The Secret of Evil (2 page)

T
HE
S
ECRET
OF
E
VIL

This story is very simple, although it could have been very
complicated. Also, it’s incomplete, because stories like this don’t have an
ending. It’s night in Paris, and a North American journalist is sleeping.
Suddenly the telephone rings, and someone asks in English, with an
unidentifiable accent, for Joe A. Kelso. Speaking, says the journalist and then
looks at his watch. It’s four in the morning; he’s only had about three hours
sleep and he’s tired. The voice on the other end of the line says, I have to see
you, to pass on some information. The journalist asks him what it’s about. As
usual with calls like this, the voice gives nothing away. The journalist asks
for some indication, at least. In impeccable English, far more correct than
Kelso’s, the voice expresses a preference for a face-to-face meeting. Then,
straight away, it adds, There is no time to lose. Where? Kelso asks. The voice
mentions one of the bridges over the Seine. And adds: You can get there in
twenty minutes on foot. The journalist, who has had hundreds of meetings like
this, says that he’ll be there in half an hour. Getting dressed, he thinks it’s
a pretty stupid way to waste the night, and yet he realizes, with a slight shock
of surprise, that he’s no longer sleepy, that the call, in spite of its
predictability, has left him wide awake. When he reaches the bridge, five
minutes after the appointed time, he can see nothing but cars. For a while he
stands still at one end, waiting. Then he walks across the bridge, which is
still deserted, and after waiting for a few minutes at the other end, finally
crosses back again and decides to give up and go home to bed. While he’s walking
home, he thinks about the voice: it definitely wasn’t a North American voice and
it probably wasn’t British either, though he’s not so sure about that now. It
could have been a South African or an Australian, he thinks, or a Dutchman,
maybe, or someone from northern Europe who learned English at school and has
since perfected his command of the language in various Anglophone countries. As
he crosses the street he hears someone call his name: Mr. Kelso. He realizes
straight away that it’s the man who arranged to meet him on the bridge, speaking
from a dark entrance way. Kelso is about to stop, but the voice instructs him to
keep walking. When he reaches the next corner, he turns around and sees that no
one is following him. He’s tempted to retrace his steps, but after a moment’s
hesitation he decides that it’s best to continue on his way. Suddenly the man
appears from a side street and greets him. Kelso returns his greeting. The man
holds out his hand. Sacha Pinsky, he says. Kelso shakes his hand and introduces
himself in turn. Pinsky pats him on the back and asks if he’d like a whiskey. A
little whiskey, is what he actually says. He asks Kelso if he’s hungry. He
assures the journalist that he knows a bar where they can get hot croissants,
freshly baked. Kelso looks at his face. Although Pinsky is wearing a hat, his
face is a pasty white, as if he’d been locked away for years and years. But
where? Kelso wonders. In a prison or an institution for the mentally ill. In any
case, it’s too late to pull out now, and Kelso wouldn’t mind a hot croissant.
The place is called Chez Pain, and in spite of the fact that it’s in his
neighborhood (in a narrow side street, admittedly), this is the first time he’s
set foot inside, and perhaps the first time he’s even seen it. Mostly he
frequents establishments in Montparnasse with a dubious air of legend about
them: the place where Scott Fitzgerald once ate, the place where Joyce and
Beckett drank Irish whiskey, the bars favored by Hemingway and Dos Passos,
Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Pinsky was right about the croissants at
Chez Pain: they’re good, they’re freshly baked, and the coffee isn’t bad at all.
Which makes Kelso think — and it’s a chilling thought — that this guy could well
be a local, a neighbor. As he considers this possibility, Kelso is seized by a
shudder. A bore, a paranoiac, a madman, a watcher with no one to watch him in
turn, someone it’s going be hard to get rid of. Well, he eventually says, I’m
listening. The pale man, who is sipping his coffee but not eating, looks at him
and smiles. There is something intensely sad about his smile, and tired as well,
as if it were the only way in which he could allow himself to express his
tiredness, his exhaustion and lack of sleep. But as soon as he stops smiling,
his features recover their iciness.

