Who is Charlie Conti? (11 page)

When I spoke to the guy in Spanish, he stopped ignoring me. He seemed happy that I spoke his language. I sat down to dry in the sun and we carried on talking. When I asked him what he thought of tourists he said he didn’t like them much. He told me that every summer twenty or thirty Americans get pulled out to sea by the rip tides and the local Mexican kids swim out to try to save them; he personally had dragged two American women back to shore this year already. But, he said, the Americans are so rich and yet they don’t even give you any money for saving their lives. He said he hadn’t received a single cent, then he spat into the sand. I thought about this. I guess, from our point of view, if someone saves your life you don’t really think to give them money. The gesture would seem laughable. And even if you did want to give them something, any small sum would feel like an insult and any large sum would seem like an attempt to place a monetary value on the life that was saved, and you don’t really want to be doing that either. But then, I guess the error is to see a relatively small sum as laughable or insulting. In Mexico, if you’re selling pirate DVDs on the beach, then that sum could mean the difference between going to bed hungry or not, and there’s nothing laughable about that. For most Americans on holiday in Mexico that’s a pretty alien concept. I understood why the Americans he’d saved hadn’t given him any money, but I also realized that, if he didn’t understand the reasons for himself, there was no way I could make him understand. 

We stayed in Mexico for a week and did some pretty touristy stuff – beaches and Mayan temples, that kind of thing. Then we drove back north, headed for New Orleans.

Bourbon Street, New Orleans. Boy was it humid and hot. The smells of spilt beer, human sweat and horseshit were overpowering at first, but you got used to it. On the old town square we had our tarot cards read by a man with a bulbous nose and a bright red beard, then we wandered down to the gay quarter. It was kind of hard to stay on the sidewalk: men in tight tops with muscles bulging like subcutaneous pretzels were everywhere. There seemed to be some sort of rally starting up. Soon it was so crowded that we ducked into a tiny alleyway between two old mansions, just to get a breath of air. I saw a doorway in the side of one of the buildings. There was a small dusty window set into the wooden door. A sign read ‘Voodoo Museum’; tacked underneath that sign was another one saying ‘Open’. Jeanine looked uncertain but I held her arm and opened the door.

It was pretty dark inside and the temperature was surprisingly cool. There was a smell of dust and old books, reminiscent of the library back at Belmont. There was no reception and there didn’t appear to be a curator either. At the other end of the room a dark doorway led into a narrow corridor. Once my eyes had adjusted to
the gloom I started looking at the artefacts on the walls; tiny stuffed crocodile heads and dried bats were pinned to the crumbling plaster. Underneath each object was a little rectangular card. The card itself was yellowed with age and the information on it was handwritten in a regular but spidery script. The sign underneath the dried bats read:
Gris-gris. To be dropped into a lady’s porte-monnaie as a warning.
When I showed the exhibit to Jeanine she was disgusted; I guess the warning would have worked well on her. There was a shelf with jars containing mutations in some preserving liquid. I saw a baby chicken with four legs and then, more frighteningly, a snake with three heads. Two of the heads were right next to each other, where the proper one should have been, but the third appeared half way down the snake’s body. The next two or three jars were smaller and contained tiny embryonic shapes which may have been mice; in the half-light it was impossible to distinguish their mutations. I was fascinated by the pallor of the creatures’ translucent skin and the way they floated as if suspended in amniotic fluid.

Jeanine whispered into my ear that she had to get out. I didn’t want to go so I said I’d meet her outside in half an hour. She left; I could see her through the window in the door, smoking a cigarette. I entered the dark corridor. The walls were hung with old photos of a witch-doctor called Marie Laveau. She looked surprisingly friendly. I continued walking along the corridor until I got to the open doorway at the other end. Stepping through I found myself in another room, smaller and even gloomier than the first. In one corner there was a human skeleton with a cigarette clenched between its teeth and a black trilby cocked at a jaunty angle across the polished skull. The expression was humorous and grotesque,
like the face of an old man who’s just said something dirty. Next to the skeleton I saw a large glass box containing the scaly coils of a huge, thick, sulphurous-yellow snake. As I stared the coils began to rearrange themselves with slow and oily exactitude.

‘So, I see you have already met Sibilla.’

I whipped round. Behind me a short, pale, portly gentleman with white hair had just emerged from behind a drape which presumably concealed another entrance to the room. He spoke softly, lispingly.

‘Forgive me for startling you. I have few enough visitors as it is.’ He paused and stared at me intently for a moment. ‘My name is Jonty, though in these parts I am known as the Curator.’ Again he paused. He seemed to be wheezing and I wondered if he was asthmatic. Then he said, ‘Few people realize that “curator” and “cure” have the same root, yet it is obvious to those that seek the meaning of things.’

