Next day began with more knocking at the door, this time pounding, the noise invading an apocalyptic dream I woke from with a hangover as big as the Ritz. Thrashing free of some tangled sheets I sprang out of bed, a big mistake as it turned out, and threw open the door. Paul’s boyfriend Ray looked at me with the nervous self-effacing air of an importunate bellhop.
“Eughuugh,” I said, looking down at his shoes. Only then did I recognize my surroundings. My mouth tasted like a reptile hatchery. I was wearing the clothes I’d passed out in.
Ray giggled nervously, as though he had serious business to discuss and any levity was an awkward distraction from his real mood—whatever that might be. Other people’s lovers, like other people’s husbands and other people’s wives, have often been inscrutable and menacing presences in my life. I had often been told that Ray “liked” me, but our relations seemed arrested at the stage of circumspect politeness. I thought it entirely possible that Ray could stop liking me at any time.
The fifth-floor hallway was flooded with horrible, brilliant sunlight. The arches at both ends of the hall were open to the elements. One faced the palms in the square, the other framed the grimy dome of the cathedral. Between them the green-and-black floor gleamed like polished glass.
I held up a finger and gently closed the door. I vomited quietly into the toilet, then went back to the door. Ray hadn’t moved.
“Paul thought you’d like to visit the set,” he offered. His shrewd eyes examined me for residual inebriation. He was a small, compact Australian with a long patrician nose and an Adolphe Menjou moustache. That morning he wore faded denims and a darker blue sport shirt with a little alligator on the breast. “Didn’t you want to come?”
I agreed to meet him on the second-floor terrace and then searched desperately for aspirin, finding instead a box of amphetamine pills that Irma had handed me sometime the previous evening. I found that I could recall only the movement of her hand inside her purse and the passage of the box from her hand to my pocket, like a tight iris shot without any explanatory footage before or after: I could not remember where we’d been or anything beyond our initial movements through dark, narrow streets to a cramped discotheque. Faces appeared to me in the shower, strange faces with bits of nameless feeling attached.
I probed the outcrop of tooth lodged in my upper gum. Today it felt queerly like a chip of quartz or mica. Pressing the soft tissue around it with my fingernail, I could not feel any larger incipient mass. The bleeding had stopped, at least temporarily.
I stood under the shower long enough for the first waves of speed to rill through my headache.
“Looking a bit more human,” Ray hailed cheerfully. He sat alone on the long empty balcony, flicking cigarette ash into the greasy remains of his breakfast. The spaces between the tables contained palms in cement tubs. Window boxes of begonias balanced on the balcony railing. The tables themselves featured checkered oilcloths, paper napkins, and Woolworth’s cutlery and dishware. I resented these cheap touches through my first two cups of coffee, until the amphetamine fully kicked in.
In the plaza directly below, a small army of boys with shoe-shine kits and old men selling tinto and lottery tickets swarmed over the tar pavement and lounged in the cool shadows of the fountains. The curb beside the Palace of the Inquisition was lined with taxis. I wondered with vague alarm if one of them contained the driver I’d made it with the previous evening.
“Quite a night, quite a night.” Roy’s avuncular tone sounded ominous.
“Oh God,” I said. “What happened?”
He displayed his easy smile button grin. Ray normally had a guileless, friendly, mildly subservient attitude. Yet he was a brittle person, inhibited, touchy, and terrified of rudeness.
“Well, you were in top form,” he said. He ruffled his hair, almost singeing it with his cigarette.
“Wait a minute, though, I don’t remember seeing you. ” A mirrored ball refracting blue and orange constellations on peach walls, a stuffed marlin, fishnets, nautical decorations, young dudes with leather vests over bare chests, earsplitting ye-ye music, Irma and Michael and Maria shaking on the dance floor: some things came to me like slides flashing through a projector. Paul drank Midori sours and described his correspondence with Leni Riefenstahl. Alex introduced a bald man who ran the local film festival. But Ray was in none of my pictures.
“Do you remember what you said to Alex?”
“Oh God. Oh God.”
