A Trip to the Stars (31 page)

I shook my head.

“
Bien
. At the time Varcas wrote his book, after wandering all over this country, he was forty-two years old and all his hair had turned white because of what he had seen. I’ll read you a passage from the second chapter, where he is traveling north to Albuquerque, which was then called San Felipe de Albuquerque.”

In a solemn, measured voice she began to read:

“More tea?” Dalia murmured, dropping the pages onto the divan.

I had grown up in that hotel having women read me fantastical stories, but I hadn’t been quite prepared for this.

“That’s amazing,” I said, as she took my cup. “And you’re treating it as history?”

“It is history. Real history which, large or small, must always be—what—
un viaje por el infierno:
a journey through hell. Varcas then visited mission towns and settlements and you begin to see that this incident is nothing compared to what he found later. And he documents everything: dates, descriptions of victims, witnesses who give sworn statements. The Indians encountered these creatures, as did the Spanish conquistadors. The Spanish suppressed this information—obviously. They were colonizers—why would they want to frighten away immigrants from the old country? To the Indians, the vampires, like ghosts and other potent spirits, had always been a natural part of the nocturnal landscape.”

“So what did Varcas find later?”

She smiled. “I’ll read you some more tomorrow, if you like. But you know what’s really exciting—and terrible to contemplate?” she said, narrowing her eyes. “These creatures never die. To them, the decades since Friar Varcas perished are like this”—she snapped her fingers—“which means they are still roaming this country. That is why I came here: to see the places Varcas wrote about, and also to breathe the air these creatures inhabit.”

“You’re going to retrace his steps?”

“Of course. As much as I can by automobile—Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, all over.” She raised her hands. “This is what I am working on, but there is more to me than that. And there are other things
to discuss.” She fixed her eyes on mine. They were pale blue, I saw now. “I understand you’ve had a wanderer’s life—
un vagabundo
—like me,” she said, lowering her voice to just above a whisper. “Tell me about yourself, Enzo.”

I have little recollection of what I related to her, outside a superficial outline of my recent history. Maybe it was the maté tea. Or the fact that it took me a while to put the tale of Friar Varcas and the vampire out of my mind. Or, more likely, that I simply found it difficult to concentrate on the particulars of my own life when my eye kept gravitating to Dalia’s dangling leg or her lovely breasts, the dark disks of her nipples pressing against her silken shift, when she locked her fingers behind her head and leaned back on the divan. Soon enough the shaman playing his flute on the Isla Cook gave way to some reggae, and Dalia took a plastic bag and a blunt pipe out of a velvet pouch. I had smoked marijuana a number of times and lost interest: alongside the effects of the spider bite—however subtle their evolution—it didn’t do much for me. But this wasn’t ganja Dalia was tamping down into the pipe.

“It is the ground-up buds from a tree we have in the mountains of Chile,” she said.

“Coca?”

“No, nothing so strong, but much rarer. These buds when they blossom are called
flores de luna
—flowers of the moon. They are silvery white circles with black dots, like the moon’s craters. A couple of puffs, it just makes you feel kind of dreamy,” she said, passing me the pipe and putting a match to the bowl.

The smoke was bittersweet, tinged with a lilac scent. Expanding in my lungs, it constricted my throat, but I held it in for a long time.

“The fruit of this tree,” Dalia went on, “is white, the size of an olive, and if you rub it in your palm, and say some magic words, it glows in the dark.”

“What are the words?” I said, taking a second puff off the pipe.

Dalia ran her fingertip along my eyebrow and then down my cheek. “Enzo, you’ve got very nice eyes.” Her fingertip traced my mouth. “And lips.”

My mouth went dry as she slid closer to me. “Those are the words?” I laughed nervously, exhaling the smoke.

“No,” she said softly, her eyelids at half mast.

I felt a lightness to my body, but my mind remained clear. At least, I thought it did.

“The words,” Dalia whispered, “are, ‘Let’s dance.’ ” And, taking my one hand, she placed the other lightly on her breast, which felt hard, and the nipple even harder, through the silk.

The next thing I knew we were dancing cheek to cheek, our bodies pressed together tightly and the throb of the reggae pulsing the air so that gradually I felt like I was underwater in a bright red sea. I had never been that close to any girl, feeling every ripple of her body against mine. I closed my eyes and we moved in slow circles around the room, much slower than the tempo of the music, and didn’t exchange another word. But we did kiss, on the eyes, cheeks, and lips, and then for the first time I had a girl’s tongue in my mouth when she licked my upper lip and slid her tongue in, revolving it slowly. The more we danced, the longer and harder we kissed until finally one of our slow lazy circles ended abruptly at the bed, onto which we tumbled as if it had been awaiting us all along. As of course it had.

“Enzo, I feel famished,” Dalia whispered, running her hand up my thigh and unzipping my pants.

I had a hard-on like a rock as she sat astride it and threw off her shift. Then she got on all fours, her breasts inches from my face, and I slid out of my pants and kicked them away. I took her breasts in my hands while she unbuttoned my shirt and then put her mouth over mine. She didn’t have on underwear, just an inverted triangle of silk beneath which was a nearly identical triangle of soft light hair that emerged when she unsnapped the elastic band that circled her waist. I put my mouth greedily over one breast, then the other, and rolled over on top of her.

