.
Shit! Poor baby! She was even abandoned by a ghost! Her late father’s relatives treated her like the unwanted bastard she was. As Doc talked on, I could picture some ignorant small-town family shooing my poor little friend away like a stray cat in the garbage, as her mother tried to rein her back in with fire-and-brimstone pie-in-the-sky demands that she accept the Lord Jesus and repent . . . What a mess!
Narcisa, of course, wanted no part of any “family” anymore, Doc sighed. Rather than submit to a life of creeping provincial boredom and mediocrity, she’d stuck her thumb out on the highway and sold her leggy adolescent body to truck drivers for the few coins needed to eat and survive on her way to the hard-knock dogfight streets of Rio. Any world she could find must have looked better to Narcisa than the hell she came from. I could relate.
Drugs were a regular staple of the hippie ghettos and anarchist punk squats dotting the long, hard road to perdition like errant gypsy camps. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Violence. Rape. Abuse . . . Perfect, Max! Just like home sweet home!
By fifteen, after crisscrossing the countryside for years, often alone, sometimes in the company of other teenage runaways, she’d eventually covered as much ground as the seasoned truckers and traveling salesmen she met up with along the road. But the only thing Narcisa had for sale was her gangly-limbed, fresh-faced innocence—or whatever was left of it.
Doc looked across the table, rolling his mad eyes. “Unfortunately, Cigano, by the time I found her, Narcisa was already a hardened, streetwise adolescent prostitute in Copacabana. In many ways, it was simply too late by the time I made her acquaintance . . . Ahhhhh! I must say, though, she was always far more attractive and popular than those other ignorant streetwalkers. Infinitely more intelligent, resourceful and well-informed, as well . . . Ahhhhh, well, as you can imagine, she inspired a good deal of envy from those dreadful trollops! She simply refused to conform, even in that sordid, low-class criminal subculture! Narcisa, you know, has always been unable to get along with others, even with the other prostitutes, mostly poor, ignorant, illiterate mixed breeds and Negros, all the inferior races . . .”
He stopped and looked at me with pride, as if waiting for me to shake his hand as a fellow member of the Aryan Brotherhood or some shit.
I remembered Narcisa telling me of this guy’s dark, ugly Nazi leanings, of how he’d always declared himself a big admirer of “real leaders” like Hitler, Mussolini and Pinochet. Still, I said nothing, waiting for the whack-job to go on.
Taking my stone-faced silence for tacit complicity, Doc grinned like a mule, then picked up his demented musings. “Perhaps,” he speculated, playing cafeteria psychoanalyst, “she simply hated those low-class whores because they unconsciously awakened traumatic memories of her own prostitute mother.”
With her light-skinned, sassy good looks, youthful health, native zeal and charisma, Narcisa soon gravitated up the ladder of high-priced garotas de programa, granting her access to a more discerning world of prettier, younger, whiter, top-shelf call girls; a better grade of whores, catering mostly to well-heeled gringo tourists at the luxury beachfront hotels of Copacabana and Ipanema.
That was around the time she first met this Doc and “changed his life.” And that’s when he’d decided Narcisa should become the purebred psychic progeny he’d never had. Whether she wanted to be or not.
He stared across the table at me with the eyes of a rabid puppy, scrunching up his face like he was taking it in the ass. “Ahhhhh . . . I’ve done everything I could possibly think of to get that unfortunate youngster away from that disgusting life of crime, vice and homosexual perversion. I’ve really tried to convert her into a decent human being, Cigano . . . Ahhhhh . . .”
I wondered if he was even aware he was implying his beloved “daughter” was less than a “decent human being,” for being a whore. I had a sudden urge to pick up my uneaten plate and give it to him right in his smug, effeminate, Nazi-loving kisser . . . Knock this puritanical, gay-bashing, haughty old Boy Scout right off his fucking high horse! But as he whined on, something stopped me.
As I watched him, I thought he was going to start crying. He looked crazy; a full-time victim, a well-intentioned bleeding martyr, buckling under the weight of Narcisa’s heavy cross. I couldn’t help almost feeling sorry for the poor, misguided little bastard as he sighed again, shaking his head like a broken-down old horse shrugging off flies. Then he continued, telling me so many things about Narcisa that soon my own head was reeling in a confusing, unpleasant sentimental stew.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Lissen, Doc,” I blurted out, swallowing my distaste for everything about him. “I’m really worried about Narcisa! We had this stupid fight a coupla months ago, then she just split. I haven’t heard from her ever since. She’s disappeared . . .”
As I talked on, he stared at me with a weird, longing expression.
“ . . . Look, man, it’s been tough for me not knowing what’s become of her. I haven’t heard from her for months now . . . You seem to know Narcisa better than anybody. Where do ya think I might be able to find her? I really gotta talk to her, man. Have you got any idea where she mighta gone . . . ?”
Silence.
After a long, suspenseful pause, he rubbed his womanish double chin and spoke. “You mean you didn’t know, Cigano? You don’t know what’s happened?”
