La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  “Macha is different, you know? He’s the only one who looks me in the eye. I wonder: Is he afraid of me? Macha, who they tell me is so courageous? . . . Some afternoons he invites me out for a cold one at a bar around here, close to the market. We talk in a way we can’t talk with people who work directly with us. Because of compartmenting, you understand. I don’t know who Rat is. I know his pseudonym. I don’t know who his wife is or anything about his kids. I’m not supposed to know. Although, don’t ask me why but I get the feeling he’s fuzz. He doesn’t know anything about me either. It’s for good reason our anthem says ‘We are children of solitude.’ No one is more solitary than us, man,” and he looks at me with emptied eyes. “With so much distrust, you end up not trusting yourself. You start to think of the enemy as an equal, almost like a brother. He must be all alone, too, in some miserable room in a boardinghouse out there, living his lousy clandestine life. His presence, which is always alive in your imagination, accompanies you from afar. If it were possible . . . You know: hate and love can change places. Later, you tell yourself that no, obviously it’s not like that, he is, truly and completely, your enemy. And still . . .

  Macha doesn’t know who Iris really is, or Chico Marín. He doesn’t know . . . On the other hand, since we’re in different departments, Macha Carrasco and I can talk. Not a lot, but some. Even though we only know each other by our fake names. But I know who his son is, I do know that. We talk about soccer, we talk about his father, who was a truck driver. He drove a Ford with a trailer on it, and Macha hardly ever saw him. He carried cargo to the south, Macha’s dad did, and he was hardly ever home. They didn’t get along well. ‘My old man,’ he told me, ‘put me in military school to straighten me out.’ That way, they’d see each other less. ‘My old man didn’t take me into account,’ he says. His old man wasn’t there for Macha. Maybe that’s why he turned out so macho. That’s what I think.

  “We don’t talk about work much. A little, though. He looks down on it. He looks down on our ‘fat-ass bosses,’ he looks down on the decorations, the circular commands; he doesn’t trust anyone. . . If there was ever a solitary man, it’s him. I think he can’t even imagine how far his ‘fat-ass bosses’ would be willing to go. The day he least expects it, they’ll get sick of looking the other way when he ignores procedure, they’ll get tired of his habit of going off, out of an excess of ‘professional pride,’ as they say, to arrest the “Prince of Wales,” for example, on his own and with no one’s authorization—not no one’s, as Ronco would say—I don’t think a thing like that even crosses his mind. Or Iris’s, or Great Dane’s, or any of the other people who blindly follow him. Command has hardened feelings, you know. To Command, we’re all disposable, hear? Not just the terrorists. Everyone. And above all, the ones who do this job.”

  He goes on chewing and chewing, concentrated. He examines the bit of sandwich he has left and he takes a giant bite right in the center.

  “Macha lives with no yesterday or tomorrow. Those acts of blood and guts he’s so wrapped up in happen and they swallow him up. It’s like he dreamed them. He’s isolated in a present that’s separate, I’m telling you, from what happened before and what will happen after. Maybe he lives like he’s dead. He thinks: this has to be done; it has to be done, period. Tomorrow no one will understand us. He and I understand each other, you know? ‘Someone,’ he says to me, ‘gives the order: clean out the building’s plumbing, it’s stopped up. And someone else has to go and open it up and look at the plumbing, shine a light into the pipes and watch the shit go by in that thick and stinking water, someone has to stick the metallic tubes in there and unclog the pipe. And the hands that are feeding out the electric snake end up stinking like that sewage. Gato, we are nobody, and we always will be,’ he tells me.

  “You know what he was telling me about the other day, last Thursday, I think it was? ‘The bad thing about these CZs, Gato, the down side is that they’re too fast. You shoot, and the bullets go through the man so fast he keeps on moving, right? It seems like he’s still alive, he won’t die, he goes on opening and closing his mouth, poor fucker, and so you go on shooting him. When the guy finally stops moving, you’ve already emptied a clip into him . . . ’ As for me, Cubanita, you know I’ve never shot at anyone. God willing, I won’t. Macha suspects that someone higher up is protecting the terrorists, he thinks they don’t want to finish them off once and for all so we can maintain the threat, the justification, he tells me, he asks me. And he watches me. Like he’s trying to get in my head. That’s how it feels, I don’t know . . . Did you know Macha has terrible aim? But he gets up close to the target, he holds the gun at eye height and shoots at the man between his belly button and his neck. He gets really close to him and that, of course, makes all the difference.”

