by Daniel Klein
They pace slowly along Main Street, Esther’s arm through his. It is mid-week at the tail end of foliage season and the streets are empty at this hour. Nonetheless, a number of stores have taken to illuminating their windows at night at this time of year, the way they only used to at Christmastime. Wendell and Esther stop to admire the window display in Cohen’s Hardware and Plumbing; Syd Cohen has outdone himself this time with a diorama of leaf-gathering techniques ranging from an aluminum rake to a leaf blower the size of an industrial vacuum cleaner. A multicolor sprinkling of maple leaves adorns Syd’s set.
“The man’s an artist,” Wendell says.
“But not a good businessman,” Esther says. “One look at this and you’d feel guilty as hell buying anything but the rake.”
They laugh and move on to Digby’s Music Shop where the window display looks no different from the rest of the store—a muddle of CDs and sheet music with the occasional guitar pick thrown in.
“Now there’s a merchandiser for you,” Wendell says.
Usually, when Wendell passes the house on Board Street where he and Beatrice rented an apartment forty years ago, he quickens his pace so it cannot reach across the front lawn and touch him with memory, but tonight he lingers a moment in front of it and indeed, a memory does roll out to him: bringing newborn Franny home from the hospital.
At the three-story, Victorian house at the end of the block where Esther and her children rent an apartment, Wendell says, “I’m getting Cold Mountain on Saturday.”
“Brrrr,” Esther says. “I’ll bring a sweater.” She kisses him again.
Wendell feels dizzy with gladness as he returns to the Phoenix to pick up his truck and drive home and, when pulling into his Mahaiwe Street driveway he notices a ‘For Rent’ sign newly sunk into the lawn in front of the other half of their two-family dwelling, that gladness expands to a feeling of unlimited possibilities.
CHAPTER NINE
It had been another profitable night. Hector sold his allotment of Rico’s Camels at the Sagrado stoplight in less than three hours, employing his new, musical sales pitch. Accompanying himself on a cuatro he bought from a street vendor in Ciudad Bolivar, Hector stood in the middle of Carrera Seven singing songs from Puerto Alvira—”Culebra,” “Mis Flores Negras,” “Por Un Besa de tu Boca.” He wore a flowered linen shirt and a black Aztec cap, and under the band of this cap he displayed his wares of contraband cigarettes. It was a captivating sight even for downtown Bogotá: a towering boy with large liquid eyes and high-angled cheekbones in a hodge-podge theatrical get-up. To the tourists, he looks dashing and folkloric. And having learned to play the cuatro from his late father, Hector could produce flurries of staccato arpeggios that more than compensated for his tentative, thin voice. His tips exceeded his sales.
Cigarettes sold, Hector walks to the Casa Medina in the business district where he joins his friends, Mano and Sylvia. Mano is lounging in front of the hotel in his usual outfit of ragged jeans and side-slit T-shirt, his pan flute suspended from a brown cord around his neck. But nobody looks at Mano anyhow, not with Sylvia in sight. She is leaning against the trunk of a palm tree in a red-tasseled white skirt and embroidered, off-the-shoulder blouse, her waist-length hair flowing across one of those naked shoulders. Sylvia has more Indian in her than Hector and that is most evident in her narrow, tilted eyes, an angle she parallels in the luminous, Scarlet Macaw feathers fixed in her hair on the sides of her head. Sylvia is their star.
The three young people share a cigarette, then amble over to the square of pavement at the side of the Casa Medina where the hotel manager permits them to perform. Hector tunes up, Mano moistens the tips of his flute pipes, and Sylvia strikes a pose patterned after an American actress playing a Spanish dancer in a Hollywood film she once saw on television. It is a pose of total insolence. She sings.
Their first set is a mix of Jobim, Flamenco, and the Beatles. Sylvia has a forty-tone range that allows her to bounce up an octave when the spirit moves her, like in the last verse of “Michelle Ma Belle.” For the most part, her voice is a flattish drone, but in the upper registers it is invaded by an involuntary catch that sounds like a desperate woman’s plea. That is what tugs the audience around from the front of the Casa Medina.
