BY CHRISTMAS, 1920, Rebeca Fuertes was established in free union with one Florencio Merluza, off-and-on welder at the Reservation docks, who bad been circling her for years, floating in wait for her in shallow pools of lamplight on her evenings off, gaping hungrily week after week, almost getting his gills pinned back on one occasion by Ned Cod. Merluza was a short, thick, slurvoiced man with skin the hue and texture of a chestnut. His heavy-lidded eyes and lazy movements made him look drugged, though in fact he neither smoked canyac nor even drank but was quite simply so afflicted with the Latin plight machismo that all his energy of mind and body went to the service of his reproductive organs. He earned fair money when he worked, and when he didn’t, sold contraband cigarettes cantina to cantina, and on this income he maintained three common-law wives and near a dozen children, three households where bed, board, respect, and pliant flesh at all times awaited his unannounced arrival. He was, besides, ever alert to targets of opportunity: cantina barmaids unattended on the nights before an Army payday, lurable servant girls, the odd Reservation wife disposed to play a matinee while her husband worked, such whores as might take busman’s holidays, and on one marvelous occasion, an elegant young matron of the best breeding in Tinieblas who’d warned her husband if he walked his mistress out in public one more time she’d horn him33 with the lewdest drifter in the city. It was a rare moment when substantive sensation crept above Merluza’s pelvis, much less to his brain, but then he’d ponder vainly to comprehend the mystery34 of his letch for Rebeca, the city being gorged with younger, better-looking, and more willing women. Still, not a Thursday evening passed without his putting himself in her path one way or another, and when she and León left the Reservation and sought refuge in a bare room above a billiard parlor in an obscure alley off Plaza Bolivar, his dong led him to her like a dowsing rod. All was made clear to him the morning she allowed him to possess her (in a bowed fiber hammock slung across a corner of the room). When Rebeca sloughed her dress to the splintered floorboards, he felt the insects tattooed on her body swarming in his blood and guessed he’d smelled them on her years before when he first saw her. Within the hour (and until he died) she had him mooning like a cunt-struck adolescent. He got his job back, peddled his contraband more eagerly than ever, left his three wives, forgot all other women, installed Rebeca and León in two rooms beside the dockyard fence in the La Cuenca quarter, kept them as best he could, and hammocked with such frequency and energy that inside the year Rebeca bore his son.
Perhaps because this son, José,35 was born club-footed and dark-skinned, Merluza never cared much for him. He beamed paternal affection on young León and took an interest in his education to the extent of including him on his commercial forays through the nether regions of the capital. These usually began late in the afternoon with visits to certain barmaids who could be counted on to wheedle cigarettes from their commissary-carded gringo lovers: to Mariluz for Luckies, to Marisol for Camels, to Mariquita for Old Golds and Chesterfields, to Maribel for Raleighs, to Mari Carmen, Mari Pilar, Mari Lourdes, since some might be out of stock, or have locked doors and squeaking bedsprings. Merluza bought at five centavos the pack—all profit to the girls—and sold at ten out of a. paper sack on street corners, at stand-up eateries along Bolivar Avenue, in cantinas and poolrooms, beside hag-tended pans of lard-fried patacones and braziers where men broiled goat cutlets and chunks of skewered beef, in the vestibules of walk-up three-whore brothels, along the row of lottery vendors who parked their trays of hope before the statue of the Liberator in the center of Bolivar Plaza, outside the entrance of Hotel Excelsior, and, when the doormen weren’t looking, in the nightclubs down the block. León made rounds with him and learned the business, took part, in fact, contributed to its growth, for Merluza found that profits could be upped by bribing those nightclub doormen to let León sell inside. Let a whore fondle him or a soused swabby muss his hair, and León could move two packs at twenty-five centavos each and pick up a tip besides. So from the age of five or thereabouts León was trudging through the Black Jack (which showed a framed oil portrait of old Pershing over the bar and catered to the army), the Happy Time (a navy haunt), the Jacaranda, and the Gay Paree, inching his barefoot way among our Prohibition-parched Good Neighbors and the “hostesses” who helped them spend their pay, while horns blared dixieland and rumbas, and striptease dancers flounced their feathered merkins.
