A Change of Skin

3. VISIT OUR CELLARS

That same September night the Narrator is led by Fatality to the Place. The only Reading he takes along with him is a poem by Octavio Paz which at this time has yet to be published:

Water above

Below, the forest

Wind along the paths

The well is motionless

The bucket black The water solid

Water goes down to the trees

Sky rises up to our lips

The Narrator decides to ponder over this poem. Feeling ashamed, he asks himself why poets can say everything in so few lines and Baudelaire replies, he believes, that only poetry is intelligent. The Narrator, Xipe Totec, Our Lord of the Flayed Hide, changes his skin.

Δ You stopped at the base of the enormous hill-like pyramid, in front of the entrance to the tunnel. There were iron rails for the wheels of the mine carts used to move out the excavated earth. The tunnel stretched in a straight line, illuminated by hanging naked light bulbs, as far as the eye could see. Javier stepped aside and Franz went in first, then Elizabeth, then Javier, and finally you, Isabel. The tunnel was low and the men had to stoop to dodge the electric cable overhead. Franz stopped for a moment with his fingers touching the smooth black wall. Elizabeth rested her hand on his shoulder and felt his sweat. But the air was not hot here, a cold current of air swept in from the entrance. Shafts led off to right and left. Franz moved forward again and Elizabeth kept her hand on his shoulder.

“Straight ahead,” Javier said quietly. His voice was muffled, yet seemed to echo. The four of you walked on slowly. As you approached one of the hanging bulbs, your shadows stretched behind you; as you walked on beyond it, they moved out in front of you, your shoulders magnified to spread all the way across the narrow tunnel. Franz reached a low dark arch and stopped. Javier felt until he found the light switch on the wall. Illuminated stairs climbed out of sight, almost vertically, to the foundations of the chapel, a dizzying ascent. Javier turned the light off.

“Franz?” a voice said. “Franz?” The voice was neither near nor far. It was penetrating without being loud. It lost itself in echoes and all of you stopped. Elizabeth thought that the voice had been Javier. She turned to him angrily: “Javier, shut up!”

“Franz, where have you been hiding?”

“Shut up, I said! Don’t pay any attention to him, Franz. He’s spent his entire life playing let’s-pretend games. They’re not worth worrying about.”

But Javier and you, Isabel, both knew that the voice had not been Javier’s. You said nothing. Javier, confused, did not know what to do, what attitude to adopt, whether to be ironic or amused. He spoke, still quietly,

“To the right, Franz,”

and Franz led you down a dark gallery of uneven stone. The lighting was not so bright now. Franz bumped against three protruding steps, the profile of one of the seven ancient pyramids that form the great hill. Elizabeth grabbed him by the waist to keep him from falling.

“Straight on, Franz,” Javier said.

And the unknown voice, louder than Javier: “Franz, haven’t you expected anyone to find you? Did you think you were finally safe?”

“Don’t listen to him!” Elizabeth hissed. “He’s out of his mind!”

Franz slowly, gropingly moved forward, the palms of his hands touching the rough stone walls. Now the cold draft from the entrance corridor was behind you. The air was thick, motionless. You were deep within the hill in a labyrinth of galleries and cross-galleries that seemed suspended in darkness and space, timeless. Water dripped softly and invisibly, as if the seven pyramids nested one upon the other concealed a secret spring, or as if the stone itself were sweating.

“Up the steps, Franz. We’re right behind you,” said Javier.

Franz raised his face and climbed slowly, as a sleepwalker. He reached the topmost step and stopped.

“Now,” said Javier, “we are approaching the heart of the pyramid.”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “Don’t believe him. Don’t listen to him.”

The air was dense, almost suffocating, and you could feel the weight of the thousands of tons of earth and stone above you pressing down, wanting to settle the last few inches or few feet that would close the tunnels forever. Elizabeth reached forward to touch Franz again but hesitated and instead turned and stared at Javier’s expressionless face, its whiteness accentuated by the pale light of the naked bulbs.

“We’ve come far enough,” Elizabeth said. “I want to go back.”

“Now take the stairs to the left.”

Franz moved on and after a moment Elizabeth hurried after him. He ducked his head to enter the stairs. The ceiling here was loose adobe bricks, unsafe, dangerous. He climbed slowly. Finally he emerged in a vaulted gallery decorated with a frieze in vegetable colors. It was the core, the solidity that supported the great mass above. Franz moved into the gallery and Elizabeth followed him. Javier next. You, Isabel, held back, standing near the top of the stairs. Elizabeth stared around her and felt dizzy. Light bulbs hung far apart, high above, faintly illuminating the frieze, which consisted of a succession of round-headed locusts, round skeletons with round eyes, sunken cheeks, hollow nostrils and sharp teeth, in three colors: yellow, red, and black.

Javier moved forward to lecture: “The locusts, gods of the mountain. Plague of the harvest, yet at the same time its guardian.”

Franz turned his back on the frieze and rested his head against the wall. Elizabeth also leaned against the wall staring at the locusts’ red teeth.

“Red, the death color,” Javier went on. “Yellow, life.” He studied the frieze thoughtfully. “The locust brings forth both life and death. Like all of the ancient Mexican gods, it is ambiguous. It belongs to a cosmogony of paradox in which death is life’s prerequisite, life is death’s herald.”

Franz was not listening. He had turned his back on all of you, leaning with his forehead against the frieze.

“Those monsters simply laugh at the pleasant saints in the chapel up there,” Javier said, looking toward the ceiling. “They make frightening faces and scare the cabbage-headed little Virgin.”

You had held back, Isabel, at the entrance to the gallery, hugging yourself with folded arms, looking at Franz, Javier, and Elizabeth as if they were three actors on a stage that every moment moved farther away from you. Listening to Javier’s cold, precise comments. And now at last Franz’s voice, strident, metallic, with the echoing resonance of this chamber deep in the earth:

“Javier! That wasn’t your voice! I tell you, it wasn’t your voice!”

