Exposure (8 page)

“A
W
, D
IEGO, C’MON
, man. This is not what I
do
— you know that.”

“I know it’s what you have so far
refused
to do, Capitano, which is not quite the same thing.”

Otello goes to the big window of the penthouse and gazes down at the boats that are packed densely into the marina. He wishes Desmerelda were home.

“Yeah, well, maybe the things we don’t do are more important than the things we do.”

Diego, seated on the sofa, seems to consider this. “That’s deeply philosophical,” he says eventually. “And as your friend, I wouldn’t mind passing the afternoon debating it. But as your agent, I need to concern myself with money. Elegante has agreed to a fee of six hundred thousand. Which is far more than they had in mind before I took them to lunch.”

Down at the quayside a couple of skinny boys are lugging a basket from one pontoon to the next. A security guard is watching them from just inside the gate of the compound. Otello cannot see what it is that the kids are trying to sell, but he knows they will have scant luck. On weekdays the place is a graveyard, the sleek white yachts and cruisers aligned like magnificent sepulchers.

“And it’s for a woman’s razor, right?”

“Elegante does grooming products. It’s a huge market, and they have a big chunk of it.”

“A razor.”

“Yeah, okay, a razor. But we might well be looking at other stuff. A long-term brand relationship, you know?”

“So what would I have to do?”

Diego gets a folder out of his briefcase, although he doesn’t need to. “Okay. Two days filming, max. Stills for posters and so forth to be done at the same time. By a very good agency; I’ve checked them out. Dates to suit you, so long as they’re in the next two months. And if — you have the final say in this, of course — we go on to do other things with them, we negotiate from scratch. Which means, naturally, a bigger fee.”

Otello lets out his breath slowly and turns away from the view. “I dunno, Diego. It’s not like I need the money.” He raises his hand, because his agent is about to speak. “Okay, okay, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, as usual, that I’ve got maybe five, six more years playing at this level. That after I quit I’ll have, God willing, fifty years left to me, and if I don’t want to end up as an old bum on the street, we need to — what’s your expression? — ‘broaden my career base.’”

Diego’s smile is rueful. “I didn’t realize I’d become such a bore. I apologize. But yes, I do see it as part of my job to get you maximum exposure. Because, let’s be honest, the fate of most ex-players is obscurity. And a lot of them end up broke or a joke. Am I wrong?”

“No. I guess not.”

“No. But in fact I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to point out that half of this fee would finance your drop-in center for homeless kids up in Espirito for at least a year. And because it’s a legit charity, that makes a nice reduction on your taxes. And I’m assuming that not paying taxes to your father-in-law’s nasty government is something that would appeal to you. Am I right?”

The TV commercial is an instant, scandalous, enormous success. It is condemned by no fewer than nine bishops; it is banned by BVTV, the Catholic channel, and it outrages the Committee for Public Decency. In response to public demand, Elegante puts it on their website so that it can be downloaded onto iPods and cell phones. You’d think no one had ever seen a black man shaving a white woman’s body before. Elegante’s sales — not only of the Ladyshave Silk, but of the company’s entire range — increase by forty percent. But it’s the poster —
that
poster — that lingers in the popular consciousness. The morning it appears on the huge electronic billboard in the Plaza de la Independencia, drivers are so utterly transfixed by it that they fail to notice that the traffic lights are sometimes green, and as a result half of downtown is gridlocked within twenty minutes. One of the inconvenienced travelers is Nestor Brabanta. He sits fuming in the back of his chauffeur-driven limousine for almost three quarters of an hour. When the car eventually reaches Independencia, he looks up at the billboard, and the blood drains from his face.

Although the woman on the poster has her head turned away from the viewer, her light skin, the soft cataract of honey-and-tobacco-colored curls, and the tiny hummingbird tattoo on her exposed shoulder all suggest very strongly that she is Desmerelda Brabanta. (She is not, of course. She is a model, the hair is a wig, and the tattoo will be easily erased by a dab of Elegante cleanser.) Her right arm and hand cover her breasts. Her left arm is raised and bent so that the forearm rests on her golden head; the hand is clenched into a fist. Thus the viewer’s eyes are drawn to her exposed armpit, the armpit that Otello (standing slightly behind her, leaning down and forward) is, with rapt attention, de-stubbling with a turquoise plastic razor. Both he and the model are wearing only sarongs.
Sarongs!
Hers is black; his is white.

On the seventh floor of
La Nación,
Paul Faustino is struggling with the hot drinks machine when Edgar Lima arrives and helps him with the buttons. Lima is the photo editor for the weekend color supplement. He looks about seventeen years old, has his hair in a gelled tsunami, and in the top of his right ear wears a clip fashioned from an antique silver coffee spoon. Naturally they begin to talk about the burning issues of the day.

“It’s absolutely
brilliant,
” Edgar says. “One of those images that are instantly iconic.”

“Yeah?”

“God, yes. I spend my days praying that one of our guys will come up with something like that.”

“What, a soccer player shaving a woman’s armpit? I don’t want milk with that, by the way.”

“Okay, there you go. Actually, it’s not really about shaving armpits. Well, it is, but hey, Paul, c’mon. Deconstruct it a bit, and what do you get?”

“You tell me. I know you’re dying to.”

“All right. It’s wonderfully complicated, but the first thing is, of course, it’s about Otello and La Brabanta.”

“It’s not her, though. Is it?”

“I very much doubt it. But we want to believe that it
is,
right? We want to believe that we’re seeing an intimate moment — albeit a slightly grotesque intimate moment — from the private life of the country’s most celebrated couple. Like they’ve just got out of the shower or something, and she says, ‘Darling, would you mind shaving my armpits?’”

