I stepped out of the rain into the arcade. A line of wrought iron lanterns running down the middle of the vaulted ceiling threw gray light into recesses along the slick tiles. At the distant end of the walkway, in front of the national bank, a uniformed figure smoked a cigarette in the shadow of an arch, shoulders and a raised foot resting against the pillar, hustler-style.
Lightning branched in the livid air above the palms, solarizing the dull plaster columns and baroque façades. Feeling tense and excited, I rushed into the Hotel Bolivar. In the lobby I had to stop dead and take my bearings.
It was all strangely familiar. Drab walls, flaking portraits of third-rate conquistadors, aquiline dukes and swan-necked duchesses in lace collars and velvet greatcoats. Ceiling fans knifed the motionless air. Lights hung in fluted bowls of frosted glass. Like a proscenium dressed for a play on the theme of miscegenation or incest.
Green and black floor tiles. A scarred oak staircase. An elevator cage. In the paneled office enclosure, a vulpine Ricardo Montalban type counted receipts on a baize desk blotter.
With a sleepwalker’s certainty, I knew the corridor behind the desk would lead into the patio, and that I would find Paul out there in the vegetation. The desk clerk’s fishy gaze swept over me, indifferently tagging my place in the food chain. I heard the same scratchy music that had played in the taxi, its island staccato lending mechanical gaiety to the dank garden behind the hotel.
Leaving my bag in the hall, I stood in the patio doorway. Numerous square tables were scattered around. The movie people sat in the open getting soaked, ignoring the drizzle, fussing over storyboards and script notes amid dirty plates and overflowing ashtrays. The familiar evidence of compulsive orality was almost heartwarming. Paul was flanked by his technical crew, nondescript young people sucking cigarettes, hands poking and flailing to illustrate their jumpy thoughts. Their voices were loud, contentious, workaholic. Paul had removed his spattered glasses and was oblivious to my arrival.
He was an intense-looking man of thirty-five with a steeply angled nose, disdainful lips, and an expression of incipient hilarity . . . and something dark, sardonic and secretive, in the unexpected grins, the caustic asides, the casual, vast erudition . . . Delicate fingers rummaged through wet papers as his eyes skipped myopically from face to face, as if pondering the special absurdity of each interlocutor. He wore what I called his Jean-Paul Sartre look, froglike and skeptical. He heard everyone out impassively, then replied with exact, jaded intelligence, meanwhile squeezing water from his matted hair.
He was speaking German, English, and Spanish without any transitional pauses, translating from one language to another. The table, actually several tables pushed together, was bowered by a vast rubber tree, its foliage shunting the rain into erratic streams.
Water gushed from a drainpipe near my head, splattering a trail of jagged flagstones. Rain galloped on a tin awning over the doorway, pattered through the tree’s endless canopy.
“Nicht arbeit, der Kamera ist hier. Und hier. ”
“Aber die Elemente des Bildes in bestimmter—”
“Es ist möglich?”
As I moved out of a violet light under the awning—a light equipped with some crackling device for electrocuting small insects—I noticed Irma Irma’s platinum hair among a gaggle of heads, in the shelter of a bar shack under the hotel wall. The shack had a thatch roof and some tall stools, and was strewn with red chili pepper lights, as if for a voodoo Christmas. One group was loudly abandoning the place, staging a drunken dash for the lobby. As they fled past, I recognized passengers from the Bogotá flight.
Approaching the truncated Last Supper scene where Paul held forth, I became uneasily conscious of a young man sitting beside him in the swaying shadows of a low-hanging bough. While this stranger was still a peripheral object I found myself standing behind him and then became paralyzed by his beauty, which hit me with the force of a blunt instrument when I looked him full in the face. I ignored his presence so emphatically that I might as well have groveled at his feet. However, no one noticed a thing.