Hector is adept at identifying the nationalities of their listeners and if, say, he picks out a French couple, he whispers to his companions and they break into “Auprès de Ma Blonde” or “Tes Yeux Sont Tout Fatigués.” Sylvia’s Spanish-accented Piaf impression can elicit a downpour of fifty-thousand notes into Hector’s upturned cap.
Hector loves it all—the music, the performing, the money, and especially Sylvia herself. He adores the way she looks and the way she sings, but above all he adores her haughtiness and the self-confidence that underlies it. Sylvia treats Hector and Mano like brothers and comrades. She hugs and kisses them at the end of their performances, and she refuses to accept more than one-third of their take, even though she is clearly the main attraction. But when Hector looks at her with undisguised ardor, she merely laughs and nods and looks away.
Hector’s feelings for Sylvia contributed to his decision to stop prostituting himself for lonely tourists, but certainly the money he takes home from their musical performances made that decision much easier. He has made another decision too: He is going to use his secret savings to pay for an apartment in La Sabana. He has already spoken with the landlord who will let them take possession of a two-room apartment if Hector produces a full year’s rent in advance. Hector is now only three hundred thousand pesos away from that sum. The idea of emigrating to the United States is long gone from his mind.
It is past midnight when they call it quits. As usual, Hector is the last passenger aboard the Number 2 bus in its final night run to Soacha. As the driver approaches the last hill, he reflexively reaches for the shotgun leaning against his seat and cradles it across his lap in his left hand. To both the driver and Hector, this maneuver is no more than a routine gesture, like automatically crossing yourself when you pass the statue of the Virgin and Child at Santa Teresita Circle. Hector gets off at a pile of rubble that was once a street sign, saying goodnight to the driver. He slings his cuatro across his back.
He walks softly along the ridge of the Soacha basin to the back of Rico’s shack where he takes the path down to Rico’s front door. On the bus, Hector had separated his cigarette revenues from his tips, putting the former in a front pocket, the latter in a drawstring bag that hangs from his belt buckle to the inside of his undershorts. Rico sits just inside his open door, smoking a cocaine pipe. He looks up at Hector, then back at his pipe.
“A long night,” he says.
“Yes. But I sold out everything.” Hector reaches into his pocket and pulls out the wad of pesos.
“It must be that clown outfit,” Rico says. He issues a graveley snigger and stands, but he does not reach for the money.
“I think it helps.”
“And the cuatro too. I bet the foreign bitches love that. A boy and his cuatro.”
“It helps me pass the time.”
“Play for me, boy. Sing me a sad song.”
“I do not sing very well.”
“Play!”
Hector pulls his instrument around in front of him. He tunes it, then strums the opening chords of “Mis Flores Negras.” He begins to sing.
“Oye: bajo las ruinas de mis pasiones
Y en el fondo de esta alma que ya no alegra,
Entre polvos de ensueños y de ilusiones
Yacen entumecidas mis flores negras.”
Rico punches Hector on the side of his jaw and Hector falls backward, slamming his head against the doorpost. Hector slides to the ground. He can feel blood dripping from his scalp onto his neck.
“You are so pretty, aren’t you?” Rico is standing over him. “How much do the cunts pay to squeeze your bony ass?”
Hector does not reply. His only movement is to breathe as deeply and regularly as possible. Above all, he does no
t want to lose consciousness. He orders his heart to slow down. He keeps his eyes open.
“Don’t you know I always find out? You can’t hide anything from Rico!” Rico punctuates this last with a vicious kick at Hector’s ribcage.
Gasping for air, Hector blacks out, but only for a second; he seizes on his first dim glimpse of light and scrambles back to consciousness.
“You look like a woman to me,” Rico is saying as he shoves his pipe into his pocket and begins to unbutton his fly. “Just like an Indian whore I used to fuck in Mitu. Because of this, I will not need to shut my eyes when you suck me.”
His penis is out and rigid, a miniature replica of his own squat stature. “Now, bitch boy!” he growls.
