But in fact . . . in fact, the whole business ended in an onrush of foolishness . . . more inanity, more petty rivalries, more circumspection . . . as things will, on a film. With nothing resolved, really . . . well, what was there to resolve? Paul seemed satisfied with what he was getting, not that he’d really managed to maneuver things—between Michael and Irma, Irma and Michael. And then, when I thought it might turn into something . . . well, there was always that strange bit of tooth or whatever it was in the bedside drawer, I took it out and stared at it, but you know something, I felt distinctly nervous about that little clump of matter: it reminded me of bad things in science fiction movies . . .
It seemed entirely possible that Jaybill Hanratty would turn up again, with “Simone,” in some kind of configuration . . . And then Alex, with his book of transparencies, which he pressed on me two days before we left, at the end of a “business talk” where I got drunk and agreed to everything . . . There was, of course, a strange evening at the villa—Maria had returned, just when we’d begun to suspect that someone really had done away with her . . .
“Poor Hannah,” Valentina sighed. “Poor, poor Hannah.”
“What a curious sentiment, poor Hannah.” Paul folded his hands above his plate, probed his teeth with his tongue.
“Poor Hannah my arse,” Roy grumbled, slicing his chicken cutlet into little squares. “Poor us that poor Hannah’s here.”
The other plates had been cleared . . . There were mixed sentiments about the chicken. Maria declared it delicious. Michael had eaten his with great appetite. The thing that had been there between them . . . seemed to have evaporated during Maria’s absence. She never said where she’d been . . . Irma puffed her cigarette . . . in the candlelight, the spark of a match, Paul lights a cigarette, the flame reflects in his glasses . . . Hector Luis moves between the chairs, pouring coffee and brandy. We’ve all just finished our dinners. Numerous porcelain birds, blue jays, finches, yellow canaries, perch on painted branches in a straight, close line running down the center of the table . . .
Irma and Michael pass a joint between them as I listen to Maria enumerate the contrasts between Carnaval in Cartagena and Carnaval in Cali—not that she’s actually saying she’s been in Cali all this time, but just as a general thing . . . Cali, she insists, is more truly festive, the parades more “authentic” . . .
“Authentic in what sense?” I ask.
“I think it’s awful we don’t invite Hannah,” Valentina is telling Paul. It’s hard to know if she’s serious. Everyone at the table has developed a habit of undermining any earnest utterance with comic movements of the face . . . subtle displacements of the gaze . . . a manner that belies meaning, just a fraction or so, signaling depths of private irony. “A woman alone at the Bolivar,” Valentina stridently continues, cheeks flushed with incipient hilarity. “And with the leg broken.”
Valentina tries not to laugh when the others start, but the effort’s too much. Irma barely follows the conversation. She’s in another world. No doubt she’s playing her own favorite game, imagining what we all would’ve been in the Third Reich. I look at Paul across the candlelight. Paul looks at me. Together we look at Irma and Michael, their heads framed in a fuzzy halo of light against the darkness, as night noises from the patio create a sort of unfortunate Joseph Conrad feeling, and it seems to me that the two of them, in some ineffable manner, passing that joint, for example, fingertips brushing, her glancing into his eyes, him glancing into her eyes . . . with Maria determinedly focused on what Valentina and Ray are saying, Valentina and Ray and Paul, and Paul’s telling Valentina, “She isn’t alone at the Bolivar, she’s got Vale to look after her . . . anyway she’s a miserable person.”
“She’s from a very good family, Alex told me,” Valentina counters, as if this would make any difference.
“Pacific people are more free,” Maria says ethereally, resuming her speech on Carnaval. “In Cali, we have the big ocean, it’s more cosmopolitan. Here everyone stares at you, if you’re a European.”
“Which you’re not,” Michael murmurs under his breath. She looks at him sharply.
“Sort of like rural Italy,” says Paul.
“But here you had all the beauty queens,” Ray says. “You wouldn’t see Miss Santa Marta in Cali.”
Paul stands up. He moves down the table and sits next to me. Irma stands up, picks up her coffee cup. Her hand drifts over Michael’s shoulder.