T
HE
O
LD
M
AN
OF THE
M
OUNTAIN

Things are always happening by chance. One day Belano meets
Lima, and they become friends. Both live in Mexico City and their friendship,
like those of many young poets, is sealed by a common rejection of certain
social norms and by the literary affinities they share. As I said, they’re
young. They’re very young, in fact, and full of energy, in their own way, and
they believe in literature’s analgesic powers. They recite Homer and Frank
O’Hara, Archilocus and John Giorno, and although they don’t know it, their lives
are running along the brink of the abyss.

One day — this is in 1975 — Belano says that William Burroughs is
dead, and when Lima hears the news he goes very pale and says, He can’t be,
Burroughs is alive. Belano doesn’t insist; he says he thinks that Burroughs is
dead, but maybe he’s mistaken. When did he die? asks Lima. Not long ago, I
think, says Belano, feeling less and less sure, I read it somewhere. What
intervenes at this point in the story is something that might be called a
silence. Or a gap. A very short gap, in any case, and yet, for Belano, it opens
up and will last, mysteriously, until the century’s final years.

Two days later, Lima turns up with proof, and it’s indisputable, that
Burroughs is alive.

Years go by. Occasionally, just occasionally, and without knowing why,
Belano remembers the day on which he arbitrarily announced the death of
Burroughs. It was a clear day; he was walking with Lima on Calle Sullivan;
they’d left a friend’s place and the rest of the day was free. They might have
been talking about the Beats. Then he said that Burroughs was dead, and Lima
went pale and said, He can’t be. Sometimes Belano thinks he can remember Lima
shouting: He can’t be! It’s impossible. Unjust. Or something like that. He also
remembers Lima’s grief, as if he’d been told of the death of a very dear
relative, a grief (although Belano knows that
grief
is not the right
word) that persisted through the following days, until Lima was able to confirm
that the information was incorrect. Something about that day, however, something
indefinable, leaves a trace of uneasiness in Belano. Uneasiness and joy. The
uneasiness is actually fear in disguise. And the joy? Belano generally thinks,
or wants to believe, that what lies hidden behind the joy is nostalgia for his
own youth, but what lies hidden is really ferocity: a dark, enclosed space busy
with blurry figures, adhering to one another or superimposed, and constantly on
the move. Figures that feed on a violence they can barely control (or can only
control by means of a very strange economy). Although it seems counterintuitive,
there is an airy quality to the uneasiness provoked by the memory of that day.
And the joy is subterranean, like a geometric ship, perfectly rectangular in
shape, gliding along a groove.

Sometimes Belano examines the groove.

He leans forward, he bends over, his spinal column curves like the
trunk of a tree in a storm and he examines the groove: a deep, clean trace,
parting a strange kind of skin, the mere sight of which makes him feel nauseous.
The years go by. And they rewind. In 1975 Belano and Lima are friends, and every
day they walk, unknowingly, along the brink of the abyss. Until one day they
leave Mexico. Lima sets off for France and Belano for Spain. From now on, their
lives, which have been joined, will follow different paths. Lima travels through
Europe and the Middle East. Belano travels through Europe and Africa. Both fall
in love, both try in vain to find happiness or to get themselves killed.
Eventually, years later, Belano settles down in a village by the Mediterranean.
Lima returns to Mexico. He returns to Mexico City.

But things have happened in the meantime. In 1975, Mexico City
is a radiant place. Belano and Lima publish their poems, usually together, in
the same magazines, and participate in readings at the Casa del Lago. By 1976,
both are known to, and above all feared by, a literary establishment that simply
cannot stand them. Two wild, suicidal ants. Belano and Lima lead a group of
adolescent poets who have no respect for anyone. Anyone at all. An unforgivable
offence for the literary powers that be; Belano and Lima are blackballed. This
is in 1976. At the end of the year, Lima, who is Mexican, leaves the country.
Shortly afterward, in January 1977, Belano, who is Chilean, follows him.

That’s how it goes. 1975. 1976. Two young men sentenced to life.
Europe. A new phase beginning and — as it begins — pulling them back from the
brink of the abyss. And separation, because although it’s true that Belano and
Lima meet in Paris and then in Barcelona and then in a railway station in
Rousillon, their destinies eventually diverge and their bodies move apart, like
two arrows suddenly, inevitably, veering off on separate trajectories.

So that’s how it goes. 1977. 1978. 1979. And then 1980, and the ’80s,
a black decade for Latin America.

