¡Decias que no y hasta la trompita alzabas!
—Mexican slang10
January 1, 1940
By the time Johan Thoms and Catalina did meet Cicero again, as agreed, in Monaco on January 1, 1940, Spain had been under the German-sponsored fascismus grip of Franco for nine months, the northern cities of Bilbao, Santander, and Gijón viciously bombed into a stubborn and brave submission. Guernica, too, had fallen to the Luftwaffe and the Stuka. Johan and Catalina did not discuss the possibility, which they both feared, that Cicero would not appear, that he would be dead, a skeleton on a scorched hillside. As the crescendo of that day neared, however, they thought of little else.
Europe was already four months into Blair’s predicted second round. Soon the whole world would be in the game.
France would fall before 1940 was out. Britain would come within a hairsbreadth. Thankfully, she remained intact, for without that wonderful bridgehead, there would have been no D-Day landings in ’44.
An estimated million Spaniards (and others) had perished in Spain at the hands of the Spanish (and others). Horror stories of mass slaughters of men, women, and children, of mass graves, abounded, bringing a terrifying new element to modern warfare. Add this million to the thirty-six million boys, women, and men from ’14 to ’18, and to the inevitable toll from the current clash (’39–’45), then imagine the twitching, blurting, babbling state of Johan Thoms.
Nonetheless, he and Catalina made it to the Café de Paris as the sun tried to poke through a belligerent mist like an old tangerine at the far side of a steamy Chinese restaurant kitchen. Cicero was already there. However, he had lost his left leg below the knee and the use of both eyes. He heard his old mate approaching, accompanied by the gait of a waifish young girl, whose steps he thought he recognized.
“Hope you’re not here to play cards, boss!” he yelled into the approximate area of Johan.
“You silly boy!” Johan’s relief to find him there outweighed the sadness of his best pal’s injuries, but only just.
“Johan, you old sea dog. And is that who I think it is?”
Yes, it was who he thought it was, but he had not the ability to tell if she was still in a tatty blue dress. Catalina swiftly kissed Cicero on his cheek, and lightly ran off to the gardens to weep. Cicero sniffed the Spanishness of her skin, and then heard her tears, but presumed not the emotion with which those tears fell.
And yes, Johan did now resemble an old sea dog, as Cicero felt his way around that bulbous melon along the tramlines etched deeply into his pal’s face.
“You’re looking old, boss.”
“Hardly surprising!”
“I know! I know! Not only do we folk hear better, but we know what people are going to say next. How do you say? It’s all my damned fault. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re killing yourself.”
Stoically, Johan changed the subject.
“What got you, Cicero?”
“A land mine, thirty miles out of Madrid in ’39. Thought it was a windmill, my Quixote! Four days from the end! Pendejos! Hijos de putas!”
At least his Spanish was improving.
* * *
A blind man with one leg, a madman who still wandered naked in the night with a patch on whichever eye, and a blossomed beauty, no longer in a tatty blue dress (or at least, not that often): this unholy trinity planned to head out of Monaco and seek refuge where they could. Johan’s psychotic (and in this case, quite accurate) sixth sense was telling him once again that he was being looked for, and so movement could only be a good thing. As the trio pondered a plan on the terrace of the Café de Paris over three martinis, Cicero made a very sensible suggestion.
“Let’s go to England, boss. The Germans will be here soon, they say.”
“Ah. Forget them. They are here every fifty years, like clockwork. You know they say the krauts even designed the wide boulevards and the tall trees of Paris themselves so that their troops could walk in the shade.”
“Well, I am not so keen to meet them. Anyway, you love those English. You can go to your Stratford-in-Avon, afternoon tea at the Savoy.” Cicero grinned, tipping an imaginary teacup to his lips, with his little pinkie pointing to the horizon.
An all-seeing two-legged Cicero could have wrapped Johan around that very same little finger pointing to Dover. This Cicero could do so even more easily. Johan answered:
“It’s upon, not in Avon.”
