Time was moving in a deep, black river. Cartagena felt like a hot loaf of bread. Days passed hazily in thick, pounding heat, and at night we were all bone tired from the day or else artificially wired from cocaine. And that could mean a frantic, brittle evening in Boca Grande at the casino or the discotheque, sloppy, wine-dilated meals in the beach restaurants, winding up at the Arsenal Bar after midnight.
Typically, though, the residents of the villa kept to their pool and watered drinks and late dinners in. Miles away, Alex ate with his mother at the Caribe and tried to pick up vacationing American girls. Those of us marooned in the Hotel Bolivar went our odd, independent ways, sometimes meeting in the patio bar or crossing paths in the plaza. Since Michael’s room was directly across the hall from my own, his movements acquired a certain interest. I listened for him in the evenings, and sometimes timed my own exits so that we would meet.
He was a curiously changeable young man. Sometimes he came out of his room wearing a look of luxurious contentment. He wrapped me in a muscular embrace that was either tinged with lust or a put-on, insisting on buying us beers, there in the Bolivar or around the corner at Paco’s. There was a spring in his walk and a strutting self-assurance that made him even more desirable, if that were possible. At other times he seemed startled or annoyed to see me, his eyes hooded, and skulked evasively to the stairwell or fled back into his room.
Even when Michael was obviously high on coke and unable to suppress a torrent of speech, I found it difficult to recall later on any single thing he had spoken about. Except his body. Michael could speak inexhaustibly about his physical envelope and its discrete parts: his fingers, hands, elbows, chest, abdomen, hair, knees, abdomen, moles, feet, teeth, penis, testicles, ears, eyelashes, and internal organs provided him with endless conversational material. He spoke of the various events these pieces of himself had undergone, the myriad sensations they had experienced, injuries they’d sustained, always with a kind of enthralled detachment, as though his possession of such superb corporeal merchandise never ceased to amaze him. He was especially loquacious when describing his various brushes with discomfort and pain. He tended to get backache. He once described his aching back in such explicit detail that I began having the same aches and twinges. It crossed my mind that this may have been an invitation to offer him a massage, but I felt inhibited by his beauty.
At Paul’s insistence our characters had fought in the middle of the dirt road in Boca Chica, “Max” supposedly provoked by my failure to reserve a rental car at the airport, also by the heat and the dust. I understood that our rehearsal of various stage combat feints was a ruse: behind Paul’s directions there were other directions, behind the narrative another narrative, real violence behind the fake violence. This would be partly for him and partly for me, we would both have some of it, and with any luck it would taste good, like the blood in a rare steak.
Paul expected me, at the crucial moment, to bring my arms up too slowly to deflect Michael’s fists. Two rapid, strong blows struck the sides of my head. I blacked out for a few seconds. I blinked awake in Michael’s arms. His face was a rictus of guilt and concern. Hovering behind him, Paul beamed ecstatically.
“You see? He’s really a . . . a brawler,” Paul marveled later in the Arsenal. We had wrapped early and gone by ourselves to the bar, stopping beside the brackish canal to look at the warm sunlight, the mottled stones and weedy moss of the embankment, and the indistinct clouds scudding in the blue-white sky. The Arsenal had just opened, the sound system was mercifully silent, and only two other people were in there, both part owners of the place who were sweeping and prepping the bar.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Michael’s docile as a kitten. You just rigged it so he had to hit me. You know he’ll do whatever you tell him. I mean he has to.”
“He didn’t say no,” Paul said, licking his lips with satisfaction. “Besides, that wasn’t some love tap he gave you.”
I shook my head. “I’d like to know what this is leading up to,” I said. “I mean if you want . . . well, him and Irma . . .”
Paul’s blue eyes glistened. At times he resembled an ancient tortoise peering from its shell. His partly tanned neck was loose in his shirt collar. “You’d like that as well, wouldn’t you?”
“To see them . . . yes, sure.” I shrugged. “Although I’m sure he’ll be sleeping with Maria before long.” Despite her frequent references to a dashing banker-lover in Cali, Maria had been more or less throwing herself at Michael for days. In his quiet way, he appeared to return her interest, or at least acquiesce in it, though his public demonstrations of affection were always perfunctory and strangely impersonal, as if to emphasize his equal availability to everyone.