As I drank my coffee and tried to chew some toast slices smeared with guava jelly I noticed that Ray was trying very hard to seem relaxed but was lighting one cigarette from another. The hair on my neck bristled. Had I committed some atrocity that had seriously changed the state of things? The combination of alcohol and cocaine was completely lethal, I reminded myself. Whatever pent frustrations or tamped rages I held inside me were bound to come splattering out if I indulged my usual recklessness vis-à-vis “substances.”
Ray told me what I had told Alex, described a conversation we had both had with Carlotta Gavro, and said I had offered a blowjob to the Arsenal Bar bartender: nothing especially horrific. Other things were bothering Ray, it seemed.
“I don’t remember any of this,” I said. “How embarrassing.”
“The bartender sort of went for the idea. But then you were really too drunk. It couldn’t go on like that so we brought you back.”
“You mean to say I went down on him?”
“You honestly don’t remember?”
I could not summon any picture of the bartender, or of Carlotta.
“It’s hard to believe Alex actually has a mother. What’s she look like?”
“Really blonde, and really old. Full of spunk, though. In every sense of the word, from what I hear. Good figure for an old broad. She was wearing a brocade thing with sequins sprinkled through it. Hair up like this. Almost Irma’s color.”
“Uh.”
“Next to each other she looks like Irma’s mother, actually. Or grandmother.”
Ray had parked the production pickup truck on a side street. It was an old white thing all filthy in back, with dents in both doors and the side panels. He looked small to be driving it.
“How’s that room?”
“Hardly been there, have I.”
“Seems like a decent establishment.”
“Pisshole full of bugs.”
“Rudolph stayed there once.”
“Must’ve been slumming,” I said.
We were rolling through streets with cars parked on both sides leaving a single negotiable lane. People swarmed out of shops in shawls and campy headgear. Mule-drawn wagons clopped along the wider avenues. Indians bowed under bales of straw and sacks of fertilizer lumbered through sidewalk markets where produce and clothing and all sorts of junk were sold out of wooden bins, kiosks, and car trunks. Alongside these antiquarian figures strode young urban people in smart European clothes, shop assistants and office workers and petty capitalists. The stucco architecture all dated from the same period, at least two hundred years ago. Storefronts had been gouged out of ancient façades, tricked out with corrugated metal aprons, security systems, and plate glass.
“Rudolph came here two or three times. Alex brought the head of the film festival to dinner a few nights ago, this Luis Vasquez—you met him last night, no? I think he’s an old smuggling buddy of Alex or something, he was telling us. Rudolph went to the Bolivar because he got himself barred from the Hilton. He was bringing his twelve-year-old tricks up to the room and so forth. Not just one, five or six of them. Must’ve looked like Menudo up there.”
“Lovely.”
“Six a night at twenty a pop. Marks, not dollars. Sounds like Rudolph, don’t it.”
“Sounds like everything else down here, actually.”
“It’s possible to miss him.” Ray looked around, steering with his wrists resting on the wheel, studying the profusion of life in Cartagena. We were, quite suddenly, two guys from another town, in the middle of our lives in a foreign city, experiencing a sort of peace, an inconsequential curiosity, a moment of something very close to nothing.
“Don’t hold it against Paul about the villa. He’s really pissed about it himself.”
“Well, I do blame him for letting this happen. For the past four months he talked and talked to me about the villa every time he called, what a fabulous place it was. Look, Ray, you people have a pool and privacy and a staff. The dump I’m in hasn’t even got room service. That isn’t right.”
Ray chewed the middle of his moustache. “It is an unfortunate, uh, problem,” he said. “No argument there. The situation really sucks. Paul was ready to throw in the towel over it, don’t tell him I told you. If there’s anything I can do to make things easier, don’t hesitate to ask. And you know, you can always come over and use the pool.”
“Be that as it may,” I said. The concept of Paul canceling the film over a minor difficulty, even one that inconvenienced me, was disturbing. Of course it probably wasn’t true.
A dog ran through the crowd in front of the truck. Ray jammed the brakes on, tossing us both at the windshield.