* * *
Cicero told Johan how the unity of the troops had initially convinced him he had done the right thing in joining up. However, he had questioned his decision within weeks of seeing action. By the middle of 1938, he was looking for a sign as to whether he should continue. This sign appeared in the most bizarre of circumstances.
Cicero had seen Eric Arthur Blair again in Albuixech, ten miles up the Balearic coast from Valencia, which within nine months was to be the final Spanish city to fall to Franco.
Cicero’s battalion had dropped back to the coast after taking heavy casualties near Albacete against a pocket of supposedly suicidal Nationalists way behind enemy lines. A rumor had spread that a Mexican battle cruiser was anchored off the coast. Medical, military, and nutritional supplies were supposedly on offer. It was true. The Guadalajara had indeed dropped anchor there, and for those very reasons. Blair and Cicero recognized each other in the otherwise empty town square, for both were strolling in the rain while all others had taken cover. Cicero went to embrace Blair, which forced the Englishman to retreat. However, they walked and eventually sat together on the front steps of a once-fine old mansion, which seemed to have been deserted; the heavy front door was open and the tall arched windows had been smashed from the inside. They looked out to a gray sea and compared tales of the past year.
Cicero told Blair of an amusing but puzzling scene the previous morning as he had been sitting by the road out of town. He had witnessed a rowboat being dragged at high speed by a crazed horse along the dirt track heading north. What had made the spectacle all the more amusing yet also disturbing was that there was a naked man in the vessel, a man whom Cicero was sure he recognized. He thought he knew the slightly off-center eyes, the vast hands, the thick neck and wrists, and the ability to swear, with what Cicero was sure was an American invective.
Blair, ever the consummate storyteller, was able to fill in the vital and enlightening details. The evening previous to the horse scene had been a wild one in a local saloon. Blair likened it to the one when he had first met with Cicero and his strange friend, Johan Thoms. It was similar in another regard, for Ernest Hemingway was once again celebrating a birthday; it must, then, have been July 21, 1938. Ernie had spent his evening as he spent most of his evenings, although this one was more notable than usual for the presence of two quite luscious twins—identical not only in their fine, swaggering build and exquisite facial features, but also in their attire, which was the deep scarlet of the Gypsy flamenco dancer. However, their blood might have had a sapphire tinge, for they claimed to be descended from Mexican royalty.
“You look exactly like my third wife,” Ernest had said to one of them.
“And how many times have you been married, you beast?” she had asked.
“Oh, just twice.”
They laughed so hard, until the hot blood of the gemelas stirred with the wine and with Ernie’s pirate stories. They promised to indulge his every desire if he took them to their compatriots’ boat, moored out to sea—the Guadalajara. He accepted without negotiation. But after almost an hour of searching for any type of vessel, it seemed as though the American was not to have his birthday treat after all. Hemingway excused himself from the girls momentarily—to urinate in a ditch, they presumed. He returned with a horse, a fine, dappled beast of eighteen-plus hands. He hoisted himself aboard and pulled each of the impressed ladies up, one in each of his mighty paws, placing one in front of him and one behind. In his broken Spanish, he explained to them how they would find a boat far more easily this way. He lied, for he then tapped the animal in the ribs with his size-fifteen boots, and they powered first toward and then into the warm Balearic waters. Ten minutes later, they were next to a small rowboat tethered to the warship. The twins jumped in and then climbed the rope ladders into the ship. Ernie tied the horse to the rowboat. “This won’t take long, I promise,” he assured the rightly uncomfortable creature.