My instincts took over—with some help from Dalia. The platinum spirals of her hair fanned out over the pillow as she wrapped her arms around my shoulders, her fingernails poised sharply on my skin. Then she spread her legs into a wide V, opening up to my fingers even as she caressed me, gently pulling me into her. My whole body felt on fire, from my skull to my toes. Behind the roaring blood in my ears I heard a clear, high-pitched ringing, as if a small silver bell were being struck
at regular intervals. Intervals that shortened with every passing moment as I buried myself deep inside her, thrusting, too hard and fast at first in my ardor, even as she thrust back more deliberately, drawing me into a slower surer rhythm. I closed my eyes and felt her lips slide across mine and flutter down to my throat. And then quickly, almost too quickly, every force in my body seemed to be coming apart at incredible velocity and merging into one at my burning center. We moved faster and faster, and then slower and more conclusively, our bodies pounding together, the sweat pouring off my back and the air tight in my lungs, as in one long burst all that fire at my center streamed into Dalia.

As I lay beside her, catching my breath, everything in the room falling away from me, the names of those asteroids began lighting up in my mind suddenly, in sequence as always—such was the staying power of Labusi’s method!—but a fractured sequence now, like my breathing—
Pia, Renata, Palma
—and I thought of all the girls I might meet in my life, and all the women in the world—
Chloë, Olivia, Jena
—and I realized how much pleasure it had given me holding all those names in my head, until finally, at the end of that sequence—
Esther, Violetta, Philippina
—bringing a smile to my lips, I arrived at #643,
Scheherazade
, the weaver of tales, of desire.

At that instant I saw on my closed eyelids a perfect sphere, pale green with red streaks, rotating slowly, backdropped by stars. It was a planet. A year after memorizing the names of the asteroids, I had succeeded in reconstructing mentally Hadar’s lost planet between Mars and Jupiter. It had come whole suddenly—all those names cohering and transmuting in my head—just as the rest of me had burst apart. After several seconds, the image disappeared, spinning away through space until it was just another tiny light among so many others.

Like the stars in the sky over Acoma the following night when I concluded my second visit there with Calzas and Sirius. Sirius had not been back since Calzas found him as a pup. We had flown into Albuquerque and rented a jeep. Four hundred miles east of Las Vegas, Acoma was fifty miles southwest of Albuquerque. About 150 miles to the north on Route 666 was Four Corners, which I had visited with
Calzas on my first trip to Acoma three years earlier. I had wanted to see Four Corners ever since Samax pointed it out to me from the air on that first plane ride from New York to Las Vegas. And just as he told me he had done, I walked around the monument with the four state seals, following a small tight circle from New Mexico to Colorado to Utah to Arizona. The dirt was orange there, a slow wind blew hard, and it was 110°.

On this trip we drove straight to Acoma. We arrived at noon and left just after nightfall, and as eagerly as I had anticipated my return to the sky-city, my mind was elsewhere that day. From the moment we left the Hotel Canopus at dawn until our return at midnight, Dalia—her scent, her touch, the coolness of her white skin—was never far from my thoughts. In everything I did that day, from climbing the mesa and hiking over a field of boulders to feeling the sun pounding my bare back, my body felt different. Though still fifteen, legally, officially, a minor, it was as if overnight much more than a night had passed; though no stranger to the company and ministrations of women, from Luna and my grandmother to the two sisters and Desirée at the hotel, it seemed to me now that I had truly entered their world, which was also the world of the heart.

At Acoma, it was Calzas’s world I entered. No sooner had we started driving west out of Albuquerque than I felt he was completely in his element. He didn’t change much around other people, whether at the hotel or in Las Vegas itself when I accompanied him on business errands. But in New Mexico something dropped away from him—he seemed more alert to his own needs rather than the needs of others. In his wraparound Polaroids and long-brimmed baseball cap, he always enjoyed driving in the open air, the top down, no matter what the temperature. And he was naturally taciturn: if I didn’t speak, he wouldn’t; but if I brought something up, he was always open—though never voluble—regardless of the subject. That particular day, though, barreling down the shimmering desert highway with sand stinging our cheeks and the backdraft fiercely hot, he was far more preoccupied than usual.

Over time I had discovered the exact nature of Calzas’s employment with Samax. In addition to his far-flung troubleshooting with antiquities, Calzas had a ten-year contract with Samax for his
exclusive services as an architect. His projects were Samax’s various real estate acquisitions: hotels, office buildings, several theaters, and an opera house, which Calzas gutted, redesigned, and renovated. His contract expired in 1973, at which time, with Samax’s blessing (and regret), he planned to go into business for himself. So when I turned eighteen, his role in my life—part surrogate brother, part godfather—would come to an end. On account of his youth alone—when I was otherwise living exclusively with men in their fifties and sixties—I never underestimated the importance of that role, despite the fact that Calzas was on the road more than he was at home at the hotel. As with Desirée, the age difference between Calzas and me was such that the older I got, the more I became his peer. For a while, though, I had often imagined him and Desirée as my ideal parents—talented, beautiful, and happy reincarnations of Luna and Milo, or better yet, of my ever-mysterious real-life parents—even though I knew Calzas had a fiancée in Santa Fe, a Zuni girl named Cela whom he visited every other weekend and planned to marry as soon as he set up his own business. Calzas looked hard at Desirée on occasion, but, the son of a philanderer, he was faithful to a fault.

Aside from his fiancée, Calzas rarely brought up his personal life or his family in New Mexico. So I was surprised when he broke into my thoughts about twenty minutes into our drive.

“We’re going to see my father’s grave,” he said.

In the years I had known him, Calzas hadn’t said much about his father, but I had assembled a thumbnail sketch from others. Like me, Calzas had never known his true father, who left him, his mother, and his two brothers when Calzas was two. His father ran around with other women and worked as a sheet metal cutter in an airplane factory in Phoenix. Later he went east and became a construction worker, on skyscrapers and suspension bridges. Like many Indians, because of his extraordinary sense of balance he was made a riveter assigned to the greatest heights. Eventually he died in a fall on a job in New York City and was buried there. That was all I knew.