“Monstrous woman,” Paul said, with curious lightheartedness, half an hour later in my room. He was referring to Carlotta Gavro. “Of course these silly conditions are really from Alex, not from her. She’s letting him cast her as the dragon lady, what does she care? Not that she couldn’t be. But in this case . . . I’m sure Alex thinks if he doesn’t splinter up the group, we’ll all get too close and form a cabal against him.”
Alex and Carlotta were staying at the opulent Caribe in Boca Grande, he said, “outside the inner circle.” In Paul’s mind, the inner circle consisted of himself, his lover Ray, Irma, the editor Valentina Vogel—and, he implied, me. And then there were Maria and Michael, sort of the outer inner circle. Paul claimed that Alex had already entered a conspiracy with the cameraman and the line producer to sabotage his, Paul’s, authority.
“Or else it’s just a petty way of showing that he’s in control. We can’t get dailies, for example,” Paul said. “Mainly because he says to have dailies flown from Miami is too expensive. My suspicion is that that cameraman changes my shots when my back is turned, especially when I’m acting in the scene, according to things Alex tells him. He doesn’t want me to see what they’ve been doing,” he concluded. Realizing that this sounded paranoid, he added in a less certain voice, “It’s possible, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. Anything was possible.
“I don’t understand the script.” I pulled off my sneakers and wriggled out of my Levi’s. I stood at the window naked except for athletic socks and underpants. I smelt foully of travel.
“That’s all right. I don’t really understand it either.” Paul was now wearing a Panama hat as well as his pale striped jacket and looked, I thought, a little louche. He had uncapped a small amber bottle. A tiny spoon dangled from the cap, on a tiny chain. With scientific patience, he scraped the bottle’s insides with the spoon. He lifted the spoon to his nostril and inhaled brusquely.
“Yes, but you wrote it.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“Okay,” I said, staring at my hairy chest. My body looked like something bloated from long immersion, white as lard. It repulsed me. “You secretly run the country. Alex is the official torturer and drug kingpin, the Kurtz character. Irma is his mistress. Then Michael and I show up as two investigative reporters—”
“Yes, yes, he’s writing a story on the Nazi underground railroad. You’re the photographer.”
“I would think I’d be the writer and he’d be the photographer, but anyway. Alex tells Irma to find out what we’re after . . . but this other plot, the revenge story, the guns . . . it’s a little opaque, isn’t it.”
Paul rose from the bedside and extended the amber bottle. I shook my head.
“I hate that shit.”
“You must have some. It’s the national product.”
“Oh, all right.”
As I sniffed the white powder I took in more of the room, to avoid looking at my legs. It was mint green. The window shutters, folded open for the night breezes, were darker green. My green luggage was sitting open on a brown chair. A fan with white wooden blades whirred overhead, a useless decoration. The heat got into everything. The room contained a dresser and a shuttered closet and a Spanish copy of The Watchtower in the night table drawer.
“The plot is expendable,” Paul said. I thought of white stones soaking up solar heat, of animals driven mad in high temperatures. “The script was thrown together as soon as the chance to do a film came up. Alex gathered all these state grants on the basis of a one-page treatment. The only condition, as far as he was concerned, was that it had to be shot in Cartagena.”
“Why Cartagena, particularly?”
“Because Carlotta owns that house. People do this all the time. The company rents the villa as housing and rents it again as a location. So you also have insurance clauses and so on and so forth. Maybe certain pricey things get broken. Say Carlotta has a little cash flow problem. A sixteenth-century crucifix she picked up in a flea market, valued at ten thousand marks, is smashed by a careless gaffer. The rental monies filter through Carlotta back into Alex’s pocket. That’s another reason for putting some people in this place. He works out a deal with the management, they give him padded receipts, he takes half the declared price of the rooms.”
“Charming.”
“Well, he’s a crook, what do you expect? I mean, he did go to jail for robbing a bank.”
“He looks more like a petty holdup type. Convenience stores and gas stations.”
“In any event, the script isn’t engraved in concrete. I’m definitely changing it.”
“Wonderful. If you make my part any smaller I can just phone the performance in.”
“It won’t affect you. Calm down.”
“I assure you, it doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m just pleased to get a vacation.” That sounded too generous; I added, “Even here.”
Paul fussed with his drug and contemplated the ceiling. He had a way of seeming entirely at peace with the larger movement of reality while remaining overwrought about all its particulars. Now he became avid. His voice turned urgent:
“You do see the possibilities, don’t you? With him? Even from where I was sitting downstairs, I saw you staring at him—”
“That obvious, huh?”
“Only to me, my dear. Because you and I think just alike.” He let that sit there while I peeled off my socks and stomped to the bathroom. I paused uncertainly in the doorway. I knew he had already set into motion whatever convoluted scenario was infecting his imagination. I remembered a party we had both attended in Paris three years earlier; this moment and that one seemed fused, spliced together in the same waking dream. The image of the two mouths returned, now strangely linked in my mind with the partial wisdom tooth I’d felt in my mouth earlier in the day.