  The phone rang. Gato repeated the order I had received. Silence. “I wanted to be sure the operation was authorized,” he said.

  “Understood,” he answered, submissive. “It’s just that with Macha Carrasco, you never know . . . Right away,” he adds, resigned. “Right away!”

  He hangs up, chastened, and he squats down to take my purse out of the drawer.

  “Go on. They’re waiting for you.” And when he handed it to me: “Of course, he would do it now. I forgot: they’re doing evaluations this month. That Flaco doesn’t miss a trick!” he exclaimed.

  He licked the mayonnaise off his lips, though a smear remained on his chin; he smiled at me, sphinxlike, and waved his thin little fingers in the air.

  FORTY-FOUR

  They intercepted him at eight in the morning coming out of a house that was being watched. He walked calmly, an ordinary man. He didn’t worry about checking for a tail. Once again, no attempt at checking his surroundings. Nothing. I watched what happened second by second through my binoculars from a fake taxi parked a block and a half away. As soon as I recognized him walking toward me, I gave the signal. Macha got out of another car parked closer, got right on top of him, and aimed at his forehead. No more than four yards between them. I would have liked to see that exchange of power in their eyes. The Spartan tried to take his gun out. But Great Dane came out of nowhere, leaped into the air, and planted a foot in his face. The Spartan fell but he got up, blood streaming down his face, and ran toward a pickup truck, ignoring Macha’s bullets as they whistled past. As I told you, they wanted him alive. He put the key in the lock. Macha shot holes in the tires and the Spartan’s truck started to lean to the side. He managed to get the door open. When he saw he was lost, he put the barrel of his SIG-Sauer in his mouth and fired.

  I liked it. The guy had balls. The Spartan didn’t want to surrender: “Talking isn’t the sin, the sin is letting yourself be taken alive.” That thick paste, mixed with viscous liquids—it was hard to believe that repugnant pulp was all that was left of the head that used to lean over a chessboard and could divine moves none of the rest of us could see. And if he was only that, then so was my daughter, so was I, so was anyone. He was left shamelessly exposed, turned inside out like an animal destroyed. And I remembered the Fonseca no. 1 wrapped in rice paper that he’d given me at the restaurant in the Central Market. And I remembered the girl who was waiting for him in Quivicán, rolling tobacco leaves.

  That same night, three leaders of Red Ax fell, including “Viollier.” They made me identify him after he was already dead: it was Max, no doubt about it. He was almost intact. It happened at the corner of Argomedo and Raulí. He was on his way in to the “meet.” He didn’t obey the order to stop, they said. Lies. They shot him point-blank. He never even fired. It wasn’t like with Rafa or the Spartan. They didn’t even try to take him alive. Macha crossed in front of him, aiming at him and cutting off his escape. Iris, from the sidewalk across the street, hit him with a single 9mm bullet in his temple. An old woman who’d just arrived heard the bullets and started walking down Raulí; they let her escape and put a tail on her.

  FORTY-FIVE

  “Let’s go to Wild Cat,” he says, “Come on.�
� And in the Volvo he gives me a bottle of Christian Dior perfume—a small bottle so I can carry it in my purse—and then he hands me a line on his gold credit card. Flaco is attractive, but you know, the fire of the beginning has cooled over time. But not if we go to the den in Malloco. There, my whole body starts to vibrate again. Sometimes, I go with Flaco to the private room with Louis XV chairs and the faded black velvet sofa. And after a little of the white powder, I start to smolder again, burning up my desperation, my resentment, my twisted sadness. Then, to receive Jerónimo and Rabbit under Flaco’s gaze is to kill them and resuscitate myself. And Flaco loves me then with a renewed passion.

