MY FATHER, León Fuertes, was gone from home ten years, first wandering, then at war. During his errantry and vagabondage he learned their cognate woes, error and vagueness; for having missed on three clean shots at what he thought would be oblivion, he set about to thanatize himself in messy increments of degradation. This failed, as had rope, ratsbane, and revolver, and yet it served for a preparatory trial. It left his personality dismantled, hence ready to be reassembled more in concert with his fate.
Exile was a strong opening move; it forced the sacrifice of precious figures. There was no place for León, scholar, León, artist, León, athlete, in the dank fo’c’s’le of the Galactic Line fruit boat which he boarded at Bastidas, and since León, lover, had perished with Rosario, he started out peeled of identity. He took the clothes he wore and, for spiritual baggage, two equal weights of grief and incest guilt wrapped in self-hatred, sewn with shame, embroidered with his mother’s curse.
Move two: he ceased to bathe, to shave or groom himself,59 to wash his clothes. The deck plates glowed and buckled under the Carib sun like a biscuit tin forgotten in an oven, and all hands toiled the days out hoisting banana bunches from the hold and heaving them overboard (to keep the New York market firm, you know), so that what with his natural sweat, smear of banana oil, meal stains and galley sloppings, coal soot, salt grime, and brassy tarnish, León was soon a salient spectacle of filth, a fount of stench even to those misbegotten anthropoids his shipmates. From them and, through them, from the women, sodomites, and beasts they coupled with in mixed-blood, vermin-ridden ports of call, he recruited three separate regiments of lice, which quartered on his head and chest and pubis. He suffered these to bivouac in his beard, to march and counter-march along his eyebrows, to trench his groin, to forage in his navel, to invest his armpits, to cache their stores of eggs in every follicle of his body, and so to reinforce their numbers that in sleep his whole crown writhed with their maneuvers, until the man who bunked above him—a syphilitic Berber from Oran who liked, for his diversion while on shore, to bugger drakes and then feed off them roasted—gagged at the sight. He likewise let himself be occupied by several armies of bacteria, for whom he was content to furnish transport, via his fingernails, to all the orifices of his body and to every scratch break in his skin, till he was studded all about with sores and ulcers, buboes and carbuncles, verdigris abscesses and azure boils, cankers, swellings, cysts, festering impostumes, and creeping rot. By the time his ship had rounded Sandy Hook and run past Bedloe’s to the Battery, he felt himself a fellow to the foulest plagues on board, kin to the grey-backed bilge rats, sibling of roaches, heir to fleas and maggots. He’d sunk, in fact, to such a depth of rankness that his shipmates, not a fastidious bunch, refused out of disgust to sail with him. They attacked warily, all twelve of them at once, until they saw he’d offer no resistance. Then they dragged him down the gangway to the pier and flung him down against the clapboard shack that served for a longshoremen’s union hall and kicked him unconscious, stole his pay, cursed him and spat on him, pissed in his bleeding face, and left. An early gloom crept in to nuzzle his cringed neck. The wind flailed freezing rain across The Narrows, dampening his cotton shirt, goading him back to consciousness and pain, to exile and the smell of his own filth. Then León felt he was beginning to approach a level of debasement proper to him.
Next he became a beggar. Work, after all, always confers some dignity no matter what the task. Granted, during those years thousands of more enterprising men than León panhandled too, but León neither looked for work nor would have taken it if it were offered. He didn’t even work at begging, which, as a performing art, might have enjoined his talents. He did not, for example, wait by the traffic light in Union Square or trudge the inching lines of cars on Second Avenue to wipe the sleet from windshields—a performance which dirties the glass but makes the driver feel both warm and prosperous. He lacked the English for sad tales of woe, but it is clear he’d not have told them if he could have, since he neglected to put on such mimings-out of loneliness and famine as might have touched a tender-hearted housewife. Nor did he wield his ugliness to give the squeamish chills, to fright a coin from that paunched, velvet-collared advocate by conjuring forth the fellow’s dread of revolution, to nauseate (by an adroit manipulation of his stink) a bill from one of those two window-shopping dowagers, short-sellers’ widows, maybe, in their Persian lamb coats, their snug fur hats and muffs, or the beneficiaries of a pair of broking partners, richly-insured reliable bread-winners who, having tossed their own and all their customers’ money in the bear market’s maw, had tossed themselves off the Singer Building five years back. León would play no roles—and not because of pride either. He simply didn’t give himself the trouble. He shambled the avenues and sat in vacant doorways with a meek cupped palm, and if a nickel dropped, he clutched.