None of this sat well with Rebeca, but Rebeca was not herself. At first there were belt-thrashings and tongue-lashings for León and his stepfather when they came home, but soon she lost energy for this. Rebeca was born an artist, not a breeder; each pregnancy disturbed her more severely, and from the moment she conceived my uncle Pepe she fell into a depression, which deepened through a decade. She had hallucinations and obsessions. The ghost of Dr. Azael Burlando lurked in the plumbing of the tenement’s one toilet, and for years she never ventured to that corner of the hall but used a chamber pot, that León had to empty. She dreamed her skin turned black like Señora Perfecta’s and after that would not go in the sun or let one ray glance on her through the window. She grew fat and petulant, given to tears and screaming. She would lie fitfully for weeks on end, neither awake nor sleeping. And her memory became so vagrant that León, who’d got the gift of lying from his father, could claim, on creeping in two hours after midnight, he’d been in bed all evening and had merely slipped out now to use the toilet. Rebeca kept the pale ghost of a grip on him by whining out the catalog of sacrifices she’d made. He did the market and helped care for his brother. But mostly he was on his own, living in the streets and rounding with Merluza, wise and wary, sharp and tough, a veteran of the struggle for existence and an expert in the sociology of squalor and the economics of despair.
Which was just as well, for Merluza too went in decline, beginning with his union with Rebeca. First of all, he became a figure of contempt among his co-workers and nightgown compadres the instant that Rebeca transformed him, without the benefit of clergy or of law, into a husband. He husbanded his pay check and husbanded his seed and in return was nagged and scolded mercilessly. Worse, once she turned pregnant, Rebeca never let him in her bed again and made no bones at telling half the quarter of his exile. And when, after some months, he went in fear and trembling to seek release and self-esteem in the place where hitherto he’d always found them, that well was dried up too: he was impotent as an ox. He continued to fawn on Rebeca in hope she would relent, and in the meanwhile took to drink. Before long he had lost his Reservation job and grown quite useless as a peddler. Then León led him around or, like as not, would park him in a cheap bodega, a half-inchado piece clutched in his quivering hand, and go to buy the goods and vend them on his own. (Merluza lingered in a semistupor until the night of 29th-30th November, 1930, when, in the course of disturbances attendant on Alejandro Sancudo’s first leap onto the Tinieblan body politic, one of the coffee peons whom Sancudo had infiltrated into the capital swung his machete at a stevedore (who favored the constitutional President) and, missing, split poor Merluza’s head like a dry melon.) By age nine León was head of the household and sole source of its support.
I shall now show some slides procured at great trouble from diverse sources:36
The first offers a barman’s view of the Happy Time cabaret on a payday evening in 1927. In the background (hazed by smoke and/or imperfect depth of focus), three jazzmen formed of melting Hershey bars aim clarinet, cornet, and trombone at the ceiling while, below them, a mob mills on the dance floor. Our interest is, of course, the foreground group of three: a U.S. Navy chief, a B-girl, and young León. You will observe that despite his ragged shirt and grimy neck, my father makes an excellent impression. His curly hair and clear complexion are aesthetically appealing, while at nine he already shows the broad forehead, firm jaw, and wide-set eyes which, three decades later, proclaimed sincerity, integrity, and trust from all his public portraits. He holds up a pack of Camels, which the chief declines, and is just managing, in a most manly way, to hide his disappointment. The chief, whose weather-beaten face is youthed by whiskey, appreciates this stoicism, smiles as he shakes his head, and shoves a nickel toward him along the bar. Meanwhile, on the right, the girl, a beige mestiza whose flimsy, cheap red satin flapper shift suits her spare body, takes advantage of the diversion to pluck a dollar off the mound of bills stacked on the bar before our nautical booby.
This companion shot, next, shows the very scene again, except that now the girl has tucked her loot away and gropes her hand down in the sailor’s crotch. He, understandably, has turned to face her. And León, his noble stare dissolved in twinkles, scoops a buck for himself while winking at the camera.
Now, here we have the port of Ciudad Tinieblas on a dry-season day (the sky is cloudless) sometime before 29th November, 1930 (the north side of the Presidential Palace, just visible there at the extreme left, is not yet pockmarked from Sancudo’s coup d’état), and after 7th August, 1929 (when that Costaguanan schooner—a close look at her stern will show the legend “LOLA, MICHAGRANDE”—anchored at middle distance was impounded by Tinieblas on a smuggling charge). The grey cranes on the right belong to the U.S. Naval Dockyard in the Reservation. The destroyer beneath them, her stern (and hence her flag) obscured by the pier shed, is (if Jane’s silhouettes can be trusted) French, perhaps on a good-will visit. The U.S.-flag freighter warped against Tinieblas’s one cluttered pier is not, as you undoubtedly assume, a banana boat—Tinieblan bananas were (and still are) shipped from Bastidas, on the Caribbean—but probably on charter to the Copperhead Mine Company: she will have debarked a cargo of mixed goods and be preparing to sail empty to Puerto Ospino in Otán Province, there to load ore. The yellow blur in the foreground is the bent-back tree of the child’s wagon in which León Fuertes pulled his crippled younger half brother, Pepe (our photographer), around the town. And the white blur just below and to the right of the crosstree on Lola’s mainmast, there, is León himself, bare as a plucked gamecock. He has swum out to the deserted vessel, climbed her anchor chain and then her spar, and dived off. Now he plummets like Icarus down toward the oil-streaked water, while Pepe and those three less venturesome ragamuffins grouped beside the little pile of León’s clothes look on in (we may assume) respect and envy.