Other liaisons were also forming. Valentina had begun “dating” Luis Vasquez, and the line producer, Hannah, had started sleeping with the Dutch cameraman. Irma had a chaste friendship going with the sound technician, a fat leather queen from Berlin named Ciro, with whom she went swimming in Boca Grande on our days off.
“Imagine,” she told me. “He goes off into those outdoor toilets with soldiers . . .” While remaining hazy about her own erotic life, Irma always savored the exact details of these encounters, reporting that Ciro loved it when a man in uniform “made pee into his beard” or squirted come on his large, hairy belly.
Paul and Ray . . . argued. Paul replayed their arguments in all their particulars, rolling details around until every possible meaning had been considered. I can reconstruct these arguments as though I’d been present, having them from both parties, see them today in my mind’s eye: the two men in the northwest second-floor bedroom of Villa Gavro; Ray, whose crumpled-handsome face (the face of a runty but dashing corsair, its fleshy proboscis firm as marble above his sculpted mustache) looks oily in the candlelight, has donned his white linen jacket and a pink St. Laurent shirt, stiff at the collar and cuffs. He wears nothing below but a tight pair of red silk underpants. Ray’s scrotum is conspicuously large. Paul, athletic and baby pink after a lukewarm shower, has dressed in a gray Armani suit too thick for the heat. He sits on a soft bundle of mosquito netting folded at the foot of a frilly canopied bed, holding one of his shoes.
The ghosts of Effi Briest and Major Crampas, of Warren Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor hover in the enormous room. The electricity has sputtered out, as it does three or four times every evening. The terra-cotta sconces in the ancient stucco, their stout yellow candles exuding a faint gardenia scent, have been pirated from a cathedral in Lima, along with a voluptuous marble Christ impaled on a sectioned two-by-four of worm-eaten teakwood. All the villa’s furniture is massive, incredibly old, and seems to have migrated from a looted monastery or museum.
Paul claims that Carlotta Gavro has been the lucky beneficiary of myriad pillagings. That after the war she was an essential link in the vast network that spirited the likes of Mengele and Barbie out of Germany into the depths of Bolivia and Paraguay. These grateful fascists have funneled objects of virtu to her over the years, until her villa has become a virtual museum. Paul thinks about the Elgin Marbles, about the weird, bloody circulation of money through the universe. About exploited peasants and the piquant depravity of dictators. When Paul pictures himself rectifying life’s injustices—relief worker in the Congo, signer of petitions and indignant newspaper letters, member of the RAF—he gets a mental cramp. He would like to plant bombs at Springer Verlag, smuggle plastique aboard transatlantic flights, shoot an I. G. Farben CEO. But he can’t, and much of his imagination expends itself in stepping over the rubble of ruined dreams.
Instead he imagines “pictures.” As work on the film proceeds, each day requires the fresh invention of images, positioning of bodies in space, numerous hours in an unreal world.
Ray stands at an inlaid African dresser, contemplating his diminutive but manly features and the room behind him in a tall, oval mirror. The silver nitrate behind the glass has cracked and peeled in several spots. The mottled reflection breaks Ray’s body and the room into jigsaw pieces. Ray resists suggesting that Paul use the mirror in his film. Ray thought the cock-shaped turrets of the city walls were made for the movie, too, and Paul instantly rejected them: they’d remind people, he insisted, of the fantasy city of Rudolph’s film Tarantella. “People will think I’ve got no ideas of my own.”
The mellow room cools after a day of soggy, listless heat. Under the balcony overlooking the courtyard the monkeys scream in their cages.
“I don’t see what you’re driving at,” Paul tells Ray, jimmying a white-stockinged foot into his shoe. “We shot eleven pages today and we’re three days ahead of schedule. We don’t have dailies but I’m almost certain what we’ve got looks great.”
“I just wonder,” snorts Ray, amiably, admiring the fractured image of himself thrown back by the scaling glass, “whether what you’ve got makes any sense. That boy is supposed to be a reporter. I mean I know he fucks her, but we never said the audience was supposed to drool over his body every time he’s on screen.”
“Why not? He looks better than Alex.” Paul ties his shoelace, walks to the dresser with an air of decision, and embraces Ray from behind. They contemplate themselves in the leprous glass.