He was dependent, therefore, on such poorly compensated patrons60 as could make their own diversions from him: on Mrs. Esther Tunafish of 219 Amboy Street, Brooklyn, who was about to treat her son Larry, aged eight years, to a movie at the Roxy when the latter commented on how “dat bum deah” wore the Daily Forward as a muffler and who, mistaking León for a fellow yid, dropped him a dime; on Finnegan, the novelist and storywright, gloomed at that time in the dead waste and middle of his soul’s dark night, who was writing little and selling less, suffering much and drinking more, who was just back from his disastrous trip to Norway and about to leave on his disastrous pilgrimage to Hollywood, and who, as he emerged from luncheon at the Plaza (supported by his publisher, Mr. George Jaggers, and by his literary agent, a Mr. Cannon), spied León slumped against the famous fountain—famed in good part by one of Finnegan’s own legendary revels—and, feeling much better at the sight of one worse off than he, crossed the square under his own power, split a crisp five from the hundred dollars Jaggers had just loaned him, and pressed it in León’s paw; on the Honourable Miss Diana-Anne Withers and Mr. Richard Abrhams-Hoof, both British subjects (she was on tour with Mother, he enrolled at Berkeley), both nineteen years old, both terribly in love (Richard with Anne and with his own emotions, Anne with her own emotions, with her fiancé in England, and with Richard too), who had met first in San Francisco, then shortly afterward in Sacramento (Richard had glimpsed a page of Lady Withers’s Thomas Cook itinerary), then in Los Angeles (Anne had let drop the name of their hotel), and, finally, here in New York (with unsuspecting Lady Withers embarked for home on the Queen Mary and Anne permitted to stay on a week “alone”), who, being booked (in separate bedrooms) at the Dorset, had semiconsummated their romance in an Eden of dry humping, and who, both sad yet both a bit relieved to have come through unscathed, spent their last twilight in a stroll along Central Park South, until, breaking from an embrace, they were confronted by a ragged, pestilential beggarman shuffling sideways with his left palm cupped, his right arm drooped, his rheumed eyes pulled to slits, and thereby blessed with such a firm presentiment of death, and decay that they at once dumped to him all their change and then dashed back to their hotel, stripped themselves naked, and made forthright, procreative love all the night long; on Beulah Jane Nell Dosby, chocolate-skinned granddaughter of household slaves, who had lost her (common-law) husband to the First World War and her baby to the 1919 influenza epidemic, who since then had earned her keep mothering other people’s children, and who, when her Tuesday-night-off companion Jimmy Blue kicked León savagely out of the servants’ entrance of the town house where Beulah worked, hollering, “Get out my way, white trash!” felt her forever-close-to-hand maternal instinct roused, cussed Jimmy for a “mean nigger if there ever was one,” and gave León a quarter; on Mr. Barney Ross, Welter Weight Boxing Champion of the World, who was helping a brace of Harlow-style platinum blondes out of a cab in front of the Stork Club when he saw León stumble by, received a futuregram, wordless but woeful clear, to the effect that he, B. Ross, would soon be on the skids himself, and ordered his manager, who was paying the taxi tab, to “Give the bum a buck”; and, of course, on many others.
Then he gave up begging, which, after all, brought in some little money no matter how desultorily he practiced it. He ceased to venture from the Bowery—trash-heap of garbaged lives on which the after-images of used-up men scuttle like phantom rodents. No begging there—well, no professional begging. A passer-by might sometimes spare a dime, but passers-by were few while bums abounded, and León never saw another fin again to buy him a full month of sheltered flop. He slept outdoors, in pawnshop entrance ways, under the dinged marquees of closed-down burlesque theaters, against tenement walls, beside crate fires built in empty lots. He wore newsprint underwear beneath his now-disintegrating clothes and over them a 1918 U.S. Army blanket which he’d peeled from a dead bum. He groped his grub out of the offal pails of unswept hash houses and was, both to himself and to any observer, just another lump of refuse, a well-squeezed orange rind in which the counterman has ground his cigarette, or the end product of a Bleeker Street abortion swaddled up oozy in the Evening Sun and tucked in someone’s ashcan.