And Javier replied quietly, “No, Franz, it wasn’t,” as Franz was already moving toward him with his hands at his sides and his fists clenched. Javier suddenly lost his composure and began to tremble. He looked at Elizabeth beseechingly, but Elizabeth had merely stepped back and watched as Franz moved forward, perspiring, his shirt-sleeves rolled above the elbow, his muscles tense. With his gray eyes he stared at Javier and Elizabeth saw in that gaze all the cruelty and almost childlike tenderness she had loved in Franz, the cruelty and tenderness that are prerequisites for each other, a necessary fusion, serene inner life and violent outer life, loss, self-apology, action impelled by orders given long ago and still obeyed, action and dream long ago, blind, confident, insane, but always action, lumbering forward gracelessly toward Javier’s opposing absolute passivity, Javier facing a rendering of accounts he had not written, pitying and waiting for the attack he would welcome. They touched and Franz’s arms went around Javier to wrestle him to the ground while Javier’s arms went around Franz to embrace him, hold him, be near him. And as they gripped each other, the attack ended as suddenly as it had begun. The tension between violent strength and accepting weakness dissolved and very slowly they pressed their bodies together, joined at the belly and the thighs, still embracing each other without now admitting their true intention, a violent embrace of hatred transforming itself, as the two women looked on, into desire that neither of the women could understand or participate in. A sensual, excited embrace between two men who drew back their hands, their heads, and their feet, but remained locked together at the loins in a way that neither had expected, neither had foreseen, each of them suddenly become a sleepwalker in the damp, stifling gallery beside the frieze of darkness and mystery, the red and yellow and black locust gods of life and death, each of them now far from this place and this moment but each calling to the other to return and join him and each about to disappear, and Javier trembles and whispers something: the tomb of the dead gods is moving, swaying, it’s a quake, an earthquake, take cover … Earth rains down from the vaulted loose adobe overhead … The walls shake, shake … centuries and centuries collapsing … and the locusts hold the weight of seven stone pyramids on their feeble backs … Loose adobe bricks … friezes crushed … walls, steps, galleries, the church above swaying … And noise can bring down hills, even mountain peaks … darkness falling upon them from above … everything falling, falling … Ligeia leaping forward to embrace Franz … Isabel grabbing Javier, trying to pull him toward Franz and Elizabeth … Javier takes her arms and draws her back … everyone shouting, screaming … rock crashes down separating the two couples, a mass of dead stone, broken bricks, old adobe … Javier and Isabel run … They escape down the stairs, down the corridor, followed by the thunder of falling earth and rock … Some day it had to happen … Ligeia and Franz have remained, trapped on the other side, where there is no way out … Locked behind the collapse of the hill-pyramid … Yes, he hears their voices, their shouts … Ligeia screaming his name … Franz shouting … Ligeia screaming that she can’t get her breath … And they’re trapped, trapped … Isabel and Javier hear them and embrace … Javier hugs her, kisses her … “Now we will love each other,” he says. “We’ll have to love each other…” Isabel squeezes his hand and they go down the tunnel holding hands, see the exit shining in the distance like an incandescent point … Holding hands they emerged into the sun, the sun, the night sun … They had gone in in darkness and they came out into the shining sun … They got into the car … Now only two of them, Isabel and Javier, Javier and Isabel … Isabel drives … They go toward the hotel, Isabel looking straight ahead with a motionless face, through the streets of Cholula, past the smooth-skinned emaciated dogs that run barking after them, past the big-bellied women and the soldiers with knife-scarred faces … the car bounces across ruts and holes … And Javier can read Isabel’s mind … Yes, she is telling herself, I can be his strength, his inspiration, his everything, but he doesn’t understand that. He thinks that he is sacrificing himself. That when he married Ligeia he destroyed his ambitions. Married her, lived with her, slept with her. A way of dying … If I only had more experience, Isabel is thinking, if I could let him know what I know. But even if I did, by living with him, sleeping with him, marrying him, he would still not be convinced … that it’s not too late … That is what she is thinking … it’s what she has to be thinking as she drives from the pyramid to the hotel, Javier thinking for her: his dream is not lost but only with me can it come true, with me who can be his strength, his harmony, his peace, he understanding that this is what I was born for, that I can’t live alone, that I must be joined to him, a man I can understand: I want to be his earth, his roots, his air, I want to tremble when his hands touch my nipples, his lips kiss my clitoris, his breath goes into my ear. I want to lie on the bed and have him lie upon me and take me as I take him, together, without victory, without defeat, I want to praise him without shame, to stare at him without modesty, to touch him without haste, to live and make love without haste, the long slow mornings waiting for the always new surprise that will come when he wakes: that’s it, that’s what I want, and all the rest too, to learn his likes and dislikes, to cheer him up when he’s depressed, to listen to records with him, to read with him, travel with him, nurse him when he’s sick, go to the drugstore and buy his razor blades, his shaving cream, his soap, his soda bicarb, see him dance with another woman, see him angry, sleeping as if, without ever telling me, he always knows that I am with him, supporting him, nurturing him, that I don’t want to possess him for myself or to see myself, but to be all that he needs while remaining outside him: not that he should cease to suffer but that he should find the suffering he needs in my suffering, not that he should have no doubts, but that in me … that’s it, that’s it: that he should accept everything not as if it were fated but only as if it were necessary: things happen to us not because of destiny but because we need them to happen, and so I will be able to hold off destiny, fate, circumstances, fatality, prevent them from touching him until I offer them to him transformed by me, by Isabel, and if he understands, that is how it will be, how it will have to be; a woman is never overcome by a man but overcomes herself in order to love him and be his; there is never rape, every woman always lets herself be taken; there is no love that does not rest upon humiliation; and that is why I am here, why I took this trip to the sea with him; maybe he’ll understand … The car stops in front of the hotel … They get out … slam the doors … enter the hotel … ask for the key to Isabel’s room … walk along the halls … hear the fountain in the glass-roofed patio … open the bedroom door … Isabel throws herself on the bed crying … Javier unbuttons his shirt … wads it into a ball and wipes his armpits with it … takes off his shoes, covered with dust, and his trousers, and sits on the bed to take off his socks … keeps his underwear on and sits holding his socks … he is thinking that maybe she believes she understands, but she doesn’t understand … she thinks she does, but she doesn’t … she wants to offer herself to him now … she is hoping that he will unbutton her dress, but he turns his back on her and she lies there crying, meek, submissive, humble now after the hell of the afternoon with Ligeia … he unbuttons her yellow shantung dress, looks at her back covered with droplets of sweat … she is thinking, he reflects, about her humility, her strength to endure … She shrugs her shoulders to wriggle out of the dress and he looks at her nude, sweat-beaded body … She is thinking of a life of tenderness and compassion in which she, sacrificing her possibilities, will guide a poor unsuccessful author back to creativity, giving him through herself a second birth, confidence … beneath her protective wing she will make him sit down and do his daily stint, now and then bringing him a cup of herb tea to calm his colitis … Why not? He grunts and throws his socks down … No, she doesn’t understand … she doesn’t understand that Ligeia, his poison, his toxin, is also his life, his habit, that without that habit his world would collapse … that he prefers Ligeia, with her barrenness and her routines, to someone else who would be equally barren and have worse routines … that he prefers Ligeia because she is violent and given to extremes, that anything else would be flat and tasteless … and with any woman he would merely go on breathing, chewing, swallowing, digesting, seeing, touching, smelling, the same tube called a man that stretches from his mouth to his anus … she does not understand that he no longer writes books but reports for a committee of the United Nations, that he is just as he would be no matter what he did, for all he can do is fill out his allotted time, no more … Tender and compassionate … she thinks she understands, but she doesn’t … she lies there, motionless, nude, thinking that she understands and not realizing that she too makes demands … insists on understanding me and overwhelming me with her pretended gifts, her subjugation given with loyalty, insists that I live only for her, only so that she can care for me, flatter me, protect me, nurture me, she and she alone: an iron instinct that I can never break, no, neither I nor any man … I cannot transform either myself or the world so that all of us, men and women alike, can be alone and solitary, alone when we want to be alone, joined to others when we need it, always free to choose and decide, to be the same or different, to belong to and possess whomever we care to … Can she understand this?… She is waiting for me to move nearer … she doesn’t understand why I don’t go to her and touch the nipples she is offering me … For her, humiliation; for me merely freedom, necessary, rational: can she understand?… will she allow me to be openly unfaithful?… Oh, no, she won’t … I know that well … And then the disillusionment, the tears, the hurt feelings, the certainty that I don’t know how to appreciate her or I would not leave her for anyone, and finally the hatred, the rebellion, her own unfaithfulness: a betrayal that I would not want to face and accept, for from the beginning she would have denied freedom and now she would be claiming it … And who am I talking about? My head aches, hurts … Bring me an aspirin … Isabel, bring me an aspirin … now … Isabel who is Ligeia … she will be Ligeia … and she knows it … she’ll want everything for herself alone … all my time … all my love … and will be disillusioned, hurt … will hate me … will give me Ligeia’s hell again … He looks at her … She does not move toward him … Maybe she in her turn is mind-reading … What can he do except stay with Ligeia, the familiar port, rather than venturing to begin again, risk everything with a fear he will not conceal, simply so that Isabel may become his new Ligeia, new young flesh, rosy lips, heavy pubis, hard breasts, firm thighs … how young they are and how they show themselves at first, how they respond when there is neither old habit nor old understanding, how charming is young clumsiness, what a discovery, what a surprise … He gets up from the bed … Isabel lies there, naked, her legs spread, waiting for him … He looks for and finds the black shawl … No, no man wants to repeat life … Isabel will never be Ligeia … Isabel will be a fleeting love … forever beautiful, a sweet, warm memory, never old … He takes the shawl in his hands and stretches it … He wants to he alone … I want to be alone, Isabel, don’t you understand that?… And you will remain young … Always young … I promise you your youth as I walk toward you with Ligeia’s black shawl in my hands … You will never age and I will always remember you as you are, as you were … Isabel’s arms rise to receive him … Quickly he slips the shawl around her neck and twists it … She doesn’t suspect yet … she thinks that my fury is merely a new proof of love … that today I offer her once again a new and different experience … and I tighten the shawl, tighten it, and do not look at her bulging eyes, at her open mouth with the protruding tongue … how long, my God, her tongue is …