Sadly, it took longer than Ernie had expected. He stirred hours later to a nagging, rhythmic knocking and the searing glare of the early-morning Spanish sun, which had just that moment shifted into the line of his wonkier right eye. He had a girl (even more beautiful in the daylight) nestled in each arm. He wrestled himself free of their minimal weight, and as he moved toward the annoying sound, he realized its unhappy source. Wearing not a stitch and remembering his promise to the beast who had generously conspired and helped to secure his pleasure, he was galvanized into action. Ernie was down in the launch within seconds. He untied the naval knot and was soon rowing the frothing, panicked animal toward shore. Ernie was not stupid, but he had not fully planned this out, for when the horse’s hooves hit the firm sands under the water, it tapped a fresh store of energy. The rowboat which had been pulling the horse was quickly spun through one hundred and eighty degrees then dragged along the stony, bumpy road in a dust cloud, and at top speed. This sight presented itself to not only Cicero on that open road, but also then to the congregation of an emptying church on that cloudless Sunday morning, and to a police chief inspecting his officers in the town square. They had all laughed, but this had only made them sad, as they realized, as one, that they had not done such a thing for two years and five days.
Out to sea around that time, the Mexican navy woke to a vision now firmly entrenched in the swirling magic and the fine myth of that sublime land. In fact, it is rare to find a Mexican sailor to this day without a tattoo somewhere on his person of two grinning twins in scarlet-red dresses, the scarlet of a Gypsy flamenco dancer.
Johan had always impressed upon Cicero that Mexicans were the finest judges of character in the world. This was the sign that Cicero had been looking for. He trusted the twins’ instinct and therefore, by association, the magnetic American. Cicero fought on with all his might.
Ernie Hemingway and the horse, they say, became great friends.
* * *
They finished up their cocktails at the Café de Paris as the sun started to fall toward a building, hefty mistral.
“Best togs for tonight,” Johan announced. “We celebrate our reunion. We dine in the Hermitage. We play the casino.” He believed he had become telekinetic.
Best togs for Johan was his old Schneider’s suit (though immaculately clean), eye patch on the left in honor of Cicero’s fallen comrades. For Cicero, his proud olive-green fatigues from Spain. Catalina procured something suitable—deep turquoise, as it happened—from a boutique near Le Jardin du Roi within thirty minutes. The purchase of shoes took an understandable two hours.
Cicero found his way back to the Hôtel de Paris with an unerring sense of direction, his sticks clicking at each curb like a deranged woodpecker. He checked into his sumptuous chambers and launched himself onto a chaise longue. Then a hot, deep bath, lavishly laced with unknown oils, drawn by a sweet-smelling chambermaid, who Cicero estimated at a hundred pounds from the creak of the floorboards, twenty-two years by the pitch of her voice and single, from her invitingly flowered cassolette of gardenia and skin.
That evening they attended the Lermontov Ballet, ate the best crab the principality (probably) had to offer, and drank champagne overlooking the choppy Med, which hypnotized everyone, even a sightless but imaginative Cicero, with a half-moon’s sharp white light.
The casino was half full. A seat was found for Cicero at the roulette table, and Catalina and Johan flanked their friend. They had agreed that the extent of their gambling was a single round of roulette each.
They studied the form for over twenty minutes.
Both Catalina and Johan went for red. A straight evens bet. A pile of green and royal blue chips was stacked to above Cicero’s erstwhile-eye level.
Cicero chose black thirty-three. An understated single gold chip.
The dealer threw in the chunky ball bearing before declaring a rhythmic and somewhat bored “Les jeux sont faits.”
Johan pondered the appropriateness of the statement.
The ball fell and spun madly.
“Noir! Trente-trois!”
“Well played, soldier,” players murmured as polite applause spread. Cicero was rewarded with a hefty pile of riches that he heard drag across the tight baize cloth. Catalina blushed at his success. A couple of pretty local ladies eyed the quietly smug veteran.
Cicero collected his winnings and pushed them in Johan’s direction to cash in, then stood up and had started to hop away when, to his surprise, the dealer gave a condescending “monsieur.” Then Cicero remembered the etiquette of roulette: a second chip was to be left on black thirty-three. He thought he smiled at one of the girls (he did) and gestured for her to take the wager on his behalf.
Catalina and Johan winged their cohort and off they moved toward the green neon of the sortie, to a distant, unenthusiastic call of “les jeux sonts faits” from their simian-mannered host.