“Fucking man’s-best-friend. They’ll probably be stuffing him into empanadas by dinnertime.” He braced himself and watched the animal streak past a corner supermarket, disappearing into an extensive galleria. The truck inched forward.
“Plenty of shops,” Ray said neutrally. “Paul tell you about Colombia paying off the national debt with cash from the big drug dealers? He claims García Marquez organized some big conference, here in Cartagena. And they paid off billions, in cash. To frustrate the North Americans.”
“It’s probably the North Americans who came up with the idea,” I said. “Everybody likes cash. Paul says you’re not enjoying yourself.” I wasn’t really curious about it; it was just something to say.
Ray’s slightly mousy face took on a guarded look. He seemed flustered at becoming a subject instead of an observer. The idea that he was secretive had never occurred to me until that moment. I realized that in the years I’d known him I had hardly given him two consecutive thoughts.
“I wouldn’t say that,” he said, downshifting the stick and tapping the brake to let a bus cross an intersection. The Cartagena buses were festooned with decals, Day-Glo emblems, and shimmering lenticular panels, like wheeled acid flashbacks. “I will say, I have trouble tolerating the people down here,” he let out after a brooding silence. “I mean, look at this bottleneck here. They’re like monkeys. I mean they really carry on like pigs.”
The vista in front of the windshield, an avenue constricted by traffic and variegated humanity, looked completely normal. The only difference from a street in Munich or Sydney, as far as I could tell, was that the people were darker and had more life.
“I know it sounds racist,” he went on, “but you get to the point of thinking they really are dirty and smelly and lazy. Some of them are all right of course but the majority, you can have them.”
I pretended to think distant thoughts. I didn’t see what good it would do to argue. I didn’t think Ray believed what he was saying, anyway. Something else was bothering him about the situation, about being down there, that he wouldn’t express. It had to be about Paul, and maybe, I thought, it also concerned me, my friendship with Paul. The idea formed that possibly Ray had insisted on having me stay at the Bolivar, to keep us separate. In that case, Paul, in order not to alienate me from Ray, had persuaded Alex to pretend that it had been Carlotta’s idea. Ray probably believed it was my bad influence that made Paul go over the top, but it was really the other way around.
I tried to “push the thought out of my mind,” as a smoke-quitting class I’d attended in New York had urged, on the grounds that “the mind can only have one idea at a time.” I concentrated hard on the idea of Michael Simard’s genitalia.
Ray piloted the truck through a maze of bright streets. Dank vegetable smells hung in the air, wafting off the filth packed into odd corners and heaped around trash bins. The trash of Cartagena had a particularly blunt, naked appearance, composed as it was of matter too rotten and useless for any trash picker.
Some of the streets ran flat out to a horizon line where a vast blue sky obliterated the sense of boundaries. Others switched back on themselves, snakes claustrophobically coiled in a basket. Eventually we passed outside the city walls and took a tar road that hugged the meadowy grass moat, through a sparse zone of trees and greenery and a valley overlook, passing a willow grove beside an ancient cloisters converted into tourist shops.
“. . . like this Hector, this little spic that works at the villa,” Ray was saying, now gripping the steering wheel with both hands. “He must be all of sixteen, I suppose what he really does is sodomize Carlotta for a living, but he’s supposed to be a servant—you know, make the beds, set the table, and I promise you, you have never seen such a grudging performance in your life. It’s not that I like the idea of people waiting on me, as a matter of fact it repulses me. There’s so much abuse and sadomasochism built into the whole fucking concept. In this case, though, the more human you try to act with this Hector, the more vicious he becomes. He hates all of us, I’m sure of that. I don’t blame him, either. But if he’s paid to do x, y, z, he fucking ought to do x, y, and z—period. End of fucking message.”
We entered a thickly settled area where one-story white houses were grouped beside the road, and other white houses filled an entire small valley riven with alley-size streets. The grass moat under the city walls ran along the opposite side of the road, a wide marshy belt with muddy paths scuffed through it. A twenty-year-old Buick and a black van were parked on the shoulder. Paul sat on the Buick’s fender, balancing a clipboard on his knee. His hair blazed red and gold in the bright sun. On the moat, equipment was being assembled, and actors primped in the shade of a wall buttress.