Lima sips his tea. “No, it’s more than that. What we secretly want to believe is that she says, ‘Darling, would you please shave my armpits because you know how much it turns me on.’ That’s why she’s hiding her face. She doesn’t want us to see how turned on she is. Which signals to the viewer that she is very turned on indeed. That’s why she’s holding herself the way she is, right? And the intent expression on Otello’s face tells us that he knows it. The armpit itself is a metaphor, of course.”

Faustino considers this for a moment or two. “You are a very unwholesome person, Eddie. I’ve always thought that.”

“No, I am a very ordinary person. I see what everybody else sees. That’s why I have my job.”

“No, you have your job because you have a university degree in stuff that most people don’t understand, and because somehow you charmed the pants off our man-eating boss at your interview.”

“That is also true.”

“I’m glad you know it. Please continue.”

“Okay. So. As well as the sex thing, there’s the violence thing. Or maybe ‘violation’ is a better word. You know, the way he
looms
over her. He looks twice the size she is. The photographer obviously got him to pump that arm up, because the muscles stand out like knots in a ship’s cable. Like he’s doing something that requires a lot of effort. And what he’s doing is taking a razor to this defenseless, submissive white chick.”

“Aw, c’mon, Eddie. It’s a stupid little green plastic thingy.”

“Maybe. But it’s a razor nonetheless, a thing with a blade. One false move, and there’s bloodshed. At the same time, he’s doing this slightly icky task for her. So you get this dangerous twist on the master-servant relationship. Or mistress-servant relationship, I should say.”

Faustino harrumphs skeptically, but Edgar Lima is not deterred.

“All that is pretty obvious. You might even say
crudely
obvious. But what makes the image really interesting, its stroke of genius, is that Otello is wearing a skirt.”

“No, no. It’s a
sarong.
Perfectly conventional beachwear.”

“Well, yes. Some guys wear them at the beach. But at
home
? What kind of guy wears a sarong around the house? But the point is, Paul, right, that in the poster
she
is wearing one, which is like saying quite plainly that this is girls’ wear. Thus, by extension, that Otello likes wearing the same clothes as his wife. And enjoys joining in with the kind of thing that women normally do in the privacy of their bathrooms. It’s brilliant. It’s got it all: race, latent violence, sexual ambiguity. It’s very erotic and rather disturbing at the same time.”

Faustino shakes his head, marveling. “So let’s see if I’ve got this right,” he says. “This ad for a woman’s razor is actually telling us that the country’s number-one soccer hero is a brutal, blade-wielding, transvestite rapist. That it?”

Edgar Lima grins. “Or that our leading black sports star is a gentle, wife-loving man who is perfectly confident in his sexual identity. You pays your money and you takes your choice. You see what you want to see. Anyway, gotta go. I have to Photoshop the vice president’s wife to make her look less like the witch she is. See you around, Maestro.”

Faustino muses, finishing his coffee. Despite Lima’s colorful analysis, his own view remains unchanged — which is that someone has persuaded Otello to make himself look like an idiot.

He is halfway back to his office before it occurs to him to wonder why anyone would want to do that. And, for that matter,
who.

Desmerelda presses the remote, and the TV says something like
zonk
and goes off. She sinks into the sofa and stretches her arm along the backrest. She’s wearing a loose, long-sleeved silk shirt. No armpits on display.

“And you didn’t notice that she looks like me?” Her tone is neutral.

Otello has been standing at the picture window, looking out into the night, while his wife has been watching him shave a girl’s legs.

“She doesn’t. She doesn’t look anything like you. The guy at the studio introduces us; she’s got short dark hair, dark eyes, you know? She’s maybe half Japanese or something. Even when she comes out of the makeup room with the wig on, she doesn’t look like you. I mean, if you could see her face, you wouldn’t think —”

“I kind of imagine that even if we could see her face, it wouldn’t be the main thing we’d be looking at.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

“And the tattoo? You didn’t see that and think,
Whoa, what’s this?
”

“Well . . . I guess it’ll sound weird, but I don’t remember her having the tattoo. I dunno, maybe the lights and everything, so much going on . . . I didn’t notice it.”

“Hmm. I guess they could’ve added it on, post-production.”

“They can do that, can they?”

Desmerelda huffs a little laugh. “Oh, yeah. You’d be amazed at what they can do. You’ve got a lot to learn.”

He turns to face her. “I’m sorry.”

She regards him somberly for a moment, then pats the seat beside her. “Come here. Sit down.”

He does as he is told.

She says, “Right, Señor Elegante, I think it’s honesty time, don’t you?”

He nods. “Okay.”

“Look at me.”

He looks at her. Her face is very serious.

“I had doubts about this thing from the word go, remember?”

He sighs. “Yeah. I should’ve listened to you.”

“So listen to me now. That ad is seriously the coolest, sexiest thing I’ve ever seen on TV. You look fabulous. The camera loves you, man, and so do I. When I was watching it, I wasn’t thinking,
Take your hands off my husband, you bitch.
I was thinking,
My God, look at that guy. And he’s mine. I can hardly believe it, but he is.
I’m so proud of you.”

And, at last, she smiles.

Later, in bed, she says, “Diego was right. You should do more modeling, stuff like that.”

“What? Diego said I should do
modeling
?”

“Yeah. Well, not
fashion
modeling, maybe. But, you know, magazine work, advertising, things like that. Why not? Other players do. Come to think of it, why
not
fashion modeling? You look great in clothes, as well as out of them. And it’d be a change from all those wasted-looking rent boys you usually see in the magazines. You should think about it. I know lots of people who’d love to use you.”

“When did Diego say this?”

“Oh, I dunno.” She yawns, nuzzles her face on his shoulder. “A couple of weeks back. We had lunch.”

“Did you? You didn’t mention it.”

“Didn’t I? Mmm . . . turn the light off, honey. I’m really sleepy now.”