White T-shirt, tanned arms, sculpted biceps in rolled sleeves . . . I thought of some rare, pornographically detailed jungle orchid. I couldn’t look at him: such faces are not for me. He was overpoweringly phallic, male, inhuman . . . sitting rather primly beside him, whose crisp efficiency was such a devious mask . . .
“You could at least have sent someone to the airport.” I announced my presence with the swagger of somebody in jodphurs with a riding crop. I felt that this . . . person was a surprise Paul had saved in order to devastate my sensibilities. He had not mentioned any great beauty hired for the film. Very few people could still make me crazy with sexual desire, but this boy . . . young man, I should say . . . had something ecstatic about him, like the aura of a saint. I caught myself “acting” for him, not saying what I meant to say but striking a certain unconvincing pose, cravenly dissembling my rising excitement.
Paul betrayed nothing. He assumed a familiar joviality full of cunning and secrecy.
“I have,” he said, snapping a lighter flame to the tip of a cigarette, “perfect faith in your ability to find a taxi.” His voice plunked a note of warning to save my acting for later. “We knew you’d find your way here. Everyone was busy shooting. We’ve just finished up for the day.” They had also finished dinner, I noticed: the soggy remains of a broiled white fish, fried potatoes, and slimy green beans occupied a plate at his elbow. Despite the humidity, Paul wore a light jacket over his shirt. He fanned his face with a sheaf of damp papers.
I began to describe what I had seen at the airport. “You see, Paul, I’d just gotten off the plane . . .” The boy’s eyes roamed over my face. The harder he stared, the less I could follow my own narrative. I began losing track of my words, my voice rising in panic. What I had just witnessed started to lose its reality . . . to the degree that I actually felt I was lying, or at least embroidering a tall tale out of something small and insignificant. The words coming out of my mouth, the phrases I picked, were “for” the boy, meant to impress him with my worldliness, my wit, the danger I had been in, wanting to excite his . . . protective instincts? So the whole episode became a piece of fiction. Even before I let my account trail off into nothingness I sensed that the gorgeous stranger must have understood how his presence derailed me, making me stupid with desire.
“Somehow deliberately choosing this climate makes it slightly more tolerable,” Paul said, pointedly changing the subject. “At any rate, once we finish this little meeting, I’ll check you in here. You must be wanting a shower.”
“I thought I was—”
“Staying at the villa, yes, we had it all arranged, and then this morning our hostess descended from her hotel and announced a change in the arrangements. She has limited the villa to five. It’s infuriating, but what can I do? We have five in there already, as they all arrived before you.”
This was a drastic shift.
“You can’t make her make room for one more person?”
“Can’t make her do anything. Even Alex can’t make his old mama do anything, can he?” This was directed at a square-headed man with bad skin who was puffing a cigar and squinting through clouds of malodorous smoke. He emitted a coughing chuckle. “Poor Michael here,” Paul continued, indicating the youth, whose candid look gave me an immediate, unwanted boner, “also must stay at the Bolivar.” He let that sink in. He waved at his companions like a bishop flicking holy water, reciting their names. They nodded and grunted indifferent welcome. Deflecting further protest, Paul pointed out that they, too, resided at the hotel. Obviously, I couldn’t reply that they were “only” crew, though Paul read the thought on my face, and so did they.
So there was a name attached to that terrifying beauty: Michael Simard.
Sulking at the head of the table, Alex Gavro was already familiar from numerous Lionel Stander-type roles he’d played in German New Wave movies. Like many persons associated with Rudolph Bauer, Alex Gavro had a potted minor legend, endlessly repeated in reviews and press releases: rejecting his bourgeois background, he’d joined a criminal gang in his twenties, in nebulous solidarity with the Red Army Fraktion. He spent three years in prison, where he wrote two “hard-boiled” novels. These brought him cult fame, as a kind of discount-house Genet. Now he wrote, produced, and acted in movies. In Paul’s movie he would incarnate a Nazi fugitive who had designed concentration camps for the local government (supposedly Paraguay) and trained its security forces. He was also producing the movie. The fabled villa Paul had promised belonged to Alex’s mother, Carlotta.