“Here we go,” said Ray, pulling up behind the van. He shut the engine off but made no move to get out. We sat in the truck cab finishing our cigarettes and watched the technicians and actors stroll back and forth on the bare grassy plain, each in his own world, the cameraman, the sound man, an actress in a black slip, Maria with a makeup box, the camera assistant, Michael in olive twill pants and a white cardigan, a scrawny local boy wearing a Bundeswehr tank top. It was that interminable interlude when everything is being set up and no sense of organization has yet settled in, the sun climbing to its zenith, scattered fibrous clouds dissolving in the azure sky.
I flipped through my copy of the bound script. “What’s he called in the movie?”
“I can tell this script grabbed you as much as it did me. This,” Ray said, shoving his door open with his shoulder as he indicated the surrounding vista, “is on page twenty-seven.”
I found the scene as we trudged along opposite sides of the black van and converged at the Buick’s trunk. The pebbly ground crunched underfoot. Michael, known in the film as “Max,” would buy a gun from the prostitute Imelda. “She pulls a newspaper package from under the chintzy bed. The room has a grease-coated fan, scarves tacked to the plaster, and posters of Delores del Rio and Maria Felix.” First he would pick her up near the wall, then they would cross the moat into the warren of slum housing, camera tracking in long shot.
“There you are,” said Paul. His face looked absurdly determined, weary, and absent, all at the same time. He was one of those people depleted by any prolonged effort to take things seriously, and his current situation obliged him to pretend more forcefully than usual. In the distance, the cameraman was planting a tripod on a dry patch of earth. Paul put aside his clipboard and slid off the fender to his feet. “A man’s having anal sex,” he said, stepping over to reach into the car’s side window.
“This one’s bloody sick,” Ray chuckled, then walked away in the direction of the wall, Maria, the actors, shaking his head.
Paul pulled out an opaque plastic bag containing numerous small objects. He fished out a pack of cigarettes and after lighting one tossed the pack back in, then took out a large brown rubber dildo.
“And he finishes,” Paul continued, “and he says to the girl, ‘That was great! How was it for you?’ ”
Across the white road, electric blue graffiti was sprayed across a house wall. Spidery letters partly obscured by a candy green Toyota: ESTA something YANKI something NICARAGUA.
“ ‘Humiliating,’ the girl tells him. Then he says, ‘That’s a pretty big word for a nine-year-old.’ ”
Maria met Ray in the middle of the grass, a few feet from where the camera was being mounted. They studied the mise-en-scène together, then Maria came running up, Louise Brooks hair slapping her cheeks. She panted extravagantly.
“Any makeup is going to melt right off them,” she told Paul, who wagged the dildo at her, holding it by the perfunctory testicles at its base.
“This,” he said, “should go into Imelda’s room so it’s in the first shot.”
“Quite a catzo.”
“If mine were this big I would rule the world by this time,” Paul said.
Ray returned from conferring with the cameraman. I detected a brittle edge in his banter with Paul, as if a long-running argument were being held in abeyance until they could get each other alone.
The next hour was full of desultory exchanges, snippets of gossip, disputes about camera angles, light readings, rehearsals of Michael walking from the sidewalk to the wall, of Michael and Imelda walking from the wall to the sidewalk . . .
“It’s too mechanical,” Paul said, agitated, pacing the ground behind the camera while the cameraman, a Dutch hippie with a moon face and wispy little moustache, turned the apparatus to track Michael. In broad daylight, Michael looked even more a miracle of genetics, nearly six feet tall, with perfect muscle tone evident under the clothes, a face out of Caravaggio, broad forehead squared by a mop of fluffy ink-black hair. And the dazzling teeth, the dimpled smile of pure seduction . . . there was, I decided, something horribly repulsive about him.