“Her and him, you mean.”
Paul chortled. “Of course her and him. You weren’t thinking him and you, by any chance? Or me and him? We don’t want something so obvious or vulgar—you can see it, can’t you?”
A long silence.
“This isn’t a bad room,” I said. It came out sounding like a question. I felt nausea stir in my stomach, at the same moment the drug began spreading out in euphoric waves. I removed my glasses. I folded them and placed them on the night table. “I mean I’ve been in worse rooms. That phone doesn’t work, though.”
Paul plucked off his hat and idly ran the brim between his fingers. He placed the hat on his knee. Then he lifted the old-fashioned Bakelite receiver and pressed it to his ear. After a moment he muttered something in Spanish and hung up.
“It works. You have to go through the switchboard.”
He rearranged his floppy body on the bed. Paul had a bit more bulk to him than I did. Pressing one nostril shut with his middle finger, he ingested a smudge of cocaine.
“I can try, maybe by next week, to put you in the villa,” he sniffled. “Don’t forget, though, you might not really want to stay there.”
The coke had spread a sour taste through my throat. I tugged off my underpants.
“He looks sort of Russian,” I said.
“Russian?” Paul chased the coke down with bemused drags of a Marlboro. With his glasses on he seemed to take in every detail of the room, adding it to a vast inner catalogue of geographic oddities. “You think so? To me he’s a French schoolboy, or a French sailor. He has a perfect ass, by the way. Two solid cantalopes.”
I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I thought about men wanting things from other men and the odd, contradictory forms those things could take. The shower hissed out full strength and quickly shrank to a lukewarm trickle. Michael’s mouth came into my mind as I soaped my testicles, Michael’s mouth overshadowed by Irma’s mouth, the two mouths lining up somehow like graph lines on a three-dimensional grid. I could not reach the jagged bit of tooth with my tongue but imagined it inside my mouth. The flimsy shower stall with its plastic curtain felt like a clammy nesting spot for spiders or scorpions. I put my finger inside my mouth and felt in back for the tooth.
He was on the phone when I came out: “. . . tell her there’s nowhere to buy it. Not after seven. Unless she wants to go into Boca Grande. There’s a pharmacy near the Hilton. You go up past the Caribe, around that little peninsula. The shops, everything up there stays open for some reason. Not everything, but the pharmacy does. She won’t tell you it’s her pussy? Make her admit it. And tell her we’re looking for a big, big Negro to bang her pussy for her.” He listened for a moment, then started laughing. “All right. In a few minutes. I kiss your big prick, darling. All right.”
I walked around the bed to look in my suitcase, adjusting the towel around my waist.
“Ray says hello.”
“How is Ray?”
“You know how I rely on him. He’s honestly my favorite person in the world. He hates it here. Says it reminds him of shitholes he saw in the merchant marine. Rangoon, and so forth.”
“Good old Ray.” It crossed my mind that I did not really know Ray very well.
“He’s quite a special person, isn’t he? It’s a pity, perhaps, that we don’t share everything. It’s too bad there are areas where he doesn’t—well, certainly parts of me he doesn’t appreciate. Aspects of my psyche or whatever. But maybe it’s a good thing really. Otherwise I would make his life too complicated.”
“I don’t believe Maria has gone through my luggage. Look at this.”
“Now you’re angry.”
“Not at all. There’s nothing very private in here.”
“She was just checking out your wardrobe.”
“What parts of you doesn’t Ray appreciate?”
Paul sat up straight with his legs in a semilotus position.
“Various parts,” he said.
“Anyway,” I said, “I do appreciate the fact that we’re here. Some people seem to think that travel’s bad for you, but I’ve never found that.”
“Why, because it corrupts people? How would we learn how terrible where we come from is, without some vacations in real nightmares like this place. It’s sexy here. The constant threat of violence and the sultry weather driving everybody out of their skin. And you know, down here you can get anything you want. Really anything.”
“You sound positively depraved when you say that. Don’t put your feet on the bed.”
“Except good coffee. Isn’t it incredible?” Paul sank back against the pillows, stretching out his legs so his shoes hovered over the side. “They export it all.”
“Paul.”
“All we can get is instant.”
I leaned out the window. The window faced a high, dark, stucco wall. If I strained my neck I could make out part of the street where some teenage boys were playing stickball, and a portion of the spired cathedral roof. The air was hot, but ruffled by cool gusts. The breeze carried the young people’s voices, a motorcycle exhaust, the brief rattle of a tambourine and a man singing over it, a rumbling truck.
“Strange town,” Paul said. I glanced at him across the night table light, which gave his head the nimbus of a corpse in a funeral parlor. He squeezed his eyes shut as if the noises played over his nerves like the padded hammers of a piano.
“It looks it.”
“But you haven’t seen anything yet.” He sat up a bit. I blew a cloud of white smoke into the blue darkness and watched it scatter in the breeze. I liked Paul more than almost anyone. “If you want a boy, you can always have Alex fix you up with someone.”
