The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  Sunday. Pack up. Settle bill—330 pesos.…

  Monday. Cable AMPR for advance on salary. No news, Lexter. Cannot understand delay. Return Rincón. New room. Unpack …

  Wednesday. Dusenberry bets me that Russia will ally with Germany against Britain and France—fifty dollars.… [Here there is an unexplained gap of one week.]

  Wednesday. Lexter says my request for visa renewal has been turned down.

  This was an astonishing blow. I had been in Mexico for getting on for three weeks, and despite the unprecedented delay I had never once suspected that I would not be allowed to return to the United States. Lexter was apologetic but formal. He declined to explain why I had been refused entry. His sympathy for me, his decent pro-European liberal sentiments, disappeared behind apparatchik reserve. As symbol of my plight he naturally became my enemy. Suddenly I found his mop of hair an offensive affectation. Shouldn’t a man of his age, I suggested to him, stop pretending to be a college kid? He called a Marine in to throw me out. I apologized, said I was overwrought; my country was at war; I just wasn’t myself. We sat down again. It must be a simple mistake, he said. He would investigate further. He advised me to do what every frustrated emigrant did: be patient and reapply.

  I took his advice. There was one other course of action I could have followed: catch a boat to England from a Mexican port. But I was now running into the other eternal problem—money. Brodie McMaster’s chauvinistic loyalty to a fellow Scot had its limits. He sent me one week’s salary in lieu of notice. I was unemployed. The Coopers wrote and said that without the rent they could only hold my apartment until the end of October. Soon I would be homeless. I left the hotel and moved into a clapboard cottage behind the Vera Cruz. It cost sixteen pesos a day, cheaper than a double room at the Max. After a week there and more fiscal calculations, I transferred to a single room in the main hotel that bore an unfortunate resemblance to my cell at Weilburg, but it cost only eleven pesos a day.

  My life took on a strange routine. I ate a modest breakfast at the Vera Cruz—pan dulce and coffee. I wrote letters in the morning. I lunched in a cheap restaurant (surrounded by suspicious monoglot locals—what was this gringo with his old newspaper doing here every day eating refritos eggs and rice with a bottle of Garci-Crespo mineral water?). After lunch I took a long siesta. In the evening I bought a couple of lardy quesadillas—hash and cheese—from a roadside stall on my way down the avenida towards the Americana. There, I tried, and usually succeeded, in getting mildly drunk on white tequila with beer chasers. I became a regular. There were always new émigrés to engage in conversation, but I am afraid people tended to avoid me after a couple of nights’ of my company. I could only talk about one subject and at length—the conspiracy to prevent me from entering the U.S. I had become a bore. Even Monroe Smee (whom the Anti-Nazi League had sent down with some money) stayed only twenty-four hours.

  Three times a week, then once a week to economize on gasoline, I drove into Tijuana. I visited the consulate, where I inquired about the progress of my reapplication, and changed the books I was generously allowed to borrow from the small eclectic library they had there. Lexter was a thoughtful decent man, but even he admitted that this delay was more than bureaucratic ineptitude. But he couldn’t clarify matters any further. After that I went to the post office to post letters and collect mail, bought whatever English-language newspaper was available and drove back to Rincón and my drear accommodation at the Vera Cruz.

  On Christmas Day 1939 I motored up to Tecate, parked the car in some scrub and walked several miles across the border to Potrero, where sanity returned and I retraced my steps. So many official inquiries had been instigated on my behalf, my particulars had been forwarded to so many government agencies, that I realized I must be the best documented would-be immigrant the U.S.A. had ever seen. I would be lucky to last a week before being deposited back in Tijuana with all hopes gone. And Lexter would never forgive me. He was my only hope. I simply had to be patient.

  My begging letters kept me alive, hovering above the poverty line. Lori, the Coopers, Monika, the Hitzigs, the Gasts and the Anti-Nazi League subsidized me in my exile. All my Californian gloss disappeared. I grew thin again, my hair was cut rarely and my clothes were grubby. My friends corresponded regularly, sent me food, newspapers and magazines. Even my father wrote. I had cabled him for fifty pounds. He replied, saying he would see what he could do—then, silence. My letters to Eddie Simmonette were marked “return to sender.” To my eyes it looked suspiciously like Eddie’s handwriting on the envelope, but I couldn’t swear to it.