Though cold and inanition numbed his brain, here and there—beneath the spark-fretted firmament of the Third Avenue el, in the vast antres under Brooklyn Bridge—he yet recalled a León who had battled hostile circumstance and won, provided for himself, protected others; as well as other Leóns later on who’d been lauded and loved. But those identities seemed giant’s robes for such a dwarf as he was in his spirit. León, garbage, fitted much better. Despite his compost of encrusted filth, the wheeze of phlegm-choked lungs, the feeble, agued twitch of his bent shoulders, now and then—as, for example, when a burly bum elbowed him cringing from a spot beside a fire, or the night when he lay too weak to move under the pelting of a pitiless storm—he could remember when his body bad been healthy, clean, and strong. But since his soul was sick, wasted and soiled, pest-ridden, vermin-swarmed, infected, illness and frozen slime became him more. As death would perfectly. Death by starvation. Death by cold. Death by disease. Or death by violence—yes! Killed for his greasy blanket. Stuffed down a manhole, Drowned in a sewer.
He would have died, no doubt, except he had an accident. One midnight he lurched off the Bowery sidewalk after what looked to him like a stray dime (and was in fact a lamp-gleamed gob of spittle), into a passing car. Now, it happened that this car—a twin-six Packard limousine with swooping swan radiator cap and fender-mounted spare wheels—was piloted by one Seamus Grodiham, pre-Great War racing colleague of E. Rickenbacker’s, Western Front ambulance driver, now private chauffeur, who knew the perils of the Bowery route to the Manhattan Bridge and was proceeding with great caution, and who had the wit and self-control not to stomp on the brake when he saw León lunge out toward the slushy street but rather nudged the Packard’s flank against the forged steel stanchion of the elevated railway, doing a frightful deal of noisy scraping to the car but cutting its speed. This car, furthermore, chanced to be owned and occupied by Dr. Felix Heilanstalt 61 one of the great surgeons of his time and the most arrogant, a man who believed in neither God nor Satan, who, acknowledging no agency higher than his own skill, could never be resigned to losing patients no matter what smashed-up, run-down, or otherwise unhappy shape he found them in, and who, besides his wealth and culture, had enough New York savvy to have made many unbilled attentions to the police. Thus the impact and injury to León were less violent than they might have been. Thus, scarcely had he cannoned through the air, bounced on the pavement, slid, and come to rest against the curb, when he was in the care of a brilliant practitioner, who not only ministered first aid and diagnosed a wealth of trouble beyond shock and broken bones and a concussion, but who actually looked forward with great joy not to saving a clearly worthless life but, as a point of pride, to curing a tough case. And thus, also, León was not afflicted with the kind of bureaucratic bumf that has killed healthier victims of less serious accidents, for when a cop who’d heard the noise steamed up, looked from the Packard to its grubby victim, decided (rightly, but for wrong reasons) it was the dumb bum’s fault, touched his cap to minked and sobbing Mrs. Heilanstalt, growled at the clutch of derelicts bunched in the headlamps’ stare, mushed to where Dr. Heilanstalt knelt tuxedo-trousered in the gutter bandaging León’s head with his silk scarf, tapped him upon the shoulder, and reached ponderously for pencil and notebook, the doctor had but to flash his wallet with the miniature gold badges—gifts of commissioners and precinct captains—pinned inside, and all red tape was sliced.
The cop chugged for his corner call box. The doctor asked his wife to move up front. He and his chauffeur bundled León in the velvet car robe and bore him gingerly into the Packard’s stern. Doors slammed. The V-12 engine roared. From off away on Centre Street came the siren wail of the police motorcycle escort which was to meet the doctor on Manhattan Bridge. The Packard churned ahead, its fantail slewing, its right rear wheel flinging a curtain of grey glop on an abandoned pair of fur-lined pigskin gloves, toward which the derelicts converged in feeble scrum and which, after much vaporpanted cursing and some swaying motions more like dance than battle, emerged divorced and departed, one uptown, its ex west along Prince Street, on the hands of different bums.
