A SEASON IN HELL
Later, when it was over, Beth Browder asked herself what kind of madness had possessed her. But in those early heady days of her live-in relationship with Charles and Lucinda Céspedes, she felt she was existing at a level of extremity and glamour beyond anything she'd ever imagined.
It was a whirlwind of dancing, drugs and sex, and the whirl was so fast, so disorienting, her head seemed literally to spin. It was as if her view of herself and of the world had gone cockeyed.
On their first outing as a threesome, they attended a birthday party for matinee idol Juan Sabino at the country home he shared with his wife, almond-eyed film star Juanita Courcelles.
An outdoor dance floor had been erected over the terrace. Intricate fireworks rocketed across the sky. The guests were beautiful. The tango band was superb. Beth danced with half a dozen partners, then joined the Céspedes when they went skinny-dipping in the pool.
"Tango's devouring, isn't it?" Lucinda whispered as they floated side by side on their backs. "I think of it as being like a big cat, say a cheetah or jaguar, that grabs you by the throat then won't let go."
After their swim, in search of towels, the three of them stumbled into the middle of a candlelit group-sex scene in the pool house.
Beth held back, even as Charles and Lucinda urged her to join in. There were limits after all. She was still getting used to frolicking with the two of them. But the chiaroscuro effect of the candlelight as it licked the flesh of lean young writhing bodies, endowed the scene with an essence that reminded her of a baroque painting, and that fascinated her even as it repelled.
The following day, Lucinda took her to a custom shoemaker's shop where they purchased the latest in tango-wear—tango shoes with narrow leather bands that criss-crossed their legs, wrapping them a good eight inches above the ankles.
The shoes were broken in that night at Club Noir. Since it was a weeknight, action at the club was slow. Poli Ríos closed the place at three a.m., then invited his remaining clients to a party at his loft in Puerto Madero.
It was a large space on the top floor of an elongated brick building, one of several warehouses converted into chic condominiums. To Beth's delight, Poli also invited several of the most famous stage tango dancers in the city. After giving a private performance, the stars circulated among the guests. Beth danced with two men she'd seen perform in San Francisco. As she put it to the Céspedes, as they drove home at dawn: "It was like dancing with tango gods!"
At the end of that first week, Lucinda loaned Beth a ball gown, then summoned a seamstress to the house to custom fit it. That evening the three of them, Beth and Lucinda in gowns sparkling with sequins, Charles in white tie and tails, attended a performance of Wagner's Die Walküre at the Teatro Colón, watching from first ring box seats as they sipped champagne.
The opera house was magnificent—five tiers of balconies. The production was set in a retro environment of art deco structures, nineteen thirties period limousines and huge overpowering fascist era sculptures, with singers from Spain and Germany performing the starring roles.
Reveling in the sets and metallic costumes, Beth closed her eyes to allow the great seething shimmering music to wash over her. It was the first time, she realized, she'd immersed herself in the Wagnerian universe, that strange mythic world of Nordic Gods, Goddesses, passions and betrayals.
At the end of Act One, the famous incest scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde knocked her out not only by its beauty but also on account of its resonance with the Céspedes. Siegmund's sword blazed when he set it down beside the bed. Sieglinde's mirror-polished bra flashed lightning when she peeled it off. In the midst of the scene, Beth stole a glance at Charles and Lucinda, hands clasped, straining forward in their seats, eyes riveted to the stage.
After that everything in the opera was anti-climactic until the finale when Wotan, punishing Brunhilde, surrounded her sleeping body with a magic ring of fire.
Joining in the standing applause, Beth overheard Charles mutter something to Lucinda about "gesamtkunstwerk." On their way home, she asked Charles what that meant. He explained that it was a German word meaning "total artwork," the Wagnerian ideal in which story, music, voices, costumes and sets work together to create a powerful momentum that forces total attention.
"It's our ideal," he told her, "making a world of our own into which we will allow nothing ugly to intrude." He glanced at Lucinda. "Isn't that right, sweetbird?"
"Yes," Lucinda said, smiling at Beth. "A fine ideal too, especially in stuffy old Buenos Aires."
They took her for the weekend to their estancia, a ten thousand acre country property. The main house was a sand-colored Arabian Nights fantasy palace complete with notched walls, pillars, arches, courtyard and tiled courtyard pool. The ceilings were hung with fabric vaulting giving the place the feel of a seraglio. On one side of the house was a long building used to stable polo ponies, on the other a matching garage filled with their late father's collection of vintage automobiles.