All the same, every now and then, Belano and Lima hear news of each
other. Belano, especially, hears about Lima. One day, for instance, he hears
that his old friend has been hit by a bus, and miraculously survived. The
accident leaves Lima with a limp for the rest of his life. It also converts him
into a legend. Or that’s what Belano thinks, anyway, far away from Mexico City.
From time to time, a friend who lives in Barcelona has visitors from Mexico, who
bring news of Lima, which the friend then passes on to Belano.

T
HE
C
OLONEL'S
S
ON

You’re not going to believe this, but last night, at about
four a.m., I saw a movie on TV that could have been my biography or my
autobiography or a summary of my days on this bitch of a planet. It scared me so
fucking shitless I tell you I just about fell off my chair.

I was stunned. I could tell right away the film was bad, or the sort
we call bad — poor fools that we are — because the actors aren’t much good and
the director’s not much good and the cretinous special effects guys are pretty
hopeless too. But really it was just a very low-budget film, pure B-grade
schlock. What I mean, just to be perfectly clear, is a film that cost about four
euros or five dollars. I don’t know who they conned to raise the money, but I
can tell you that all the producer shelled out was a bit of small change, and
they had to make do with that.

I can’t even remember the title, really I can’t, but I’ll go to my
grave calling it
The Colonel’s Son
, and I swear it was the most
democratic, the most revolutionary film I’d seen in ages, and I don’t say that
because the film in itself revolutionized anything, not at all, it was pathetic
really, full of clichés and tired devices, prejudice and stereotypes, and yet at
the same time every frame was infused with and gave off a revolutionary
atmosphere, or rather an atmosphere in which you could sense the revolution, not
in its totality, but a fragment, a minuscule, microscopic fragment of the
revolution, as if you were watching
Jurassic Park
, say, except the
dinosaurs never showed, no, I mean as if it was
Jurassic Park
and no
one ever even
mentioned
the fucking reptiles, but their presence was
inescapable and unbearably oppressive.

Do you see what I getting at? I’ve never read any of Osvaldo
Lamborghini’s
Proletarian Chamber Theater
, but I’m certain that
Lamborghini, with his masochistic streak, would have been happy to watch
The
Colonel’s Son
at three or four in the morning. What was it about? Well,
don’t laugh, it was about zombies. No kidding, like George Romero’s movies, more
or less; it had to be a kind of homage to Romero’s two great zombie flicks. But
if the political background to Romero is Karl Marx, the political background to
the movie last night was Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry. Pure French
insanity.

Don’t laugh. Romero is straightforward and tragic: he talks
about communities sinking into the mire and about survivors. He also has a sense
of humor. You remember his second film, the one where the zombies wander around
the mall because that’s the only place they can vaguely remember from their
previous lives? Well, last night’s film was different. It didn’t have much of a
sense of humor, although I laughed like a madman, and it wasn’t about a communal
tragedy either. The protagonist was a boy who — I’m guessing, because I didn’t
see the start — turns up one day with his girlfriend at the place where his
father works. I didn’t see the start, like I said, so I can’t be sure. Maybe the
boy goes to visit his father and that’s where he meets the girl. Her name is
Julie and she’s pretty and young, and she wants to be — or seem to be — up to
date, the way young people do. The boy is the son of Colonel Reynolds. The
colonel is a widower and loves his son — that’s obvious right from the start —
but he’s also a soldier, so the relationship that he has with his son is one in
which there’s no place for displays of affection.

What is Julie doing at the base? We don’t know. Maybe she went
to deliver some pizzas and got lost. Maybe she’s the sister of one of the guinea
pigs that Colonel Reynolds is using, although that seems unlikely. Maybe she met
the colonel’s son when she was hitching a ride out of the city. What we do know
is that Julie is there and that at some point she gets lost in an underground
labyrinth and innocently walks through a door that she never should have opened.
On the other side is a zombie, and it starts chasing her. Julie flees, of
course, but the zombie manages to corner her and scratch her; at one point he
even bites her arm and her legs. The scene is suggestive of a rape. Then the
colonel’s son, who’s been searching for her, appears, and between them they
manage to overpower and kill the zombie, if such a thing is possible. Then they
flee down increasingly narrow and tortuous underground passages, until they
finally make their way out through the sewers to the surface. As they’re
escaping, Julie begins to feel the first symptoms of the illness. She’s tired
and hungry and begs the colonel’s son to leave her or forget her. His resolve,
however, is unshakeable. He has fallen in love with Julie, or perhaps he was
already in love (which suggests that he has known her for some time); in any
case, armed with the generosity of the very young, he has no intention, come
what may, of leaving her to face her fate alone.