Five months later León Fuertes emerged from Dr. Heilanstalt’s deluxe private hospital, cured in body and convinced in mind that passive modes of self-degradation were inadequate. From then on no sloth attended his career in defilement and dishonor. By dint of will he drove himself ever lower.
During his sojourn in the hospital León was sullen. His body was reluctant to respond. Though first and last a surgeon, Dr. Heilanstalt had enough interest in mental influences upon disease to have named one of his sons after S. Freud, and he remarked León’s thanatotic urge and welcomed it as yet another challenging complication. More, he liked his charity cases to provide some entertainment or instruction, so as soon as he had dragged León off the critical list, he saved some time each evening to drop by and try (in French, their only common tongue) to draw him into conversation, thereby to learn who León was, what made him tick, how he’d descended to skid row, and why he seemed unwilling to be cured. Failing in this—for León at the best answered in grudging monosyllables and wouldn’t say a word about his past—the doctor set about cajoling him toward a desire to live, said he was young and tough, bright too, as far as one could see, promised to put him on his feet once he was cured, give him some cash, find him a job, arrange his passage home, told him that he, Dr. F. Heilanstalt, had known hard times himself, had started out with nothing but his brain, his steady nerves, and his ambition. Then, when he realized León’s problem wasn’t lack of cash or lack of work or homesickness or dejection at being down and out, that León simply didn’t enjoy living, Dr. Heilanstalt offered to send him off to Spain, where there was a cracking good war in progress and a demand for corpses in potentia. This was a particularly exciting subject for the doctor, who had a strong if secret urge to join that war. He’d never been to war, having arrived in France with the old AEF at the very hour of the Armistice. He’d never have gone into surgery, he knew, but that he had a taste for blood and chopping up live bodies, and while surgery, like war, offered a means to slake this taste with honor, war, unlike surgery, gave one a chance to risk one’s own life, not just someone else’s. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t just a mite afraid to lose his marvelous life, which was filled up with honors and affection and respect, with money and the love of women, with fame and the grand kick of saving otherwise doomed people. The possibility that he might have some fear only intensified his urge to go to war, to risk his life and therein test himself, and he controlled this urge only with difficulty by thinking of his wife and family, his hospital and patients. In the end he lost control of it. He joined the U.S. Army on the morning following Pearl Harbor and three years later found his ordeal and his Valhalla when, as a brigadier of Medical Corps, he went forward to inspect field hospitals and was engulfed into the Battle of the Bulge. But at the time of León’s injury Spain had the only decent war-in-progress, and, yes, León should go off to Spain and fight. For either side; the doctor didn’t care. He was partial to the Loyalists but, in the end, it was the war that mattered, not its occasion or who won or lost. There León might discover joy of life—or, if he didn’t, fling his life away in a more picturesque and thrilling manner than he could do down on the Bowery. León listened to all this with a great, sullen weariness, an attitude that to an eavesdropper might have suggested that he was a psychoanalyst engaged in therapizing Dr. Heilanstalt. Meanwhile he went about his business of autodestruction by making himself a morphine addict.