* * *

Δ The men were still standing pressed against each other when I moved forward from the stairs to where you stood just inside the gallery. I took your hand, Isabel, so that you would know I was there. Javier did not notice me. Neither did Elizabeth. Only Franz saw me and asked who I was. But immediately the Monks arrived with their insane noise, the music of the electric guitars they had prepared earlier, during the afternoon, their singing voices as they moved toward the frieze from both ends of the gallery, and Javier suddenly collapsed in the dust and did not understand and Elizabeth knelt to hold him while Franz stared and the music pounded its defiance and challenge

Now the day has come

That day has come, oh, oh, oh

Judgment day, judgment daaaaay

They came in from the two ends of the gallery preceded by their two minstrels, the Negro wearing the charro sombrero and holding the guitar away from his chest, the tall youth with the long unkempt hair and the tight rose-colored pants and the leather jacket, carrying the other guitar tight in his arms, one from the left, the other from the right

Man, man, count your time

The minutes left, oh, oh, oh

and behind them the others: behind the Negro, the girl dressed all in black; behind the tall youth the girl with her eyes hidden behind dark glasses, wearing the Greta Garbo hat with its wide fallen brim, her trench coat with raised lapels, her face pale with pallid makeup that caused her features to disappear in the dim light: mouth and dark glasses, that was all that could be seen of her,

Pop your eyes, death and nature

Judgment day, oh, oh, oh

Let creation rise and shake

then the blond, bearded young man in corduroys and sandals, and behind him the youth conventionally dressed, but now incongruously, in a tweed jacket and flannel trousers. The Monks had arrived:

What did David tell the Sibyl?

