The Return (11 page)

Be a good girl, Joannie, he said, and write me some time.
I’ll call you, I said, it’s not the end of the world.
He was nervous and forgot
to put on his shirt.
I didn’t say anything; I picked up my bag and put it on the
passenger seat of the Alfa Romeo.
I don’t know why I thought that when I turned
back to look at him for the last time he’d be gone and the space he’d occupied
next to the rickety little wooden gate would be empty, so fear made me delay
that moment, it was the first time I’d felt afraid in Los Angeles (on that visit
I mean; there’d been plenty of fear and boredom the other times) and I was
annoyed to be feeling afraid, and I didn’t want to turn around until I had
opened the door of the Alfa Romeo and was ready to get in and drive away fast,
and when I did finally open the door, I turned and Jack was there, standing by
the gate, watching me, and then I knew that everything was all right, and I
could go.
That everything was all wrong, and I could go.
That everything was
sorrow, and I could go.
And while the detective watches me out of the corner of
his eye (he’s pretending to look at the foot of the bed, but I know he’s looking
at my legs, my long legs underneath the sheets) and talks about a cameraman who
worked with Mancuso or Marcantonio, a certain R.
P.
English, poor Marcantonio’s
second cameraman, I know that in some sense I’m still in California, on my last
trip to California, although I didn’t know that at the time, and Jack is still
alive and looking at the sky, sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet
dangling in the water, in the void, the misty synthesis of our love and our
separation.
And what did this man called English do?
I ask the detective.
He
would prefer not to answer, but faced with my steady gaze, he replies: Terrible
things, and then he looks at the floor, as if it were forbidden to say those
words in the Clinique Les Trapèzes, in Nîmes, as if I hadn’t been acquainted
with some terrible things in my time.
And at this point I could press him for
more, but why spoil such a beautiful afternoon by obliging him to tell what
would surely be a sad story.
And anyway the photo he has shown me of the man
presumed to be English is old and blurry, it shows a young man of
twenty-something, and the English I remember was well into his thirties,
maybe even over forty, a definite shadow, if you’ll pardon the paradox, a broken
shadow; I didn’t pay much attention to him, although his features have remained
in my memory: blue eyes, prominent cheekbones, full lips, small ears.
But
describing him like that gives a false impression.
I met R.
P.
English on one of
my many shoots around Italy, but his face receded into the shadows long ago.
And
the detective says, It’s all right, don’t worry, take your time, Madame
Silvestri, at least you remember him, even that is useful, now I know for sure
he’s not a ghost.
And I’m tempted to tell him that we are all ghosts, that all
of us have gone too soon into the world of ghost movies, but he’s a good man and
I don’t want to hurt him, so I keep it to myself.
Anyway, who’s to say he
doesn’t already know?

Prefiguration of Lalo Cura

It’s hard to believe, but I was born in a neighborhood called Los
Empalados: The Impaled.
The name glows like the moon.
The name opens a way
through the dream with its horn and man follows that path.
A quaking path.
Invariably harsh.
The path that leads into or out of hell.
That’s what it all
comes down to.
Getting closer to hell or further away.
Me, for example, I’ve had
people killed.
I’ve given the best birthday presents.
I’ve backed projects of
epic proportions.
I’ve opened my eyes in the dark.
Once I opened them by slow
degrees in total darkness and all I saw or imagined was that name: Los
Empalados, shining like the star of destiny.
I’ll tell you everything,
naturally.
My father was a renegade priest.
I don’t know if he was Colombian or
came from some other country.
But he was Latin American.
He turned up one night
stone broke in Medellín, preaching sermons in bars and whorehouses.
Some people
thought he was working for the secret police, but my mother kept him from
getting killed and took him to her penthouse in the neighborhood.
They lived
together for four months, I’ve been told, and then my father vanished into the
Gospels.
Latin America was calling him, and he kept slipping away into the
sacrificial words until he vanished, gone without a trace.
Whether he was a
Catholic priest or a Protestant minister is something I’ll never find out now.
I
know that he was alone and that he moved among the masses, fevered and loveless,
full of passion and empty of hope.
I was named Olegario when I was born, but
people have always called me Lalo.
My father was known as El Cura, the priest,
and that’s what my mother wrote down next to
surname
at the registry
office.
It’s my official name.
Olegario Cura.
I was even baptized into the
Catholic faith.
She sure was a dreamer, my mother.
Connie Sánchez was her name,
and if you weren’t so young and innocent, it would ring a bell.