Ray has been wallowing in the weaker regions of his will. He did not think coming to Cartagena a good idea. He resisted it for many weeks and then changed his mind, whimsically. Paul slides his crotch against Ray’s taut buttocks, his hands caressing the well-toned abdomen through the pink shirt. Moisture oozes from Ray’s skin.
Ray detaches himself from Paul’s body, faintly irritated. “I just think it distracts from the story line,” he offers weakly. He spins on his heel. “But look here. Here I’m telling you what to do and really it’s none of my business—no, really, Paul, it isn’t. We’re lovers, not artistic collaborators. What I think is that I should go back to Sydney and get out of your hair.”
Since shortly after Rudolph’s death they have lived more apart than together, Ray in Australia managing a film distribution company, Paul in Munich filing bankruptcy and hatching plans. There is some unstated intention to resume connubial life in the middle future, somewhere.
In the wardrobe with Renaissance carvings where their things hang intermixed, Ray locates his cream-colored trousers. There’s a streak of dried, dark mustard on the fly, from Paul wearing them.
“But you have a part to play,” Paul protests. He joins Ray at the wardrobe. He nibbles Ray’s earlobe. He squeezes Ray’s penis. “You have to play the piano.”
Ray tousles Paul’s sun-whitened hair and makes a sour face, looking like a sober, steadfast, whiskered rodent.
“Get Maria to play the piano. I wonder who’s kissing her now,” Ray sings in a pleasant, tuneful voice.
“Maria is my wife, you’re my biographer. I need you both. Also, she doesn’t play.”
Paul slips his hand inside Ray’s underpants. He has given himself the role of the “secret genius” running the government through proxies like Alex and Luis Vasquez, who plays the chief of police. It is a good role for Paul: witness to the crimes of others, a puller of strings, Svengali. He cups Ray’s damp balls in his palm. The stringy hairs feel grainy. Ray’s penis stirs a fraction. Paul slides his hand out, smells it.
“Your crotch still has the sweetest odor,” Paul rasps.
“What about this,” Ray offers, stepping away to the bed. “I’ll go to Sydney and work for a few weeks . . . then meet you in Sosua. We’ll have a vacation. Jacmel, if you prefer.”
“Jacmel.” Paul sifts through a tangle of neckties. He picks out two and stalks to the dresser. “World capital of AIDS. Lovely.”
“Carriacou. The Grenadines. Look, Paul, I know what you’re getting into with this. And if it . . . proceeds, I’m just afraid we’re going to scrap—and I don’t want to scrap. We should just have done with all the bloody fussing. I want us to get along.”
Paul considers this, along with a blue tie, which he knots under his collar, then undoes and tosses aside. Ray farts a cheesy raspberry.
“Sorry.”
“We could have a week or two holiday but we can’t afford you flying over there and back again. It’s just too much. Look, we’ve both got to go to Sydney afterwards anyway. Jesus, what did you eat today?”
“What we can’t afford,” Ray says, waving a coiled belt at the walls, “is this, Carlotta’s bloody pisshole Kempinski. Everybody’s whole salary’s going into the damn—” He slips on his white trousers. He sighs as if tired of his own anger. “And a bunch of jibbering nignogs shaking us down for every ice cube. You know, you could call Alex on that. We never said we were doing a film just to launder money for Alex Gavro. This is your art, for the love of God.”
“Well,” Paul says with irony, “not for the love of God, certainly, but I see what you mean . . .”
Ray zips his trousers. His gaze lingers on the stain. He darts barefoot across the stone floor to a table, digs a Marlboro from a crumpled pack. The possibilities of argument are endless, he thinks, picking up a lighter: rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument, blah blah blah. Near the ashtray, a many-legged and -armed Hindu deity in jade. It, like the stain, annoys him.
“This house,” Ray says. “This house is so pretentious. I know you like these fancy digs but, I mean, really.” He flops onto his back on the springy bed. He stretches out his legs and rubs his groin with his fist.
“I’ll tell you what’s pretentious,” Paul says. “This tie. Do you know the origin of the tie?”
“Yes, I do.”
“In the middle ages,” says Paul, ignoring him, “noblemen had to wear them like a garotte to show the king that he had the right to strangle them at his pleasure. You can hardly call this a piss-hole,” he adds, standing before the peeling mirror. “Besides, we aren’t paying for it. It’s all Alex’s money, in a sense.” He puckers his lips. The spirit of Marilyn Monroe flutters at his elbow.