Studying the cars, lined up and gorgeously restored, Beth wanted to caress them. Among her favorites: a grey Delahaye roadster, a lacquer-bright red Delage, and a huge silver-and-white Hispano-Suiza limousine, the most magnificent automobile she'd ever seen.
Their father, Beth learned, had been killed three years before in a freak accident during a polo match. He left them the cars, the estancia, the house in Belgrano, along with a fortune in foreign bank deposits.
"Polo's a blood sport," Lucinda told Beth. "Dad died on the field of battle. For him there could have been no better death. I just hope ours', Charles' and mine, will be equally grand."
That night the Céspedes hosted a milonga attended by the local polo-playing gentry, a party that, in its decadent extravagance, exceeded anything Beth had yet experienced. Music was provided by a band bused in from Buenos Aires. The musicians all wore formal wear, while the dancers wore masks and matching black formal trousers, men and women alike bare to the waist except for the suspenders that held up their trousers.
It was topless tango, breast-against-chest tango, the formal properties of the dance, torsos held straight while legs entwined and thrashed below, contrasting with moist bare-skin body contact above. Beth found it exceedingly erotic, far more so than if the dancers had been bottomless or naked.
Lucinda offered her view of the party on their way back to the capital:
"We masked our faces, covered our legs, exposed our chests, making every coupling anonymous. That way all of us, all good dancers, made ourselves interchangeable."
Interchangeability along with gesamtkunstwerk seemed to be a conscious theme in their lives. Worlds overlapped, people fit together in different ways, yet everything was connected in a closed self-referential circle. It was all, it seemed, part of a personal philosophy that regulated the way they lived. Beth didn't fully understand it, but hoped eventually that she would. She had come to Buenos Aires to immerse herself in tango, perhaps find her Mr. DD in the process. But now she found herself immersed in something far more fascinating and perverse.
She did not participate in their fencing lessons, but watched from the side of the long, mirrored dining room/ballet studio, as their fencing master, lean, bald and very strict, supervised their practice. She observed Charles and Lucinda as they moved rapidly up and down the long room, thrusting and parrying, giving out with grunts and yells, always, after making hits, whipping off their masks, exposing flushed faces contorted by stress yet painted with wild grins.
They loved combat. Even their lovemaking was combative, punctuated with scratching and slaps. It struck Beth that their fencing matches, the ebb and flow of victories and defeats, were part of some kind of lifelong sibling battle for supremacy.
Beth joined in their kickboxing class, held in a second-floor gym above a furniture store in Recoleta. The instructor was a Filipino, kind and serious. Fellow students ranged from high school kids to young professionals. After getting floored a couple of times, Beth sat out the remainder of the class. Charles and Lucinda, she noted, practiced carefully with others, but when paired, attacked one another with vigor.
On the way home they gently mocked her for her cowardice.
"What's the matter?" Lucinda asked. "Couple of measly spills and you cut and run?"
"She's not used to rough play," Charles said. "What she needs is some toughening up."
Back at the house, Lucinda challenged her to a boxing match. "Not kickboxing, but the old-fashioned kind. Straight punching the way prizefighters do."
Beth, after considerable taunting, realized there was no getting out of it, that they'd keep after her until she showed them she had heart.
The match took place in the dining room/ballet studio, she and Lucinda wearing headgear and regulation gloves.
Charles, assigning himself referee, insisted they fight bare to the waist.
"I hate sports bras. Please take the damn things off!"
"Let's play along," Lucinda whispered, amused, stripping off her bra. "His fantasy is we'll be fighting over him!"
They went at it for three rounds, danced around one another, jabbing, lightly punching and recoiling, laughing as from time to time they clinched then danced a few tango steps together before Charles, annoyed, pulled them apart.
In the final round, Lucinda's eyes turned steely as she began to slug away. Beth, not wanting to be hit in the face, retreated and covered up. Then, after Lucinda punched herself out, Beth advanced and threw a couple of hard punches herself, one of which connected, giving Lucinda a bloody nose.
"No más! It's a tie!" Charles shouted, clanging the dinner bell he'd used to mark the rounds. "I can't bear to see my beauties hurt!" he said, throwing his arms around them, raising their arms high to signify they shared the victory.