Next, yes, is an unnamed alley behind the Plaza Cervantes filmed through the bleary lenses of Florencio Merluza two or three hours after midnight in November, 1930. The scene is lit from the back doorway of a cantina called Viva Mi Desgracia, through which Merluza has recently staggered, led by León, after a night spent, respectively, in guzzling and hard work. León, as you observe, lies in a scatter of garbage in the posture of the Dying Gaul. He has just regained consciousness and is trying (fortunately without success) to rise. The nasty gash on his left cheek comes from a ring (we’ll see it later) on the right middle finger of the thug in the left center of our picture. This specimen (note his moronic grin and his skullcap made from a woman’s stocking) has pushed Merluza to the ground (hardly a problem with the load of booze he carries), has knocked young León down four times and robbed him, and now stuffs a fat fist of coins into his jeans while grinding an unsold pack of cigarettes with his right instep. The dark mass at the top center of the picture is part of the tower of the Cathedral of Ciudad Tinieblas, a fine example of Spanish Colonial church architecture, completed in 1664 and extensively restored in the 1880s.
Now, this next shot may at first glance seem somewhat gross, but I include it in the belief that scholars will not be so distracted by its lewder elements as to miss the deep insight it offers into the character of León Fuertes. It shows a room in one of the cut-rate stews I mentioned earlier and was, in fact, taken by an employee who came up the stairs with an impatient customer, noticed the door ajar, assumed the premises vacant, and stuck in her head. The gentleman there supine on the bed may be identified by his moronic grin (equally brainless in lust as in cupidity) and by his skullcap made from a woman’s stocking. Close examination of his right hand, drooped almost to the floor, will reveal a cobra ring, the tail and body writhed about his middle finger, the hooded head raised to make the knuckle-duster. I suggest that you tear your eyes away from the naked, kneeling girl who is performing on him what is called an “unnatural act” and direct them to the lower foreground, where León Fuertes is also kneeling. The golf ball-sized object which he has tweezed up from the small box near his knee and now so carefully inserts into the discarded sneaker of our ecstatic fellatee is a plump Tinieblan scorpion, whose legs (but not whose sting) have been snipped off. From the condition of the star-shaped scar on León’s left check we can date this incident as having taken place some four or five months after that depicted in the previous slide. Revenge is a dish that is best eaten cold.
Next, a final slide. No grossness here; this is a rite of passage. The nude youth candidly captured in the manly act is León Fuertes. The nude girl whose slim legs twine his waist and who stares at us over what seems to be his left but is, in fact, his right shoulder is Maribel Canoa, one of his cigarette sources and our photographer—she snapped the shot in the tilted mirror above her chiffonier. The newspaper on the table beneath the open window beside the bed is the Correo Matinal for 2nd May, 1931 (the date can be mirror-read with a good glass); it establishes León’s age at a precocious thirteen years, five months, and twenty days. The blood-red sun there in the upper left-hand corner of the window is about to fall fizzing into the Pacific, establishing the time at 2354 hours, GMT. Maribel met León about ten days before through a fellow barmaid at the Cantina Trópico. Though only seventeen herself, she was wise enough to recognize him as more of a man than anyone else she knew. He maintained a strictly professional attitude in their business dealings, but when, on the afternoon of the incident depicted in the slide, she mentioned that the sergeant who was paying her rent that spring was on guard duty, and offered to throw in a kiss with the four packages of Lucky Strike she had for sale, León required no further encouragement.
Now, if you can bear the scene a little longer, I am going to ask you to clamp your mind’s eye shut, to tune your mind’s ear to the jolly squeak of bedsprings, to nuzzle your mind’s nose into the hollow of Maribel’s neck, to accustom your mind’s back and waist to the eager clutch of young and ardent flesh, to dip your mind’s member in the warm pouring of requited love, and so to know in your mind’s gonads the joys of manhood, achieved at age thirteen and at another man’s expense. Have you got it? Another moment? Very well: the sun won’t set, the girl won’t age, the ardor will not cool until I flip the switch. All right, folks? Thank you, folks. Lights, please.