Gonna be no getaway

The Monks had arrived, and as they passed us, they squeezed my arm, Isabel, and kissed you, and moved on with swaying hips and sliding feet to form a circle around Franz while Elizabeth, understanding nothing, her eyes wide with fear, went on kneeling beside Javier, who now had fainted or gotten drunk and passed out or simply crinkled up like tissue paper in the wind. They formed a circle around Franz and danced around him to the throbbing hum of their guitars, to the crazily echoing boom of their voices, twisting their supple hips, shaking their heads

For oh, oh, that day has come

Nobody hides forever

Then they stopped and were silent. Franz leaned back against the wall, his arms spread, his palms flat on the stone. They tightened their circle around him.

* * *

Δ Isabel brought the six Monks one afternoon so that they could meet me and we could get together on all this. Right from the first my young guests took over, settling themselves around my living room as if it had been theirs all their lives. They sprawled out on the floor on my old reed mats, charred by years of careless cigarette butts. They propped themselves comfortably against the walls that had once been two subtle tones of blue and now had aged and faded to many tones of gray and yellow. Their tequila glasses made new rings on my square coffee table — well, it’s also a worktable, comrades — and they heaped their cigarette butts — when they first hit Mexico City they had discovered and taken to the brand called “Pharaohs” and two or three of them were smoking pot, from the smell I thought it was the Negro dressed up in the charro outfit and the albinolike girl with the shaved eyebrows whom I immediately, secretly nicknamed White Rabbit — in the Olmecan saucers that serve as my ashtrays. I told them a little about my castle called home. That originally it had been an outlying farm building on land that belonged to a Jesuit monastery. That by and by the Jesuits had been bumped on their devious way and the monastery was destroyed, and when I found it, the building belonged to no one, was lived in by no one, apparently had been entirely forgotten. So in I had moved, for I liked the privacy and saw the possibilities, and the rent a squatter pays can’t be beat. Perhaps they had noticed that from the alley the house was concealed by the thick hedge of prickly briar. A good neighborhood, too, what Mexico City’s political fathers usually call “proletarian.” But even the poorest and weariest of proletarians have not only chains but also refuse to get rid of, and for years everyone there had ditched his on my side of the hedge, creating the savory Dadaist garden my guests had observed as they entered: rotting garbage, rusting cans, broken bottles, disintegrating scraps of clothing, with here and there in the fly-swarmed stink, the languid arms of the old maguey plants. Groovy, eh? And immediately around the house, like a line of last defense, was my second hedge of intergrown high shrubs. Isabel, that little Pussycat, stood near the door listening and after a while said that she had to leave, she had a date to go with her Proffy to the magnificent motel where he always took her, so ciao, cats, and good luck. Exit Pussycat. But not the Monks. They spent the rest of the day and most of the night with me, concentrated and intense but at the same time swinging loose.

They began by asking me about myself. I made it brief: I write when I feel like it and also when I don’t, and now and then I drive a cab to get with it again, back in it again, and that was how I met our friends Javier and Elizabeth. In a word, I have a kind of independent income. They laughed and said sure you do, and we all laughed because we all knew that no one can live beat or Viet very long without some hardworking old bourgeois paterfamilias behind him to pick up the check for the ass he sacks and the glass houses he cracks, and all that. And already White Rabbit had found my last bottle of Poire William’s, worth a small fortune at the Minimax supermarket, and was gulping it down like so much water, and now she waved the bottle at me and said, “Okay, writer or cabby, whichever you prefer, we read you but do you read us? Are you with us?” I told her yes, of course, why the hell not, sure I was with them … in principle. Not that I intended to take an active part in it. No, my role would be strictly Vergilian: their observer now and later, when I came to write about it, their amiable Narrator. But for that I needed to know even more than if I were to be one of the actors. I had to have everything scribbled down neatly in my notebooks, and because I didn’t know everything now, not by a long shot, just what reasons they might have, I would like them to persuade me a little. As for approving or disapproving, to hell with it. I was simply glad to have them there with me for a while.

They listened as I told them what I knew. Then we agreed, except that they refused to give me their real names, that would be taking too much of a chance. So I gave them nicknames based partly on their physical appearances and partly on the roles they played that evening. White Rabbit. Brother Thomas for the Negro. Morgana for the bewitchingly sexy girl dressed all in black, black sweater, black pants, black boots. Two names for the youth in the pink mountebank’s trousers: Rose Ass and Long Dong, according, as you will see after a little, to the situation. For the yellow-haired bearded young man who drove their car, an old Lincoln convertible, a good stout Mexican nickname, El Güero, which means, for those of you who don’t know us as well as we know you, something between Fair-Haired Childe Christ and Blond Bastard. And finally, Werner, Jakob Werner, the one who wore the tweed jacket and flannels and carried a briefcase: Jakob I gave no nickname because he gave me his own name, even offered me a card. Brother Thomas opened the window presently and tossed out the roach of the joint he had been stinking up my house with, a little crime I had already forgiven, for as you know I am pushing forty and look upon youth with a genial toleration, and besides I enjoy marijuana myself, and he said worriedly: “The trouble is that we don’t know how to answer questions. What we do is ask questions. And these people we have to talk about now belong to the Stone Age. They play with pretty words. They spout speeches. I don’t think it’s going to be easy.”

I rested my head back against the copy of Hopscotch I was using as a pillow and told them that in that case maybe we better switch roles. I, like every Latin American intellectual who is worth his salt and his sinecure, knew nothing at all except how to wax grandiloquent. To rock with rhetoric, as it were. So … But White Rabbit, waving her bottle around like a club (and she didn’t have to do that; when she shook it, it looked like a miserable lemon pop. Ah, appearances and reality) and taking an enormous slug of it that made her tremble, said, “Children, let’s stop wasting time. I have a very simple idea.” She waved the bottle again. “Our Vergilian friend has told us about Javier and Elizabeth or Bette or Ligeia or whatever she calls herself.” I closed my eyes and touched the tip of my tongue to my teeth. “Now, let’s get moving. Let’s come to some conclusions. Let’s go ahead and hold the trial.”

