by Daniel Klein
Hector is a joyless companion to Mano in the Café Andes that afternoon. His eyes perpetually scan the streets and corners and alleyways, looking for Diego or any other boys from Soacha whom Diego has enlisted in his vendetta. When Hector parts from Mano after only a single glass of rum, he makes his way home by a roundabout route, his eyes relentlessly roaming, vigilant, frightened. By the time he is sitting with his mother in the kitchen of their magnificent La Sabana apartment, Hector knows that his time has arrived for another migration.
While Hector brought the folk songs of Puerto Alvira with him to Bogotá, his mother, Marcella, brought the village’s folk wisdom in the form of its fables and epigrams. Many of the latter are enigmatic to the point of comic obscurity, like, “One hungry wolf is a menace, but ten hungry wolves are a circus.” Many more are self-evident truths that provide nothing new of value, say, “The man who owns the land owns the man who tills it.” But here and there are Puerto Alvira maxims that embody a kind of pragmatic mysticism that only a native can apply wisely. Such is the one that springs to Marcella’s mind that late afternoon: “The way out of a storm lies in the breeze that preceded it.”
Marcella asks her eldest son to repeat the day’s events for her, not sparing a single detail. His third time through, she stops him at the moment when the tall stranger speaks to Sylvia.
“You say he works at the American Embassy?”
“Yes, Mamma. He said that to her.”
“And what does he do there?”
“He did not say.”
“Did he look important?”
“He looked American.”
“He is the breeze,” the mother announces.
Ideally, Hector would have waited to see if Sylvia’s connection to the American was a one-day romance or an enduring affair before he asked her to intercede with the man on his behalf. But the threat to Hector is too serious and the possible cost to him and his family too great for him to delay. The next day when he meets up with Mano and Sylvia at the Plaza de Toros, Hector dispassionately recounts the circumstances that led him to kill Rico, although he omits the exact method of his murder. Neither of his comrades is shocked by his story; they have heard many like it. But when Hector describes his urgent need to flee Bogotá, Mano is instantly angered, not so much by Hector’s predicament as by the prospect of losing the trio’s handsome cuatroista. Yet Sylvia, may the Blessed Virgin anoint her, touches Hector’s cheek and asks how she can help him. He tells her.
The fleeting look of misgiving in Sylvia’s eyes when she says she will contact her American friend—a Mr. Arthur Jessel— makes her offer all the more generous and Hector all the more guilty. It is clear that Sylvia sees a risk to her relationship with the American by asking him a favor so soon in their affair. And to be sure, it is no small favor. Hector realizes he cannot let her go through with it.
“But don’t talk to him yet,” Hector blurts out. “I have other prospects to look into first.”
“Like what?” Sylvia asks, raising her feathery eyebrows skeptically.
“Well, there is a boy I know in the Sagrado. He has a cousin who—”
“My dear friend, I will talk to Arthur this evening,” Sylvia declares emphatically.
“He may not be pleased.”
“But he is very pleased with me,” Sylvia replies, smiling proudly. Even if this is the response Hector hoped for—the one that could save his life—it strikes a dagger in the love song singer’s heart.
Mr. Arthur Jessel is a third generation diplomat, educated like his father and paternal grandfather at the prestigious American college, Yale, and at the Johns Hopkins School of Foreign Service. His gift for languages—he is fluent in five— surpasses that of all of his colleagues and serves him well in his profession as well as in his most passionate avocation, women. Indeed, for that pursuit he has expanded his linguistic repertoire to include such words as ‘eyes’ and ‘hair’ and ‘breasts’ and, of course, ‘love,’ in six additional tongues. None of this is to say that his infatuation with the exotic Bogotá street singer is tawdry or trivial; Arthur is one of those rare men who can defy the laws of logic by giving his heart totally to several lovers at the same time.