Hector knows that if he screams, it will bring him no saviors, even if it might awaken scores of Soacha’s inhabitants; relentless poverty does not inspire heroic acts. Hector considers surrendering to Rico’s order. He has committed this deed before, although only once—with a British tourist—and for a great deal of money. It disgusts him, but he knows he can endure it; he has learned that there is little he cannot endure. And this is what Hector would have done had Rico not spoken again.
“Did you really think you could hide your money from me?” Rico snarls. “Do you think I am stupid?” He wags his penis with his hand as if it is a scolding finger.
So that is it. Rico found his buried box of savings.
Hector pulls himself up onto his knees, his cuatro still dangling from his neck. He opens his mouth wide. When Rico pushes his organ inside, Hector closes his lips around it in the same tender manner the British tourist instructed him to. Rico’s sigh sounds like a child’s. He pushes deeper. And that is when Hector savagely clenches his jaw together like a puma biting out the heart of a capybaras. The sound Hector’s teeth make as they slice through skin and fat and blood vessels is no different from the sound they make when he chews down on a chicharron. Rico starts screaming. Blood gushes from his wound, and it is only when he looks down and sees this purple stream that he passes out.
Hector’s fear has waited until now to seize him. He is quaking. Tears pour from his eyes, mucous from his nose. Dangling from his lips is a mix of spittle and clotting blood. Hector knows that if he is discovered by one of Rico’s people now—even by just another cigarette boy—he, himself, will be beaten and killed. Blood is still pumping from Rico’s ruptured member. Dazed, Hector scrambles to his feet, reflexively adjusting his cuatro between his shoulder blades.
Although unconscious, Rico emits a gagging sound from his open mouth. The sound stops, then starts again more loudly. Outside the hut, a flashlight scans back and forth, momentarily illuminating Rico’s doorway. Hector picks up his cap from the floor, then squats behind Rico’s head and stuffs the cap into the prone man’s mouth. Now Hector pinches Rico’s nostrils. It takes only a couple of minutes for the man to die. Hector pulls him by the feet to the back of the hovel where boxes of cigarettes reach to the ceiling. There, he covers the corpse by extending one of the blue tarpaulins and grounding it with a rock. This activity distracts Hector’s fear, keeps it at bay.
He should leave quickly now, gather up his family and escape from Soacha, but he stands immobile at the back of the hut making a calculation of his terms of survival. It takes him only a moment to decide to risk his life to find his money.
Hector tries to imagine that he is Rico, pictures him standing just where Hector is now with a dirt-encrusted metal box in his hands. Hector stoops so he is the dead man’s height, cocks his head back to approximate his dumb confidence. His eyes light on the pig haunch suspended by a rope slung over a beam at the ceiling. At times, when he was feeling magnanimous, Rico would haul that haunch down and pass it around for a gnaw apiece by his most loyal subjects. It is as large around as Hector’s waist. Hector finds the free end of the rope wrapped around a table leg, unties it, and lets the fetid pig meat descend slowly. Flies and mosquitoes sail away, then immediately settle back to pick up where they left off. When the haunch smacks the ground, Hector’s metal box tumbles out from a cavity of bone and muscle. Hector retrieves the box, looks inside; his earnings are still there.
Rather than continue down the slope to his home row of huts, Hector retraces his steps back to the perimeter, follows it to where it drops precipitously into the ravine, then edges down sideways to his house. He wakes his mother first.
“We have to go now, Mother. It is dangerous.”
Marcella nods, leans over to wake the others on the platform, touching each of their lips to warn them to be silent. Without being conscious of it, she has been expecting this night; it does not shock her. She will not even ask her son the reason for their precipitous departure until they have walked through the night for over an hour, and when he tells her, she appears neither shocked nor scornful.
The first rays of equatorial sun are spreading down the Avenida Jimenez de Quesada when the family of seven arrives there. Hector waits until eight before walking alone to Calle 11 in search of Senor Garcia, the landlord he had spoken to. He finds him sitting at a table outside the Café con Pep Moso, sipping a café con leche and reading the sports section of El Espectador. Hector waits until he has finished before approaching him.
“Senor Garcia, I am Hector Mondragon.”