The little pear inside White Rabbit’s bottle bobbed around like a bewhiskered, wrinkled fetus. As if it were trying with its reborn roots to grip the glass, to change the glass and the alcohol back into earth and benevolent rain. Morgana put on a Beatles record and suddenly they were all dancing and the light was fading and I understood nothing, nothing at all, but decided to ride with them very patiently. The electricity had been disconnected because for four or five months I hadn’t paid, and I had made a pleasant virtue of dark necessity: I lived, I told them, by pale candlelight alone, like a demented monk. And the record player, then? Why, batteries, obviously. Anyhow, the record player wasn’t going around. Only I was going around, for I had asked White Rabbit (and I was beginning to like that little gringa) to teach me how to frug and all of them were laughing at me and for a moment I really thought that they had put on a record but actually it was Rose Ass-Long Dong and his guitar playing “Yesterdays,” a song I was sure the Monks had known long before the music was published or the Beatles recorded it. Hey, brethren. So back we go to the jungle of beginnings and I twist my sluggish behind without moving my feet, trying as hard as I can to imitate White Rabbit, but try as I may, I can’t keep up with the movement, at once elegant and savage, of her beautiful young arms. “Good,” says Brother Thomas. “We’ll hold the trial and I will be the attorney for the defense.” He jerks his head like a wound-up toy turtle, keeping his hands fast in the pockets of his charro pants. “And I’ll take on Franz,” mumbles El Güero, whose face has disappeared behind a waterfall of long yellow hair as he shakes, clicking his heels, to the almost visible rhythm. It is White Rabbit’s turn. Dramatically, now motionless, fixed in an arch pose of heavy espionage, the collar of her trench coat up, the brim of her floppy Garbo hat drooping around her ears, she announces, “I’ll be Elizabeth, Ligeia, Lisbeth, whatever her name is.”

I observe that they are all observing me and laughing at me for the clumsy absurdity I am making of a dance that is entirely improvisation, yet at the same time, and this is the rub, completely a rite. The need to display a bit of rhetoric comes over me and I begin to point out to them that one by one, nation by nation, people by people, we are all of us returning to our original prototypes. The Yankees are becoming an army of Edgar Allan Poseurs complete with the Gothic castles and the dripping dungeons that Pollyanna and Horatio Alger preferred to conceal beneath marmalade and Wall Streets paved with silver dollars; the English are going back as fast as they can to Tommy Jones and Mollucky Flanders and all the belching and bawding that Victoria and Gladstone wanted to screen away behind cricket and croquet. And as for the doughty Germans, they have been and will always be …

“I’ll take the bench and be judge,” Morgana interrupts. She is sliding gracefully through a series of steps that beyond doubt began as part of some puberty ritual. “I am Javier!” cries Rose Ass (not at this moment Long Dong. His guitar is weary and sad. Jakob clasps him by the shoulder and forces him, Javier be nimble, Javier be quick, Javier hop over your stick, to jump over his guitar). “And I,” says Jakob, “the prosecuting attorney.”

The guitar is silent. With one movement they all fall to their knees in a circle, holding hands.

They begin to howl like coyotes, at first softly, then louder.

I stand alone, stopped in an awkward movement of my hips. There is no light now and outside the mongrel dogs of the neighborhood are replying to the howling of my six young guests. At the same time you can hear the termites gnawing the beams beneath the old floor, sifting their eternal dust, and the scampering through the walls of rats who are as terrified by silence as by racket.

“What is the plea?” Jakob asks sharply. “Guilty or not guilty?”

I have my matches in my hand and am looking for a candle.

“Guilty, but with extenuating circumstances, I suppose,” speaks Brother Thomas in the darkness. “Good God, wasn’t his soul his own to do with as he damn well pleased?” Brother T.’s voice mocks itself. It is deep as Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” yet as shrill as Butterfly McQueen begging Scarlett O’Hara to forgive her. The voice of a slave and rebel crawling up from the slime. Of a bird just loosed and still bewildered. Of sweaty torches winking through a night of fog. “He had a dream, man. He wanted to make it come true. The same as all of us. Just the same.”

“Will the attorney for the defense specify precisely what dream?” Judge Morgana asks.

And now we are leaving. In the darkness the flies that during daylight hang like clouds in my garden of refuse have departed. The smell is sweet, rotten, sticky. Broken glass, rags, vomit, excrement. And here and there something that might be used again, for even the poor have their moments of luxurious denial: that bicycle wheel, for example. Brother Thomas, picking his way through with enormous grace, is still speaking, and I can’t tell from his accent whether he comes from a ghetto in the North or a sharecropper’s cabin in the South. “The dream precisely? Precisely the dream of long-frustrated desire finally confessed and fulfilled. Of lost unity in life recovered again. Of complete power put to the final proof, to the test, man, make or break. He had one chance. His only chance. He had to take it and do with it what he could.” The stench of the rottenness around us is a little dizzying, a little like sweet wine. “But no one understood. Really, you know, quite a great dream. Merely a hopeless one. For he dared to believe that a life of heroism was still possible.” None of us pays Brother Thomas the least attention. We let him rattle on and don’t listen, for the attorney for the defense is expected to lie, that’s his function and duty. Or isn’t it?