“What about this?” Paul solicited Ray with a curious urgency, as if he did not really want his opinion but wished instead to reassure himself that Ray took an interest in the project. “Michael doesn’t speak Spanish, so Chino, the little pimp kid, figures Alex wants a prostitute . . . and when he introduces Imelda, she takes him off to her room, she lies down on the bed, she pulls her dress up, that’s when Michael sees there’s been a mistake, so he comes back and talks to the kid again, this time the kid understands, and takes him somewhere else. Then he gets the gun.”
“It could work.” Ray squinted into the middle distance. He seemed to seriously consider the problem. Maria sauntered back from repainting Michael’s face. They had been crouched in the shade directly under the wall, Michael impassive as Maria’s long fingers cradled his jaw, dabbed his fleshy nose with foundation, good-natured laughter infecting the two bored local actors nearby. The massive ocher wall seemed red in the sun. “Ask Maria.”
Maria thought it could be done. She would knock on some houses and find a backyard they could use. Most houses in this many-balconied warren were split into tiny apartments, often single rooms, crammed with huge, melancholy families.
This was the slum quarter called San Diego, where the nearest road through the town walls empties out at a vast weekend marketplace, much of it domiciled in a giant tent. Just within the city walls is the huge sienna thumbprint of the abandoned bull ring, its plywood whorls blanched in the relentless sun. A few hundred yards in the opposite direction is the modern business district, a patch of printed circuit board with low-rise offices of Olivetti, IBM, Mitsubishi, like a steel oasis in a desert of dust and sleep. There is a new bull ring on the road to Santa Marta, under the fortressed hills, mainly used for religious revivals and the annual music festival.
Irma arrived in a sky blue Cadillac convertible driven by Alex, who refused to stay, claiming urgent business in Boca Grande. He was plainly not interested in any scene he was not in. Irma wore huge white-framed sunglasses and no makeup, which made her look old and rather battered. They were still setting up the shots. Like every film set, this one was all about waiting and waiting and doing a shot and then doing the shot again and doing it again and waiting some more. Irma said she had thought to watch the shooting but saw that it was unbelievably dull. We walked to the dip in the road where the market tent was collapsed and roped up like a deflated, grimy dirigible. There was light foot traffic through the arched openings in the walls, an occasional bus, sporadic cars. The idea of people doing business, going to jobs, and living conventional lives in that demoralizing heat made me infinitely weary of the human swarm. A massive anthill built from the debris of possibilities.
Irma was in a bleak mood. She had gone for a walk in the Parque del Centenario, a man had followed her, she took a taxi into Boca Grande and walked down Carrera 2, another man followed her, she went into an emerald shop and the salesman hit on her. She had days like that, she said, when every man in the world was a walking boner with a big mouth. She had gone to the coffee shop in the Capilla del Mar, drunk a pot of tea, and listened to women talking at the other tables, women who were traveling with absent men; two particular women, she said, seemed to have met because these men worked for the same company, and left alone with time on their hands, they’d made a date to go shopping. Now they were finished shopping. The only things worth buying in Cartagena were emeralds, so they had obviously bought a lot of junk. They were sitting in the Capilla del Mar coffee shop surrounded by bags and packages, telling each other every single intimate thing about the men they were traveling with. The younger of the two was not married to her man, and the older one was urging her to get a ring on her finger. They get everything from you and when they’re through with you they throw you away and leave you with nothing, the older one said, unless you’ve got that ring on your finger. Palimony, forget it, the case drags on forever and you lose a fortune in legal fees.
They talked about everything, Irma said, they had never seen each other before and in ten minutes flat every detail of their sexual lives, every physical oddity and flaw of the people they lived with had been gone into in incredible detail.
“Imagine,” Irma said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Loving someone so much you give all their secrets away to a stranger over coffee.”
“But it’s kind of nice, too,” I argued. “Two women that don’t know each other, in a strange town. It has a nice existentialist thing to it. Like a Marguerite Duras novel.”
Irma shook her head. “They were not even a Jackie Collins novel, really not. She’s telling the other one about the boyfriend’s shit stains in his underpants and how his armpits smell. The other one tells her how to get more money from him. ‘And I make sure he does this for me, and does that,’ and so on. Very banal, in fact.”