Happened?!?
My gut went cold.
18. ALL THAT GLITTERS
“ALL SINS HAVE THEIR ORIGIN IN A SENSE OF INFERIORITY, OTHERWISE CALLED AMBITION.”
—Cesare Pavese
My blood froze in my veins. “Know what, man?” I croaked.
Narcisa! Please God, no! Please don’t tell me she’s dead! No-oo!
&nb
sp; Silence exploded in my ears.
“Where is she? Tell me! Please . . .”
Doc’s beady eyes bored into my face for a painful, mute eternity, as if he was trying to assess whether I was serious. I watched him in silence, waiting.
Finally, I spoke again. “Por favor . . .”
Time stopped. He stared back at me across the table.
Then, like a crooked old tomb, his mouth creaked open in hellish slow motion.
“Ahhhh . . . Well, Cigano, Narcisa’s in New York.”
“New York? What?” I almost shouted, feeling my stomach going weird.
“She married a foreigner, the banker, that John Gold fellow, you know.”
I didn’t know. I dropped my fork onto my plate and pushed it aside. “Como? Whaddya talking about, man? What foreigner? How? When?”
“But . . . Well, I just assumed you already knew about the banker, Cigano. You and Narcisa always seemed to be so close . . .”
“Seemed” close . . . Past tense . . . And with just so subtle an air of condescending, resentful spite . . . Bastard! Doc was feeding on my pain from the bomb he’d just dropped on my heart. I stopped breathing and glared at him with twin daggers in my eyes.
Silence.
I could feel my guts trembling with frustration, anger, confusion, panic. I had a sudden mad urge to jump up and punch him in the face.
“Ahhhhh . . . Well, I just assumed she must have told you, Cigano. After all, she has been involved with this fellow for years now, of course, and, well, ahhhhh . . . she finally married him, and then they left Brazil together . . .”
I stared at him.
“You mean to say you really didn’t know, Cigano?”
“I knew nothing about it, man. Nada!”
He looked at me with a mixture of feigned pity and thinly disguised triumph, letting out another long, melodramatic sigh. “Well, ahhhhh, I’m terribly sorry to be the one to be telling you all this, Cigano . . . But I suppose you really should know . . .”
I wanted to scream . . . Stop calling me Cigano, you shit-fed little parasite!
I knew he wasn’t the least bit sorry to be telling me any of it as he launched into a smug, spiteful new accounting of events and details that shattered my heart like a beer bottle dropped on a dirty, cold whorehouse floor.
When Narcisa was sixteen, right around the time I’d met her, somewhere during those first ribald days and weeks we’d spent together—and unbeknownst to me—Narcisa had met a man. Well, a boy, actually.
Doc smirked, rubbing it in. “He appeared to be a nice enough young fellow, Cigano. An investment banker from Israel. He’d been living and attending graduate school in New York City. Very intelligent, well-mannered young fellow, you know, despite his obvious . . . err . . . ethnic shortcomings.”
“You met this guy . . . ?”
“Oh yes!” Doc beamed as I fought to keep from spitting up my half-eaten meal in his face. “Narcisa brought him around to the office where I work. It was just after they started dating. She introduced me to him as her father!”
What? Dating? His obscene words nailed my soul to the cross . . . Her father?
“I was happy to meet him, actually.” Doc smiled. “After all, I suppose one really can’t be entirely to blame for being born a, a . . . Jew.” He scrunched up his nose at the word, as if pronouncing some incurable disease. “Ahhhh, yes, well, I even took the two of them out to lunch. After all, I knew that, realistically, well, let’s just say that a girl in Narcisa’s position can’t exactly afford to be terribly picky, you know. And, well, I wanted to show my, my . . . solidarity. Very nice, well-bred young fellow, in his early twenties, I’d say. A college student with a promising future, you know, upstanding family, all that. He’d come to Rio on his spring vacation, and then he met Narcisa at the beach in Copacabana . . .”
The beach?!? She’s always hated the beach! We used to fight like convicts whenever I tried to drag her to the beach! Must’ve been the Copacabana ho-stroll . . . That’s about as close to the water as she’d ever get.
They rarely had sex, Doc implied, prattling on about a “platonic love.” But apparently, Narcisa had hooked her victim up with some of her nubile young colleagues, trapping him in a soul-numbing mind-control bubble.
Doc shook his balding, skunk-striped head with theatrical distaste. “She even boasted to me how she actually encouraged her new boyfriend to have sexual relations with those disgusting strumpets while she observed, Cigano!”
Everything he was saying made sense. I knew Narcisa hated sex, at least with men, but sometimes she liked to watch. That’s what drugs and other young Copacabana whores were for to her, to make it all tolerable. I sat listening with morbid fascination as Doc’s monotonous drone plowed through an exploding minefield of details.
According to him, Narcisa had herself convinced she loved this gringo.