“I’m not sorry Alex parked himself at the Caribe,” Ray says. “And I do appreciate your putting him at the Bolivar, I’m sure you two would be giving live shows over here by this time.”
“Well, there you are. I’ve done everything you wanted, you can’t leave now.”
“All that stuff with Michael and Irma. His feet with her feet and lying about in the grass, Paul, what’s all that supposed to mean? It’s not natural, it’s . . . bizarre.”
There are wicker baskets in the room, Greek Orthodox icons, the screaming Christ with tears of blood dripping from its crown of thorns.
“Oh, we won’t even use it, probably. I was simply trying a little experiment. Kind of a carryover from the stage. Those mechanical gestures and so forth, a little like Oskar Schlemmer automata, if you see what I mean.”
Paul idly wraps a tie around his fingers. “You realize,” he continues, “you don’t have to come to the set every day if you don’t want to. No one asked you to help the crew, that isn’t your job, lugging and fetching—I only want you to play your scenes. The rest of the time you can stay here lounging by the pool! Or go out and fuck a nice boy. Why not? I don’t mind, you know. A nice Colombian youth, or one of these child prostitutes they have. Haven’t you ever felt like . . . sticking that big cock of yours into a nine-year-old?”
Ray has put out his cigarette in the ashtray planted on his chest and lit another. Paul turns from the dresser. His face looks goofy. Ray feels, for the moment, pleasantly defeated. He sucks in smoke and wrinkles his eyes shut.
“I . . . did, ” he confesses in a whisper.
Paul’s eyebrow arches in a circumflex. “How interesting.”
“In Bangkok. I mean, it was twenty years ago.”
“You were twenty. It doesn’t count. Anyway, I bet it was a girl . . .”
“Well . . . once it was a girl, that’s true, but it wasn’t only that time. You realize, Paul, you’re free to have a party, too, if you want.”
“No desire.” Paul shakes his head. “I mean I do have a party in mind, but not one where—well, let’s say I’ve got a special sort of thing in mind. By the way, darling, Hector Luis and Juan Carlos aren’t Negroes. They’re Indian and Spanish, mixed. All Spanish, if you ask them.”
“Hector Luis is a weasly little thief.”
Paul sighs. “It’s part of his charm. These servants are paid shit, you realize. If they rob us we should be glad for them.” He brings his face close to the mirror. It looks no older than when he last paid attention to it. “Glamorous screen star,” he asks his Scattered reflection, “or aging pederast? Mirror, mirror, you be the judge.”
He follows the mirrored candle-lit nimbus of Ray’s form as the latter stands up, strides to the foot of the bed, and sits down on the mosquito netting. Paul slips on his tortoiseshell glasses, assuming a look of blond efficiency and control. Ray’s pale bare feet perch on the bedframe.
“I do need you here,” he insists once again. “I need to stay alert and strong and also fucked from time to time, and not by some piece of local trade. Don’t forget I have to deal with these exasperating people.”
Ray coughs on his cigarette. He finds this hilarious.
“You thought it all up yourself, fuckhead.”
Paul nods, with energy. “I did, didn’t I. What was I thinking about? You’d have to be . . . unbelievably stoned to dump all these people together in the same place. And this place is a perfect horror.”
I imagine this little exchange taking place about three weeks into the project, on one of those sultry evenings when the vaunted inner circle was expected to join Carlotta Gavro at her regular poolside table, out on the peninsula. The Caribe was part of “modern,” i.e., tourist, Cartagena, like everything out on that fat hook of landfill. It made a change from the Bolivar.
As Ray and Paul argued, Irma put the finishing touches on herself by candlelight. Irma hated her face, all severe angles and Max Beckmann lines. She hated her hair, clipped and dyed ash blonde, her Bride of Frankenstein crossed eyes. “She isn’t beautiful,” ran one line in Paul’s movie, “but she has something. Men go crazy for her.”