“I remember you.”
“I have eleven months rent in cash, right here.” Hector holds out the metal box.
“I said a full year.”
“I know this. I will have the rest in three weeks at the most.”
“So you can come back then.”
Hector does not reply. He bows his head.
“How tall are you, boy?”
“A bit under two meters.”
“What is that on your back?”
“My cuatro.”
“You know how to play it?”
Hector nods.
“What songs do you know?”
“Very many. Some from the South.”
“Mis Flores Negras?”
Hector feels tears of panic gather in his eyes. “I was just singing that a little while ago,” he says softly. Just before I murdered a man.
“Would you please me?”
“Of course, Senor.” He strums his instrument and begins to sing:
“Oye: bajo las ruinas de mis pasiones
Y en el fondo de esta alma que ya no alegra”
Hector’s voice is stronger than it has ever been, the notes rounder, the timbre more complex and resonant. At the word, ‘pasiones,’ there is a tormented catch in his throat just like Sylvia’s. It is this that induces Senior Garcia to press a hand over his heart.
“Entre polvos de ensueños y de ilusiones
Yacen entumecidas mis flores negras.”
The owner of the Con Pep Mosa comes to the door, wiping his hands on his apron. He stands and listens. He is followed by others from inside the café, then from the butcher shop next door to it. Even as Hector sings, he knows that he will not be able to duplicate this performance any time soon.
“Toma pues este triste débil manojo
Que te ofrezco de aquellas flores sombrías
Cógelas, nada temas, son los despojos
Del jardín de mis hondas melancolías.”
Hector is singing for his life.
CHAPTER TEN
Wendell’s mother, Sally Burton deVries, always found the very idea of playacting slightly disreputable and totally unnecessary. And although the Phoenix, first as a music hall and then as a movie house, provided her and Emile with an abundant income, she was perpetually embarrassed by her connection to the theater. She entered it no more than three times in her entire lifetime.
“Why in heaven’s name does one need to dramatize life? Isn’t it spectacular and stirring and ridiculous enough just as it is?” Sally would often say when Emile came home, raving about a new play mounted on the Phoenix’s stage or a film that had just opened there.
Emile would shrug and laugh—he had ceased taking his wife seriously
on most subjects early in their marriage—but Wendell’s eldest sister, Marie, would always come to drama’s defense.
“Life is so jumbled, Mamma, so muddled,” Marie would reply. “Drama can break it down for us. Break it down and put it back together in a way we can understand.”
“Put it together in a way that is not real, you mean. Sugarcoat it beyond recognition. Theater is simply a tool for deluding yourself, dear.”
At this point, whilst pouring himself a snifter of brandy, Emile might not be able to resist chiming in, “Sort of like church in that way, isn’t it, darling?”
Wendell, still a boy of eight or nine, adored these arguments. He would listen to every word from a corner of the kitchen or the bottom step of the stair. He kept waiting for his sister or father to say, “But the plays, the movies—they’re fun! Isn’t that enough?”
* * *
Babs Dowd knew her Halloween party would be a success a good week before it began. Starting then, several phone calls came each day asking her advice on what costume to wear, and when she told them she was decorating the interior of her Queen Anne home to look like a haunted house, they cheered like schoolchildren. That was just one more piece of her love affair with Grandville—everyone’s un-self-conscious enthusiasm. It was such a relief after all that relentless posturing in Manhattan.
“Maybe I’ll come as a skeleton.”
“Well, actually, Ned has that one covered. How about a ghoul of some kind? Something Addams Family-ish.”
“Morticia!”
“That would be just perfect.”
What Babs did not tell her prospective guests is that by ‘haunted house’ she did not simply mean some indirect lighting and a few fake spiderwebs bought at Kmart and taped to her living room’s corners. No, she was going whole hog with this one. It was going to be her surprise gift of appreciation to all the wonderful people in the Grandville Players and the Lenox Garden Club who had been so welcoming to her and Michael. She had plied the Off-Broadway designer, Gilbert Crespert, with a week in the country—plus “oodles of fun money”—in exchange for a haunted house extraordinaire.