When, over a dinner of langouste ravioli at the terrace restaurant of the Hotel Andino, Sylvia tells Arthur about her singing partner’s plight, Arthur is pleased to offer his help. Contrary to Sylvia’s fears, Arthur is not in the least affronted by being asked a favor so early in their relationship. So rewarding are his experiences with women that Arthur never feels exploited by them. Before the couple retires to the suite at the Andino that Arthur rents by the month, he promises to meet with Sylvia’s young friend, Hector, at the American Embassy the very next day.
As a successful diplomat, Arthur is adept at the quid pro quo of personal indulgences. Unlike banking with its assigned numerical values, trading in favors is more art than arithmetic. The worth of the door key for Arthur’s hotel suite to his Deputy Chief of Mission cannot be calculated in terms of pesos or dollars because along with the loan of that key comes knowledge of incalculable value, namely that the Deputy Chief is cheating on his wife. This is easily worth a freshly minted tourist visa, one that dispenses with the mandatory six-month-long security-checking period. However, like banking, a favor granted begets favor debt and so, as a matter of principle, Arthur Jessel feels obligated to keep the favor economy cycling on. And that is one reason why, when he presents the visa to Hector, he asks the young man for a personal indulgence in return.
“There is a woman in Coral Gables to whom I need to convey a private message,” Arthur says to Hector in his crisp continental Spanish. “Her name is Faith Moffet and her address is 754 Jeronimo Drive. You must remember this; you cannot write it down, just as I cannot mail a letter to this address. I want you to go there—it is not so far from Miami airport—and to ring the doorbell. A maid will answer and you will ask for Mrs. Moffet. If she is not there, leave immediately. If her husband is about, you must leave quickly also. But when you get to speak with her alone, tell her that I will be in Miami on the evening of January third. The Colony Hotel. Tell Mrs. Moffet that—well, simply say that I am counting the days until I see her. Do you understand?”
Hector understands. He repeats both the address and the message for Jessel’s approval. Then they review Hector’s preparations for his departure to Miami, Florida. He must obtain a passport, a round-trip ticket, and two thousand American dollars to show that he can support himself for his ‘two-week vacation.’
Sylvia is waiting for Hector outside the embassy. When Hector shows her his American tourist visa, she grabs him by both hands and swings him around in a joyful dance in the middle of the sidewalk. Hector wonders if he should warn her that her American is a faithless lover who will break her heart. He also wonders if perhaps that is the real message Jessel wanted him to deliver—and to Sylvia, not Mrs. Moffet—a cowardly preparation for the rejection Jessel is already planning for his new young mistress. But, of course, Hector says nothing of any of this.
“I wish I could take you with me,” is what he says to Sylvia.
There are easily twenty Colombian men Hector’s age on the flight and he does his best to avoid contact with them— even the one seated next to him—in an effort to evade any suspicion by association. On Sylvia’s advice, Hector purchased a second-hand linen suit at a stall in the Pasaje Rivas. Wearing it now with a white shirt and brown tie, his hair freshly cut and combed, he looks more like a student or perhaps even a genuine tourist than one more impoverished illegal with a questionable visa. Also at Sylvia’s recommendation, Hector packed only a carry-on bag; it contains two changes of clothes, his ‘Look-and-Learn’ English lesson book, and his cuatro, its fingerboard jutting out from the top. In this way, his stop at the customs counter would be brief. It is well known in Bogotá that the distance from the landed airplane’s doors to the Miami airport’s exit is the longest expanse in America.
But none of these precautions prevents the fir
st American immigration officer who inspects Hector’s visa from promptly and expressionlessly dispatching him to a holding room ten feet behind him. Along the short passage to this room stand half a dozen men in slacks and short-sleeved shirts, attaché cases at their sides. As Hector passes by them, each mouths a single word: ‘Abogado.’
Hector stops at the last of these men and says, “I have a legitimate tourist visa from the American embassy. So why should I need a lawyer?”
“To avoid being sent home tonight,” the lawyer replies dryly.