This happened to be true, but of no particular use to her most of the time. The ground-floor room was full of stagnant air. She moved the candelabrum closer to the bathroom sink. She hated her big tits that no one bothered noticing, the big fanny she’d put on, which everyone did notice. But she was starting to like herself a little, she thought. She liked her dress, which she wore in the film and got to keep—a see-through clingy silk thing, half myrtle green, half clown pink, the colors divided vertically.
She unhooked a small crescent bag from the bathroom door-knob. She blew out the candles and walked out of the room, but stood for a while in the darkness between the rear staircase and the tiled arcade enclosing the patio, listening to the monkeys screech. Across the thickets of the garden, in the blackness above the balustrade where the dining room would be, an indistinct bolt of white hung suspended. As her eyes adjusted, she realized it had to be Hector Luis’s shirt. He had noticed her coming out of her room and was staring, watching to see what she’d do.
The villa bristled with freaky noises and abrupt silences. There was sometimes a riot of cicadas, sometimes birds, sometimes shouting from the street. And gunfire, she thought. The surflike soughing of wind in the palms. Before, she’d been able to hear Ray and Paul’s voices carried faintly from the top of the house, and then a door had squealed shut and the voices stopped. She now heard a faint, dry slithering from the sitting room across the patio, fabric rubbing fabric.
The fuzzy specter of Hector Luis vanished. For a moment the house went still, and then a raking noise came from the monkey cages. A parrot leashed to a flame tree gurgled briefly in response. She remembered that the servants were supposed to bring the parrot down. The moon slipped free of a cloud bank, lighting the flagstones and vegetation and the vines crawling up the balconies. Irma thought, Everything in the world is connected.
As she started for the living room the power flicked back on, focusing the big picture a little more sharply than she would have liked. Her thoughts had been running on a downward spiral. She reminded herself not to drink too much.
Valentina Vogel sat near the join of an L-shaped couch. Her ample posterior sank into frothy lilac-patterned cushions. Her plump elbow rested on an onyx table where a lamp threw an oval of light across an Isfahan carpet. She had laid aside Vogue during the blackout and now picked it up again. She looked prepared to retreat bodily into its pages if anything further disrupted her composure.
Irma thought the brown cocktail dress Valentina had on, by some name designer no doubt, had cost at least three thousand marks. As the editor and ambiguous consort of Rudolph Bauer, Valentina’s skills were much in demand, and expensive. Strap heels, tourmaline bracelet, a heavy gold necklace studded with dull amber stones. Straight auburn hair yanked back with pins to show off big gold earrings. “She looks like an Aztec pyramid,” Irma thought.
Their eyes met in a flicker of suspicion. Since arriving in Cartagena, Irma had experienced a medley of emotions about Valentina Vogel. Mistrust figured prominently among them, the mistrust of Irma’s working-class background toward a solid bourgeoise. She also felt a streak of defiance, against her fear of Valentina’s disapproval. And she also recognized in Valentina the strange obdurate authority her own older sister, who had recently died of cancer, had exerted over her throughout her lifetime. “If she ever asks me to do something,” Irma thought, “I know I’ll do it. Even if I don’t want to.”
“Well.” Valentina’s smile was masklike, automatic. She wasn’t pretty, but she had a monumental sort of plainness. Irma’s incipient masculinity came forward around women like Valentina, in spite of the latter’s severity. “She’s just a cunt,” Irma told herself.
“What a nice dress.” Irma stepped right over and felt it. “Very chic,” she purred, forcing Valentina into a different sort of smile, an anxious Kilroy of a smile. Irma snatched up a gold bell and gave it a shake. She selected a five-year-old travel magazine from a wicker hamper and started fanning her face with it. She sat down on the far end of the couch: she and Valentina and the lamp now formed an isosceles triangle.
“Hector’s crushed we’re not having dinner here.” Valentina giggled girlishly, thrusting her prominent round chin toward the villa’s north end. From the sofa they both saw straight down across the dining room, to a crack of light where Hector Luis or Juan Carlos, differently irascible boy servants, would emerge from the kitchen. Uncharacteristically, one of them did come out almost instantly.
They watched the mote of red and white move slowly along the mortuary slabs of chair backs pressed against the dining table. From a distance, the servants looked identical. Hector Luis was distinguished by a refined profile and elegant extremities. He had the miniature quality achieved in certain dog breeds, wiry-haired, perfectly formed, but scaled for confinement indoors.