Afterwards there was a smell of mingled sweat in the room. Stimulated by the aroma, Lucinda went at Beth as soon as Charles blanched her nose.
"Don't you want me to shower first?" Beth asked.
"I want to have you just the way you are!"
Charles laughed. "You two together are so hot!"
The three of them tumbled together onto the fencing mat on the floor. As always, the Céspedes requited her. To amuse her, they spoke of her as if she weren't there, as if she were some love object available for their use — a position which, Beth understood, she would find unbearably humiliating in "real life," but which, in this hot-house atmosphere, she found intensely pleasureful.
There were things they did that scared her, games they played which she could not bring herself to join. The most frightening of these was what they called their "quests"—late-night trolling expeditions to the seedier quarters of the city in which their handsome faces and snazzy vintage Facel Vega were the lures by which they summoned fresh partners for anonymous sex. Working class boys, adventurous girls, waiters and bellhops walking home from work, even street whores and male hustlers they found on the streets surrounding the tourist hotels—all were potential quarry.
The Céspedes were unfailingly polite with these pick-ups, acting neither snobbish nor superior. They would speak to them softly, offer them a ride, subtly bring up the matter of sex, then entice them back to the house where they would take them to their bedroom, make love with them, and, in the morning, provide café con leche, bread and jam, then politely ease them into a waiting prepaid cab.
Only after these objects-of-their-desire left, did they dissect them. They'd summon Beth to their room, then hilariously describe the goings-on, awkward gestures, naive remarks, while acknowledging how well these strangers had slaked their need.
Beth was appalled. She told Charles and Lucinda she would have nothing to do with such antics. She took to locking her bedroom door when these strangers were in the house. The game was just too dangerous, she said.
"But we always take precautions," Charles assured her.
"You're talking about STD. I'm thinking about a knife in the belly."
"Oh, pooh!" Lucinda retorted. "You North Americans! You don't understand us at all. We make love with these people. We hook up for pleasure. No one would break that compact here."
"We trust our instincts," Charles added. "We know how to tell good people from bad."
"Look at the way we took you in, gave you the run of our house!"
"Come on! I'm a university professor!" Beth reminded them.
They hooted at her.
"Right, an intellectual!" Charles said. "We're certainly safe with one of those!"
"You just showed yourself a terrible snob, you know?" Lucinda gently pointed out.
"What you don't yet understand," Charles said, "is how delicious these members of the lower orders can be. They have excellent personal hygiene."
"Cute ten peso haircuts."
"Cheap toilet-water scents."
"Rough hands."
"Fascinating slang."
"The boy we brought home last night he kept calling his penis 'my ladle'." Lucinda giggled as she quoted him. "As in 'may I dip my ladle into your tureen.' It was hilarious!"
"We had a lesbian in the other night. She kept saying to Lucinda: 'Let's play tortillas.' You know like patty cakes. That was her word for frottage."
Amused and chastened, Beth agreed to tag along that night as they trolled.
"But no commitment," she warned them. "I'll just hang out, then play it by ear."
At midnight, when they started driving around the docks of La Boca, Beth grew frightened. She'd been warned by Sabina that this was one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city.
Noting her fear, they drove back down to Puerto Madero, the area at the port where Poli Ríos had his loft. Here they parked in the shadows waiting to intercept an appropriately attractive waiter or busboy from one of the many restaurants situated on the ground floor of the development.
They finally settled on a boy whom Lucinda picked out on account of what she termed "the marvelous savage planes of his face."
"Probably Bolivian," she said. "For sure there's Indian blood running in those veins."
Having chosen him, Lucinda was delegated to fetch him. She got out of the Facel Vega, called to the young man. When he stopped, she approached and started a conversation. Unable to hear the exchange, Beth observed their gestures. A couple minutes later the boy got into the back seat beside her.
He smiled shyly at her. Beth smiled shyly back.
"I think we make a truly lovely foursome," Lucinda commented from the front.
The boy, whose features did indeed look savage in repose but turned sweet when he smiled, reached out for Beth's hand.
That's when Beth understood that Lucinda had likely lured him by telling him her gringa friend needed a date.
She gave the boy her hand, was surprised when he started wiggling his middle finger in her palm. Though intended as titillation, the gesture annoyed her. When she withdrew her hand the boy appeared hurt.