“We have better things in Cali than Miss Santa Marta,” Maria declares, ignoring Michael as he stands up and joins Irma at the balustrade. “Those beauty queens are all mistresses of army generals.”
Paul looks at me. He touches my arm in the darkness. Irma and Michael are moving with their coffee out into the patio. Something is taking its course . . .
“You don’t believe me?” Maria says.
“Of course we believe you,” says Paul. “Alex says that after her coronation at the Hilton, the winner enters a special room. There, the president of the republic sodomizes her. Only then does she truly become Miss Colombia.”
“Now it starts,” says Valentina from her end of the table. She cradles a brandy snifter between her middle fingers.
“No,” Ray’s saying, “first she sucks off each member of the parliament. They dip their cocks in cocaine, and she has to get them all off while the national anthem plays.”
“You guys,” Maria says. “You wouldn’t say that if Miss Colombia was a man.”
“I’m sure she was a man, not too long ago,” says Paul.
That night . . . the moon hung stupidly in the sky. I could see Irma and Michael dimly, crossing the patio, Irma throwing her cigarette into the stone fountain. The monkeys were scrabbling around in their cages. Darkness and silence were flowing together, darkness and silence . . . So they would: him and her, her and him . . . his mouth with her mouth . . . after all this time, despite all our efforts to bring them together—that is, to bring them together “for us” . . . and then, out by the pool . . . recumbent on a chaise, Valentina tosses ice cubes into the pool.
“It’s not really obvious,” she says, “that things are ruled by terror . . . when you go into the streets, sure you see soldiers and guns, and quelque chose—but you see poor people laughing, smiling . . . that too. Almost everyone does the cocaine, they dance, they make love. No one’s starving.”
“Quelques choses?” Paul screeches incredulously, dragging a plastic lawn chair from the storage shed at the end of the pool area. “You certainly do see quelques choses, Valentina. So glad you noticed.”
Maria, pacing the pool edge with a tall gin and tonic held like a beacon, pauses for a long swallow and says, “If you look close, Valentina, you’ll see the resignation and fear behind all the laughter and dancing. If you ask anyone here about the government, they clam right up. Betancur’s picture hangs in all the shops, right next to Christ. Why do you think they take coke all day and live in a dreamworld? Unless you’re from an important family, the men have to serve in the military, nobody can leave the country without a lot of cash in the Banco de la Republica—and people disappear here, you know.”
“And quelques choses,” Paul says.
Is she reacting to the idea that Michael and Irma . . . off in Irma’s room . . . Valentina shakes her head sadly, conveying her disappointment at oppression everywhere.
“Yeah, Valentina,” Ray quips. “Why d’ya think they sell cock for a dollar? Just naturally horny all the time?”
“I’m sure,” Valentina smugly observes, “I wouldn’t know about all that.” She pesters the ice in her drink with a fingernail.
Ray leaps into the pool. He’s wearing all his clothes. The clothes balloon out around him as he floats to the surface. His head splashes up and he spits an arc of chlorinated water in the direction of Paul, me, Valentina, Maria, all ranged along the tiles, everything ghostly and reddish in the wobbling glow of underwater lights. Around us the muted, variform darkness, climbing plants, potted ferns, a palm tree higher than the roof, everything evokes the primordial forest the neighborhood was carved from four centuries ago.
Ray propels himself to the metal ladder near the foot of Valentina’s chaise. He sloshes out, dripping copiously, staggers to the steps that go down to the patio, retrieves his drink, tastes it, then starts shedding his sodden clothing.
Valentina stands up. She walks three paces and lies face down beside the water, plunging her arm in.
“Of course you’re right,” she says. “There’s plenty of misery.”
Maria presses on: “Have you seen the children sleeping under the benches in the Plaza de Bolivar? And the kids in the doorways? On this street? They crawl under the chicken wire at the school-house and sleep in those demolished classrooms, curled up around their shoeshine boxes.”
“See?” Paul chides Valentina. “Ask Mother Teresa here.”