  I felt as if I were in quarantine, a dog suspected of rabies. I was free, but I was not free. Free in Mexico to do what I pleased as long as it was not the one thing I desired—leave. I caught something very nasty from a charming whore in Tijuana that cost me a precious twenty Yankee dollars to have put right. I didn’t visit Lexter for two weeks out of pure shame. Those pale Baptist eyes of his saw everything, I knew.

  My diary:

  Rincón. February 1, 1940. The fiesta of El Rescate, in honor of our Lord of the Rescue. I lit a candle in the church of Our Lady of Los Dolores. It is all too horribly apt. The battery on my car has gone flat and I can’t afford a new one. Assets: one immobile 1935 Mercury. Two suitcases of worn clothes. One camera. $27.55. The frightening thought strikes me that I could keep going like this indefinitely. Years may pass. Enough money to hang on in Rincón, but not enough to escape. If only Thompson would help. I hate that fat sanctimonious bastard! I think I understand the poverty trap. You have to have a little money, a little self-esteem, a little respect for authority. That way you don’t starve, beg or steal. And that way you never do anything.

  That evening I went down to the Americana to sell my camera, an expensive Leica I had bought in Berlin in ’32 (I still took photographs from time to time, mainly portrait shots of people I worked with). Juan, the patrón of the Americana, had offered me two hundred pesos for it.

  The fiesta was more or less over. It was a bluey warm dusk. A band was playing and some people were dancing in the Plaza Zargoza at the end of the main street. Mercifully, all the fireworks seemed to have stopped. For once the Avenida Emilio Carraza was empty of cars. Beneath the nutant trees—strung with bunting—two exhausted policemen collected the NO SE ESTACIONAR signs. It was hard to imagine that all Europe was at war. For the first time I realized how easy it was to be neutral.

  The Americana terrace was crowded with families. I made my way through the tables into the dark bar and asked for Juan.

  “Mr. Todd, at last!”

  I turned round. It was Dusenberry, smiling in a friendly way. I hadn’t seen him for weeks. Ramón Dusenberry was half-Mexican, half-American. He lived in San Diego, California, but kept a large house outside Rincón where his mother stayed. He was a slim, fine-boned man with a neat goatee. He was in the newspaper business. He owned a chain of local papers on both sides of the border. He was brown-skinned and dark-haired, but spoke English like an American.

  “Hello,” I said without enthusiasm. The fiesta had depressed me.

  “Still here?”

  “For my sins.”

  “You owe me a hundred dollars. The U.S. remains stubbornly neutral.”

  I laughed and then felt sick. Briefly, with passionate terseness, I outlined my position to him. One of his slim hands lightly tapped the marble surface of the bar. It looked like an elegant woman’s hand—light brown, hairless, shiny-nailed, very clean.

  “Well, what are we going to do with you, Mr. Todd?”

  I sighed. “Don’t tell me this is an affair of honor.… Look, I’m broke. Flat, stony. Skinned. No tener un centavo, mate.”

  He ignored my aggression. I apologized.

  “I am, really. I’m even trying to flog this camera to Juan.”

  “You a photographer?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m a motion picture director, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Ever worked for newspapers?”

  �
��I was a newsreel cameraman in the Great War.” I suddenly felt old. I muttered, “You know—’14–’18.”

  “Got a car?”

  “What is this? Yes.”

  He smiled. He was handsome in a faintly sinister, overrefined way. “You’re just the man I’m looking for.”

  That was how I became a newspaper photographer for the Tijuana, Tecate, Rumovosa and Mexicali Diarios. During the weeks I was employed I presided at a dozen weddings, four fiestas, two mayoral inaugurations, several livestock shows, a warehouse fire at Mexicali, the arrest of a rapist in the village of Agua Hechicera, the Miss Baja California 1940 beauty pageant and, my scoop, the collision of a freight train with a lorry full of oranges on the railway between Mexicali and Nuevo León. My shot of the body of the lorry driver lying on a bed of spilled oranges was syndicated throughout Mexico and even, so I was told, made the pages of some American magazines.