The dining room table was three hundred years old. It seated thirty. Irma did not believe there were thirty people worth having dinner with in Cartagena, from what she had seen so far. She halted Hector Luis in the archway with a look. His mischievous yet oddly worn-out face creased in idiotic amusement. A sarcastic smile bubbled to his thin lips. Valentina smiled. Irma smiled. The smiling mouths seemed to float in front of their owners, drift through the air, and stick to parts of their clothing or nearby furniture.
Valentina asks for a whiskey, in careful Spanish. Clutching Vogue by its spine and flapping it on her lap, she crosses her legs to angle it up for reading. Hector Luis shakes his curls adorably. He starts for the kitchen. Dos whiskies, Irma barks, dos, dos—the boy freezes. Hector Luis, she says in a rectifying voice, unos rum cola instead. It doesn’t bother her not speaking a word of Spanish besides mierda, but she knows his trick of pretending not to hear. Hector Luis enjoys working people’s nerves in small, irreproachable ways. Irma knows she would do the same in his shoes.
“I wonder if they would have books in German anywhere.” Valentina is digging hard for a subject. Irma nudges off her canvas espadrilles and puts her feet on the cushions. Her toenails are shiny pink. The pink-and-green silk ripples along her thigh. She starts to say she’s brought some novels, then almost guiltily closes her mouth and appears to think about it.
“Maybe at the Hilton,” she finally says. “In Boca Grande.”
A knock at the door. The sharp yawning noise produced when the servants open the front door. Footsteps crunch on the patio gravel. Michael and I have arrived together, and he, Mr. Perfect Perfection, has been having an allergy attack on our walk from the Bolivar, sneezing continuously, his face pale, eyes watering freely. Moments after our arrival, Luis Vasquez of the film festival shows up, in an elegantly sleazy suit: Irma notes his clothes, and the fact that he’s bonded to Valentina.
Hector Luis returns with drinks. Irma grabs her glass and salutes Michael with it, brazening a wide, crazy-looking smile. Michael’s mouth moves nervously.
“We’re going?” Luis Vasquez asks Valentina.
“Well, I want to wait for Paul.”
Michael sneezes twice, then a third time after some suspense, followed by a fourth and fifth sneeze. Luis Vasquez trails Hector Luis out of the room, into the kitchen. He has an easy proprietary air about the place that I can see bothers Irma.
“I wonder . . .” Valentina tosses her magazine aside. Michael plants himself in one of several leather sling chairs. I pace. Valentina leans back on the cushions as she stares at the ceiling. “I’d just as soon not go up there.”
This appears to mean that she thinks Ray and Paul are having a fight. Or something else is up. Or nothing’s up, and Valentina is giving a pointless inflection to the usual dead patch of time before dinner.
“Well, why should you?” asks Irma. She doesn’t know if she is closing off a subject or challenging Valentina to bring it up. “This is a slow country. Things move slowly here. Relax.”
Ray and Paul have been fighting but it has nothing to do with her. Ray wants to leave. Irma doesn’t blame him. They’ve shot a good deal of Ray’s part, so that will be bad, if he leaves they’ll have to reshoot with somebody else or just cut him out or shorten the part. Well, if he wants to leave he should. Whenever you think a film will be fun there is always some little detail to ruin it, usually the mad hours and weeks of hardly any sleep and down here, she thinks, it is probably going to be cocaine that ruins it. Cocaine makes everybody eager to push things too far. To “get real” with each other. And in the last few days, Paul has been getting really real—which is to say, unreal.
Valentina stretches out her legs and looks at them admiringly.
“It’s only that Carlotta will be put out if we’re all late.”
“Fuck Carlotta,” Irma can’t resist saying.
“Everyone hates Carlotta,” Valentina says, deprecatingly. “I really wonder why.” Her voice implies that she knows the answer and is eager to dispute it.
“I don’t think ‘hate’ is exactly the word.”
Valentina looks at me in challenge, then at Michael. We are speechless. Michael sneezes.
“‘Makes fun of her,’ then. I honestly don’t understand it. She’s just an old woman.”
Michael sneezes. Irma stares at Valentina, whose gaze shifts away. Her pointy nose, in Irma’s mind, symbolizes some subtle difference in sensibility or genetics, she can’t pin it down quite. Irma feels reproached by that nose, for her campy glamour compared to Valentina’s sedate Lutheran dignity. She feels her style clashing against the style of Valentina and her nose.