“Well, really,” I said, unfolding a metal chair. “It’s appalling. On the other hand, if I’m gonna feel ashamed about being here, logically I should feel the same way about living so near to East Harlem or the South Bronx. These people do thrive on tourist money, after all . . .”
Paul, distracted, says, “Tourist money in East Harlem?”
“No, what I mean was . . .”
“We went to the South Bronx,” Valentina sighs, gazing in Paul’s direction. “What was that place called that had the rappers? Fashion Motel?”
“Fashion Moda,” Paul says impatiently.
“Well, there.”
Just then Michael comes out to the pool. He yawns. It is quite dark except for the glow of the pool lights.
“I’ve seen terrible poverty,” Ray says, drawing attention to the fact that he is now stark naked. Maria announces that she is going to her room to fetch something. She walks past Michael, while Ray steps out of the shadow of the palm tree, holding his glass, staggering over to us. Swinging between his pale thighs, his long, dark member is a compelling sight. “In Rangoon,” he said. “And Jakarta. Back in the merchant marine. People knifing each other over bits of rotted food, same sort of climate. Takes the starch out of people.”
Now, to everyone’s mild surprise, Michael begins to disrobe, stands beside an empty chaise lounge, pulls off his shoes, pants, and shirt, his tanned body buffeted by dancing needles of light from the pool. His white underpants glow as they would under a disco UV.
“Ray, for heaven’s sake,” Paul’s saying, delighted and appalled by Ray’s nakedness. Ray struts up behind Valentina, whose spread-out body, swathed in an invincible white dress, is pointing to the far end of the pool. She raises herself, cranes backward. The sight of Ray’s nudity makes her giggle uncontrollably. She spins up into a sitting position, her back to the pool, but keeps her eyes averted. Now Michael dives into the pool, swims a lap, swims another lap.
“Look,” Paul tells me. “Ray has a big surprise for you.”
“I saw it,” I say. “Why don’t you make it bigger and really surprise me?”
Hector scuffs up the steps from the patio, a tray laden with fresh gin and tonics balanced in one hand. Paul has tipped him royally for working late. He’s out of uniform, in a pair of gray twill slacks. He pays no attention to Ray’s exposed dong. He heads directly for Paul, then performs a quick circuit of the rest of us, finally offering Ray the last drink. As Ray takes it, Hector makes an ironic bow. Valentina howls.
“This is a pleasant moment,” Paul opines. He settles on his lawn chair.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Ray says.
“Neither would I,” says Valentina, her voice weak, unable to control her giggles. Michael steps out of the pool, his underpants plastered to his flesh, the dark volumes of his groin vaguely visible through the clinging cloth.
“A nice break in a really tiring project,” says Paul. “Don’t you find? Everything seems to go along on schedule from day to day, but I’m extraordinarily worn out by it. But here we are in our little island of la dolce vita. Even if we are surrounded by a sea of misery.”
Ray dives gracefully into the pool, thumbs linked above his head. His body is strong, well-proportioned. He seems very small compared to Michael.
“People aren’t happy,” Valentina declares, her manic star fading, as a brisk, hot wind flaps the palm branches. Alcohol is creeping up on her brain. “Perhaps one day,” she says portentously, “we’ll have a world where people can be. We must hope, no?”
“A brighter world,” Paul exudes thoughtfully. “Yes. Where men can be equal. Full of bright voices and happy laughter . . . what a great idea! Michael, is that not a great idea? I’m surprised, darling, that no one ever thought of it until this very moment.”
Michael opens his mouth as if an opportunity to appear intelligent has finally opened for him, but I am much quicker.
“You realize,” I say, “in a brighter world, we’d all be swinging from lampposts in front of the Casa de la Candlearia.”
“Maybe you would,” Paul says. “I’d be sucking el presidente. I know which side my brighter world is buttered on.”