  So we went, and I lost him soon after we got there. I went to the bar and drank two pisco and Cokes. I looked for him until I got tired of looking for him. I danced with a big, slightly pudgy guy who squeezed me and whom I didn’t like. He gave me a black mask, soft and flexible. “It’s Italian,” he told me. He gave me a couple of lines. A boy with a shaved head embraced us, a friend of his, and we danced like that, the three of us. Then the two of them were kissing. I went back to the bar and I was drinking another piscola when Flaco appeared; he was laughing with a younger guy, dark, not very tall, thin, with dark glasses. There was a lot of complicity in the laughter of those two. We went into the room with imitation Louis XV chairs, and Flaco took out his little mirror. The other guy followed the rhythm of the music, and he inhaled and looked at me seriously and went on dancing.

  “You’ve got white on the nose of your mask,” laughed Flaco. He knew what he wanted from me. The other guy came closer. Flaco told me yes, yes, with his somber voice that conquered me. The other man laughed. I had already given myself over.

  Then I recognized him, suddenly and without a doubt. I recognized his smell. He was wearing a T-shirt again, sleeveless this time, and his arms were more muscular than I remembered. He looked at me in the darkness, but he didn’t remember me. My heart jumped when I felt my captor’s arm around me, and Flaco’s clinging gaze. Now it was me who was nervous. I whispered into his ear. “I remember you,” I told him. “I saw you once and you were wearing a green shirt.” He didn’t answer. I don’t think he heard me. He was licking my nipples and he caressed them tenderly and in the darkness he gaped at them and then went back to biting them gently. He was concentrated there. His body was hairless. I like hairless men. Rodrigo was hairless. The Greeks didn’t sculpt men’s hair, except for where it should be: on their heads and down below. Their shapes emphasize a smooth and continuous surface. Hair interrupts the beauty of the muscles. At that moment, I was enjoying his chest, too, I liked that it was bare now and free of hair that would impede my tongue.

  And so I understood him, I understood his fascination because I was also kissing his masculine breasts. “Your nipples are big and round like coins, like monedas.” That was the only thing he said to me.

  “It was on Calle Moneda,” I told him. “Remember? You pointed your gun at me.” I don’t think he heard me. He seemed really high. He was panting in my ear the same way he had on that frightful day. It was him, no doubt about it. But that day on Calle Moneda he’d been very nervous, he could have fired accidentally. And I felt the cold of the gun barrel on my temple. I’d been more serene than he was. He entered me, his phallus long and thin like a bull’s, reaching deep inside me. I shuddered. Like a good bull, he came in no time. And that was it.

  When I came back from the bathroom, they weren’t there anymore. The two of them had left. I went to the bar. I ordered a tequila.

  And then, wandering around, I found a shadowy room full of cells, like a gym with weight machines, or like a torture chamber with black leather beds with straps, and handcuffs, masks, nipple clamps, rings to put around a phallus, whips, of course, and crops and various chains: in short, the classic paraphernalia of that particular tribe.

  I went into another room, small and dark. In it there was a cross that you could be tied to, whipped, and spit on. And I saw a man wearing a mask, one of those men of indefinite age, short, double chin, long hair, muscles that had once been defined and were now soft waves, a potbellied man, with a fevered and broken spirit—I saw him seek out that place of transformation, of death and resurrection, and place himself up there in the role of a slave. I recognized him by his garlic smell. He was there. He had that high voice, as if he were faking it. My confessor, my all-powerful, my unseen one, my ally, my accomplice, my boss, my corruptor, he was there, a few droplets of sweat shining on his weak lips. At first I didn’t dare look at him for fear that he would recognize me in spite of my mask. My heart sped up, I felt anxiety tightening in my stomach. I should have left, I wanted to and I didn’t want to; I stood there turned to stone before that mortified figure. Behind his mask his eyes were hollow and red; he didn’t notice I was there.

  I moved backward and circled around until I was looking at his back. In that place he was so much shorter and fatter and more insignificant . . . I saw myself lying down, tied up, naked, and blindfolded, imagining that the one who was pressuring me with his questions and punishments was a beast both beautiful and cruel. I lost myself among the people surrounding the crucified man. It was him, no doubt about it. There’s a memory that remains in the flesh. He was my deus absconditus to whom I had sacrificed myself trying to imagine he was good. At that moment I started to retch, but I held it back.