The Curator extended his hand and I tried to shake it, though it was limp and oddly soft. ‘Sibilla is a Burmese python,’ he said. ‘Only one in a thousand are yellow. It is a sign of her power.’

He shuffled over to the glass case. As he lifted the lid I asked, ‘Where did you get her?’

‘Where did I get her? I didn’t get her; she found me.’ The Curator looked at me, his eyes bright. ‘Come, you must hold her,’ he said.

He leant over the box and lifted the snake out. She really was enormous; in the middle her body was as thick as my thigh. The Curator held her coiled around his arm like a fireman’s hose. Then he seized the thickest coil with his other hand and began to stretch
her body between his two hands as if it were pizza dough. He took a step closer and indicated to me to lower my head. For some reason I didn’t feel afraid. I did as he had indicated, then he placed the snake around my neck like a garland. She was very heavy, but I had expected that. What I hadn’t expected was that her body would be pleasantly cool and not at all slippery or damp or even scaly. Just cool and strong. Her head meandered from side to side at about the level of my right hip while her tail wrapped itself around my left arm.

‘Sibilla has been
le Grand Zombi
a number of times. At private ceremonies, not for the Mardi Gras tourists. Like I said, she has great power.’ Sibilla’s head lifted and she turned to stare at me.

‘Ah, she sees it too. You have an ancient spirit.’

To be honest, at that moment my spirit was beginning to feel kind of disconcerted. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

The Curator answered, ‘Do not believe for a moment that we walk alone through the kingdom of shadows. Come, let me read your palms.’ And he seized my hands. But instead of looking at them he closed his eyes and gently squeezed my hands with his own podgy fingers. I’m kind of sceptical about palmistry, but surrounded by old voodoo artefacts and with a giant snake around my neck, well, I was less sceptical than I might’ve been, put it that way.

The Curator started to whisper: ‘You have a powerful female protector, and yet I feel much emptiness. But wait, it is the emptiness of the protected, not of the protector. Yes, the protected… you seek her but you cannot find her. She is there yet she is not there. She is in this world and yet not of this world. That is what I see.’

The Curator opened his eyes again. I was confused and beginning to think that he was just another old wacko. I didn’t know what he meant by the protector and the protected – it sounded like mumbo jumbo. I had never protected anyone. The only person I would have liked to protect was Izzy but that wasn’t really possible. Then I thought that maybe Izzy was ‘the protected’. It was certainly true that all my life I had wanted to be closer to her. As I was thinking this, the Curator removed Sibilla from my neck and replaced her in the glass box. Then I asked him about himself but I had to strain my ears to hear his words for he spoke with such softness.

‘I was born in New Orleans, though my mother was descended from the Scottish druids. I can trace my family back to Muredach of the throne of Dalriada, but the burning of the witches in the sixteenth century nearly put an end to the line. I was sickly as a child and my nurse was a woman named Desirée; her father had been on one of the last slave ships to sail from Benin. From her I learnt the names of the Yoruban Gods, names which haunted the nights of my childhood: Eleggua, Oggun, Ochosi, Obatala, Yemaya, Oshun and Babalu Aiye. Through her I witnessed the power of the mind which can will the body into sickness or health. Then when I learned to read I steeped myself in the texts of Santería, Macumba, Candomblé and Voudu. But when my health improved and I was able to wander unaccompanied through the Audubon Park and visit the zoo, well, that is when I realized that I have an affinity with the spirits of the dumb beasts; I realized that it is not they who are dumb, but we who are deaf.

‘I do not mean to say that I speak to them the way that you and I are speaking now, but I intuit what they feel. I used to
go to the zoo everyday; I got to know the zoo-keepers. A few times I predicted whether a sick animal would live or die; it’s not difficult when you can intuit the strength of an animal’s desire for life. When animals die in a zoo it is most often because their imprisonment has robbed them of the desire to live. For a while I was employed as a keeper but I soon began to feel like a jailer. I gave up the job and went to work on a wildlife estate in Florida, caring for the big cats. Once I rescued a monitor lizard from a pet shop in Mobile. I called him Sauron and took him for walks around New Orleans; I bought a spiked dog collar for his neck from one of the gay fetish shops downtown and I walked him on a lead. He was affectionate but his breath was pestilential. He used to eat most anything. And he just kept on growing – nose to tail he was five feet long. He was protective too; he hated me talking to people in the street. Then one day a young pitbull pup went for me; Sauron reared up on his back legs and ripped the pup’s head clean off. There was a fountain of blood and the owner said he would press charges unless I got rid of Sauron, so in the end I gave him to the zoo. That was probably the hardest thing I ever did. Sauron died a year later; that was eight years ago. Still hurts like hell to think about it.’