I wondered if Irma was now sleeping with Alex. We walked back up the dusty road. Gray-bellied clouds moved over the city from inland hills. The crew was packing equipment, the two tracking shots having gone off surprisingly fast once they’d started shooting, Paul assured us, though Ray rolled his eyes and rubbed his moustache with his teeth as if he, veteran assistant to Rudolph Bauer on twenty pictures, doubted very much that Paul would be thrilled when he saw the rushes. This silent skepticism was burning a hole in the air between the two men, who stood obstructing the equipment van as the crew deposited a half a ton of lenses, slates, earphones, and boom microphones inside. Maria, desperately cheerful, flirted with Michael on the hood of the Buick, where she was swabbing his handsome face with Kleenex. She seemed eager to offset the tension between Paul and Ray with the force of her banal chatter, and her voice was getting louder and shriller by the minute.
Paul had his own plans for relieving the tension. They would not shoot the follow-up scenes in the prostitute’s room until after lunch, and maybe not until the next day. He proposed an outdoor restaurant on the inland road to Barranquilla, and after much palaver the whole production got under way, crew in the van, Ray, Michael, Imelda, and Chino in the truck, Paul and me and Irma and Maria in the Buick. Why that configuration and not another? And what was Paul talking about? There was always a great fracas of people piling into vehicles to go from one place to another; the exact disposition of bodies seeming to define the shifting magnetic affinities and polarities . . .
Paul was feuding with Alex, Alex opposed some idea of Paul’s that involved borrowing costumes from the Historic Institute in Bogotá, Alex was jealous of Michael and wanted the script rewritten to make Michael’s part smaller or his own part bigger, it sounded like a typical male thing, somebody’s part had to be bigger than somebody else’s . . . Irma wisecracking, ridiculing Alex . . . I gathered they weren’t having an affair, after all, though you could never tell . . . And Maria, suddenly gone quiet, seemed to be rolling something soft and delicious through her mind, an erotic hankering, no doubt . . .
The countryside was overshadowed by the moving clouds. The road was entirely empty, a strip of black licorice between sepulchral fields and spectral patches of “development,” a closed bauxite mine sporting hills of decaying slag, and then a rich green forest pressing close to the road on both sides.
The restaurant was a hacienda set back from the road on a sloping drive ringed by jacaranda trees, with long beds of pink hydrangeas flanking the gravel horseshoe entrance. As luck had it, Alex’s Cadillac was in the parking lot. We went into the rear garden, a maze of hedges and clematis and little gurgling fountains. Alex sat a table of attractive food, under a Cinzano umbrella, with an indestructible-looking old lady who was certainly his mother. Across from him was Luis Vasquez, the festival president, who had a long oval infant’s face and a glabrous bald head fringed with wooly hair. Luis Vasquez looked like a clown, and he was laughing like a clown at something that had just been said by a horsey, big-boned woman in a ruffled crepe blouse, a string of gold beads resting on her ship’s prow of a bosom: Valentina Vogel.
After a due amount of verbal seething and boiling, the froth subsided, the agitation melted away, and we found ourselves dispersed over neighboring tables. Paul was not thrilled to see Alex. He disguised this with his usual fastidious manners, but his expression was engulfed in a kind of woe.
I was fascinated by Carlotta Gavro and the tall, severe woman beside her. They did not look at all alike, as Ray had said: Carlotta looked much more like Irma than like Valentina, but Carlotta and Valentina both looked like Germany, specifically Germany on the march through the Sudetenland. Carlotta was a grotesque, someone through whom the vital forces continued to pump at an exalted rate, despite her advanced age. She was more animated, heartier, lustier than anyone around her, a wrinkled ingenue. She gabbed continually, making fearsome, energetic gestures, half-rising out of her chair to emphasize her points, barking out saucy observations about the whole company. Carlotta was hardly as intelligent or as witty as she thought she was, but she was far from stupid, even if her frame of reference had been more or less sealed off two decades earlier. Her humor pleased us, her gemutlekeit jokes, her barbed remarks about people’s appearances . . . even at a distance, we felt the atmosphere enlivened by her élan . . . Let’s face it, a very old person full of animation reminds you that it’s possible to live a long life . . .