He was a big white man in his late thirties whose stiffness made him seem to preside over all activity, a wooden ringmaster around whom others swirled. This impression was misleading. His charisma was only the heavy charge of fear and mistrust he inspired, like that of a sour patriarch whom relatives placate in hopes of inheriting money. I disliked Alex Gavro immediately. I had disliked him in most of his films: he played brutal characters in a way that convinced you he was that way in life. What disturbed me even more was something willfully unreal about him. Something incredible about his “casual” outfit of jeans and pinstripe shirt. Something forced and unbelievable in the stony expressions rolling across his face as he listened to the table talk, his square jaw falling open and clamping shut like a steam shovel, while his pale gray eyes bored holes in the sodden tablecloth. Here was someone who needed to believe he was as much an icon as Jack Palance or Eddie Constantine, and if you reminded him that he wasn’t, he would hate you forever. He was . . . like Rudolph, I suddenly realized, Rudolph without the fame and adulation. Rudolph as a bit player.
“If you don’t mind,” Paul said, “I want to just finish up here . . .” If I had imagined they’d gathered on the patio to await my arrival, he squashed this illusion. “Why not get yourself a drink? Look, your friend Irma Irma is waving to you.”
Irma Irma was miming a samba in front of the bar, rattling air marimbas, tits and hips jiggling in an absurd parody of local exuberance. She was projecting the impression of idiocy she had gleaned from her new surroundings. Irma’s chunky hourglass figure had been tortured into a white dress resembling a mutant Ace bandage. As she shook to the sounds of the bar radio, she kept up a breathless monologue aimed at a black-haired girl whose tight yellow skirt barely covered her crotch.
“You never call to Berlin anymore,” she shouted to me in mock reproach. How mock it was I couldn’t tell. “Weiland always says, ‘What’s happened to him, why doesn’t he call me, he doesn’t care about us any more. He’s forgotten us. Off in his glamour world of famous people.’ ” Her choppy diction put a rising lilt in the middle of sentences, as if she’d learned English strictly for rhythm rather than sense. Aside from the lilt her voice was incredibly flat.
“Weiland,” I said, “should send me a ticket and give me parts in his movies. Calling Berlin on the phone from New York isn’t cheap.”
“This is what I tell him.” Irma shrugged. Her voice trailed away into a chanting monotone, a medium channeling bored spirits from the other side. “But don’t expect anything from Weiland. If you were there, yes, he’d put you in a movie. To fly from New York? That is hundreds of marks he can use to pay his apartment, or for Turks to come and massage him. What do you think Weiland pays me all these years? For ten, eleven films? When I need money he tells me, ‘Thanks to me, you are underground superstar, you will make money from other directors because of me.’ So well he pays me, I need public welfare for my children. Ja, eine superstar . . .” In a fading voice she repeated, “Ja, eine superstar . . .”
“I’d like to know what kind of glamour world he thinks I live in,” I said.
She smirked and waved her hand across the vista of the gloomy patio.
“Well,” she said, “for example . . .”
I had once been a close friend of Weiland, her usual director, for about two years. My marginal life dropped me in one city after another without many preconceived plans or coherent purpose (in those days, I would uproot myself on the strength of the haziest promise of money or work) and so my friendships tended to bloom and wither in occult patterns, often fading out for years. I . . . lacked continuity. Weiland, Irma, Berlin . . . until that moment, they had belonged to a different period, one not so removed in time as in its general code of sentiments. We had shared a feeling of deprivation, of being more . . . authentic, up-to-date, than the no-longer-bohemian, well-off Rudolph Bauer crowd . . . and, let’s face it, those social melodramas Rudolph churned out, full of operatic self-pity, in his smug little “Hollywood on the Isar”—a bit pathetic, really . . . Well, and then Weiland had moved on to bigger budgets, bigger films . . . he now made his own versions of Rudolph Bauer movies, showing how cruel and cold life really is . . . I’d heard he still paid Irma practically nothing . . . I had gone back to Paris, plunging into fresh difficulties . . . then New York . . .