I thought to myself how strange and wonderful it is that people can get so attached to such different things. Then I asked, ‘Do you keep any animals now, apart from Sibilla?’

‘Sure I do,’ said the Curator. ‘I got a couple more pythons upstairs, and an iguana. Say, you should stop by for a cocktail tomorrow night and then I’ll tell you a little bit about New Orleans like it was when I was a kid. I mean, back then voodoo wasn’t just
another belief; it was a way of life. It had real power back then, O Lord yes. Will you come by?’

‘Yes, I’d love to,’ I said, ‘but I’m here with my girlfriend.’

‘Well bring her along.’ As he said this, the Curator took my hand between his own and squeezed it for a long moment. Then he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, ‘It would make an old man very happy.’

J
EANINE AND
I spent the rest of the day wandering around New Orleans, drinking beers and being tourists. It’s pretty hard not to; every second building on Bourbon Street is a bar and the French Quarter itself is so old and so nice-looking that you just have to stare at stuff all the time. The buildings have these wrought iron balconies with potted plants whose tendrils trail in the air below. When the sun is hot the doorways that lead onto the first floor balconies are closed with slatted shutters; occasionally you can see a human shadow flicker softly by behind the shutters. In the early evening the musicians come out onto the streets. For the most part they are wizened black men with gummy eyes and rotten teeth who play the harmonica and the accordion and who sing their riffs with rasping voices; the old bluesmen of the gallant south. Seeing
men like that made me feel very young and kind of out of place. I mean sure, I could purchase property and build a house and all, but I could never
embody
the land the way those old bluesmen did. I was thinking this when I got hollered at by an old hobo:

‘Say kid, you got a buck for an old man?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t,’ I said, and that was the truth. I’d just been to an ATM and taken out a couple of hundreds but I had no change. I could see the guy didn’t believe me, but it really was true. And I hate that feeling. I also hate being asked for money. The problem is, I don’t think you can give a buck to every single guy who asks. I mean, you’d get swamped and pretty soon you’d have nothing left. But then, I don’t think you can never ever give a buck to anybody. That would make me feel too mean. In the end I guess you’ve basically got to decide who’s deserving of the buck and who isn’t, and that’s a horrible decision to have to make. I talked to Ray about it once, because Ray never gave anything to a bum, which I guess was at least consistent, but consistently mean. When I asked him why he didn’t just give something sometimes he said, ‘And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their worth naked and their pride unabashed?’ which is a quotation from a mystical Arabian poet, so Ray said. And I get the point. I mean, who the hell am I?

The old hobo hollered at me again: ‘Hey son, you got the black man’s second curse.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘I can see it from here. You got in-grown hairs in your beard, itchy as hell. It’s the black man’s second curse.’

This was true, I did have in-grown hairs in my beard and it was
itchy as hell. You get little red spots where the hairs grow in and you have to pull them back out with tweezers. It’s a real pain in the ass. Black men just get bumps, but it’s the same deal. I called back, ‘Yeah, I know. It’s a pain. But what’s the black man’s first curse?’

‘That be the white man,’ he said, and then he set to laughing deep and raw like you wouldn’t believe, like he’d put a real fast one over me, which I guess he had, kind of.

The following evening Jeanine and I went back to the voodoo museum to have cocktails with the Curator. Jeanine took a lot of persuading, although I hadn’t even told her about the snakes which he said he kept up in his apartment. All the voodoo stuff really freaked her out and she didn’t like what I told her about the Curator’s ability to read palms. We were wandering outside in the sunshine when I told her about it; suddenly it seemed pretty unconvincing. I’ve thought about it a lot since then. Thing is, seems to me that ‘palmistry’ is a bit of a red herring. I mean, it’s true that the Curator held my palms in his own, but he never studied them like you’d expect. In fact he had his eyes closed most of the time. Personally, I think the Curator’s ‘palmistry’ is more like a hyper-sensitivity to the energy that a person projects. I know that sounds kind of imprecise, but it’s like the feeling you get about a person the moment they walk into a room, even if you’ve never met them before. With some people you get a good feeling, with others you don’t. And sometimes, if you observe that person really closely, you might get a feeling for whether they’re an only child
or whether they’re the youngest or oldest or whatever. And I guess that’s kind of what the Curator was doing, except his sensitivity is more acute. I mean, at no time did he try to tell me anything about what would happen to me in the future, because that’s where I think things start to get bogus.

