Made in Saturn

by Rita Indiana

  Linda took his hand and the gesture surprised him. She looked at him with eyes that didn’t seem to lie and said, “Argenis, it’s so good to see you well.” They had broken the ice and all of them were feeling more relaxed. Giorgio ordered a glass for the gentleman and they served him a delicious ice-cold prosecco. They had started to build a conservation laboratory for the reefs on the north coast, and the art gallery was doing well. “That’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” Linda said, looking at her husband as if she were about to announce a pregnancy. “We have a collector who’s very interested in your work.”

  During the Sosúa grant, he had painted a number of canvases with motifs from his mental illness, phantasmal buccaneers who were flaying cows. As he painted them he could smell the blood of those animals in the red acrylic. It was an intense trip that he ended up believing in. The day they threw him out, he had sworn that Giorgio was the reincarnation of one of those buccaneers, either that or a demon. Argenis had gotten violent. He didn’t even like to remember it. It shamed him. He had imagined that those paintings weren’t worth a cent and that Giorgio and Linda had thrown them in the trash, just like him.

  It hadn’t been like that. Linda had always preferred painting to conceptual art. “I saved them so I could give them to you when you were better,” she said, and Argenis appreciated the gesture, forgiving her the condescension common to all gringos. They were talking about a collector, about money. They were talking about a solo exhibition at the gallery, a studio, new work, possible exhibitions in Europe and, after ordering another bottle of prosecco, they asked if he could please get them an audience with the president. They wanted to talk to him about the laboratory, ask for funding, money to fulfill their capricious environmental dreams.

  Argenis understood the power being a satellite of his father’s would confer upon him. He weighed up what was in play. His face did not darken. On the contrary, he smiled with the same hypocrisy as Aquiles and Pellín. “You can count on it,” he told them. Now that he had something the Menicuccis wanted, he saw them in a very different light. No longer were they the epitome of good taste and cool. They were just another couple of hustlers. He got up to go in order to make himself more important, but not before leaving them a little piece of paper with the number of the cheap cell phone Niurka had loaned him.

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  A knife traces a slit from the throat to the anus of the cow. They are skinning it. That black hand belongs to a man dressed in a bloodstained linen tunic. He is carrying a kind of arquebus on his shoulder and has a purple rag tied around his head. In his right hand, which coincides with the upper-right corner of the painting, he is holding up a leg, a leg from a reality that doesn’t exist in any other part of the painting. You could count the hairs surrounding the hoof, see the dirt stuck to the hoof. You could feel the animal’s past vitality in that leg. In the lower-left corner another man is kneeling, a white man. With both hands clinging to one side of the gash that has divided the cow’s skin, he is pulling outwards. There is blood everywhere. The grass has turned red, purple, black. The white man has a knife in his mouth. Where his eyes should be there are a couple of gray smudges made with a spatula, as if his features had been liquefied – the way you sometimes see the features of two people mixed together in dreams. In some areas the paint has been applied with too much water and it drips. Inside the gash there are no guts, no flesh, no bones. What peeks out is a blue, the iridescent blue of a pool. It’s as if a David Hockney were living inside a Francis Bacon cow. The buccaneers are peering into that portal. They are going to extract a Hockney from the cow.

  Argenis would never have been able to paint that now. He remembered creating the piece, but he couldn’t recall all the details. Where had he gotten such bravery? Those thick brushstrokes on the muscled arms of the buccaneers? Those accidental-seeming stains that made distant features of the tropical landscape jump out of the canvas? The little drops of Vermeer-like light he had used to bring the hands to life? What he did remember were the names of those men, names his psychosis had told him. Roque, Ngome – buccaneers who made their living from wild cattle. They sold their hides to smugglers. He didn’t know if he had invented them to feed his paintings or if he had painted them in order to be able to deal with their insistent and inopportune presence.

  “We could ask ten thousand dollars for this one,” Linda Goldman said, standing in front of the work. She was wearing sweaty workout clothing from a Zumba session at the gym and sucking water from a little pink plastic water bottle. They were in the gallery’s basement, an art storage space with polished cement floors and climate control. Giorgio Menicucci had pulled the piece off the shelf and was holding it up by one corner. He was looking at it with the very same face his father used to admire lobsters. The price was not bad for an emerging artist.