"I can't do this," she told Lucinda in English.
"Oh, come on," Lucinda snapped. "You told us how you picked up that DreamDance guy in San Francisco."
"That was at a tango club."
"So this is Puerto Madero."
"Come on, be a sport," Charles urged.
She gave the boy another look. Well, he is kinda cute....
In the end, she decided she'd only be able to go through with it if she could dance with the boy a while first. There was something about tango, the foreplay aspect of the dance, that could make an anonymous encounter permissible.
But when she asked the boy if he danced tango, he shook his head dismissively.
"Nah!" he said. "I'm into techno and rap."
That did it. She couldn't bring herself to continue. Without tango as a prelude, she told herself, she simply could not go to bed with him.
When they reached the house, she excused herself and ran upstairs. There she pressed her ear to her bedroom door, listening as the Céspedes and their pick-up talked a while, then mounted to the master bedroom.
"You know what gringas are like," she heard Lucinda say loud so Beth would overhear. "Believe me, we'll have more fun without her."
Beth heard the familiar click as they closed their bedroom door to shut her out.
In the morning she didn't come downstairs until she heard the taxi drive away. When she did appear, she found Charles and Lucinda at the breakfast table staring at her with smug grins.
"Man, did you ever miss a good time!" Charles told her.
"Not my scene," she replied. "It might've worked for me if we could have danced a little first."
"One thing we've learned from our adventures," Charles said, "is not to impose our preferences. Pick-ups are people too, you know. You've just got to go with the flow."
She peered at him. He was dead serious. A pick-up, he'd just informed her, was not simply an "object-of-desire;" he or she was also a human being. Well, she thought, what a profound insight! Who'd have thought it?
She spared Charles her sarcasm. She could tell from the way they regarded her that she'd failed them in an important way. Evidently she lacked the courage to be an urban stalker who prowls the night-city for prey. At heart she was too bourgeois, too cowardly to keep up. They liked her well enough, had corrupted her to a point, but now they could see she'd met an invisible wall which she could not bring herself to scale.
Meeting their stares, she saw them clearly too. Initially enamored by their beauty and decadence, they had seemed perfect companions. After all, she'd come to B.A. to work through her notion that through tango she might get in touch with something dark and illicit within.
Caught up by their intensity, she'd ignored numerous warning signs: their Nietzschean operatic vision; careless sense of entitlement; the cult they made of blood sports, of sex with strangers and of tango as a game of conquest and betrayal. Lately, too, she'd caught glimpses of meanness: their notion that humans could, like plumbing parts, be easily interchanged; extreme right-wing political views dropped lightly into an otherwise inane conversation; unsolicited confessions of a fascination with cruelty and death.
And so she stared at them and they at her in silence across the breakfast table, aware that their world views were different, aware too that most likely their time of intimacy was nearing its end.
There would be one more major event and it would be the breaking point, a party they were invited to on an island in the delta of the Rio Paraná.
They drove to the town of Tigre in silent darkness, then boarded a waiting speedboat that whisked them through a maze of rivers and canals. Some of these waterways were so narrow the bordering trees formed arches overhead and branches brushed the sides of the boat as they passed through.
They arrived finally at a large house on a private island that reminded Beth of villas she'd seen on the French Riviera—a grand, luxuriously-detailed Palladian structure surrounded by terraces and superbly tended gardens.
She was used to the Céspedes' tango friends, attractive young people their age who danced beautifully and gossiped endlessly about sex, fashion and celebrities. But several of the guests at this party struck her as different. The middle-aged host gave her a stern smile, and the older guests had a special kind of glow in their eyes, a glow Beth associated with zealotry.
Charles offered her a marijuana cigarette from his father's gold and lapis lazuli cigarette case. She and Lucinda each took one, which he then lit, with customary gallantry, with a matching lighter. The three of them then sprawled out together, Charles in the middle, Beth and Lucinda on his either side, on a couch set against a wall from which they could observe the passing scene.
People glided through the rooms, speaking mostly sotto voce, creating a mood fraught with intrigue. She couldn't hear much of what they said, but occasionally, even in her marijuana haze, an occasional word or phrase caught her ear.
A distinguished looking older man in a white dinner jacket used the term "our enemies" while speaking to a younger man sporting a military haircut. Then she overheard the younger man speak of "the cleansing nature of violence."