I lead them through the narrow way out and now we are in the alley in front of the tiny neighborhood store. For twelve years the storekeeper has known that I was squatting here but he has never squealed on me. A scholar and a gentleman. “The accused,” Brother Thomas is going on, “because he lived that dream, could comprehend its poetic and mystic greatness.” Brother T. is the Invisible Man. He is Uncle Thomas now, not Brother Thomas. I greet the storekeeper with a nod and we all crowd in to buy cigarettes and Pepsis. The storekeeper’s daughter, a girl of thirteen, straight-haired and pallidly green, like a willow, puts our purchases on the glass-top counter and holds out her open hand for us to pay and Brother Thomas is saying in his tenor-basso voice, “You may ask, what did the accused abandon for the sake of his dream? Music and architecture? Yes, but remember, music and architecture without the possibility of greatness.” We tilt our Pepsis back and White Rabbit steps in front of a votive candle that casts flickering light on a print of a Black Virgin who weeps wax tears and wears tinsel and satin clothing. White Rabbit crosses herself. “A world in which he could not be a musician or an architect without accepting beforehand that society would not honor his occupation but would regard it as something at most to be tolerated, basically useless, such a world,” Brother Thomas is saying, “seemed to the accused to be a world that ought to be destroyed. Music. Architecture. Mere pastimes not related to the basic business of living, the getting…” The green-skinned daughter of the storekeeper listens and laughs and covers her mouth with her hands, their fingers rose-nailed, dark hands adorned with sick but happy roses. She cannot understand Thomas, for he is speaking English, his voice booming low, squealing high. But she laughs. She senses that she is watching a performance. Yes, it’s a minstrel show and Brother Thomas is Al Jolson, saying, “… the getting together of money so that you could live high on the hog down in Alabammy.” The storekeeper sits outside with his chair tilted against the wall. A small chair with a painted back, red and yellow flowers and blue one-eyed ducks, and he is very dark and very fat and breathes audibly, heavy as a burro, as an ocean. “To live high on the hog with a fat bank account and an easy conscience, using all the old familiar words to stay on top and to keep those not also on top jumping through the hoop just as always: be patient, brothers, be patient, your time will come. Oh, yes. Turn the other cheek. Be loving. Yes, oh yes, be charitable. The meek shall inherit the earth. By and by. By and by.” Brother Thomas is on his way now. He is on his pony, jogging rhythmically, chanting while the others clap their hands to his beat and sing out the proper responses: amen, say it, brother, say it. In the alley a dog begins to whimper and the storekeeper kicks at it and suddenly a crowd of ragged children appear from nowhere, barefoot urchins in gray overalls who throw stones at piles of dust in the alley and then give their attention to chasing after the dog, which now is howling, running away while Brother Thomas in his charro costume goes on with his star-touching, earth-rooted chant, cold, fleshless, yet as compelling as the beat of a tomtom:

“For all men are created equal…”

“Tell, us man, tell us.”

“Oh, yes, equal. And ought to be free to vote now and then.”

“Vote, brothers, vote.”

“Amen! Forty acres of your own.”

“Nobody else!”

“Forty acres and your soul. But be nice, baby, be nice.”

It’s a litany and neither the children in the alley nor the fat storekeeper can understand, but they feel the rhythm and they listen intently. They too clap their hands and out into the alley we march, like General Booth on his way to heaven, led by a black-faced captain of saints in the costume of a charro, surrounded now by the children. Behind us, smells of licorice and cinnamon and teaberry and Mimi suckers and chlorophyllic chewing gum. We are on our way too, now, to see where our legs will take us.

Brother Thomas ends his singsong abruptly and wipes his fingers on the loose-hanging tails of his charro shirt and with one hand on my shoulder for balance tugs at his fly to piss. “Hey, man, how do you want me to do it? A cowboy there, a charro here. That’s the answer, eh?”

I offer him a pair of white gloves I have in my jacket pocket. The children level the barrels of their index fingers at Thomas and, pow-pow-pow, shoot him and then the rest of us. “Charros, charros, charros! Drop dead, you phonies! Give us a quinto, blackman! A quinto to buy a pop! Come on, don’t be like that, give us a quinto!” Brother Thomas has his fly open and calmly pisses and resumes his defense-attorney speech: “The accused claimed the right to take what he had never posssessed, neither strength nor wealth nor even life. He made his own right. The right to wipe away that old world and build a new one.”

El Güero hangs his head and surprises us with his voice: faint, hopeless, the cultivated accent of a very proper Bostonian. “No, it wasn’t like that. No. It was … destiny, I think. I was caught up in my times. And … I was used to obeying, that was my habit, more than my habit, my duty. And I didn’t want…”

The children turn and stare at him and nudge each other with their elbows. He shines a little in the darkness. His yellow hair lights up his face. He is almost iridescent. “A güero,” the children are whispering. “A gringo güero.”

“I didn’t know what was really happening. I just went on doing, being what I had always done and been. Nothing changed for me. Nothing has ever changed. I’m still today just what I was then. I swear it … I thought I was doing the right thing. Others were fighting and dying for my sake. They were heroes in my name. Maybe I felt grateful to them for letting me go on being the same as always, for allowing me to feel heroic without having to be heroic. Maybe … maybe…”

The children grin at him and form a ring around him and begin to dance.

Mistress Morgana, our honorable judge, plants her black boots in the dust. She is just out of a comic strip, but she doesn’t know it. “The accused will remain silent while the attorney for the defense tries to save his skin for him,” she pronounces rather grimly.

The small brown arms of the children rise, jabbing, pointing. “El Güero! Father Jesus! Father Jesus!”

Brother Thomas tries to interrupt them: “Yes, he had to live inside a dream. A dream of a heroic people, Volk. With heroic leaders. For if he kept himself apart from it, he would never understand it, or, above all, understand the terror…”

“Father Jesus!” yell the children, and maybe they are mocking our Bostonian blond German and maybe they are not. They grab him and he stiffens to his full height, trying to escape their small brown hands. Brother Thomas goes on like an opera basso: “… the terror and the pain of knowing something that after all can never be understood.”

“Come on, holy Jesus, touch us, let us touch you! Give us your hand! Bless us!” El Güero, ringed by the prancing, shouting children, has fallen behind us. “The accused wanted to be able to believe the last legend, to take part in the last battle of the legendary warriors, the struggle fast and last against modern mediocrity.” Brother Thomas is shaking with laughter now. He is a plantation slave defending his master. And his master, shoved off balance by the clawing hands of the children, stumbles and falls into the briars of the thick hedge, while the window of one of the adobe huts that line the alley opens and a woman shouts, “What the hell are you kids up to out there? Leave those gringos alone!” Laughing, laughing, Brother Thomas continues, “He wanted to prove that the strength of the ancient heroes is still possible, that it can be the strength of feeble modern man if he will only give up his comfortable middle-class myths, his golden life in the miserable mean, his masks of decency and decorum.”