  These paintings have had a better time of it than I have, here in this air-conditioned gallery, admired and taken care of, Argenis thought as they went back up the stairs to the first floor, where the exhibit space was located. Pieces of skateboards, used tires, broken trucks, and bits of boards rested on little white shelves, the ready-mades of a Puerto Rican artist’s first solo exhibition in the DR. On the back wall a video was being projected: a skateboarder was stitching up a wound in his own knee. The curved needle looked like a fishhook and the skin appeared dark-green from the blow. The guy pushed the needle in without a fuss.

  Behind an opaque glass wall was the office. They sat in there and Giorgio pulled a bottle of Albariño out of a mini-fridge. Argenis made a mental inventory of the furniture, the Swedish desks, the Philippe Starck lamps, the shelves full of Phaidon and Taschen volumes, art magazines and critical theory organized by the color of their spines. Not a speck of dust sullied the white walls. He imagined a performance art piece with the woman who cleaned the gallery, the one who was really responsible for that immaculate space.

  “That seems fine,” Argenis told Linda, regarding the price, “but I’ll need an advance.” She looked surprised and shot a glance at her husband so quick it just about broke her neck.

  “How much do you need?” asked Giorgio.

  Argenis made a rough calculation. There were six pieces and they would keep 50 percent. Thirty thousand and thirty thousand. “I need eight thousand dollars,” he asked, worrying that he’d gone too far. Linda breathed a sigh of relief and opened the desk drawer to remove a checkbook. Argenis regretted having asked for so little, although he’d never before seen such a sum next to his name.

  He saw himself breaking down Rambo’s door, convincing him to get him a thousand dollars of H. He’d take that heroin wisely, over a few months. He’d rent an apartment in front of the Mirador where he could shoot up, and he’d buy a stereo. Maybe he’d paint. Maybe he’d buy a TV and a DVD player. A computer. He imagined himself putting the needle in while lying on the sofa he’d buy too, beatified by the light of the sunset, his father’s lobsters thermidor crawling toward him from all over.

  When Susana and he had been dreaming about the life the 500 dollars Bengoa got from José Alfredo was going to buy them, she told him they’d eat lobster every day. He was allergic, Argenis reminded her, and she kissed him on the mouth as if her kisses were antihistamine. He concentrated on looking at Linda’s ass to avoid thinking of Susana and Bengoa fucking on the sofa. Giorgio poured three glasses of the Albariño and toasted the beginning of a new stage in Argenis’s life. Argenis drank it in one gulp, pulled the check from his pocket, and kissed both Linda and Giorgio. He pushed open the door of the gallery with his back, looking at the check he held in both hands, and before leaving, he lied to them: “Papi’s on it already.” He hadn’t spoken to his father, nor was he going to. He wasn’t going to Rambo’s, either.

  The gallery was located in the new downtown area, on a Lincoln Avenue recently built up with beige or sand-colored towers and huge liquor stores with Spanglish names. You could breathe in the economic well-being, except for a brigade of Haitians in rags who were drilling a
huge hole into the sidewalk cement. They belonged to another century, to a sepia-toned world of mud and lamentations.

  An Apollo Taxi stopped and Argenis asked the driver to take him to a Banco Popular. He wanted to cash his check as soon as possible, feel the gasoline smell of those bills. They headed toward 27 Febrero Avenue and, despite all of Argenis’s warnings, the driver decided to take it. It was two p.m. and one giant traffic jam ran up and down it for kilometers, for its entire length. The faces of the pedestrians waiting on the sidewalks for conchos and buses wore an endemic sadness, a mixture of resentment and acceptance, of hate dressed up as debauchery. Desperation dressed in a Burger King uniform was holding up prepaid cell phones with monstrous Chinese porcelain fingernails. Decades of shit, of systematic looting, of public schools that were just farms for containment, had sculpted that dizzying, endless wave of eyes. Who could defend them, thought Argenis, now that the elected officials had turned into ruminants? Would it be up to him? To his frivolous friends? “There’s no way to fix this,” he said aloud, and the driver, who thought he was talking about the traffic, said, “Don’t worry, buddy. Up ahead this shit’ll thin out.”