(With Paul, things had developed almost subliminally, in little stray motes of time, after Rudolph’s death . . . in Paris, Munich, and New York . . . developed more strangely . . . that is, without seeming to develop at all . . . based on a certain . . . shared pathology, I suppose . . .)
“And now Dr. Grosvenor will make us real superstars,” Irma said sarcastically. She clutched a whiskey and soda in a fierce proprietary grip.
I shrugged. “We are already immortal, Irma. This is only a postscript of additional glory.”
I associated Irma with a sexual flamboyance for which her high-cheeked face with its slightly crossed eyes and dramatic angles predestined her. It was hard to decide if Irma was beautiful or not, but Weiland had so often cast her as a platinum “sex bomb” that her neurotic tics, even her disinterest in most erotic situations enhanced a silvery illusion of perverse insatiability. Her screen persona had come to overshadow her deeper, real personality. The celluloid Irma was easily amused, thick-skinned, wacky, amorous . . . while the real Irma was complicated, insecure, earnest, easily hurt, and boringly malcontented. Yet she could be coaxed, manipulated into behaving like the frivolous slut Weiland had invented, merging with her fictional self.
I shared this weak-willed desire to gratify other people’s wishes. It now crossed my mind that Paul had selected this current menagerie precisely for its malleability. The beautiful boy, for example . . . a model? Anxious to please in his first movie role? Willing to . . . perform beyond the call of duty? With Irma, possibly?
Slouching under the imperfect thatch of the bar ceiling, I perceived an eerie link between Irma’s flawed, smartly made-up eyes and his hooded “bedroom” eyes in the swaying shadows of the rubber tree . . . her agile, gesturing fingers and his fingers, which absently rubbed the brown flesh of his bottom lip or supported his boyish, round chin . . . her mouth and his mouth, meshing together somehow . . .
Behind the bar, a colossal white woman swayed to the sputtering radio, her vaguely defiant motions emphatically meant to give only herself any pleasure. At odd moments this woman tossed a scathing Spanish phrase to Irma’s companion, who had been following our conversation with uncomprehending interest. The girl’s masculine face reminded me of Chimu pottery.
“Here, meet Maria,” Irma said. “While the others decide how to ruin tomorrow’s shooting. Maria comes from Colombia.” And under her breath she repeated, “Maria comes from Colombia.”
Maria giggled. It was a disturbing sound. She was holding a cigarette between sharpened crimson fingernails, and occasionally bringing it to her lips to suck without inhaling. Her English was practically Californian compared to Irma’s.
“Ah,” she said, “you’re Jo-Jo.” This was a reference to my character in Paul’s script. The girl seemed in high spirits. Drug-induced, it seemed to me.
“Not if I can help it,” I assured her with irritation. At the very least, I planned to get the character’s name changed to something less stupid.
Maria cocked her head and grinned as if I were a lovable curmudgeon she had known for years. It was just the kind of presumption that put my back up.
“Don’t tell me you don’t like your part,” she scolded, wagging a finger. “Because it’s a wonderful part.”
I hoped to like this attractive girl but sensed that I wasn’t going to. She had “come aboard,” evidently, in all dewy innocence, being only twenty-two, a native of Cali, whom somebody—Alex? Carlotta?—had hired to be the art director and interpreter for the company. No doubt she’d also appear in the film, having a decidedly filmic if underdeveloped look, something like a juvenile vampire in a horror comedy. Her naively patronizing manner wasn’t the most winning quality she could have brought to the production, but her energy and evident willingness to do menial jobs would definitely endear her to the undoubtedly torpid cast and crew—she was already offering to take my passport to the desk and check me into my room, “where your bag’ll be safe, anyway,” and later, she proposed, we might go through my clothes together, “to see what can be used in the film.”