“This makes no sense,” Hector says.
“That is something for you to think about on your way back to Bogotá.”
“What is your fee?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
Hector shrugs and begins to walk away.
“Four hundred,” the lawyer calls after him, but Hector walks on into the room.
Inside is every young Colombian man Hector saw on the plane. About half of these, he sees, have acquired lawyers and Hector wonders if this places him among the most wise or most foolish of them. Over an hour passes before any of them are called to the small desk wedged in the corner of the windowless room.
The immigration magistrate makes short business of the first six boys she summons, all without lawyers. She simply holds their visas over a blue light and declares them forgeries in both English and Spanish. The rejected young men are then handcuffed by an officer and escorted out of the room—to a prison cell to await their flight back, Hector overhears one lawyer explain to his client. The seventh called is the boy who sat next to Hector on the plane. No linen suit or barbered hair for him; he looks like a typical specimen of Ciudad Bolivar poverty, yet clearly the boy arrived in America with enough cash to buy himself an abogado. And it is his abogado who does all the talking to the magistrate, holding the boy’s passport and visa in front of her face with a peculiar grip that involves raising his forefinger and middle finger above it. Hector realizes immediately that this is a signal and an artless one at that; the lawyer is offering her two hundred dollars of his fivehundred-dollar fee for the boy’s visa validation. Indeed, the validation is granted without a single pass of his visa in front of the blue light.
Hector panics. He is about to ask one of the lawyers in the room to represent him too when the magistrate calls his name. Hector inhales deeply, then strides to the desk and presents his documents.
“This is real thing,” he declares resolutely in his ‘Look-and-Learn’ English. “I catch it myself at U.S.A. embassy in Bogotá. I am person they know.”
The magistrate, a dark-skinned Cubana-American, offers him a sardonic smile. She considers him impudent for speaking at all, let alone with such self-assurance, but her eyes do linger on his fine-boned face.
“Why have you come to Miami?” she asks him in Spanish.
“For pleasure,” Hector replies.
“Such as?”
“Dancing. Making new friends,” Hector says with a shy smile. Without thinking, he is playing the coquette, the innocent pretty boy who charms the lady tourists.
The magistrate appears amused. “And do you have money for such pleasures?” she asks.
“Enough.”
“Show me,” the magistrate says.
Hector hesitates, then reaches into his pocket for the four one-hundred-dollar bills left over after buying his round-trip plane ticket. He holds the bills in front of the magistrate. She laughs.
“Do you really believe you can sleep and eat and drink and dance in Miami for two weeks with only four hundred dollars?”
Whatever slight interest she may have had in his face or his charm has already evaporated. She turns toward the officer beside her, the man with the cardboard box full of handcuffs.
“I am the guest of an American friend!” Hector exclaims. “An important American friend with much money.” The gambit he is now playing is a treacherous one and he knows it. But he also knows how little stands between him and the night flight back to Bogotá.
The magistrate looks at Hector with disdain. She does not for a moment believe he knows a single American, let alone one with money. But what Hector has failed to accomplish with his charm, he has achieved with his audacity. There is nothing this bureaucrat relishes more than making a fool of a vain and pretentious young man. She will call his bluff.
“And what is this very important person’s name?” she asks mockingly.
“Mrs. Faith Moffet. Of Coral Gables. With address of 754 Jeronimo Drive.”
“Really? And what is her telephone number?”
“She told me to find it in the telephone directory when I am here. Do you have a directory, Madame?”
The magistrate appears both incensed and intrigued. She most certainly still mistrusts the handsome young man and further, he is wasting time she could be using to much greater profit, but she has a grudging admiration for the degree to which he is playing his hand. And it promises a more glorious humiliation than she usually provokes.
She orders the officer to bring her a telephone directory. Indeed, she does find a Paul and Faith Moffet listed at 754 Jeronimo Drive in the Gables, but she knows too well how easy it is to pick a name out of a directory and memorize it. That trick has been tried on her before. She removes a cell phone from her pocket and dials the number. It is answered on the second ring.