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  He chose the green suitcase for its color. He wanted to believe that just as the green balanced the red, this suitcase would bring him better luck, bring him a destiny that was positively complementary to the strange and desperate one his mother’s red suitcase had provided in Cuba. It was a Samsonite bag, a bit expensive, made of cloth, modern and hard. Unlike the red one, it would have survived the adventure with Vantroi, full of costumes and scenery.

  The employee who sold it to him, a Colombian with transparent braces on his teeth, told him that the suitcase was “cool,” pressing his lips together in pleasure as he opened it like the skirt of a lover to show off the inside. Argenis imagined that anyone seeing it would do the same, and made his decision. Now that he was walking with it, empty, along El Conde Street he felt how cool it was, what its compact design added to him, as he very carefully made a mental list of the products he’d fill it with. The space was limited and everything should have a certain importance and significance. Like in a painting. He wanted to bring art supplies and quality wines, clothing to give away, cheeses, chewing gum and chocolates, books and magazines, things he should buy on the other side of the city, in the Supermercado Nacional or Plaza Central.

  The cell phone Niurka had loaned him rang and he pulled it out of his pocket, saw it was his father. José Alfredo had threatened to call him and talk about a few things. Argenis felt tired just imagining those things. Being introduced to the president, a possible appointment. He ignored the call and stopped on the corner of Hostos Street to hail a taxi. Just then a cloud emptied itself like a bucket as the sun hid away. He ran with the other pedestrians to take shelter under the decrepit eaves of an art deco building, and from there he glanced over at the Cafetería El Conde a block away, where he had spent all those afternoons with the old painters when he was studying at Fine Arts. Back then he liked the place because it was the closest thing to Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night and, now that the rain had stopped and the water was making the cobblestones reflect the light from the recently lit streetlamps, he was filled with a sentimentality that made him think of all the troubles poor Vincent had endured.

  On the way to the café the green wheels of his suitcase raised little droplets from the ground. From far away, just as he used to, he made out the customers sitting on the patio, so that he could head straight to the painters’ table and avoid the poets, practically all of whom were nineteenth-century pseudo-intellectuals with halitosis. The painters’ table, next to one of the entrances, was empty and they had replaced the old hexagonal metal ashtray with the Montecarlo logo with a cheap, round, glass one. The star waiter, Abreu, flitted between the other tables. In spite of his white hair, he hadn’t acquired even one new wrinkle. Abreu recognized him as soon as he saw him and said, “Good evening, sir. Céspedes is inside.”

  José Céspedes was the only survivor of that roundtable. The other members had died unceremoniously, their work remembered only in brief, pictureless columns that the editors of the culture pages had begrudgingly written. He was sitting at a square two-top near the bathroom and the ceiling fan inside the cafeteria, wearing a pair of green Ray-Ban sunglasses that were too large for a face that had lost all its flesh. Céspedes was a skull, a skull with a five o’clock shadow and warts so big they reminded Argenis of tufts of cotton escaping through tears in a stuffed animal. He was bald, and his ears hung down as huge as steaks and the rotten cashew of a nose was covered with blackheads big as the points of pencils. Someone had set two paintings for sale on the two chairs next to him. On both of them, tremulous lines attempted to evoke the façade of the cathedral. It wasn’t the attempt of a child; it was the achievement of someone trying to paint from memory or from a dream, with lines over whose flow vision no longer had any control. Céspedes had gone blind.