On the other hand, though, everything amused her, everything sent her into gales of laughter; all this . . . life, in a person so obviously nearing the completion of life’s journey, to put it diplomatically, made a bizarre impression. After twenty minutes or so, Carlotta’s well-bred raucousness, her apparent compulsion to make the occasion a high-spirited romp, began to seem a bit gauche—after all, this woman had voted for Adolph Hitler fifty years earlier . . . Inexorably, as the afternoon wore on, the residue of the Third Reich settled on Carlotta like a toxic powder . . . A feeling of revulsion overtook my earlier fascination . . .
And Valentina, that imperious waxworks figure less than half Carlotta’s age, with her high forehead, her pencil eyebrows, suspicious eyes, her rueful, twisted, mean-looking mouth . . . She resembled a handsome but overweight, spoiled scion of some profoundly middle-class fiefdom, a dynasty of toilet manufacturers or slumlords . . .
From my vantage point several feet away I could see them glancing at us between bites of steak—practically everyone had ordered steak, since this was one of two restaurants in Cartagena that could be relied upon not to serve horsemeat—almost pityingly, as though their table were the only one worth sitting at. In fact, Maria defected to their camp, along with the local actress and the boy. Our table had gained Ray, Michael, and the cameraman. Luis Vasquez wandered over, ensorcelled by Michael, no doubt, or by Irma (whose films he knew and complimented rather nicely), but the flame of Carlotta drew him back, mothlike, to her side.
“Well?” Paul whispered in my ear. “Is he a big queer or what?”
“Who? Herr Vasquez?”
“Yes, but never mind. Let’s play Most Insignificant Person.”
“All right. Who is the most insignificant person in this room?”
His gaze swept in one direction, mine in another, searching, considering, sifting: Luis Carlotta Maria Imelda Chino Ciro Alex Vale Hannah Willie Ray me Michael Irma Paul Valentina Michael Hannah Chino Ciro . . .
And then something strange occurred, something that I find rather difficult to describe even now, years after the fact, even after telling it to Robert Scheib: because, in effect, it was something only Paul and I paid attention to, on that bright backyard terrace, with bees humming nearby in the clematis and waiters trampling in and out of the fragrant kitchen. Paul had finished eating and was smoking a cigarette, tamping the ashes into a round ashtray covered with a fine sort of steel mesh. Michael’s hand was on the table, blunt and inert, but when you looked more closely you perceived some tiny tremors, for example, of the skin at the bottom of his fourth finger, and sometimes his third and fourth fingers touched; sometimes such embryonic movements developed into real ones, as when he touched the tablecloth with his forefinger or cradled the stem of his wine glass.
These things seemed so remote from Michael himself that he might have been a great country full of internal movements that were impossible to apprehend. One of these movements consisted of a slow closing of the hand and folding of the fingers, a chaste, fugitive movement. It was curious that it generally coincided with a lowering of his eyes (which I hardly ever saw); he never raised his eyes when he did it.
Irma’s hand, a remarkable object that was charged with eroticism “through” its proximity to Michael’s hand, lay beside her plate, a long, elegant, restive sort of hand. Her hand seemed busy with its own choreography, the bunching of certain fingers that rubbed and broke apart, the worrying of one nail with another nail, pressing her thumb-tip between her second and third fingers . . . and the gnawed, fatty remains of her steak sat congealing on a blue plate.
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” she announced, glancing around to locate its likeliest spot. She was seated at the head of the table, with Ray on her left and Michael on her right, and next to Michael, Paul, and across from Paul, the cameraman, and beside Paul, me. As Irma left the table, I noticed again the peculiar affinity between her strong, broad mouth and Michael’s Italianate, big-lipped mouth, and I imagined, for no reason at all, those two mouths coming together through the wire mesh of Paul’s ashtray, I imagined the mesh caked with tar and ash inserted between the two sets of lips . . . His hand with its virile fingers, interlocked with her delicate fingers . . . And then on the mosaic tiles that paved the dining area, quite near our table, something came out from under a hedge, a tawny oval about two inches in length, its movements slow and cautious. It was a cockroach, one of those monstrous southern roaches that are, I am told, often caged as pets in Madagascar . . . Its whiplike feelers trembled in the searing, humid air . . .
