CHAPTER THREE

Edward West’s habit of collecting intelligence (which began for the most intelligent supervision of American gangsters and the American government for Horizons A.G.) grew to international proportions when the menace of world communism revealed itself to him, then doubled and redoubled within industries and governments of countries throughout the world in personnel, equipment and expenditure as his responsibility grew for reinvesting his gigantic sums of capital and credit in the business and industry of the planet. His facilities for gathering intelligence anywhere were so prodigious, his paranoiac need to confirm/ allay suspicion so deep, that he used this suborganization for all manner of things, things beyond politics and industrial espionage. Among these investigative interests was Walter Wagstaff West, then in her turn, Mayra Ashant.

When he received a report that his son had dated a nigger seven times in three weeks, Mr. West was indignant and not a little hurt. At Mr. West’s own instructions to Charles Pick, Jr., the boy had been raised and trained to understand that the slightest nuance of change in his public posture could be misinterpreted by the press and the heroic West reputation made to suffer. The idea of his own son being attracted to a nigger was both degrading and viciously exciting to Mr. West, and he resented the boy’s power over him in both respects.

Then photographs of the girl arrived, together with a detailed statement of her background, career and interests; and staring at that dark face (and actually believing for a second that he was seeing his own mother again), then reading that she was a gifted painter—an artist as his mother had been an artist-thrilled him and revolted him more distinctly. He had Willie assign a photographer to her for fullest hidden coverage. She was photographed on the streets, in restaurants, in her bathtub, in Walt’s arms, painting, dressing, undressing, dressed and naked—for three years, from the time she met Walt until they left for Bürgenstock West—in London, in Paris, in Rome and in many lovely country towns and grubby cities in between. The photographer, Bryson Johns, had become so accustomed to espionage photography that it is to be doubted whether he could still take a successful straightforward portrait in the sunlight. He used infrared, masked cameras screwed permanently within fixtures inside her flats, which he serviced daily, removing film and reloading, while Mayra did household shopping. Consequently, of the two thousand-odd photographs of her in Mr. West’s files there were none showing her with grocers or butchers.

Mr. West would sit in the library at Bürgenstock West and go over Mayra’s lovely body inch by inch with an enormous magnifying glass, spending a half hour studying her haunch, staring for twelve or fifteen minutes as she sat on the toilet seemingly staring directly at the camera. He had details of her anatomy greatly enlarged: her long hands, her mons Veneris, her ear, her eyebrow, her bottom, her mouth. His passion was renewed all over again when he was told that she was studying Italian, and Bryson Johns was then assigned to make tapes of her speech, which was capable of exciting Mr. West strangely as he had never been stirred before. His years seemed to melt away. He became capable of erection, and once again—but surely the last time in this short final period of his life if he could bring this black woman to him upon the Bürgenstock—he had Willie fly whores in from New York, and he survived two orgies in which he poured champagne into the girls, every part of them, then drank it out of them.

A leading Italian architect was hired through the West Information Services in Rome to become acquainted with Walter, then to invite him and the black girl to dinner at the architect’s villa, where Bryson Johns had rigged up a secure sound motion picture recording unit and was able to expose one and a half hours of uncut movies of Mayra complete with sound track. Mr. West screened it again and again. He had it scored with wailing Sicilian music, unmusical music but moving nonetheless. He had the right to these things. Nothing in his life meant anything if, with the fruits of his prodigious labors, he could not bring his mother back to him in the form of youth, moving with such frightening grace, speaking hoarsely in the speech of her people, which, if not quite Sicilian speech, was close enough, Italian enough. This was his right. This was what each man should give his life to—his own past, his own youth, the few precious moments of utter, total untarnished happiness with his mother before she left him. But she had left him. She had gone forever. Forever. FOREVER. She had to be punished. She had to be found and fondled. All the joys that she was so capable of giving needed to be abstracted from her, then she had to be punished because of the word “f o r e v e r,” embedded so inextricably in his soul. But he must not hasten the time. Savor everything slowly.

Gradually Bryson Johns worked out techniques whereby sound motion picture installations were possible and effective in her bedroom, in her workroom and in her bathroom. The man was a wizard, and Mr. West saw to it that he was bountifully rewarded. As the film was shipped into Bürgenstock West, expert editors would shape it into many separate forms, into features and featurettes, as it were, so that if it were Mr. West’s mood to enjoy her walking across Paris, in parks, entering and leaving shops, he could do so; with this went a narration by Mayra herself, a narration taken from the recordings of her accounts of the day to Walt. If it was Mr. West’s whim to hear them rage together in quarrels over why she would not marry him or to listen to her heartbreak when she discovered that he had once been a priest, this was on film with words and music and really excellent photography. He luxuriated with her in her bath, he agonized with her at her easel. He would run close-up after close-up of her gasping twisted face during orgasm after orgasm. The cost-accounting sheets allocated one million three hundred nineteen thousand eight hundred and fifty-four dollars and nineteen cents to the project. The films of her asleep were the most serenely rewarding because sleep, in its external essence, is so much like death, and he would dig the nails of his fingers into his thighs in the screening room and often cry out to the screen in his need to punish her and bring death to her, because she was an artist, because she was his mother, because she spoke in that ancient and evil tongue and because, most of all, because she was a nigger.

He would lead her to the mountaintop, drugged into a twilight sleep. He would remove her clothes slowly and he would enter her. Again and again. Over and over, as long as his power was there. Then he would beat her. He would smash her face and break the bones of her arms and her chest and her legs as he had been forced to do so many times before when they needed punishment. But she was his mother and a nigger, and he would drag her to the edge of the mountaintop, then cast her down, down into the pit, down into the ultimate punishment. Then he would be renewed and he would start again, wholly cleansed, his mother ripped out of his sensibilities forever. When he finished her nigger punishment he would start again and cause white America to rise up and tear and break and smash down the sickening threat of the nigger living everywhere within the America he owned and loved, threatening white America like an invidious disease.

He did not tell Willie his plans. He was not as sure of Willie’s loyalty or judgment any more. He would wait. When the punishment was over, his mind would be clearer. Some sign would be given to him to know what he was to do and whom he should choose to help him in his crusade.

As his archives expanded with her image and her voice, her grace in movement and her beauty, she came to be everywhere he turned. The black woman was there. And the black man was behind the black woman—all Communists, all animals. She was everywhere he turned, and the nigger was more and more everywhere across America, possessing what was not his, threatening the home, the farm, the blood strain. His mother must be kissed and loved, but the artist she had reached out so feebly to become must be denied, because the soul is not free, the soul is bounded and baled by the strong cables of religion, which long, long before had mapped the way of the soul’s journey through all life. The soul was not free. Art is a lie. The mother must be cherished, art denied, and the alien-animal nigger punished. Punished wonderfully and terribly. More than terribly. Worse than terribly.