  Ramón Dusenberry paid me twenty-five dollars a week plus bonuses. I stayed on at the Vera Cruz, partly out of affection for the place (seediness has its own allure for the seedy) and partly to save money. I abandoned my plan of returning to Los Angeles; someone or something was blocking that route far too effectively. I decided instead, when I had some money saved, to make for Tampico and try to book a passage on a merchant ship heading for Britain. If that proved unsuccessful I would head down to British Honduras or cross over to the West Indies and make my way home from there.

  It was curious, however, how a job relieved a lot of my anxiety. I had the Mercury repaired and drove up and down the border to whatever assignment one of my four editors deemed worthy of photographing. I took a strange pleasure in these trips, motoring through the dusty arid landscape along the badly paved highway parallel to the border. I had some coarse linen suits run up for me in Mexicali; I acquired a taste for mescal. I became a well-known figure in Rincón and opened a bank account in the Tijuana branch of the Banco Nacional de México, where my savings steadily accumulated. I was told that it was something of a social cachet in the border towns to have the gringo photographer turn up to cover your wedding. In short, I began to settle in.

  Then, one evening in the middle of April, I turned down the Avenida Emilio Carraza and parked my car in front of the Vera Cruz. I had just returned from photographing the winner of the five-thousand-peso prize in the federal district lottery. The hotel owner’s daughter, Elisa, who acted as receptionist, handed me a message.

  “Meet me in the bar at the Max, seven o’clock. Monika.”

  I shaved, changed my shirt and went to meet her. She was waiting in the bar. She looked hot. A combination of the day’s lingering warmth and the Max’s ceiling fans contrived to dishevel her carefully waved hair. The little vertical creases in her upper lip gleamed with perspiration. We embraced, my palm on her damp bare shoulders,

  “My God, what’s happened to you?”

  I looked at myself in the bar mirror. “Nothing.”

  “You don’t look … We were worried about you.”

  It was a measure of my new contentment that I had stopped writing letters to my friends. No one had heard a word for weeks.

  We went to the Americana and had a cold beer beneath the colored lights in the fresno trees. Monika’s hair was backlit with blue, green, red. I felt a surge of affection for her. I never expect to inspire friendship, let alone loyalty. These moments, these gestures, disarm me. I took her hand.

  “It was sweet of you to come looking for me. But I’m fine. Well, I am now.”

  “Eddie Simmonette’s in town. He wants to see you.”

  “Eddie? Where’s he been? I must have written him a dozen letters.”

  “Nobody knows. But he’s rich. He’s bought a film company. Werner’s already working for him.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants you to make a film.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Over dinner in the Max I explained my new travel plans to Monika. Vain months of trying to get a visa rendered other attempts futile. I was somehow going to make my way back to Britain.

  “What’s the latest war news?” I asked. “We’re a bit behind here.”

  “Oh God, I can’t remember.… Nothing much. Something’s going on in Norway, I think.” She took my hand. “You must come back. Eddie has plans.”

  “Wonderful. But how?”

  She smiled.

  “Simple,” she said. “We’ll get married.”

  I married Monika Alt on April 23, 1940, in the offices of the U.S. consul at Tijuana. Mr. Lexter officiated. My best man was Ramón Dusenberry. The other witness was Miss Raffaella Placacos Díaz, Lexter’s secretary. Two hours later we drove across the border into the United States. As the spouse of one of its citizens, I was passed through Immigration with no delay.

  VILLA LUXE, June 26, 1972

  I remember today, for some reason, a conversation that took place when

  I was teaching Elroy Cooper.

  Apropos of nothing he asked, “Can God hear everything we say?”

  “No,” I said without thinking.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t believe there is a God.”

  “Yeah? So what do you believe in?”

  He was a bright boy, Elroy, not one to let things go by him. He was waiting for an answer and I realized I had never thought that deeply about it. I thought of something Hamish always said—“Anyone who can’t explain his work to a fourteen-year-old is a charlatan.”

  I tapped the cover of Elroy’s math book. Coincidentally, we were working on prime factors and how to factorialize. I had a go.