  It was contagious; there was a woman and a strapping, strong boy and a skinny, ugly man with long hair tied in a ponytail. They took turns punishing him with a crop. After a while even I laughed with pleasure, like an idiot, and I spit on his back and I wanted to whip him. In truth, at that moment I wasn’t out for revenge. Real revenge, when it came, if it came, would be something quite different. But I didn’t know that art, and they turned me away.

  Now another youth with sunken eyes and gaunt face whom I hadn’t noticed before takes the whip. The crucified man looks at him with imploring tenderness. The other looks back with distant severity. Do they know each other? Is he a detainee? Could he be an informer like me, though he’s the master now? I’ve seen him, it seems to me I’ve even talked with him. A prisoner. But I can’t be sure. Maybe he was an agent, or a whore, who knows.

  “More, harder,” the whipped man begs confidently.

  The other doesn’t change his rhythm. They search in each other’s eyes. After a while the skin has started to relax and the man with the whip gives it to him harder but keeps a steady rhythm. I watch in fascination. His muscles contract. The other man shouts in pain; it seems like he wants to stop the game. Why doesn’t he? To be like victims burned at the stake, signaling through the flames. The man with the whip is sweating and he goes on whipping, perhaps a little harder still. He yanks off his leather jacket and throws it to the floor, and he’s left in a sleeveless black shirt, sweaty and tight against the muscles of his chest. I like his collarbone, thin and feminine. He starts up the whipping again at a slower, more violent rhythm. His sweet, reddened face shines with sweat. This is not a genital orgasm; it’s a voyage into unknown territories of the mind. They look at each other like they’re hypnotized. There are no shouts now, just a giving in to the love in each lash of the whip.

  “More, yes, yes, more,” the victim says, “that’s it, keep going, more, more.”

  On his back red dots have sprung up that lengthen into drops. The eye contact resumes and it’s like a tense thread about to break; they see something in each other that I can’t see, a phosphorescence, an apparition.

  At some point everything stopped. Gato was untied. He was trembling and swaying, panting. He took off his mask and tears were falling down his cheeks and blood down his shoulders, his back and ribs. The young man helped him sit down on the floor. “Cover yourself,” he told him, solicitous, “cover yourself.” And he put a damp towel over Gato’s shoulders and sat down next to him. I left the two of them shivering in an embrace on the floor under that towel, and I rushed off to the bathroom to find a line I desperately needed.

  That invers
ion was a cruel game, but it was consensual. Completely different from the unilateral horror, from the power imposed by one body on another. We are taught to be ashamed of our instincts. Our hypocritical education, a gag. There’s a tyrannical pleasure in the degradation of oneself. We are that, too. In the underworld of that dark, bewitched house, I lived it frenetically, like one returning to a lost Paradise—not the sterilized and anodyne paradise of Genesis, but a cruel and delicious unleashing, a plunge into the burning and confused sea of our origins, a sudden fusion with the savage animal that inhabits us and that we deny ourselves. In that pit I touched the bottom of the truth that we deny ourselves, the truth that we invent. Not “The Truth” but rather instants of vehemence, vertiginous truths like bites or burns, momentary passions that I lived deeply and free of doubt.

  FORTY-SIX

  I say to Flaco: I’m going to leave you, I’ll retire and start my own security business. Don’t you think I’d be able to start a security business and make money?

  And he says: Of course. You could start a business and make a lot of money. I have no doubt.

  And me: And you know what I’m going to do with all that money?

  And he looks at me with questioning eyes, and waits.

  And me, smiling: I’m going to buy myself a penthouse, or, more like it, a penis-house.

  And he: Oh! Really? That’s what you want?

  And me: It’s not what I want; I need it.

  And he: A penis-house . . .

  And me, very seriously, holding back the laughter: Exactly. So I can have lots of penises in my house.

  And he, laughing: So you need lots of penises . . .

  And me: Yes. One night with one, another night with another. To miss out on all of them, except yours, shows a serious lack of consideration.