She was one of
the stars of the Olimpo Movie Production Company.
The other two stars were Doris
Sánchez, my mother’s younger sister, and Monica Farr, née Leticia Medina, from
Valparaíso.
Three good friends.
The Olimpo Movie Production Company specialized
in pornography, and although the business was more or less illegal and operating
in a distinctly hostile environment, it didn’t go under until the mid-eighties.
The guy in charge was a multi-talented German, Helmut Bittrich, who worked as
the company’s manager, director, set designer, composer, publicist and,
occasionally, thug.
Sometimes he even acted, under the name of Abelardo Bello.
He was a weird guy, Bittrich.
No one had ever seen him with an erection.
He
liked to do weights at the Health and Friendship Gym, but he wasn’t gay.
It’s
just that in the movies he never fucked anyone.
Male or female.
If you can be
bothered, you’ll find him playing a Peeping Tom, a schoolteacher, a spy in a
seminary—always a modest, minor role.
What he liked best was playing a doctor.
A
German doctor, of course, although most of the time he didn’t even open his
mouth: he was Doctor Silence.
The blue-eyed doctor hidden behind a conveniently
located velvet curtain.
Bittrich had a house on the outskirts of town, where the
neighborhood of Los Empalados borders the wasteland, El Gran Baldío.
The cottage
in the movies.
The house of solitude, which was later to become the house of
crime, out there on its own, among clumps of trees and blackberry bushes.
Connie
used to take me.
I’d stay in the yard playing with the dogs and the geese, which
the German reared there as if they were his children.
There were flowers growing
wild among the weeds and the dogs’ dirt holes.
In the course of a regular
morning ten to fifteen people would go into that house.
Although the windows
were shut you could hear the moans coming from inside.
Sometimes there was
laughter too.
At lunchtime Connie and Doris would take a folding table out into
the backyard, under a tree, and the employees of the Olimpo Movie Production
Company would hoe into the canned food that Bittrich heated up on a gas ring.
They ate directly from the cans or off cardboard plates.
Once I went into the
kitchen, to help, and when I opened the cupboards all I found were enema tubes,
hundreds of enema tubes lined up as if for a military parade.
Everything in the
kitchen was fake.
There were no real plates, no real knives and forks, no real
pots and pans.
That’s what it’s like in the movies, said Bittrich, watching me
with those blue eyes of his—they scared me then, but thinking of them now I just
feel sad.
The kitchen was fake.
Everything in the house was fake.
Who sleeps
here at night?
Sometimes Uncle Helmut does, Connie replied.
Uncle Helmut stays
here to look after the dogs and the geese and get on with his work.
Editing his
homemade movies.
Homemade, but the business was booming: the films went out to
Germany, Holland and Switzerland.
Some copies stayed in Latin America and others
were sold in the United States, but most of them went to Europe, which is where
Bittrich had his main client base.
Maybe that’s why he did a voice-over in
German, narrating the various scenes.
Like a travel journal for sleepwalkers.
And the obsession with mother’s milk, another European peculiarity.
When Connie
was pregnant with me, she went on working.
And Bittrich made lacto-porn.
Along
the lines of Milch and Pregnant Fantasies, aimed at men who believe or make
believe that women lactate during pregnancy.
With her eight-month bulge, Connie
squeezed her breasts and the milk flowed like lava.
She leaned over Pajarito
Gómez or Sansón Fernández or both of them and gave them a good swig of milk.
That was one of the German’s tricks; Connie never had milk.
Or only a little
bit, for two weeks, maybe three, just enough to give me a taste.
But that was
all.
Actually the movies were like Pregnant Fantasies, not so much like Milch.
There’s Connie, big and blonde, with me curled up inside her, laughing as she
lubricates Pajarito Gómez’s asshole with Vaseline.
She already has the sure,
delicate movements of a mother.
My moron of a father has left her and there she
is, with Doris and Monica Farr, and the three of them are smiling on and off,
exchanging looks and subtle signals or secrets among themselves, while Pajarito
stares at her belly as if in a hypnotic trance.
The mystery of life in Latin
America.
Like a little bird charmed by the gaze of a snake.
The Force is with
me, I thought, the first time I saw that movie, at the age of nineteen, crying
my eyes out, grinding my teeth, pinching the sides of my head, the Force is with
me.
All dreams are real.
I wanted to believe that when those cocks had gone as
far into my mother as they could, they came up against my eyes.