  “Well, I’m inclined to believe in this,” I said. “In science—maths and physics. I prefer to believe what they tell us about the world.” I paused. “They say that the world is a highly complex place but at its root, at its basic elementary level, it is a realm of random events governed by chance and uncertainty. It doesn’t make sense, any logical sense that we can understand. It can’t be figured out by what you and I would regard as commonsense ideas. This is what lies at the bottom, at the foundation of everything.

  “But what we do, us human beings, in our everyday life, is go around pretending it does make sense, that there is a meaning and solid foundation to everything which we will discover one day.” I smiled. “Mind you, I think in our heart of hearts we have to believe whatever the mathematicians and physicians are telling us. People have various ways of pretending the world makes sense and believing in God—or a god, or gods—just happens to be one of them.”

  Elroy was skeptical. “But couldn’t God have made the world like that? You know, to fool us?”

  “I suppose that’s a theory, but it’s a bit feeble. There wouldn’t be much point in believing in God, then. You see, people like to think there’s a meaning in life and a hidden order in the universe. It would be a pretty strange God who made his presence known by arranging things so it looked like there was no meaning, and making the universe random and unpredictable.”

  “I don’t know. He can do what He likes.”

  “A very famous mathematician said, ‘God may be devious but he doesn’t play dice’—or something like that. I don’t think you can have a dice-rolling God. There wouldn’t be any point. In fact I think they’re mutually exclusive as ideas, dice and God. You see if—”

  “Can we get on with these prime factors?”

  * * *

  Another thing I forgot to tell you is that while I was in town the other day I went into a bookshop. In the English-language section I found a book called The Movie Encyclopedia. There was an entry under my name. I copied it out.

  TODD, JOHN JAMES: b. 1899, d. 1960? English director of the silent era (Julie, Jean Jacques!); reappeared briefly in Hollywood during World War II, where he made a number of indifferent B-feature Westerns.

  16

  The Kid

  Between 1940 and 1943 I made eleven Westerns, all but one of them under an hour long. Among the titles I can recall are Gun Justice, Fo
ur Guns for Texas and Stampede! As always, the names tell you much about their quality. I shot them quickly, efficiently and wholly without passion. I might have been making deck chairs. All they had to do was work.

  Eddie Simmonette had arrived in Hollywood in early 1940 with a considerable amount of money. I never knew how he became such a rich man again—it certainly wasn’t his Yiddish films. I think it was something to do with wartime currency restrictions and gold bullion. From time to time he made trips to South America. Once he went to the Bahamas. I asked him why.

  “To see the duke of Windsor.”

  “Oh yes, sure, Eddie.”

  “It’s the truth. You don’t have to believe me.”

  I laughed and told him of course I didn’t. I think if I had pressed him he would have told me then. But I thought he was having me on. Anyway, he bought a small company called Lone Star Films and doubled its output. We made cheap Westerns and a few thrillers. I have a feeling that Lone Star was part of this wider financial manipulation, but I could never figure out just how and where it fitted in.

  I was glad to be working, albeit on such a reduced level. It was pleasant, also, to be prosperous again. I stayed on in Pacific Palisades; I liked the ocean. I bought a larger house on Chautauqua Boulevard itself and Monika and I settled down to some sort of domestic routine.

  We were divorced, quite amicably, six months later. We were tolerable lovers but lamentable spouses. We needed our liaison to be illicit for it to flourish. I think we rather bored each other, married. I started sneaking off to Lori’s again and Monika took up with some young man she met. It soon became apparent that we should separate.

  However, she told me one fact that clarified the recent past somewhat. Evidently, during a drunken argument with Faithfull she had taunted him with our affair and its more intimate details—size of Todd organ vis-à-vis the Faithfull member, ingenuity of position, stamina reserves and so on. Faithfull threw Monika out and went blustering round to my house to confront me and “teach me a lesson,” only to find I was away in Rincón awaiting my residency renewal. He got straight on to a crony at the British consulate and had him warn U.S. Immigration about me. Fuller investigation on their part revealed that I was a registered debtor in Scotland. It was enough to keep me in Rincón all those months.