Pause for four, five, six seconds.
Shrieks of delight. The stingy arse made a mean, envy-laden announcement of “noir, trente-trois,” barely audible under the cheers.
Within an hour, the trio had taken a fine bottle of bubbly onto the white stone deck at the Hermitage, (two of them had) surveyed the clipped grandeur (and described it to Cicero), and (all of them) discussed England. Johan teased Cicero by telling him not to worry if he heard a newspaper vendor cry, “ENGLAND IN DANGER.”
“It just means they are losing at cricket to Australia.” They laughed, as they did at regular intervals for the next couple of hours, until they retired to their chambers. Cicero, though, was to have company. The two winning ladies of black, thirty-three paid him a visit, having tipped the concierge with a gold chip to find out the soldier’s room number. They would still be there in the morning, exhausted and sated, as Cicero giddily one-legged it to Johan’s suite to postmortem on the turn of events.
The dealer left the casino quite disgruntled.
All others involved in the evening’s proceedings were, however, quite gruntled.
* * *
They decided against driving.
Instead, Johan had the concierge leave the faithful old car in a rented lockup. It is possibly still there today.
They caught the first available train to Paris, with three tickets, two trunks, an old kit bag, and a pair of crutches. They shared a comfortable sleeper compartment, for money was not a problem. The wonderful old benefactor and guardian angel Count Erich von Kaunitz still made annual deposits, hugely generous ones, into the account; they had as well the lucrative earnings from the casino.
Cicero, still savoring the goings-on of the night before, smiled all the way to Lyons, where he eventually drifted off into a slumber. Observing his young pal’s sated expression, Johan was reminded of a glorious day (or so) he had spent in the countryside years before at Kaunitz’s castle.
“When this one is over, I want to go back and see him,” Johan said to himself out loud.
* * *
In Paris, news of the war engulfed them. Stories of the escalating conflict gave Johan heart palpations, narcolepsy, and incontinence. Newspapers were pushed under his hotel-room door; cinema newsreels yelled it out if he had decided upon a little escapism at the movies; conversations in bars, elevators, taxis, the métro, and finally his own head.
In his waking hours, he saw the corpses of Ferdinand and Sophie, Bill Cartwright, a million unknown soldiers in trenches of mud, snow, shit, bones, blood, fields of quiet poppies . . .
He took to wearing a loincloth around his hotel suite, and then farther afield. He had stolen the garment from a fancy-dress shop in Pigalle, after entering an episode when he was convinced Lorelei had passed by him on a bus. From his vantage point between a rack of bad Napoleon outfits and ropy old skirts for Moulin Rouge chorus girls, he had seen the bus trundle by with what seemed to be a familiar face in a rear window. He grabbed the loincloth, bolted from the shop, and chased the bus for a mile, in a reversal of Zhivago and Lara. He commandeered a cab and ended up in the eastern alleys of Montparnasse, in a taxidermist’s boutique. Montparnasse was a grubby, nasty quartier littered with cheap, dangerous tabacs. The better ones, with their ignored spittoons, were populated in the front by largely toothless sorts, while well-missed toilets dominated in the rear (if a hole in the ground could pass for a toilet). The lower-food-chain establishments were to be recommended even less. There were some things the Montparnassians, these rank-and-file soldiers of gracelessness, did remarkably well, Johan begrudgingly admitted to himself. A lack of bathroom manners was certainly a forte of theirs, and he was a firm believer that one should always be encouraged to play to one’s strengths.
He barged in maybe three minutes after he saw her go in, only to be confronted by former gnus, ex–boa constrictors, and erstwhile gibbons, before tapping her on her shoulder by the platypus section.
It was not her, of course.
What would she be doing on a bus? In Paris? In Montparnasse?
He could only respond by blurting “Qu’est-ce que fuck?”
Mon Dieu! Zut alors! Tant pis!
Lorelei Ribeiro, however, was in Paris that day.