The children have pounced on El Güero where he lies sprawled in the hedge. “Get away from me!” he yells at them. “Goddammit, don’t touch me! Don’t let them touch me! They want to hurt me!” He struggles free and stands with his face hidden behind his palms. Then his hands move away and show his eyes open very wide, his lips peeled back from his white teeth, his golden hair shining in the darkness. The children, silent, retreat one step, only to return again throwing a mocking chant into the night air like a mortal leap,

Dingaling let’s go to mass

And fuck Jesus up his ass

and Brother Thomas must raise his voice: “Give up those absurdities and have faith once again in his hidden and secret powers that for centuries have been suppressed by the faithless faithful, the chicken-shit believers and the self-satisfied unbelievers and the well-educated burghers whose credo is the dollar now and after death, an even greener reward.” El Güero, standing again, lifts his hands in a pious gesture and announces: “I forgive them. They know not what they are doing.”

“For God’s sake,” Jakob mutters. “Playing Christ isn’t in the script. Stick to your role.”

“No,” admits El Güero. “But I like it. I saw Buñuel’s Nazarín a few days ago.”

“For God’s sake,” Jakob repeats.

I notice that the kids are picking up stones and are going to throw them. I shout a warning and we are all running toward the wide avenue at the end of the alley, the swift Beltway, cold white lights of a hospital, a morgue, a mortuary. The kids race after us but stop at the end of the alley. It’s their frontier, not one more step. Brown-skinned little sons and daughters of the great whore, swollen small bellies, worm-infested blood, infection in their guts, tetany in their skinny necks, shouting after us and shaking clenched fists that hold stones they do not throw.

“Well, you were enjoying yourself,” White Rabbit is saying to El Güero. “Why didn’t you go through with it to the end? We could have found you a cross somewhere.”

“I didn’t care for the set,” he replies.

We are standing on the narrow traffic island in the middle of the Beltway. All of us in a line holding hands like shipwrecked sailors, one misstep and we will all fall, and now and then no cars pass but now and then again they go by like projectiles. White Rabbit is beside me. Her hand is in mine and I can smell her makeup, which has dried and stiffened and is ready to crack. I smell her like an ocean beach about to be murdered by dawn, small in the trench coat that is exactly like the ones Sam Spade and his sons Garfield-Bogart-Belmondo used to wear. “Your style will come in again,” I am about to say to her. I let her hand go and hug myself with both arms and by breathing in her smells I secretly embrace her. “Long hair will go out, little gringa, dated, washed up, old hat.” I say it silently and feel stronger. But White Rabbit is not reading my thoughts. She is murmuring to El Güero, “I suppose you wanted Cecil B. De Mille as your director.” Her voice is amused and tender.

“Why not?” he replies in his damn Brahmin accent, the accent of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (for which read Wasp), the accent of a Boston Boy, which is what I think I shall call him from here on out. He has something hidden under his long corduroy frock coat. It’s a cardboard box full of wriggling earthworms. Yes, that it is, that it is. And why the hell not? Can’t a Boston Boy carry worms around?

“What are you hiding there?” White Rabbit asks. Her pink eyes are golden through her dark glasses. “And who made that coat for you?”

“Cut it out, you two,” Jakob says harshly. “We’re not here to discuss our personal problems. No one is interested now. Stick to your roles.”

“But I am looking for a savior, a god, something,” White Rabbit retorts. “In all seriousness.”

Jakob calmly slaps her cheek.

“Shit, it is my role!” she says. “Do you think this is me?”

“Okay, okay, so excuse me, I’m sorry, I’m wrong.” Jakob bobs his head up and down as if he were memorizing something. Brother Thomas, his voice deep in his chest, shouts, “An ultramundane glory! A loving forgiveness!” Now he is begging like the plasm of a ghost abruptly remembering what it is, who he must be, the attorney for the defense, Franz Boston Boy’s alter ego. “Full pardon for the most extreme excesses, those of a life of conformity, for the pointless squandering of transient strength, oh Hero, oh Captain.”

We stand there arm in arm and I feel the coldness of the night and don’t want to run away from anything, from this drowned meeting with the whimpers and soft moans that come from beneath Boston Boy’s long-skirted coat of the Romantics, tight around the chest, loose below. I read in Harper’s Bazaar that Pierre Cardin has made that style coat the fashion again. Or, to drop a pleasant name, China Machado told me, and certainly she must know, for she is the most exciting woman in the world (except you, little Pussycat, of course). And none of us is exposed to anything. We risk nothing. No one is going to stop us and ask us what the hell we are doing here, why Brother Thomas is crooning to us a repetitive canticle of abstractions so dry and remote that they are entirely senseless. “They marched forward to meet what man had lost. The tragic life. The life of the animal. The final dangerous and true limits of human action. The will to continue to the end, to the edge, to the precipice.” Yes, the papier-mâché mountains of Götterdämmerung. The mighty Hausfrauen carrying lances and wearing gold breastplates and horned helmets. Sure, and Goebbels was Siegfried, I suppose. “Joyous acceptance of all the faces of man. That freedom.” Sure, sure, Brother Thomas. Oh, bullshit. Stuff it, stuff it.

At this instant a car whirls by with mocking voices, laughter, jeers, waving fists, the horn honking shave and a haircut, two bits, the voices crying go fuck your goddamn mothers as a cellophane bag filled with urine flies out the window and hits good Brother Thomas squarely in the face. He is drenched and the rest of us are spattered. He ignores it. “That true freedom to accept all, not only what man is but what he may be. All the powers of Man, of Man, of Mangy, Maniac, Manacled Manequin Man.” He wipes the piss off and gravely concludes: “All human being. The most secret and the most terrifying.”

For a moment we stiffen our poses in a phony, absurd Laocoön group.

But the figures of our ensemble come apart and the only serpent is the embroidered silver snake that twists across the ass of Brother Thomas’s charro trousers gobbling up a silver eagle.

