The Return (12 page)

There they find Monica Farr,
completely naked and chained in an upright position.
The beggars empty the
sacks: an abundant collection of sexual instruments made of steel and leather.
The beggars put on masks with phallic protuberances, and, kneeling down, one in
front of Monica, one behind, they penetrate her, moving their heads in a way
that is, to say the least, ambiguous: it’s hard to tell whether they’re excited
or the masks are suffocating them.
Lying on an army camp bed, Pajarito Gómez
smokes a cigarette.
On another camp bed the conscript Sansón Fernandez is
jerking off.
The camera pans slowly over Monica’s face: she is crying.
The
beggars depart, dragging their sacks down a miserable, unpaved street.
Still
chained, Monica shuts her eyes and seems to fall asleep.
She dreams of the
masks, the latex noses, the pair of old carcasses who could barely hold a breath
of air and yet were so enthusiastic in the performance of their task.
Supernatural carcasses emptied of all the essentials.
Then Monica gets dressed,
walks through the centre of Medellín, and is invited to an orgy, where she meets
Connie and Doris; they kiss and smile at each other, and talk about what they’ve
been doing.
Pajarito Gómez, half dressed in fatigues, has fallen asleep.
When
the orgy is over, before it gets dark, the owner of the house wants to show them
his most prized possession.
The girls follow their host to a garden covered with
a metal and glass canopy.
The man’s bejeweled finger indicates something at the
far end.
The girls examine a cement swimming pool in the shape of a coffin.
When
they lean over the edge, they see their faces reflected in the water.
Then dusk
falls and the beggars come to an area where big cargo ships are docked.
The
music, performed by a band of kettledrummers, gets louder, more sinister and
ominous, until the storm finally breaks.
Bittrich adored sound effects like
that.
Thunder in the mountains, the sizzle of lightning, splintering trees, rain
against window panes.
He collected them on high quality tapes.
He said it was to
make his movies atmospheric, but in fact it was just because he liked the
effects.
The full range of sounds that rain makes in a forest.
The rhythmic or
random sibilance of the wind and the sea.
Sounds to make you feel alone, sounds
to make your hair stand on end.
His great treasure was the roar of a hurricane.
I heard it as a kid.
The actors were drinking coffee under a tree and Bittrich
was playing with an enormous German tape player, away from the others, looking
pasty, the way he did when he’d been working too hard.
Now you’re going to hear
the hurricane from inside, he said.
At first I couldn’t hear anything.
I think I
was expecting a god-almighty, ear-splitting racket, so I was
disappointed when all I could hear was a kind of intermittent whirling.
An
intermittent ripping.
Like a propeller made of meat.
Then I heard voices; it
wasn’t the hurricane, of course, but the pilots of the plane flying in its eye.
Hard voices talking in Spanish and English.
Bittrich was smiling as he listened.
Then I heard the hurricane again and this time I really heard it.
Emptiness.
A
vertical bridge and emptiness, emptiness, emptiness.
I’ll never forget the smile
on Bittrich’s face.
It was as if he was weeping.
Is that all?
I asked, not
wanting to admit that I’d already had enough.
That’s all, said Bittrich,
fascinated by the silently turning reels.
Then he stopped the tape player,
closed it up very carefully, went inside with the others and got back to work.
Another movie:
Ferryman
.
From the
ruins you might think it’s about life in Latin America after the Third World
War.
The girls wander through garbage dumps, along deserted paths.
Then there’s
a broad, gently flowing river.
Pajarito Gómez and two other guys play cards by
the light of a candle.
The girls come to an inn where the men are carrying guns.
They make love with them all, one after another.
They look out from the bushes
at the river and a few pieces of wood tied clumsily together.
Pajarito Gómez is
the ferryman, at least that’s what everyone calls him, but he doesn’t budge from
the table.
He holds the best cards.
The villains remark on how well he’s
playing.
What a good player the ferryman is.
What good luck the ferryman has.
Gradually the supplies begin to run short.
The cook and the kitchen hand torture
Doris, penetrating her with the handles of enormous butcher’s knives.
Hunger
reigns over the inn: some stay in bed, others wander through the bushes looking
for food.
While the men fall ill one by one, the girls scribble in their diaries
as if possessed.
Desperate pictograms.
Images of the river superimposed on
images of a never-ending orgy.
The end is predictable.
The men dress the
women up as chickens, make them do their tricks, and then proceed to eat them at
a feather-strewn banquet.
The bones of Connie, Monica and Doris lie on the
diner’s patio.
Pajarito Gómez plays another hand of poker.
He wears his luck
like a close-fitting glove.
The camera is behind him and the viewer can see
the cards he’s holding.
They are blank.
The credits appear over the corpses of
all the actors.
Three seconds before the end of the film, the river changes
color, turning jet black.
That one was especially deep, Doris used to say, it
illustrates the sad fate of artists in the porn industry: first we’re ruthlessly
exploited, then we’re devoured by thoughtless strangers.
Bittrich seems to have
made that movie to compete with the cannibal porn videos that were starting to
cause a stir at the time.
But it isn’t hard to see that the film’s real center
is Pajarito Gómez sitting in the gambling den.
Pajarito Gómez, who could
generate an inner vibration that planted his image in the viewer’s eyes.
A great
actor wasted by life, our life, yours and mine, my friends.
But the movies
Bittrich made live on, unsullied.
And so does Pajarito Gómez, holding those
cards covered with dust, with his dirty hands and his dirty neck, his eternally
half-closed eyelids, vibrating on and on.
Pajarito Gómez, an emblematic
figure in the pornography of the 1980s.