Valentina’s reservoir of empathy has clearly been drained by this discussion of local conditions. She now finds herself alone with three drunken homosexuals and Michael, with whom she’s never been particularly friendly or unfriendly. She’s been waiting all night for Luis Vasquez to take her dancing at La Piragua. They’ve been seeing each other . . . But it’s already eleven—she announces her retirement. And if Luis Vasquez arrives, she instructs us, we must tell him that Valentina is very, very disappointed.
“And very, very disappointing,” I add once she leaves.
“Oh,” Paul says reproachfully. “Valentina’s charming.”
“She’s very chic,” says Michael. “Isn’t she?”
“You just aren’t used to her,” Ray tells me from the pool. Paul watches Ray swimming halfhearted laps.
“Since you are,” I say, “I think you should be the one to tell her that Luis Vasquez is the biggest queen in Cartagena.”
“Not after you arrived.”
Michael stretches out on a chaise. He crosses his long legs, the white bulge of his groin creating a kind of seething lump of matter in the shadows. I force myself to “casually” get up, stroll around the pool, look at Ray swimming, circle around to sit on the tiles near Michael’s chair. I look at his flesh in the darkness, the long-muscled limbs, his black hair, his strong fingers gripping his glass . . .
“I told you the one about the kidney,” Paul’s dark silhouette says from several feet away, crossing its legs in the chair.
“No,” I tell him. Michael is staring at the pool, not reacting very much to what’s said, and his body is close enough that I could, if I dared, reach my hand out . . . I could even touch him in a “friendly” way, put my fingers on his fingers . . .
“A man went into a bar in New York,” Paul says. “He’s having a drink, a woman sits down next to him and starts talking. They have a few drinks and then they leave together. The guy’s married with kids, he doesn’t go home that night, the next night, so the family gets the police out. Four days later, the man wakes up in Central Park. Terrific pain in his side. He staggers off to the nearest emergency room. There, they make a strange discovery.”
Ray clings to the pool ladder from inside the water, listening.
“Cheap suspense,” he says, pushing himself backward back into the middle of the pool.
“They find that his left kidney has been surgically removed.”
“. . . ?”
“The strange part,” Paul says, “is that they’re not surprised. Apparently a lot of this goes on these days.”
Well, yes, it’s a good story—but I notice Ray’s body in the pool, Michael’s body sprawling on the chaise . . . one body “against” another body, Ray kicking up waves in the water . . . one of Michael’s feet rubbing the bottom of his other foot . . . Paul sitting in darkness, a black shape—and then, rather startlingly, Michael speaks:
“I heard something interesting, too . . .”
His voice trails off. He sips his drink and puts it down on the ground.
“Yes?” Paul uncrosses his legs. Ray glides underwater. Now he comes up, breaststrokes to the ladder, hoists himself up, a great dripping shower.
“Oh, I don’t know, it’s nothing,” Michael says. “I mean I did hear something, but . . . never mind, really.”
“Bloody hell,” snorts Ray, examining his shriveled fingertips.
I am watching Michael’s fingers as they stroke the aluminum arm of the plastic chaise, migrate to his thigh, and briefly stroke his large groin, returning to the chair arm a moment later.
“Well, I shouldn’t—but anyway, I was talking to a room service waiter at the Caribe the other day, I met him on the beach. A guy named Julio. So I was telling him why I was down here, and telling him, you know, the producer and his mother are living in this hotel—and I described Alex, and Julio knew who it was, he says, ‘Oh, sure the tall man with the sunglasses.’ ‘Yes, exactly,’ I tell him, ‘and his mother, you know she lives here in Cartagena.’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘yes, I know which man you’re talking about, but he’s not at the Caribe with his mother.’ ‘Oh,’ I tell him, ‘but he is, he’s with a very old blonde woman, his mother.’ ‘The blonde woman, yes,’ Julio says, ‘but you’re very mistaken. Señora is not his mother.’ ‘What do you mean,’ I said. Julio said, ‘Mr. Gavro visits the Caribe with his wife.’ ”
Somehow I knew what was coming, and moved a little closer to Michael’s chaise, watching Ray drip water on the tiles, and the wavering liquid shadows cast on the ancient brick walls running up behind the pool. Michael moved the leg closest to me, swung it over the edge of the chaise and planted his foot on the wet tile. I looked at the foot, inches away from me. The toes were rather long and bony and had fine little black hairs on them. As Michael talked his toes flexed and then arched outward. The longer I looked, the more Michael’s foot took on a life of its own, the more it became an erotic object, the locus of all his nerve endings . . .