“Mrs. Moffet?” the magistrate asks. After the reply, she says, “May I speak with her, please?”
The magistrate watches Hector’s face, waiting for the first signs of foreboding to register. Just how long will he let her go on with this charade before he concedes defeat? Hector smiles weakly back at her.
“Yes, Mrs. Moffet, I am calling from the United States Immigration Service where I have a young man who claims to be a personal friend of yours . . .” She looks down at Hector’s passport. “His name is Hector Mondragon.”
“Arthur Jessel’s friend!” Hector interjects loudly in English, aiming his voice at the magistrate’s phone. “From embassy in Bogotá.”
The magistrate glares at Hector. She has had quite enough of his impudence. She moves her thumb to the Off button on the phone, but before pressing it she hears the party at the other end speaking sharply. The magistrate puts the phone back to her ear and listens a moment, then says in a subdued voice, “Yes . . . yes . . . Miami International. He will be waiting for you in my office.”
Hector sits in the passenger seat of an open Jaguar convertible, his overnight bag between his knees. Driving is Faith Moffet, a silky haired blonde wearing wrap-around sunglasses and a one-piece garment that consists of shorts with a halter top. To Hector, this article of clothing looks like a child’s playsuit—later he will learn that it is actually called a ‘playsuit’ by mature native women—except for the milky-white crescent of breast at the sides which the halter is built to reveal.
Even as his fate was being determined by Mrs. Moffet in the immigration office, Hector was comparing her to Sylvia and finding the wealthy American wanting in both beauty and grace. Although he is an uneducated, rural-born, street hustler of not yet twenty years, Hector has a sophisticate’s eye for refinement. In fact, Hector’s background makes him more discerning in this regard than, say, someone like Arthur Jessel, whose judgment is impaired by the money-bound prejudices of his social class. Of the two men, only Hector can see the royalty in a half-breed street singer and the vulgarity in a wealthy socialite.
But Mrs. Moffet’s vulgarity notwithstanding, Hector was impressed by her confident manner when she strode into the magistrate’s office, announced herself loudly, and then embraced Hector like a long-lost cousin. Or lover. And although the Cubana magistrate had lost her contest with Hector, she had to smile when she saw the rich gringa kiss his smooth cheek.
Hector and Mrs. Moffet are cruising along Lejeune Road heading for Coral Gables. So far their conversation amounts to no more than her inquiry of how his flight went and his reply, “Very excellent.” Now Hector turns to her and relays Jessel’s me
ssage, complete with the diplomat’s exact words about counting the days until he sees her. The woman nods, pleased, and then says, “Where should I let you off?”
Hector looks out. He sees hotels and shops and restaurants on both sides of the road.
“Here is good,” he says.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It took three generations for Grandville’s first white settlers to make their way from Boston.
The first, the English-born Malcolm Wright family, trekked west by foot to Sturbridge Village, having heard that settlement was in need of a blacksmith to replace the one who had succumbed to bronchitis the previous winter. There, some ten years later, the Wright’s eldest son, Robert, married a young woman by the name of Louise Button, the only child of Sturbridge’s barber and blood-letter, Barnard Button.
Feeling hemmed in by the village’s increasing density— there were already more than thirty houses, barns, and shops thickly settled at its center—the newlyweds saved up for a horse and wagon before taking up the second generational leg of the westward journey. But crossing the Connecticut River on the third day of their expedition, they lost both horse and wagon to a frenzied current that had begun as a squall in the White Mountains on the same day they departed Sturbridge. With literally no more than the sopping clothes on their shivering backs, Robert and Louise staked out a plot on the west bank of that great river. Here, in the course of two decades, they built a homestead and a subsistence farm, and bred eight children, five of whom survived to maturity. In that time, several other families settled nearby, forming the nucleus of what would later be Westfield.