We hear Paul’s voice, crashing down from the second-floor balcony. A door slams, whether with intended violence or not, none of us can tell. Sharp steps on the balcony. Irma finds a magenta lighter in her bag. She lights a cigarette. She slides her feet back into her shoes. She feels suddenly weightless, silly, and closes her eyes and pictures Valentina’s nose growing to the size of an alp. She opens her eyes. Paul comes across the veranda and down the steps into the room. As he glances at us, his prominent nose inhabits his face like a prosthesis stuck on with putty.
He nods and does his usual little dance around the furniture, debating where to alight, radiating commotion, with his nose sticking out.
“Well. So.” He sits down in a scissor chair and deflates like a tire with a slow leak.
Luis Vasquez walks in ceremoniously with a tray of drinks. Glasses full of ice and fizzy something, an odd touch. The servants are fiercely protective of the booze: only they can handle it, so to speak. A volley of caustic looks passes. Luis Vasquez commences handing out drinks. A gliding motion of Michael’s mouth, a sudden squawk from the parrot in the garden.
“Where’s Maria?” Paul rotates his finger in his glass.
“She went to Paco’s for a hamburger.” Valentina jiggles the ice in her glass. “She hasn’t eaten today. She couldn’t hold out another minute. She said she’ll meet us at the Caribe.”
Irma swallows a lot of her rum cola. It tastes like vodka, not rum. It probably is. She watches Paul. Out of the corner of her eye she notices Luis Vasquez staring at her. He is squatting beside Paul’s chair like a faithful dog, his bald head looking more and more like a circus clown’s pate. He never looks at the person talking. His eyes crawl all over you when you aren’t watching. The moment seems pregnant, but pregnant with nothing.
“She’s out in the dark walking around by herself?” Paul’s eyes bore into Valentina. The note of concern in his voice is meant to allude, no doubt, to the so-called Vampire of Cartagena, whose gruesome escapades have thrown sudden terror into the city. “Vampire” is a bit of a misnomer for what sounds like a serial killer with cannibalistic tendencies, but the Colombia press has firmly affixed the moniker.
“Well, actually, Luis, maybe we should join her at Paco’s and take her with us to Boca Grande,” says Valentina.
Luis grows restive. His knuckles fidget against his glass. His nose clings stubbornly to his face.
Valentina’s nose is calm and decisive.
“Yes, we must go to Paco’s.” She throws her arms out to convey the naturalness of wanting to go to Paco’s if you are all dressed up.
Irma settles her drink on the glass table and watches condensation puddle at its base. She believes that the villa’s architecture, its grandiose excrescences, the monumental furniture, the expressionist lighting casting monstrous shadows, all conspire to suck people up and make them invisible.
Upstairs a door creaks open. Without even mentioning the Vampire of Cartagena we have managed to summon the idea of him, forgetting about Ray, who now hollers down something unintelligible.
Snail tracks of moisture dribble down Irma’s glass. The underside of Valentina’s shoe comes up and settles against the edge of the table. In silence, tensions gather at a vortex I imagine hovering above a square crystal vase in the center of the table. In the vase is a perfect cymbidium orchid. Michael sneezes.
“Jungle fever,” someone whispers in a goosey voice: myself, I later realize. Then it all breaks up and melts into insignificance. Paul complains about something he ate the day before, Michael stares at his loafers, Valentina fondles her necklace and massages the muscles in her throat, Ray ambles into the room muttering about a handkerchief. The copy of Vogue on the sofa cushions. Paul’s fingers rubbing his glass. Michael’s fingers scrabbling at his hairline. Ray’s palms smoothing his jacket lapels, the blue lamp, the lush potted palm, the orchid, the vase, the bit of tooth burgeoning inside my mouth, the shadows of the palm splashed across the upper wall, Luis Vasquez’s gleaming baldness, the black iron ceiling fixture, the fan, footsteps in the dining room, Hector Luis’s red jacket, insects croaking in the garden, Paul’s glasses, Ray’s mouth, Michael’s mouth, Irma’s mouth, Valentina’s mouth, Hector Luis’s mouth. Hector Luis smiles.