“Now I get confused. ‘Mr. Gavro isn’t married,’ I tell Julio. Julio gets a knowing look on his face. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘I see. They are not really married.’ ‘No, of course they aren’t,’ I tell him. ‘It’s his mother.’ So Julio laughs and says, ‘That’s quite impossible.’ Because, Julio says, he delivers breakfast in their wing of the hotel, and one day last week, he came to their suite and found the door slightly open, and thought maybe they were on the terrace, because he knocked and there wasn’t any answer. So he took the tray in, and found them, he said, together in the act of love. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘Mr. Gavro was with a girlfriend or something.’ But no, Julio won’t hear of it. Then he describes Carlotta to a T. And, he says, ‘Mr. Gavro’s old wife, she looks like she is enjoying it very much.’ ”
The silence resounds around the pool. Weather happens. I move myself still closer to his body, to his foot, thinking of the prosthetic legs on Jaybill Hanratty’s veranda. Somewhere between the moon and the villa a cloud shaped like a long, poisonous turd hovers in the balmy air, blue as a fatal contusion. I think of how the Bay of Naples looked in moonlight. Ray shivers, scampers to his heap of clothes, pulls out his underpants and slips them on. He stands for a moment in the dense shadows and then takes a running dive into the pool. His body becomes a gelatin of concavities and convexities flickering underwater. Paul looks at Michael, I can’t really see his face but I know his expression is one of total rapture. Michael, acutely self-conscious, says, “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.”
It was the most Michael Simard had ever said all at once, and though it would be hard to say exactly how, we each in our respective dim corners of the pool area understood from the way he told the story that Michael Simard was as gay as a jewel, even if he’d banged every woman working on the movie. (I did not think he’d had Valentina, but you never know.) He was coming out to us, and Paul wasted no time in pulling his chair closer to Michael’s and revving up the conversation. It was a pretty unmistakable impression, but Paul had to be sure.
Next it was dope, another round of G&Ts, some joints from Ray’s stash, lines of coke on a little compact mirror. Paul stripping down to his underpants, diving in the pool, climbing out, tossing off the underpants, getting Ray to do the same with his, more drinks from Hector, who, from what I could see, looked bemused by developments. And then Paul was telling me to come in swimming, I looked about to melt in the hot night air . . . so I took off my clothes and jumped in. The water was cold, we thrashed around . . . more gin, more joints . . . and by the time it started to happen, we were all fairly drunk—no, we were all completely drunk.
Paul ran back into the house, upstairs, and came flying down again, crossed the inside hall, went down through the dining room. He came back holding a bottle of poppers and a fifth of brandy . . . Ray was standing behind the inclined back of Michael’s chaise, talking about . . . Berlin, I seem to recall, in a casual, steady voice . . . clubs in Berlin, places to eat after midnight in Berlin. And I noticed his hands were on Michael’s bare shoulders, squeezing them . . . Paul squatted down beside the chaise, uncapping the bottle and holding them under his nostrils, while I, sitting on the tiles on the other side of Michael’s body, began stroking his calf, lightly, with my fingertips . . . After a few minutes, we had all moved closer to the pool, Michael lying on an inflatable raft, Paul kneeling beside him as Ray knelt between his legs . . . sliding several fingers in and out of Michael’s . . . Michael groaning commands: “oooh, yeah, baby . . . that big powerful . . . take that . . . all the way in, yeah, baby . . .” I ran my tongue over his chest, taking occasional hits off the poppers and flying out of my skull into some other universe, water lapping the edges of the pool, the underwater lights casting giant bobbing shadows along the walls . . . “That’s it, take that . . . lick . . .” Then the configuration changed, Paul got on all fours on the inflatable with Michael kneeling behind him; Ray moved over and squatted down before Paul . . . angling his . . . into Paul’s mouth as Michael entered . . . while I buried my face . . . between Michael’s . . . Now it was “give me that nice tight . . .” to Paul, and “eat that . . .” to me. The sound track of this particular orgy tape was becoming a bit of a camp: “. . . get that . . . in the air . . . pump that . . . with your . . . ,” and several more variations (“Now I’m . . . your tight . . . with my fingers, man, feel those fingers . . . feel the . . . of that . . . in your . . . man . . . suck the head of my . . . suck it, lick it . . .”), lasting for two or three hours, far into the night . . . And the odd thing, as far as I was concerned, was that everything was about us having him, him having us . . . that is, I didn’t really do anything with Paul or Ray, they didn’t do anything with me—a few caresses, an occasional lick of each other’s organs and holes, scattered unfeeling kisses . . . but nothing, nothing significant. And Hector Luis spying from between the potted plants inside the house, watching the gringos making sandwiches . . . I felt the whole preceding period had been leading, inevitably, to the taut bud of Michael’s . . . on my tongue, as I slathered it and sucked it into my mouth, licking it open . . . The other odd thing was . . . now that we were having him, all unexpectedly, it was as if it was someone else . . . in other words, now that I could wrap my . . . around his . . . and give it a nice long . . . it no longer seemed like “Michael Simard,” but just any good-looking boy we’d picked up. Someone passed the poppers . . . I inhaled twice in each nostril and handed the bottle back . . . His flesh was everything. I thought of Jaybill Hanratty and his four stumps jiggling on his torso . . . and that thing she’d pulled from his shorts like a tube of whale blubber . . . and the wire mesh of that ashtray, and the weird rock or whatever it was I’d dug out of my mouth . . . and Irma’s lips and her crossed eyes and the sunglasses she wore and Michael’s serious Balkan-looking lips and now the tight aperture of his . . . against my teeth . . . while the oily shaft . . . of his . . . squished in and out of . . . A faint whiff of . . . coming from the junction down there . . . I angled my face further down and licked at Michael’s . . . loose in their sac, easy to roll with the tongue . . . they tasted anti-septically of chlorine. At about four in the morning it was my turn to get . . . offering my . . . like some futuristic bathroom appliance . . . Well, you get the idea . . .
Our orgy with Michael notwithstanding, we’d all been getting on each other’s nerves for weeks—in fact, a tremendous inventory of shit had gone down, and a day or two later we got some rushes from Miami that were not so wonderful. Some of the acting was incredibly wank, there were times when we all looked like we were in different movies, althougho . . . there was something funny about it, too . . .
Alex arranged through Luis Vasquez to screen the rushes at the art museum. The museum director even made a little cocktail party out of it . . . There was no sound track, so we sat there looking at random footage while Paul explained things. We weren’t supposed to deal with drugs or the army or the government, so Paul made up an entirely original story line. Carlotta invited various local snobs, old queers and dried-up party girls putting on an air of culture. Like a third-rate embassy party. One suddenly got a taste of Carlotta’s regular life in Cartagena: vulpine middle-aged and elderly right-wingers, with that touch of insanity they all have . . . jungle vivisectionists, retired army generals, motor scooter sales and rental people, Prussian lunatics from hill stations, plus the usual local bohemians, college professors, aging nymphomaniacs . . .
After that there was an excursion out to the Rosarios, where Carlotta packed a big picnic lunch, and Valentina got a rash from some island plant, and Alex complained about the budget . . . and a wrap party at the villa, where some of the transvestites from the Arsenal came, and Michael got into an argument with Maria, Irma ripped her dress on a nail in one of the chairs, Paul bought several grams of coke from Luis Vasquez, and we all took turns snorting it in one of the upstairs bedrooms . . . And around two-thirty in the morning, when everyone was thoroughly wrecked, Jaybill Hanratty and Simone showed up, her pushing him through the house in the wheelchair . . . And the next day I caught the morning flight to Miami.