In his first weeks at the hospital León received morphine regularly against the pain of broken bones. He found it the best surrogate for death he’d come upon so far, and he appreciated its potential as a means to self-debasement, so when the dosages began to be diminished, he exaggerated his pain—not by gross screams or wailing but by using all his histrionic talent to portray a man racked by great agony who tries his best to bear it but cannot. There was a nurse assigned to midnight shifts, not a young woman but a greying Irish spinster, whom his performances moved with peculiar force. She had great soccer-ballish bosoms on which a silver crucifix jello’d benignly, a round red face puffed to enforced good cheer, and not a few taut lines about her eyes and mouth which, to a careful judge, argued some secret sadness and much tension. León discovered that if before she made her rounds, he gouged his nails deep in his palms or, better yet, gobbled a fold of cheek between his molars and chewed it so bloody that her tongue depressor would emerge all gulesed, this woman, Nurse Edna Scallop, would, despite the language barrier, appreciate his torment and slip him a fix. And since Dr. Heilanstalt had put him in a private room, he could by gesture get her to stay on a bit, say a “Pater noster” with him or an “Ave Maria.” And of course she would, at his dumbshow request, massage his chest and neck to ease the discomfort of lying pinned in traction all day long. And then one night, as she massaged him so, he put his own hand to her meaty nape, raising a startled yelp, a stare of disbelief, and a hiss of indignation reflexed across the decades from the memory of adolescent pawings that Edna Scallop hadn’t stood for, but then, since he persisted and they were alone, she smiled and closed her eyes and let him touch her for a moment before brushing his hand back with a feigned roughness and saying, “No more of that, my lad.” But of course, the next night there was more. Nothing remotely sexual: he kneaded the tense flesh above her clavicles and palped her nape with the same blend of clinical solicitude and sister-of-mercy charity that she showed him. By the third night she was prepared to give herself up to this kindness for a few minutes. Before long his attentions had traversed her pachydermic back and reached her hips, and she would leave his room at once cased and excited. Then—But there is no need in a work like this to stendhal out a step-by-step account. Let it suffice to say that by the time León had been six weeks in Dr. Heilanstalt’s hospital, the character of his paddlings of Nurse Scallop had entirely changed, and that he had (at two-fifteen of a still Sunday morning, while a shuttered night light jaundiced half his sickroom floor and his freshly-emptied bedpan tottered frenetically atop the pushed-back bed table to the bump of Edna’s butt) manually proportioned to her the first orgasm of her life. From then on morphine was no problem. She was as badly hooked as he. One solace well deserved another. She might as well be damned for a thief as for a lecher. And what could she deny to the dear boy who gave her such joy and peace? León took with him from the hospital a morphine habit the size of Yankee Stadium.
There is a dignity to certain lives of vice. One may feel awe before the priestly dedication of the man who gives his life to booze, or heroin, or gambling. Strange gods, and yet some people live as truly for them as some others live for science, or for Christ, or for their countries. But León Fuertes never worshiped morphine. He sought his purpose in himself, not in external absolutes or causes, nor (saving his lunar month with Rosario) in other people, nor (much less) in groups or institutions. He was a man self-fixated. During the period I am describing his passion was self-hatred, and he strove to sink as single-mindedly as during other times he strove to soar. Morphine was but a means to his defilement. It fouled his brain, warped his metabolism out of balance, and robbed him of control over his life. And of course, it demanded daily propitiation whether one believed in it or not, thereby presenting him with further opportunities for degradation. I suppose León felt properly debased dipping his fingers in the cotton drawers of a kindhearted yet most bloat, repulsive woman, but once he left the hospital he found an even more disgusting way to procure morphine: he became a catamite.
M. Braquemard Fauconnier, the fifty-year-old Belgian who became León’s protector, believed he’d made the conquest of a lifetime. He was a tall, pale fellow with a slightly bulbous lower lip and milky blue eyes in which, if one looked closely, one could see an asthmatic eight-year-old who cannot get to sleep until maman brings him a good-night kiss. His schooling and some early lovers had endowed him with a wide though superficial culture. His Parisian tailor composed his flabby body into the counterfeit presentment of good health. His large inheritance permitted him indulgence, of his hobbies, which were art criticism and travel, and his vocation, which was sodomy. Although he hunted ceaselessly for fresh meat, he bore himself with great restraint and circumspection, exhaling but the faintest fragrance of effeminacy in his way of brushing his clear-lacquered fingernails across his lips while yawning or his tendency to speak a trifle quickly when a potential cher ami was within hearing. He was vain of his exquisite taste, his delicate, impeccably refined sensibilities, but he didn’t really like himself at all, and thus he marveled at what he thought was his seduction of a perfectly beautiful, ostensibly hetero, anally-virginal young man. In fact he was seduced by León.
Having decided to become a whore, León might certainly have looked to women. He had his youth, his education, his good looks. Dr. Heilanstalt had given him some cash and a good suit of clothes; five months abed had furnished that ethereal pallor which your moneyed dame often finds fetching. His experience with Edna Scallop must have shown him gigoloing is revolting. Perhaps he considered it and then rejected it as foul but not quite foul enough. In any case, he took the doctor’s gifts and Edna’s parting thank you of six flasks of morphine and went trolling for a wealthy invert. He fished M. Fauconnier so skillfully that Fauconnier believed himself the predator.