We arrived at the museum just as the light was beginning to fade. I knocked and the Curator opened the door almost immediately; he must have been waiting just inside. He was wearing a tuxedo and there was the sweet scent of gardenia in the air. He embraced me affectionately though he only gave Jeanine a perfunctory nod. Then he led us through the dim corridor and the room with Sibilla the Burmese python, through a doorway behind a patterned drape and up four flights of stairs to his apartment. The building was one of the old New Orleans French Quarter houses that were rebuilt by the Spanish; in the middle of the building there was a small courtyard which you could see into from the galleries which encircled it on every floor. In the courtyard itself there were a few tomato plants, slightly withered because the sun only reached them right in the middle of the day, and also an old barrel placed to catch the rain water which was funnelled down from the roof four floors up. As we climbed the stairs from gallery to gallery I could hear the faint intermittent sound of a piano; someone was practising the slow chords of a funeral dirge. The Curator said, ‘That’s Madame Dubois – she’s a concert pianist,’ before resuming the climb to his apartment on the top floor.

The door to the apartment was unlocked; the Curator pushed it open and switched on the light. I had expected to find the room full of bric-a-brac, like the museum downstairs, so I was surprised
to see that it was as sparsely furnished as a monk’s cubicle. The reception room had a couple of old armchairs and what looked like a large beanbag. The Curator motioned us towards the armchairs and I was about to sit down when Jeanine violently seized my arm. I heard her breathe ‘Oh my God’. I looked in the direction she was staring and I noticed that the beanbag was moving.

‘Ah yes, allow me to introduce you,’ said the Curator. ‘That is Mortimer, my reticulated python. He’s very docile, and in any case he ate two chickens last weekend so he’s still digesting. He’s also the reason why I never need to lock my door.’

At that moment the telephone rang. The Curator shuffled off towards another room saying that he’d be back in a second and leaving me and Jeanine with Mortimer for company. Jeanine was holding my arm so tightly that I could feel her nails digging into my flesh. She whispered to me that there was no way she was going to stay. I’d have liked to carry on talking to the Curator but I didn’t want to leave Jeanine to wander the streets by herself at night, so I said I would invent an excuse to leave as soon as he returned. However, when he came back into the room he said, ‘That was the couple on the second floor, Mike and Sean. They’re making daiquiris and wondered if we wanted to join them. I said we’d say hi, do you mind?’

‘Not at all. Actually we were a little, um, uncomfortable with Mortimer anyway.’

‘Really?’ The Curator seemed genuinely surprised, but only for a moment. ‘Ah yes, of course. Women and snakes; an uneasy relationship.’ Then he led the way back downstairs.

Mike and Sean were a gay couple in their thirties. They seemed a different breed to the muscular, pretzel gays that I’d seen earlier. Mike was a painter and Sean was a photographer, both natives of Louisiana. They were impeccably polite and elegant in a kind of ante-bellum way. Their apartment was the opposite of the Curator’s. Every conceivable inch of wall space was covered, either with thick velvet curtains or faded watercolours of old family plantations or with Sean’s huge black and white photos of male nudes. The funeral dirge was a little louder in this second floor apartment. An oversize chandelier hung in the reception room and brightly colored parrots with devilish yellow eyes observed us suspiciously from their pagoda-like cage in the corner of the room.

The Curator introduced us and Sean said, ‘I am delighted to make your acquaintance and I do apologize for the lugubrious strains that you hear; they proceed from the indefatigable Madame Dubois.’

‘Don’t worry, I like sad music,’ I said, and it’s true, I really do.

‘This is Jeanine, your lovely girlfriend? Charmed, I’m sure.’ He scarcely looked at her. We talked for a bit, then Sean turned back to me.

‘Now Charlie, you come with me; I need a little help fixing these here strawberry daiquiris.’ Taking me by the arm, he lead me into the kitchen.

Sean gave me a knife and a bowl of strawberries and asked me to slice off the little green bits and then quarter the strawberries.
Then he asked, ‘So Charlie, what did the Curator tell you about Mike and I?’

‘Well, nothing really,’ I said. ‘Just that you were a couple.’

‘Hmmm, you see, even that is not strictly true. It is true that we cohabit, but I am not beholden to Mike, nor is Mike beholden to me. Here, will you drop the strawberries through this little opening while I switch on the mixer.’

When the mixer was on it made such a noise crushing the ice cubes in the bottom that we had to stop talking until he switched it off again.

‘Say Charlie, so what’s going on with you and Jeanine?’

‘She’s my girlfriend, that’s all. We’re going to Beaufort to visit some friends of hers.’

‘Huh. But do you care about her?’

‘Sure I care about her,’ I said slowly.