When Beth turned quizzically to the Céspedes, she found Charles resting with his eyes half-closed, while Lucinda, puffing slowly on her toke, stared off aimlessly into space.
Beth's sense that there was a mood of intrigue in the room, grew as she stood and began to circulate. Stepping outside to escape the smoke, she found herself on a terrace overlooking the water. The sky above was ablaze with stars, but as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she noticed a half dozen quiet men, dressed totally in black, posted about, rifles in their hands, guarding the house.
Re-entering the villa, she woke up Charles.
"Jesus! There're guys with guns outside!"
Charles shrugged. "Guess they want to keep the party private." He shut his eyes again.
Exploring some more, it occurred to Beth that there were actually two parties going on at the same time—one, in which she seemed to be included, of well-dressed, relaxed, good-looking young people sipping drinks and smoking grass, and a second party of older people, sober and intense, holding themselves aloof from the first group, forming small separate circles of their own.
As Beth circulated she received querying glances from these older types. And though she tried to blend in, she didn't feel she was successful. People would stop talking when she came near, smile at her, tighten their lips, then whisper about her after she passed: "I haven't seen her before. Who's she with?"
The bartender, wearing a white mess jacket with gold epaulets, displayed a stiff military bearing. When she tried to talk to him, he was polite but non-communicative. Moving on, passing a pair of women, she overheard one use the expression "la hora de la espada," the time of the sword. They stopped talking until she passed.
Observing some of these older, serious people drifting toward the rear of the house, she followed only to find herself confronting a closed set of double doors. One of the ninja type guards from outside stood in front. Beth smiled at him. When he didn't return her smile, she looked away. She could smell cigar smoke wafting out, could hear a deep male voice speaking within. But no matter how hard she strained, the words were too muffled for her to make them out.
Suddenly one of the doors opened. A man she'd seen earlier came out, whispered something to the guard, then strode away. Through the open doorway, Beth caught a glimpse of a scene that stuck with her through the rest of the evening. A tall, lean somewhat stooped middle-aged man was standing before several others who were seated. He was speaking while holding some kind of elongated object in his hands that Beth thought could be a knife. Behind him she saw a large painting on the wall of a husky man in uniform standing in what looked to be an alpine setting. She peered in, trying to see more, but just then someone inside pulled the door firmly shut. The guard sternly observed her as she shrugged, then moved back to the front room where she found Charles and Lucinda sprawled out in the same positions as before.
As they drove back to Belgrano, the couple shrugged when she asked them about the host and turned silent when she told them what she'd seen.
"There's something we've been meaning to tell you," Charles said, changing the subject.
"What's that?"
"Lucinda and I are going to conceive a child."
Well, there's a real conversation-stopper!
"We've been discussing this for some time. We know it sounds bizarre, but we have our hearts set on it."
"Have you...tried yet?" Beth asked.
"We have. And it appears we may have been successful."
Jesus! She didn't know what to say. Congratulations didn't seem quite in order.
"He'll be our love-child," Lucinda said. "A superman."
Superman? What the hell are they talking about?
"Our contribution to the nation," Charles explained, "a precursor of a new race here, a race of men and women destined to be the salvation of our country."
"It's the least we can do," Lucinda added. "Argentina has been very good to us."
Beth knew then that they were mad. For the first time since she'd met them she felt real fear. She'd realized all along that there was something deeply strange about them: their attachment to black leather clothing; the huge, empty unfurnished rooms in their house; their narcissistic delight in their physical beauty; the militant way they danced. But nothing had prepared her for this latest revelation—their intention to produce a child who would be a "precursor" for some kind of master race.
And then, suddenly, in light of the strange goings-on she'd observed at the party, the pieces started falling into place. Not only were they mad, wealthy, incestuous siblings, but they were dangerous as well—fellow-travelers, it seemed, of some kind of right-wing group, perhaps killers and torturers left over from the former military regime scheming to take over the country again and install a new proto-fascist government.
Cued by Beth's silence, Charles and Lucinda changed the subject again. As they drove on, Lucinda placed her arm about Beth's shoulder, while Charles spoke delightedly of the erotic romp the three of them would engage in as soon as they reached the house.
Beth felt herself begin to tremble. It was time to leave them, way past time. Yes, she knew, she must leave them, the sooner the better too...or else risk being sucked ever further into their vortex.