One may imagine62 León perched at the bar of the St. Regis, nursing a goblet of vermouth and soda, ostensibly immured in his own thoughts but keeping the room cased by discreet spyings in the mirror. Fauconnier glances in, sees something interesting, strolls up and takes a stool one stool away from León’s, shoots his cuffs, spikes elbows on the bar, orders Pernod, and passes some remarks in French to the jowled barman. León retains eyes front but smiles effusively at the first clever mot. Fauconnier looks over suavely, hesitates, receives no answering look, continues chatting—in a most animated manner, strewing out pearls of wit. In due course León smiles again—as to himself, you understand; as one who does not seek but cannot help to overhear; as one who knows the language, appreciates good talk, admires the speaker’s brilliant sense of humor, and, perforce, smiles. Fauconnier takes the bait:
“Vous parlez français, par hasard, jeune homme?”
They chat—or rather Fauconnier displays his cleverness and culture like a peacock’s plumage; León admires. The cocktail-hour tide seeps in, filling the tables, bubbling about the bar, and M. Fauconnier moves from his stool to stand at León’s side. They switch, at Fauconnier’s invitation, to something stronger—“Un whisky maintenant, par exemple? Bien? Formidable!”—and go on chatting. Yes, agrees León as Fauconnier drains his second whisky, it grows stifling in here. Yes, in point of fact, he’s free for dinner.
One may imagine them sconced in a fashionable corner at the Chambord, sucking braised capon. Fauconnier discourses with sibilant respect of Proust and Gide—of their literary genius, not their love life. It’s a bit early for the latter, but then he can’t resist and works it in discreetly, praising “pauvre Marcel” on the skill with which he fashioned blossoming young girls from his male playmates. And the delicious boy takes it in stride, shows no repugnance, even remarks that (he supposes) love remains love no matter whom it’s felt for or how it’s expressed.
One may imagine their handshake upon parting: León presses virilely before retreating to the Y. to plot campaign; Fauconnier lays his left hand over León’s right, breathes “Cher jeune homme,” then taxis off to an androgynous bordello on West Fourth Street to ’suage his thirsty letch. One may imagine their next day’s rendezvous at the Met Museum, their evening at the theater, their afternoon with Rubinstein and Chopin at Carnegie Hall. One may perfectly well imagine both their lunch at Rumpelmayer’s (where Fauconnier, after checking slyly to make sure that the two silver-fox-draped Jewesses at the next table, who might know French, were too engrossed in their own gossip to eavesdrop, delivered—just in passing, you understand, just to make conversation—his famous Bumberry Prize lecture, “Great Faggots of Art and Letters,”63 in which he proved by unassailable logic that since the golden days when Socrates cornholed Alcibiades, everyone with any taste or talent was queer) and their dinner at Delmonico’s (where León told with poignant entirely fabricated innocence how through his orphaned youth he’d yearned, to have a father and then looked up, moist-eyed and reverent, toward the slavering Fauconnier). While one is at it, one may also imagine their late evening conversation in Fauconnier’s suite, during which León reeled the fat cod in. León reclines like Mme Recamier on a silk-upholstered, blue-and-beige-striped chaise longue. Fauconnier, bleary with lust, has dragged a scrollarmed desk chair to within half a meter of León’s crotch, has clasped his hands firmly together to impede their premature activity, and has invited León to move in with him and to travel with him to Europe as soon as passages can be procured. León temporizes by declaring that he has no passport. Fauconnier lets his hands fly ceilingward, assures his dear fellow that such things can be remedied, what is money for? León looks down demurely and pleads that he feels so strongly drawn to M. Fauconnier that were they to live in close proximity, he might begin to feel, to do … Fauconnier grinds his teeth, manages to smile, to shrug avuncularly, and to whisper that there is nothing to fear in friendship, in the true friendship of men. Then León topples into sobs and confesses that he has already betrayed their friendship, and Fauconnier shudders, conjuring up the image of a youthful rival to whose muscular embraces León repairs each night. León confesses there is something terribly wrong with him, and Fauconnier glances mentally into a glossy tome filled with illustrations of scabrous maladies. Then, finally, León blurts out that he’s a morphine addict, and Fauconnier, unspeakably relieved—no, not just relieved, exultant, since he will have the wretched boy entirely in his power—reaches a trembling hand to León’s knee, calls him his dear, dear boy, grants him full absolution—“Ça! Ça n’est rien entre deux hommes du monde” —feels his hand tentatively touched in gratitude, in love, reaches it higher, transfers his buttocks to the chaise, leans forward, and flops, gasping and gaffed, in León’s net.