He wasn’t specially well endowed or
muscular, he didn’t appeal to the target audience for that kind of movie.
He
looked like Walter Abel.
He had no experience when Bittrich dragged him from the
gutter and put him in front of a camera: the rest came so naturally it’s hard to
believe.
Pajarito had this continuous vibration, and watching him, sooner or
later, depending on your powers of resistance, you’d be suddenly transfixed by
the energy emanating from that scrap of a man, who looked so feeble.
So
unprepossessing, so undernourished.
So strangely triumphant.
The
pre-eminent porn actor in Bittrich’s Colombian cycle.
The best when it came
to playing dead and the best when it came to playing vacant.
He was also the
only member of the German’s cast who survived: in 1999, the only one still alive was
Pajarito Gómez, the rest had been killed or succumbed to disease.
Sansón
Fernández died of AIDS.
Praxíteles Barrionuevo died in the Hole of Bogotá.
Ernesto San Román was stabbed to death in the Areanea sauna in Medellín.
Alvarito Fuentes died of AIDS in the Cartago jail.
All of them young guys with
supersize cocks.
Frank Moreno, shot to death in Panama.
Oscar Guillermo Montes,
shot to death in Puerto Berrío.
David Salazar, known as the Anteater, shot to
death in Palmira.
Victims of vendettas or fortuitous brawls.
Evelio Latapia,
hung in a hotel room in Popayán.
Carlos José Santelices, stabbed by strangers in
an alley in Maracaibo.
Reinaldo Hermosilla, last seen in El Progreso, Honduras.
Dionisio Aurelio Pérez, shot to death in a bar in Mexico City.
Maximiliano
Moret, drowned in the Marañon River.
Ten- to twelve-inch cocks, sometimes so
long they couldn’t get them up.
Young mestizos, blacks, whites, Indians, sons of
Latin America, whose only assets were a pair of balls and a member tanned by
exposure to the elements or miraculously pink by some weird freak of nature.
The
sadness of the phallus was something Bittrich understood better than anyone.
I
mean the sadness of those monumental members against the backdrop of this vast
and desolate continent.
For example, Oscar Guillermo Montes in a scene from a
movie I’ve forgotten the rest of ; he’s naked from the waist down, his penis
hangs flaccid and dripping.
It’s dark and wrinkled and the drops have a milky
sheen.
Behind the actor a landscape unfolds: mountains, ravines, rivers,
forests, ranges, towering clouds, a city perhaps, a volcano, a desert.
Oscar
Guillermo Montes perched on a high ridge, an icy breeze playing with a lock of
his hair.
That’s all.
It’s like a poem by Tablada, isn’t it?
But you’ve never
heard of Tablada.
Neither had Bittrich, and it doesn’t matter, really, it’s all
there in that image—I must have the tape around somewhere—the
loneliness I was talking about.
Impossible geography, impossible anatomy.
What
was Bittrich aiming for with that sequence?
Was he trying to justify amnesia,
our amnesia?
Or portray Oscar Guillermo’s weary eyes?
Or did he just want to
show us an uncircumcised penis dripping in the continent’s immensity?
Or give an
impression of useless grandeur: handsome young men without shame, marked out for
sacrifice, fated to disappear in the immensity of chaos?
Who knows?
The only one
who always got away was the amateur Pajarito Gómez, whose endowment extended,
after plenty of work, to a maximum length of seven inches.
The German flirted
with death—what the hell did he care about death?—he flirted with
solitude and black holes, but he never tried anything with Pajarito.
Elusive and
uncontrollable, Pajarito came into the camera’s scope as if he just happened to
be passing by and had stopped for a look.
Then he began to vibrate, full on, and
the viewers, whether they were solitary jerk-off artists or businessmen who
used the videos to liven up the decor, barely intending to glance at them, were
transfixed by that scrawny creature’s moods.
Pajarito Gómez gave off prostatic
fluid!
And that was something different, far exceeding the German’s
lucubrations.
And Bittrich knew it, so when Pajarito appeared in a scene there
were usually no additional effects, no music or sounds of any kind, nothing to
distract the viewer from what really mattered: the hieratic Pajarito Gómez,
sucked or sucking, fucking or fucked, but always vibrating, as if unawares.
The
German’s protectors were deeply suspicious of that talent; they’d have preferred
to see Pajarito working in the central market unloading trucks, ruthlessly
exploited until the day he disappeared.
They wouldn’t have been able to explain
what it was they didn’t like about him; they just had a vague sense that he was
a guy who could attract bad luck and make people feel ill at ease.
Sometimes,
when I remember my childhood, I wonder how Bittrich must have felt about his
protectors.
He respected the drug lords; after all they put up the money, and
like all good Europeans, he respected money, a point of reference in the midst
of chaos.
But the corrupt police and army officers, what would he have thought
of them, Bittrich, a German, who read history books in his spare time?
They must
have seemed so ludicrous, he must have had such a good laugh at them, at night,
after those unruly meetings.
Monkeys in SS uniforms, that’s what they were.
Alone in his house, surrounded by his videos and his amazing sounds, he must
have laughed and laughed.
And they were the ones who wanted to get rid of
Pajarito, those monkeys, with their sixth sense.
Those pathetic, odious monkeys
thought they could tell him, a German director in permanent exile, who he should
and shouldn’t be hiring.
Imagine Bittrich after one of those meetings, in the
dark house in Los Empalados, after everyone else has gone, drinking rum and
smoking Mexican Delicados in the biggest room, the one he uses as his study and
bedroom.
On the table there are paper cups with dregs of whiskey in them.
Two or
three videotapes sitting on top of the TV, the latest from the Olimpo Movie
Production Company.