‘Well, maybe you should stop her from doing so much blow.’

I was surprised. ‘How d’you know?’ I asked.

‘I can tell. I mean, I don’t think she’s high right now, that’s true. But if you look into her nose, well, it’s practically hollow. The cartilage is almost gone, eroded.’

‘Shit, you can see that?’

‘Sure I can. So, all I’m saying, you ought to get her to take it easy for a bit.’

‘I don’t think I can stop her,’ I said. ‘I mean, she does it all the time, and, well, I guess she isn’t so beholden to me either.’

Sean had arranged five glasses in a row and started pouring the pink liquid into them. ‘Well, that’s a problem,’ he said. ‘But you have to set small targets, Go for a night without a line, say.’

‘Problem is, we still got a load of the stuff,’ I said.

‘Then maybe try a little variation. We could do a swap – you give us some of your blow, and we’ll give you a couple of tablespoons of giggle juice.’

‘Of what?’ I asked.

‘Giggle juice,’ said Sean, dabbing with a cloth at the blobs of spilt daiquiri between the glasses. ‘It’s a hormonal secretion, totally safe. Makes you laugh like crazy. And it’s an aphrodisiac.’

‘How d’you get it?’ I asked.

‘It used to be legal; bodybuilders took it. The state of Louisiana only banned it a few years back, so there’s a lot of it still around.’

‘I meant, where’s it come from?’

‘Oh, I’m not sure about that. But don’t worry about it, it’s fine.’ Sean used a few half strawberries to decorate the rims of the glasses. ‘So, will you try some?’ he asked.

‘Ok, I guess.’

We carried the daiquiris back into the main room on two big silver trays, family heirlooms probably. The Curator had coaxed the parrot out of its cage and was sitting in the corner with the bird perched on his shoulder. When Sean and I appeared Jeanine and Mike broke off their conversation. Jeanine looked sullen. The daiquiris were really strong and tasted pretty good too, and soon they loosened everyone up a bit. I was feeling kind of tipsy after the first. Mike went to the kitchen and fixed up a second round, even stronger than the first I thought, except by then it was not so easy to tell. The parrot suddenly pecked the Curator’s cheek and squawked. Then Sean reappeared holding a small glass vial of the bright green giggle juice. He poured some onto a spoon
and fed it to me like I was a kid. It tasted pretty disgusting – salty and viscous. We all had a spoonful, even the Curator who was still nursing the cut on his cheek. Like I said, I was getting pretty drunk, so it was hard to tell what was the effect of the alcohol and what was caused by the giggle juice. I was definitely starting to find everything pretty funny.

At one stage I realized that the piano music from downstairs had stopped. Then a few minutes later the front door opened and a tall, elegant, pomaded elderly lady floated in – the pianist. She was wearing an ankle length kimono of turquoise silk. On one palm she held a tiny Pekinese with a pink ribbon in its hair.

‘Madame Dubois, so happy you could make it,’ said Sean, ‘and you’ve brought Miss Dolly along, what a delight. And don’t you two look beautiful today.’ Boy, these queens knew how to lay it on thick.

‘Why, thank you. What beautiful manners you young gentleman have. I know Miss Dolly feels the same way.’

If Miss Dolly did feel the same way she didn’t acknowledge it. In fact she looked nonplussed. Her petulant little face was in danger of releasing the wave of hilarity that had started to build inside me, so I made for the kitchen. There I found Jeanine snorting a line of blow off the stove. I started to laugh uncontrollably. She looked irritated at first but when she opened her mouth to say something she started to giggle too. I took her hand and we went to the balcony on the other side of the apartment, overlooking the street. On the way we walked past Mike and Sean’s bedroom. The walls here were also covered with Sean’s photography, but it was less restrained – there were huge posters of priapic men with ram’s
horns growing out of their foreheads, butt cheeks, shoulder blades, from everywhere in fact.

From the second floor balcony we watched the mass of
party-goers
crowding the streets. I was still finding everything pretty funny. Jeanine had stopped laughing so much and was behaving kind of strangely. She kept trying to stick her finger into my nostril. She caught me by surprise the first time and succeeded. It was the weirdest feeling – not painful, just wrong. We struggled and giggled and made out on the balcony and Jeanine slipped one hand into my pants and with the other she made occasional jabs at my nose. I fought her off playfully but it was hard because I was still having to giggle so much. I paused to listen to the jazz that was now coming from the apartment and I watched the hoards of pleasure seekers below and felt the heavy humid air on my skin and smelt the liquor and the sweat and the sex wafting up and thought about the snakes and the Curator and the queens and the rams’ horns; and I realized that this was a place where crazy flowers grew.