There was a space of perhaps five feet between the end of our table and a fieldstone wall wrapped around some kalanchoe bushes beside the building. The floor was an odd Mediterranean surface of sea shells and smashed, varicolored ceramic tiles embedded in a cement grout, an intricate obstacle course for the roach, which seemed headed toward Alex’s table in the distance. After noticing the bug I continued talking with Paul, who was describing, in a defiantly loud voice, his idea for a long “historical flashback” in the very middle of the picture, an idea Alex had apparently vetoed earlier in the day, and meanwhile Ray took one finger of his left hand in two of his right and carefully examined it while a dreamy smile spread over his face. Michael, languidly and inexpertly puffing on a French cigarette he’d gotten from the cameraman, was telling us that he played the saxophone, just in case Paul felt like giving him a saxophone solo in the film. I pictured this Greek divinity sitting in his underpants, beefy legs spread, blowing into a saxophone. His eyes looked over to register the flicker of sexual attraction in my eyes. Paul’s eyes picked up the telegraphy of our eyes. Meanwhile Ray and the cameraman saw everything without really seeing anything. They carried on smoking, telling dirty jokes, and each would go blank for a moment and stare at me, or Michael, or Paul, and then decide to move a piece of cutlery or push an ashtray across the table a few inches. Ray crossed his legs, uncrossed them, cleared his throat, coughed, and so forth. In the slithering language of glances I followed Paul’s gaze to the crawling roach on the mosaic tiles, and saw that Michael, too, kept returning to the labored movement of the insect.
Suddenly there was a sharp crack, as if a strip of sealing tape had been ripped from a package. It wasn’t a loud noise, but it was strange enough to stand out from the other noises. A kind of “now it’s coming” feeling flashed through my head. Irma resumed her seat at the end of the table, Valentina swooped over from her table to gossip with Paul about Alex, Paul introduced me and Michael to Valentina, Ray began a salty anecdote about a friend of his who smuggled heroin, a cacophony rose in the surrounding air, and then I saw that Irma had crushed the cockroach en route to the table, it lay there flattened against the whorled crown of a conch shell protruding from the cement . . . worse, the thing was trying to crawl on its two or three remaining legs, wobbling crookedly a few millimeters and then collapsing onto its crushed side . . . I looked away, my eyes immediately locking on Paul’s, for he had noticed the feeble efforts of the roach . . . an inferno of pain had opened up a few inches from our feet. From out of the clear sky an indifferent god had transformed this writhing organism into a lump of apocalyptic agony . . . By this time Irma’s glance had also fastened on the cockroach. Her elbows rested on the table, her left hand cradled the wrist of her right hand. The cigarette in her right-hand fingers dissembled the trajectory of her gaze. She caught Michael’s eyes with her eyes, directing them to the death throes of the insect, which was pushing itself forward with repulsive determination, a shiny trail of olive viscera oozing over its path of broken shells and crockery . . .
Irma smiled, lightly, almost imperceptibly . . . and her smile coaxed a wicked, corrupt smile onto Michael’s genial face, a smile of casual complicity . . . Paul and I watched them watch the crawling, dying thing on the ground while Valentina laughed at one of Ray’s jokes, and then Michael stood up, stretched conspicuously with a forced yawn, his eyes twinkling, and moved around the table in an elaborately casual manner, unhurriedly heading for the toilet . . . all this so he could stand facing the table rather than the restaurant when, with a theatrical deliberation all the more impressive because he was also making himself inconspicuous to everyone except myself, Paul, and Irma, he brought his foot down on the scaly back of the struggling creature, cracking its spine, crushing the rest of its legs, smashing all its internal organs . . . so that a flattened carapace remained glued by its own guts to a smooth rhomboid of pink ceramic when his shoe moved off toward the WC. He paused once on his way to turn and smile at Irma, the wide, lascivious smile of a man confident of having given total pleasure.