When they reach the surface, Julie’s hunger is uncontrollable. The
streets have a desolate look. The film was probably shot on the outskirts of
some North American city: deserted neighborhoods, the sort of half-derelict
buildings that directors who have no budget use for shooting after midnight.
That’s where they end up, the colonel’s son and Julie, who’s hungry; she’s been
complaining all the time they were running away. It hurts, I’m hungry: but the
colonel’s son doesn’t seem to hear; all he cares about is saving her, getting
away from the military base, and never seeing his father again.

The relationship between father and son is odd. It’s clear from the
start that the colonel puts his son before his duties as a soldier, but of
course his love isn’t reciprocated; the son has a long way to go before he’ll be
able to understand his father, or solitude, or the sad fate to which all beings
are condemned. Young Reynolds is, after all, an adolescent, and he’s in love and
nothing else matters to him. But careful, don’t be misled by appearances. The
son appears to be a young fool, a young hothead, rash and thoughtless, just like
we were, except that he speaks English, and his particular desert is a
devastated neighborhood in a North American megalopolis, while we spoke Spanish
(of a kind) and lived, stifled, on desolate avenues in the cities of Latin
America.

When the two of them emerge from the maze of underground passages, the
landscape is somehow familiar to us. The lighting is poor; the windows of the
buildings are smashed; there are hardly any cars on the streets.

The colonel’s son drags Julie to a food store. One of those stores
that stays open till three or four in the morning. A filthy store where tins of
food are stacked up next to chocolate bars and bags of potato chips. There’s
only one guy working there. Naturally, he’s an immigrant, and to judge from his
age and the look of anxiety and annoyance that comes over his face, he must be
the owner. The colonel’s son leads Julie to the counter where the donuts and the
sweets are, but Julie goes straight to the fridge and starts eating a raw
hamburger. The storekeeper is watching them through the one-way mirror, and when
he sees her throw up he comes out and asks if they’re trying to eat without
paying. The colonel’s son reaches into the pocket of his jeans and throws him
some bills.

At this point four people come in. They’re Mexicans. It’s not hard to
imagine them taking classes at a drama school, or, for that matter, dealing
drugs on the corners of their neighborhood, or picking tomatoes with John
Steinbeck’s farmhands. Three guys and a girl, in their twenties, mindless and
prepared to die in any old alleyway. The Mexicans show an interest in Julie’s
vomit too. The storekeeper says the money’s not enough. The colonel’s son says
it is. Who’s going to pay for the damage? Who’s going to pay for this filth?
says the storekeeper, pointing at the vomit, which is a nuclear shade of green.
While they’re arguing, one of the Mexicans has slipped in behind the till and is
emptying it. Meanwhile the other three are staring at the vomit as if it
concealed the secret of the universe.

When the storekeeper realizes he’s being robbed, he pulls out a
pistol and threatens the Mexicans. This gives the colonel’s son a chance to grab
a few sweets from the counter and beg Julie to get out of there with him, but
Julie has gone back to the raw meat, and as she tears into a steak, she begins
to cry and says she doesn’t understand and implores young Reynolds to do
something. The Mexicans start brawling with the storekeeper. They pull out their
knives and flash them in the bluish light of the food store. They manage to get
hold of the storekeeper’s pistol and shoot him. He drops to the floor. One of
the Mexicans goes to the counter where the alcoholic drinks are kept and grabs
some bottles without bothering to see what kind of liquor they contain. As he
passes Julie, she bites him on the arm. The Mexican howls. Julie sinks her teeth
in and won’t let go, despite the pleas of the colonel’s son. Another
gunshot.

Someone shouts, C’mon, let’s go. The Mexican manages to pull his arm
free and catches up with his companions, crying out in pain. Young Reynolds
examines the storekeeper’s body lying on the floor. He’s alive, he says, we have
to get him to a hospital. No, says Julie, leave him, the police will take care
of him. Their steps, as they walk out of the store, are quick but unsteady. They
see a black van parked outside and break into it. Just as young Reynolds manages
to get it going, the storekeeper appears and begs them to take him to a
hospital. Julie looks at him but doesn’t say a word. The storekeeper’s white
shirt is stained with blood. The colonel’s son tells him to get in. When he’s in
the van and they’re about to go, they hear the siren of a police car. Then the
storekeeper says he wants to get out. Can’t do that, says the colonel’s son, and
tears away.