But if one is going to imagine all that, one is then obliged to imagine, one is forced to imagine, one is remorselessly compelled to imagine what follows in suite. An implacable and iron hand seizes one’s poor imagination and stuffs it down into the mess that follows next. One cannot help imagining a supine and unbuttoned León allowing those clear-lacquered fingers to roach over his flesh, letting that flabby body leach against his, permitting that bulbous lip to snail across his abdomen and clam his manhood. One is unable to avoid imagining León twitching his loins in uncontrolled, unfakable pleasure as several million of his potential sons and daughters spurt hotly onto Braquemard Fauconnier’s gold inlays. And one is powerless to blot out the image of León Fuertes kneeling before the chaise, resting his naked belly on the silk, submitting peacefully while the old pervert trowels cold cream onto his (León’s!) pouting bung, anoints his own puffy lob, and slides it in.
My father, León Fuertes, was a kept boy for three years—a Ganymede, a pederast, a gonzel. He delivered himself entirely to this profession, leaping with abandon to gross couplings, till Fauconnier wondered if he was truly a fresh convert and not a refugee from some Calcutta burdel who’d been at them from childhood. The acts, in themselves, would not have been degrading, but that they were inauthentic and done as self-punishment. León wasn’t gay, he wasn’t bi. He didn’t crave to have sex with men, he didn’t enjoy it. He flogged himself to it, against disgust, and later indulged in feasts of self-pity. He put on all the trappings: the twittered moues and languid mincings and simpering smirks, warping his mind so that his body altered. His voice mounted an octave, his hips rounded, his legs slimmed. He might have vaulted the sex barrier as cleanly as Rebeca had, but that he kept the organs he was born with. With Rebeca, the change occurred, and she adapted. León forced the change to procure defilement.
He went with Fauconnier to Europe on a fake passport with a phony name and a false nationality, luckily enough, or else the evil reputation that he won there might have blocked a return to himself and smashed his life. Nowhere on that decaying continent, not in Capri or fuming Venice, was there a more flagrant and disgusting swish. He mastered all the repertoire of vice, adding refinements of his own which would have shocked Gomorrah, and played on Fauconnier, wasting his body and reducing him into an idiocy of sexual dependence wherein León was able to extort large sums for this or that caress and get away with any infidelity or insult. His public behavior was a perambulating scandal up and down the Côte d’Azur. He referred to himself loudly in the feminine gender, flirted in blatant glee with handsome waiters, squealed sluttish epithets in packed cafés, and boasted of his loves, some real, some fancied, with a shamelessness and wealth of filthy detail that embarrassed even other perverts. At Cannes he rose from a winning hand at baccarat to embrace the croupier, kiss him on the lips, run mousy fingers down his shirt front and inside his pants, so that the poor man had convulsions, and the cards and chips went flying, and the game broke up, and León was whisked rudely from the building and warned on pain of jail never to step inside again. In Nice he put on drag and captivated a thirty-nine-year-old Wyoming cattleman, a dead ringer for Gary Cooper and as straight a man as ever pulled on boots. He’d heard about those Frenchy wimmin and their wiles, but he’d never bought much of it till he met the real McCoy, and León led him a terrific chase: check-to-cheek dancing under smoldering stars while saxophones moaned passion and the sea lapped softly at the smooth stones of the plage; hand-holding midnight strolls along the Promenade des Anglais; slow horsecab rides to nowhere punctuated by deep endless kisses; and at length, an intimate rendezvous, at which León (Léona to the gringo), pleading virginity and fear of pregnancy, stayed fully clothed but made him profusely happy with a triad of concatenated blow jobs. That night the man proposed. The next day León met him for lunch on the well-frequented Negresco terrace and (between the pâté and the sole amandine) pitched him to gibbering, foam-flecked lunacy by removing first earrings, then silky lashes, then lip rouge, then auburn wig, and then frock, so that before the maitre d’hôte hustled him off, León stood a moment in male bathing costume, thrusting the pouched proof of his virility into the gringo’s face. And in Villefranche one night he took on the entire starboard watch of a Greek frigate. He delighted in seducing married men, in splitting pairs of homosexual lovers, in debauching schoolboys, and he vaunted his conquests proudly, as though there were no finer thing in all the world than to have been reamed by every dingus in the south of France.