I tossed my cigarette out. I pictured it landing in somebody’s hair. The idea pleased me. I decided to put on the Levi’s I’d taken off earlier. I slipped into them without underpants. Paul retrieved the drug from his pocket. His single-breasted jacket was made from a soft, thin material that had wrinkled in the moist heat, like parboiled flesh.
“I don’t want boys that Alex gets. I don’t want Alex knowing my business.”
Paul snorted. A mosquito with horrible long appendages dangled around the bedside lamp.
“Life certainly is full of ridiculous lessons.” The mosquito bobbed closer to Paul’s face. “You can’t imagine what it was like going from the high of producing Rudolph’s films, then after his death having the whole bankruptcy thing come down, and now, in my stupid little optimistic way, making a movie with Alex— Rudolph despised him, you know—but I keep thinking, it would turn things around if we did something that would pick up a few prizes. Maybe I delude myself. You’re right, the script isn’t very good.”
His eyes were huge behind his eyeglasses. I considered for the thousandth time that Paul and I could pass for brothers. He was a little more solid, maybe a little handsomer, too. And blond. But the resemblance was striking.
“Who knows. Things may never be good again, but . . . it’s too bad I have to take Alex for the main actor.”
“He’s a good actor,” I said, though I didn’t really think so.
“His skin is like cottage cheese.”
“So? That could be interesting. I don’t know why we always want to look at beauty. Beauty is boring,” I said, putting up what I knew was a doomed, elliptical defense against the strange power of Michael Simard and whatever real-life script Paul was conjuring. “It’s redundant. That’s what Breton should’ve written, ‘Beauty will be REDUNDANT or it won’t be at all.’ Anyway, Irma’s fabulous, you have a big part; it ought to be very antic and glamorous and smart, even if it doesn’t quite make sense.”
“And you, don’t leave out.”
“Yes, with my face all wrecked. Well, that proves my point.”
“I wish you’d realize that most people can’t even see those little scars. They’ve become less and less noticeable in the years I’ve known you.” Paul smashed the mosquito by clapping his hands. He bounded off the bed and got a bathroom tissue to wipe off the bug guts.
“The camera sees them.”
“In a certain light.” He tossed the scrunched tissue on the night table and resumed his recumbent pose. “But you’re the one who zooms right in on them, no one else does.”
The drug bottle came out again and he sniffed several hits, quickly, to close the subject.
“Take more,” he said.
I folded back the shutters of the other window in the room, which offered basically the same view. There was a lighted window low on the opposite wall, in which I saw the corner of a wooden table and a hairy arm resting on it. A big cigar was planted in the fingers at the end of the arm. The cigar and the arm bobbed up and out of view, fell back in gray trails of smoke, at regular intervals.
“Be discreet,” said Paul. He said the town was full of police spies. Ignoring him, I snuffled up some powder.
“Tell me the truth,” he went on. “You don’t think the script makes sense? I’m not a script magician the way he was.”
I burst into explosive laughter and tossed him the bottle. I thought I detected a startled movement of the faraway arm holding the cigar. The hand and the arm vanished. A moment later the window was slammed shut.
“My god, you still say ‘him’ as if you were talking about Jesus Christ,” I said with more derision than I intended. “I’ve got my scars, and you’ve got Rudolph. I mean, no offense, Paul, but who cares at this late date, what a genius he was? At least you’re not under his thumb for the next twenty years. Let’s face it, he wasn’t any picnic.”
Paul flushed. He bounced up and strode around the room, shaking out his pantlegs and arms as if centipedes were trapped in his clothing.
“It’s no picnic since he died, either.”
“Instead of feeling like you had the rug pulled out from under you,” I said, “you should consider how likely it is that he would’ve fired you in the middle of the next picture. On some whim. And then it would’ve been even worse, no one would’ve worked with you out of fear of offending him.”
“I don’t believe Rudolph would have done that. We had a good relationship.”
“Yeah, but he did things like that to plenty of people he had a good relationship with. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a good thing he croaked or anything.” Basically, of course, that was exactly what I was saying. “I just think we’ve got to move on with what we have.”
“Oh, no question.”
“So,” I said, in a summarizing spirit. “Let’s see what adventures we can have. This town must be full of horny studs with big fat cocks and dirty girls and drugs until the cows come home. Why not run with it? The local ambiente?” We had both moved beyond such pedestrian pleasures, but for a moment I felt a kind of desire as I spoke.
“Yes, why not? I should tell you, they only do it for money down here.”
“Then I need an advance on my pay. I have something like eighty-five cents, I think.” I began putting on my sneakers, without socks. As I laced them I studied Paul’s face: he had something slightly maniacal going on there. We had agreed to join Irma and Alex and the others at a gay bar outside the city walls, along the canal—the only gay bar, actually. I was noticing that the room was full of small insects, moths and so forth, besides lacking all amenities. A soft knock sounded on the door. I opened it a crack. Michael Simard stood in the hall, dressed now in long pants and a black-and-gray crepe shirt.
“I’m ready,” he said, with a timid, almost supplicating look. “Let’s go out.”