The chase begins. It doesn’t take long for the police to start
shooting. The storekeeper opens the van’s back door and shouts, That’s enough.
He’s cut down by a hail of bullets. Julie, who’s sitting in the back seat, turns
and peers into the darkness. She hears him crying. The storekeeper is crying for
the life that’s slipping away from him, a life of ceaseless work and struggling
in a foreign land to give his family a better future. And now it’s all over.

Then Julie gets out of her seat and goes into the back part of the
van. And while the colonel’s son shakes off the police, Julie starts eating the
storekeeper’s chest. With a radiant smile on his face, young Reynolds turns to
Julie and says, We’ve lost the cops, but she is crouched on all fours in the
back, as if she were a tiger or were making love, and her only reaction is to
breathe a satisfied sigh, because she’s assuaged her appetite; momentarily, as
we shall soon discover. All the colonel’s son can do, of course, is cry out in
terror. Then he says: What’ve you done, Julie? How could you do that? It’s clear
from his tone of voice, however, that he’s in love, and that although his girl’s
a cannibal, she is, in spite of everything, his girl. Julie’s reply is simple:
she was hungry.

At this point, while young Reynolds is mutely venting his
exasperation, the police car appears again and the young pair resume their
flight through dark, deserted streets. There’s still a surprise in store for us:
when the police open fire on the fugitives, the back door of the van opens, and
the storekeeper appears, but he’s become a ravenous zombie. First he tears open
a cop’s throat, then sets on the guy’s partner, who empties the magazine of his
gun at him, in vain, then freezes in horror, before being devoured in turn. Just
then two cars from the military base close off the alley, and using two rather
strange weapons, like laser guns, neutralize first the storekeeper and then the
two zombie policemen. Colonel Reynolds gets out of one of the cars and asks his
soldiers if they’ve seen his son. The soldiers reply in the negative. Another
car appears in the alley and a woman, Colonel Landovski, gets out. She informs
Reynolds that from now on, she’ll be in charge of the operation. Reynolds says
he doesn’t give a damn who’s in charge, all he wants is to find his son safe and
sound. Your son’s probably been infected by now, says Colonel Landovski. It’s an
odd scene: Landovski takes on the role of “father,” prepared to sacrifice the
boy, while Reynolds takes on the role of “mother,” prepared to do anything to
ensure the survival of his son. A fifth or sixth car pulls up at the corner, but
no one gets out. It’s the Mexicans.

They recognize the van from the food store, the van in which the
young lovers fled. One of the Mexicans, the one Julie bit, is pretty sick. He’s
running a fever and raving incoherently. He wants to eat. I’m hungry, he keeps
telling his friends. He asks them to take him to a hospital. The Mexican girl
backs him up. We have to take him to a hospital, she says sensibly. The other
two agree, but first they want to find the bitch who bit Chucho and teach her a
lesson she’ll never forget.

Since we forget everything in the end, I’m only guessing that they
talk about killing her. They’re spurring each other on to vengeance. They speak
of honor, respect, principles, the right thing. Then they start the car and
drive off. At no point do the soldiers show any sign of having noticed them, as
if this ghostly street were a busy thoroughfare.

In the following scene Julie and young Reynolds are walking over a
bridge. Where can we find a taxi? the boy wonders. Julie announces that she
can’t walk any further. On the other side of the bridge is a phone booth. Wait
for me here, says young Reynolds, and runs off toward the booth, only to find
that there’s no phonebook and that the receiver has been ripped out. Looking
back, he sees that Julie has climbed onto the balustrade of the bridge. He
shouts, Julie, don’t! and starts running. But Julie jumps and her body
disappears into the water, although it soon floats to the surface and is swept
away by the current, face down. The colonel’s son goes down a stairway to the
river. The water is very shallow: a foot, three feet at the deepest. The river
has man-made banks and even the bed has been paved. A homeless black man, hidden
among some concrete pillars down the river, is watching young Reynolds. The
boy’s search brings him near this man, who tells him to give up, the girl is
dead. No, says the colonel’s son, no, and goes on searching, closely followed by
the black guy.