2

Pace and Terry’s trip proceeded uneventfully until they crossed the border into Mexico from Brownsville to Matamoros. It was in El Jabalí, a bar in Matamoros, that they met a man about Pace’s age or older named Hugo Gresca, who spoke fluent English and told them he had worked for many years as an assistant to the movie director John Huston.

“I was the one who took Huston to Puerto Vallarta and found the location for him to shoot Night of the Iguana. He bought a property I discovered down the coast accessible only by boat. I was a young buck back then, a handsome devil, you’d better believe. Remember in that movie how Ava Gardner’s always dancin’ on the beach with those two caballeros shakin’ maracas who’re supposed to be her playthings? Well, scratch that, amigos. It was yours truly she took up with, taught me what she called the bullfighter’s hello, which was to take her from behind when she didn’t know you were there. She drank a lot and was losin’ her looks a little, but she was a real woman. Those prancy-ass beach boys were maricones, both of ’em; they doted on Ava, though, brought her whatever she wanted: booze, boys, mota. She liked small men, married Mickey Rooney, for God’s sake, and Sinatra, both shrimps. Ava lived in Madrid, mostly, at the Hotel Victoria, where the bullfighters stayed, and she had her pick. I got nothin’ but good things to say about that woman.

“John took me to his estate in Ireland, where we drank whiskey every morning with breakfast, then chased foxes on horseback with the dogs. It rained all the time there and I needed the sun, so I went back to Puerto Vallarta and became the caretaker at John’s hideaway for twenty years, off and on. It was a great life, amigos! Beyond dreams. After John died, I lived in New York for five years with Raquelita Pamposada, the Uruguayan actress known as La Pitonisa, the pythoness. She made only a few movies, most of them in Spain and Argentina, before she married a Swiss banker. The divorce settlement allowed her to live a life of luxury on Sutton Place, in a tri-level apartment above Katharine Hepburn’s. This is where I met her, when John was spending time with Hepburn and Bogart before filming The African Queen. Raquelita had a very small part in that movie, as a Congolese prostitute Bogart’s character consorts with prior to setting off on the river. She told me he had terribly bad breath and confessed to her that he could no longer get a hard on after too many years of hard drinking. Unfortunately, the Congolese whore part got cut out of the final version of the film because one of the producers thought it would prejudice the audience negatively toward Bogart. This was La Pitonisa’s swan song, and nobody saw it. She showed me the reel and it was awful, though she was a knockout naked and painted black. I gave her the bullfighter’s hello and goodbye both the first time I saw it.

“Later, the pythoness, who was famously lazy, grew quite fat and began spending her money and time at European spas, health farms, to lose weight. She had plastic surgery, too, which made her look like she was chewing tobacco all the time. Eventually, she preferred goin’ to bed with women, gave up men, includin’ me. Shot heroin, too, and sailed that Chinese junk straight to the isle of Lesbos. So, amigos, I made my slow exit, reluctantly, suffering humiliation upon humiliation. Despite her unsurpassed narcissism and diabolical behavior, I remained hopelessly in love with Raquelita. Only Dolores del Rio, or maybe Hedy Lamarr, had a face to rival the one she had before those witch doctors cut into it. Compared to La Pitonisa, Garbo might as well have been a chimpanzee.”

Hugo Gresca’s monologue, fueled by Cinco Estrellas and Negra Modelos, Pace and Terry realized, would not cease until he collapsed or died. They never did find out how Hugo had ended up in Matamoros because just as he started to tell them about a night he and Sean Connery and Huston spent in a Kabul whorehouse called The Den of Forbidden Fruit during the filming of The Man Who Would Be King, a very large, purple-black man wearing a crocodile-skin vest over his bare chest, entered the bar and lifted Gresca out of his chair and without saying a word carried him away.

Terry was awakened early the next morning in their motel by a call from his father. Terry’s mother had had a heart attack and she was in the hospital. Pace drove Terry back across the border to a small airport in Brownsville, where he got on a plane to San Antonio. From there he could catch a flight to Raleigh-Durham or Charlotte. Pace again pointed his 4Runner south. He needed more of Mexico, or thought he did.