I often dreamed
about that: my sealed, translucent eyes swimming in the black soup of life.
Life?
No: the dealing that imitates life.
My squinting eyes, like the snake
hypnotizing the little bird.
You get the picture: a kid’s silly celluloid
fantasies.
All fake, as Bittrich used to say.
And he was right, as he almost
always was.
That’s why the girls adored him.
They were glad to have the German
around; they could always count on him for friendly advice and comfort.
The
girls: Connie, Doris and Monica.
Three good friends lost in the mists of time.
Connie tried to make it on Broadway.
Even in the hardest years, I don’t think
she ever gave up on the possibility of happiness.
There, in New York, she met
Monica Farr and they shared their hardships and hopes.
They cleaned hotel rooms,
sold their blood, turned tricks.
Always looking for a break, walking around the
city hooked up to the same Walkman, typical dancers, a little bit thinner and
closer together with every passing day.
Chorus girls.
Looking for Bob Fosse.
At
a party thrown by some Colombians they met Bittrich, who was passing through New
York with a batch of his merchandise.
They talked until dawn.
No sex, just music
and words.
They cast their dice that night on Seventh Avenue, the Prussian
artist and the Latin American whores.
It was all decided then and there.
In some
of my nightmares I see myself resting in limbo again and then I hear, distantly
at first, the sound of the dice on the pavement.
I open my eyes and I scream.
Something changed forever that morning.
The bond of friendship took hold, like
the plague.
Then Connie and Monica Farr got an acting job in Panama, where they
were thoroughly exploited.
The German paid for their tickets to Medellín, which
was home to Connie and as good a place as any for Monica.
There are photos of
them descending the steps from the plane, taken by Doris, the only person who
went to meet them at the airport.
Connie and Monica are wearing sunglasses and
tight pants.
They’re not very tall, but they’re well proportioned.
The Medellín
sun is casting long shadows across an airstrip devoid of planes, except for one
in the background, emerging from a hangar.
There are no clouds in the sky.
Connie and Monica displaying their teeth.
Drinking Coca-Cola in the taxi line
and striking provocative, turbulent poses.
Atmospheric and terrestrial
turbulence.
Their attitude suggests that they have come straight from New York,
surrounded by mystery.
Then a very young Doris appears beside them.
The three of
them hugging each other, photographed by an obliging stranger leaning against
the taxi’s bumper, while the driver inside looks on, so old and worn it’s hard
to believe he’s real.
So begin the most passionate adventures.
A month later
they are already shooting the first movie:
Hecatomb
.
While the world is
in turmoil the German shoots
Hecatomb
.
A film about the turmoil of the
spirit.
A saint in prison remembers nights of plenitude and fucking.
Connie and
Monica do it with four guys who look like shadows.
Doris walks along the bank of
a weakly flowing river accompanied by Bittrich’s largest goose.
The night is
unusually starry.
At dawn, Doris comes across Pajarito Gómez and they start
making love in the back part of Bittrich’s house.
There is a great fluttering of
geese.
Connie and Monica at a window, clapping.
The lobster-red cock of the
saint shines with semen.
The End.
The credits appear over the image of a
sleeping policeman.
Bittrich’s sense of humor.
His movies amused drug lords and
businessmen.
The ordinary guys, the gunmen and the messengers, didn’t understand
them; they’d have been quite happy to blow the German away.
Another movie:
Kundalini
.
A rancher’s wake.
While the
mourners weep and drink coffee with aguardiente, Connie enters a dark room full
of farming implements.
Two guys—one disguised as a bull and one as a
condor—jump out of an enormous wardrobe.
They proceed to force Connie’s
front and rear entries.
Connie’s lips curve into the shape of a letter.
Monica
and Doris touching each other up in the kitchen.
Then stables full of cattle and
a man approaching with difficulty, pushing his way through the cows.
It’s
Pajarito Gómez.
He never arrives: the following scene shows him stretched out in
the mud, among cowpats and hooves.
Monica and Doris rimming each other on a big
white bed.
The dead rancher opens his eyes.
He sits up and climbs out of the
coffin to the horror and amazement of his family and friends.
Covered by the
bull and the condor, Connie pronounces the word
Kundalini
.
The cows escape from the
stables and the credits appear over the abandoned, gradually darkening body of
Pajarito Gómez.
Another movie:
Impluvium
.
Two genuine beggars dragging sacks along a dirt road.
They reach the backyard of Bittrich’s house.