Actually, he stewed in self-loathing. His pose of shamelessness drenched him with shame, in which he soaked as punishment for shameful actions. Hence be was drawn to that particular class of thug (homos themselves, if often latent ones) who like abusing queers. He would pursue them—pimps, degenerates, the rankest sewer flotsam—and beg for love, or attempt fondling, till, whining and blubbering, he got his longed-for beating. And so, as yet another step in his descent, he put himself in bondage to such a type, a certain minor gangster of Toulon called Dédé-le-julot. He fell in love with Dédé, that kind of love whose gratification is injury and humiliation, a coprophagous love engendered by its object’s foulness. He left Fauconnier and became one of Dédé’s cocaine pushers.
This move paid him abundant dividends of squalor. Dédé abused him with satisfying regularity and cruelty. Dédé reviled him. When one of Dédé’s streetwalkers fished a particularly kinky client, Dédé made León accommodate the fellow. And when Dédé staged exhibitions in the shuttered barroom of a hôtel de passe, León’s was the main act in the repertory. Sconced on a mattress ringed by sweating men and prospecting harlots, he played Desdemona to a Mauritanian longshoreman, a marvelously well-equipped performer whose sole thespian defect was that he tended to become personally involved in the drama and to jam prologue, rising action, and catastrophe into three frenzied minutes. Thus León clawed himself down into the slough of degradation. Thus he indulged himself, for self-hatred is a mark of pride, and León surely cared about himself immensely to take such pains in his defilement. He did everything, absolutely everything, to lower himself.
At length he reached bottom.64 One night as he lay whimpering in his room—a cubicle in a weary old fornicatorium beside the harbor in Toulon—his grandmother Rosenda and his great-grandmother Raquel and his great-great-grandmother Rosalba came to him, although he saw them not, and brought him a kind of clearness. He remembered his bright promise and reviewed his terrible descent, his headlong fall which was no accident of chance but freely sought. He looked at himself with the eyes of that young León who had seen the bums and perverts of La Cuenca, his drunken stepfather, Florencio Merluza, for example, or the abject sweeper of the cheap cantina where Merluza drank. And these seemed decent men worthy to wear God’s image beside the 1940 model León Fuertes.
Then León wished himself a dung beetle or a toad or any crawling thing to which such baseness might be native, but there was nothing lower than himself and nowhere lower to descend to. And so he got up from his bed and went past the window—which let in the warm breeze of the May night and the immemorial raucous bruit of harbor revelry—and took his razor from the shelf above the washstand and cut his throat. He looked in the stained mirror, smiled sickly at himself, and cut his throat. He laid the edge of his razor against his flesh above the bridge of his clavicle and cut his throat. But no blood flowed. He pried the gash apart with his fingers and stared into it and rubbed it with his knuckles, but his veins refused to bleed.
Then León thought that he was dead and gone to hell. He had died the same night as Rosario and had been in hell ever since. One of his suicide attempts had worked, and he had dropped into a proper Christian hell where incest was punished with imaginative rigor for eternity. His damnation would drag on across the eons, on and on without release.
While he was thinking this, he watched the deep slash in his throat pucker and heal, and this recalled the way his wounds had healed years before on the Fort Shafter ball field. Then León suddenly decided he had gone to hell alive, not dead, that he had written his own ticket for the trip, but that something inside him had remained unsoiled and uncorrupted. Next he decided he had indulged himself enough in that kind of tourism, that it was time to search for a route back. He looked at himself in the mirror and laughed, half bitterly but half in cheer as well, and decided that he had seen some things of interest but that wherever he went from now on, he would not pass this way again. Then he bathed himself as thoroughly as he could and left that place and his morphine and his syringe and his life of shame. A few hours later the Wehrmacht smashed into France and furnished him a path to reclamation.