No way! How? She couldn’t! She’s not just gonna fall in love with some guy . . . Narcisa doesn’t have those skills in her bag of tricks! Forget it!
Shifting in my chair, I listened as Doc rattled on like a clamorous funeral procession, plodding toward the moldy old tomb of Betrayal.
Even as I dreaded what he would tell me next, I found myself leaning forward at the table, staring into the hell-pits of his eyes, needing to know more.
19. MAGIC TRICK
“THE FIRST IMPOSSIBILITY REQUIRED OF THE ADEPT IN BLACK MAGIC IS THAT HE SHOULD LOVE GOD BEFORE HE BEWITCHES HIS NEIGHBOR; THAT HE SHOULD PUT ALL HIS HOPES IN GOD BEFORE HE MAKES A PACT WITH SATAN; THAT, IN A WORD, HE SHOULD BE GOOD IN ORDER TO DO EVIL.”
—The Book of Ceremonial Magic
Apparently, their courtship had lasted for two whole years. As Doc told the story, I sat listening in shocked, befuddled silence, thinking back over the years of my relationship with Narcisa . . . The whole time she was reeling him in, she was in and out of my life, and my bed! And I never even suspected . . . Shit!
During each of her regular ninja-like disappearances, I’d always figured she was just running around town as usual, peddling her sweet ass, or seducing other young chicks. That was just Narcisa. Why would I give it a minute’s thought? She always came back to me, eventually, so what did I care? I’d never dreamt of her having some kind of weird secret love life. And certainly not with some guy.
But now, sitting across a table from her Dickless Old Cushion, with a New York blizzard raging in my stomach, it all started to make sense. As Doc talked on, I recalled something Narcisa had said to me the last time we’d been together. I’d thought nothing of it at the time. Now I realized it had been significant. A clue, whizzing right past me.
We’d been hanging out for days on end that final week. I’d needed to go out one afternoon to take care of business, some little moneymaking scheme.
When I’d told her I had to run out for a few hours, Narcisa had pitched a violent tantrum. She’d started yelling, threatening, screaming that if I didn’t blow off everything to take her shopping, I could forget ever seeing her again.
I was shocked. At the time, I’d already been trying to justify all the time and money I was murdering with her frigid little ass as she bombarded me with absurd demands for full-time attention. Narcisa had begun turning into some sort of soul-sucking energy vampire; testing me, teasing me, slurping away my lifeblood. As Doc rambled on, I replayed the whole scene in vivid detail—the words I’d said to her that day, pleading for compassion from the criminally insane.
“Whaddya want from me, Narcisa? Jesus! All you ever wanna do is sit around and watch television and stuff your face all day. I just gotta run out and take care of some stuff! What’s the big deal? I been with ya every day and night for a week! I can’t just keep you company all the time! I feel like a babysitter! Anyway, how am I supposed to take ya shopping if I’m broke? I gotta go out and make a little money, ya know? I can’t be two places at once!”
Narcisa’s wild-eyed reply seemed especially significant now.
“Forget about de tw
o place, Cigano! I wanna man who gonna take care of me! All de time! I don’ care about money! I don’ care if I gotta go live under de focking bridge with somebody! I just don’ wan’ e’stay alone! Nunca! Got it?”
I hadn’t got it. Not then. But now, looking into Doc’s ugly, leering face, the sound of Narcisa’s angry words rang in my ears like a revelation. That kind of neediness coming from someone as headstrong and self-reliant as her had seemed cryptic at the time. Now I realized she’d been giving me that bitch-beating just to see how far she could push me.
She’d been testing me!
All at once, the penny dropped. It wasn’t that Narcisa didn’t want to depend on anybody. She just didn’t want to have to reciprocate. Ever.
Of course! She was trying to turn me into a slave! A mind-control zombie, another Doc! Narcisa! The living, breathing epitome of infantile, self-centered egotism! I must’ve failed the test, and then some dumb-ass, clueless little gringo comes along! Bingo! A new, improved, clueless, wealthy doormat! Perfect, Max!
As Doc rambled on about Narcisa’s elopement with the mysterious young foreign banker, I thought back to another time, way back in the beginning, when, in the middle of the night, her cell phone had started ringing; someone calling from a weird long-distance number.
Narcisa had reached over the bed and grabbed the phone out of my hand, then started bitching out some guy in English for “leaving her all alone”; she told him she’d found “somebody else” to “take care of her,” and that she never wanted to see him again. Then she’d hung up, turned the phone off and gone right back to sleep.
At the time, I’d figured it was just some little hooker-gringo-mind-fuck game. The usual ho-stroll drama routine. I’d never given it another thought. Until now.
Now I realized the call must have been from him. Her Magic Gringo, this John Gold the banker! She musta been raking the poor guy over the hot coals all along, even back then. She was slowly cooking, tenderizing, preparing her victim’s tender pink gringo heart, getting ready for the Big Feast. Poor bastard!
Narcisa Page 9