I ordered a Cuba libre. The barwoman, instantly hostile, stomped through her enclosure, chanting a litany of disgust that concluded with the words “Cuba libre” spat out with incredulity. This startling performance repelled me. I hate fools. Then it occurred to me that the woman might be insane. She had been dancing and mumbling to herself in her bottle-lined cage like a bomb waiting to go off. In Spanish, Maria explained that I was an important movie star who did not give a shit about Cuba. I had to admire this improvisation, since none of it was true.
“Rum cola,” the barmaid chanted correctively, her big limbs hacking the air, porky hands seizing lime, knife, and Coke spigot in exasperation. The purple-blue lighting over the bar’s work counters had a soothing underwater effect. The woman’s fat, busy feet shuffled on grooved wooden planks designed to drain spills into the earthen floor. “Rum cola.”
The group at Paul’s table appeared to be breaking up. A song crowded with laid-back Jamaican voices, a song that had played three times in a half hour, came on the radio.
“Shit,” said Irma.
“You’ll hear this one everywhere,” said Maria. She mouthed a line of the song, making a brainless face. “It means, ‘Mama, my sister’s gone off with a Negro.’ Pretty racist,” she added.
“What is the race situation down here?”
“Oh, you’ll see. It doesn’t take long to figure out.”
“Well, there’s what? Spanish, black, and Indian.”
“And Germans,” Irma put in. To Maria: “Germans came here as well as to Paraguay and Argentina? Some friends of Martin Bormann’s, I’m sure.”
“There are German farmers in the interior,” Maria said, not recognizing the name. “German businesses in the cities. In terms of races, though, it’s the Spanish who own everything, and below them are blacks, all by degrees of color, see? And at the bottom are the Indians.”
“In other words the people who were here originally.”
“Exactly. Tragic, isn’t it?” Maria spoke of tragedy in precisely the vexed tone one speaks about the weather.
The rain had dithered to a residue dripping off the rubber tree and the wattled bar roof. Maria again offered to arrange the room. I surrendered my passport with vague misgivings. What was keeping me glued to the patio was Michael Simard, who smoked quietly five yards away while Paul and the others yapped about locations and camera angles and budget constraints. The interminable discussion had concluded several times, each conclusion trailing a wake of postscriptive chatter. I stood with my back against the bar facing the table, savoring the discreet view of the comely actor, a view repeatedly broken by hunching backs and gesticulating arms. I searched out his legs among other legs under the table. I mentally removed his white shirt clingy with sweat, his khaki shorts, the bright yellow socks ribbed around his ankles, the canvas espadrilles on his long feet. Now and then he tilted back his chair; in the shifting light I saw his shorts bunched in the middle by his jock strap and what was in it. Irma, oblivious, continued a wry lament about the local climate, the twice-daily rainstorms I should expect, the unfavorable terms of the housing arrangements. Tenants of the villa, she said, were obliged to pay over a major chunk of their salaries for rent and maintenance, the servants’ pay, and daily meals. Even the gin in your cocktails was itemized and billed to you at week’s end.
“I don’t say you’re lucky staying here,” she said. “But that house isn’t so special, neither.”
I wondered if Paul had coached her in resigning me to the squalid Bolivar, not fully appreciating that the hotel’s strongest selling point was sitting beside him, restlessly crossing and uncrossing his shins and stretching his sleek arms, fingers locked over his head, cracking his knuckles. The fleshy mouth opened in a luxurious animal yawn. Nonsense. Paul had measured the allure of every inch of Michael Simard’s flesh, calibrated the spell of those heavy-lidded eyes, the (conscious?) invitation of his spread-limbed body language. It only remained to discover whether Michael was as big a narcissist as most people would be if they looked like him.