  Argenis leaned in to the painter and whispered, “Maestro, it’s me, Argenis Luna.” Céspedes smiled and extended a hand to touch his face. His hand smelled like piss, but Argenis allowed him to touch his cheek, happy to make the old man smile. That sack of bones had been the cause of magical afternoons. He had recounted a world history of painting for Argenis as if it were a fairy tale, had bought him beer, wine, and cigarettes, had blessed him, had recognized the talent within him. Now penniless, with a dirty, stinking olive-green shirt over which no perfumed scarf now waved, Céspedes still inspired great benevolence and admiration in Argenis. He ordered a large Presidente and a pack of Nacionals. He praised the paintings and asked their prices. Céspedes drily said they had already been sold. Sensing he had offended him, Argenis changed the subject. They spoke of dead friends, of Ovando, Piñal, the girls that – according to him – were still falling for him, the women who said he looked like he was forty. Argenis forced a laugh.

  Abreu came back with ice-cold beer and two glasses. Céspedes searched for his lighter with an open hand on his shirt pocket. Argenis noticed the clean nails that someone had apparently cut for him. The painter lit the cigarette and the nicotine took two or three years off him. Argenis couldn’t stop looking at the two paintings with their floating cathedrals, the solidity of those animals, trains, and shoes that the clouds drew in the sky and which lasted as long as the air took to unmake them. Céspedes’s paintings, although figurative, had always had a light consistency: he translated the excessive impact of the tropical light on the city into white areas, spaces with no paint. There, where the sun hit the hardest, was where the void was found. Santo Domingo, his favorite subject, was a luminous, crystalline place in his paintings. Maybe he’s always been blind, thought Argenis. As the old man coughed into a handkerchief, he recalled an atypical green series, in which Céspedes had depicted himself talking with internationally known painters like José Luis Cuevas, Wifredo Lam, Warhol. And there was a pink series in which he painted himself with diva songstresses, but especially Cher – Céspedes was obsessed with Cher. He couldn’t stop coughing, and Argenis asked for some water for his friend. When Abreu brought the water, Céspedes stood up, still coughing, and accidentally knocked it to the ground by accident. He made a move to help pick it up and Argenis could see the disgusting contents of the handkerchief.

  The cough forced the old man to sit down again, and Argenis got up to pay their check. At the cash register, Abreu asked him to walk the painter home. He did it every day, but it wasn’t yet closing time.

  “Did you really sell the paintings?” Argenis asked.

  “No, mijo, they’ve been there for weeks,” the waiter confessed. Argenis went back to the table, gathered up the maestro’s little cathedrals, and put them into the green suitcase, then helped him to his feet with the funny “upa, upa” sounds one makes to a baby. They started on their way to the old man’s studio, an enormous one on El Conde Street that Argenis had always envied.

  The stores were beginning to shut their noisy me
tal doors, and the street filled with employees in uniforms of different colors. The rain had stopped and a pleasant breeze was blowing. Céspedes walked in silence, dragging his worn Florsheims; Argenis didn’t want to break the silence with banalities. He knew the way, populated as always with male prostitutes in tight jeans looking for business with Europeans; Goth chicks with piercings all over; and boiled corn on the cob vendors who were pedaling their way back to Los Mina.

  They came to the building, a solid, Trujillo-era construction which had once been luxury offices but now housed Haitians, prostitutes, and Céspedes. Céspedes had bought the apartment in the seventies when a gallery owner who had managed to hang his paintings in the houses of the Balaguerist petit bourgeoisie had paid him in dollars. In this open space, which in the fifties had housed desks, granite floors, and wide windows, Céspedes had painted almost his entire oeuvre. When they opened the door a stench of shit and rot hit them, turning Argenis’s stomach. Though it wasn’t necessary, the old man told him where to find the light switch. There was trash everywhere – cans of beans, bottles full of cigarette butts, egg cartons. I should have drunk more before coming, thought Argenis. Céspedes pulled him by his shirtsleeve to the far end of the studio. There the air was clearer and the music from a colmado rose from the street. There were several enormous pieces leaning against a wall. The old man felt his way to them with both hands and pushed them to the floor in order to show Argenis what was behind. They were creatures of his new darkness: the darkness inside him had replaced the solar white. Shadows of satyrs, claws, and hens, amorphous blobs, and finally, a depiction of Saturn devouring his son that Céspedes had extracted like a tumor from the back of his memory. Close up, the painting was abstract, but from far away you could recognize the watery forms of Goya’s masterwork.