Feeling a little melancholy, we cross the Beltway. Brother Thomas is speaking very softly, sadly. “Because you, all of you, have hidden, buried, killed your being. You have created a crooked, mutilated half-man, a man lacking myth.” Oh-ho. Master Swift, who despises the Animal, Man, yet so loves Tom, Dick, and Harry, I remember you, and so does Brother T.

We approach the old Lincoln convertible. “But not the Accused and his comrades. They dug up again the buried pieces of man, pulled aside the veil to show him entire and whole again.” Boston Boy raises the lid of the trunk. It is filled with a tangle of clothing. Their disguises, I guess. None of them suspects my surprise, nor do I suspect theirs, when Boston Boy gravely removes the living, moving, moaning, threatening little bundle he has been carrying buttoned inside his frock coat and tenderly deposits it in the car trunk. No, not worms after all. Two tiny animals. Each wrapped around the other and each quietly, patiently eating the other alive. Yes, that’s clear enough. The lid slams down. We can still hear the whimpering, the tiny moans, the choking sounds. All of us stare at Boston Boy but he is completely self-possessed and unconcerned and none of us says a word, and who knows what will be the end of this journey that will end when night does.

The Monks stand there and I turn my back on them and get in the car. Brother Thomas follows, muttering: “For man is Satan’s son too, Old Harry’s heir, born on St. Bartholomew’s Day.” The springs of the seat creak beneath us. I move my feet around among cans of motor oil, looking for room. “And he, man of evil as well as man of good, is complete only when he accepts, parades, makes use of his nocturnal face.” Rose Ass and White Rabbit squeeze in as best they can on my left, their weight pushing the cushion down as the springs creak again. Jakob and Judge Morgana sit in front on the right and Boston Boy is behind the wheel. “Where to?” asks Jakob. I tell him, Calzada del Niño Perdido. “That hidden face of darkness that for centuries was concealed by the Judaic-Christian barbarism that maimed and mutilated him. Thomas. Peter. John.” Yes, Niño Perdido, and we can stay on the Beltway as far as the Barranca del Muerto. “Let Gimp Man render unto Goof God what is of God, and unto Purty Gerty what is hers. Amen.” No one echoes this time. Brother T.’s chorus, like myself, has had enough. “The accused had to say everything that had gone unspoken. He had to find the fury and strength to go back to frightened God and face him once and for all, confront him with human unity, oneness, integrality, the unity the holy circumcised and the fainthearted faithful had forbidden, the weapon man had always possessed, but had forgotten how to use.” I say softly, Sure: and every year too many children are born in Mexico and Haiti and India and maybe in hell too, and must starve sucking withered breasts, while in the less fecund States, in half a decade seventy-five percent of the two hundred million or so good citizens will be under twenty-five, by which statistic my graying Yankee contemporaries can understand that their revolution is already upon them and comes not only with demonstrations and marches, long hair and miniskirts, but also like an avalanche, is no more to be resisted than an avalanche. “What,” Brother Thomas is saying, “what does the evil in us prove? Simply that evil is as human as every other attribute of man.” “Cut out,” says White Rabbit. “Can it, for Christ’s sake. You’re crazy. You’re out of it.” “Yes, and in a world that believes itself to be so impeccably in it, rich with Rationality and strong with Sanity, someone has to be out of it, to be openly and proudly sick and lunatic.” I hunch forward and look at the heap of magazines and newspapers and posters that these Monks carry with them on their pilgrimages or perhaps pick up along the way. Eros. The Evergreen Review. The Adventures of Barbarella. Circus posters with their sadism. Shirley Temple and Boris Karloff movie stills. The Wall Street Journal. Der Spiegel. Charlie Brown staring at Snoopy. Brother Thomas is beginning to give me a royal pain in the ass. If he is a defense attorney, I am the Secretary of State. Every word he speaks seems planned to harm our blond accused, not help him. Why for God’s sake is he standing up now, braced against the folded back top of the convertible, and laughing, laughing, laughing and shouting as we whirl through the underpasses of the Beltway, “The accused was Sick, Sick, Sick and Crazy … but in the name and for the sake of all mankind, that all might be healthy! And that is what you will never understand … Neveeeeer!” laughing again as we bank around a curve, “and not even failure teaches you!” I wait for him to be silent. Then I observe, shouting to be heard over the rush of wind, “Master Swifty offered the only way out, you know. To fatten the offspring of the poor and when the babies are one year old and, as Swift puts it, at their most succulent, to market them as gastronomic delicacies. A black market, I suppose…”

The city slides past us in glimpses and fragments. Brother Thomas takes off his Mexican sombrero with its decorations of dark silver roses and waves it over his head, greeting the World, the Universe: “You will never understand because today you feel that you have proven yourselves right and anointed in contrast to the demonstrated insanity of the accused. Yet nevertheless he is your savior. His rich insanity remembered what all of you had forgotten, that every goddamn one of us is capable of cruelty as far as cruelty can go, of total pride, even of a little suffering.” The Monks have begun to sing, quietly, Pretty Woman, Holy Mamma, have mercy on me. A traffic cop blasts his whistle at us. And my city, I tell them, though they don’t hear me, is falling apart into islands between which we make our lonely voyages, we see no one standing on his own feet, we see nothing, the rich live hidden in their phony reproductions of colonial-period palaces behind high walls topped with pieces of broken glass, as if with barbed wire, while the poor live hidden in the ruins that are left of the authentic colonial palaces on the impenetrable other side of deserts of pavement where living men are never seen: we see only speeding cars and overloaded speeding buses and trams, everyone is locked up in a steel capsule that orbits on rubber wheels, and the schedules of these transitory planets are so arranged that their trajectories never cross, no one ever meets his brother, no face ever gazes upon a comrade face, we forget in our alienation that others exist too, and indeed we fear to encounter another existence because that might lead to an understanding of the value of our own and end in mutual murder: oh, my Mexico City, impoverished metropolis with feet of clay, poor village greasy as tuna candy cakes, village that stretches, like an oil slick, the length and breadth of the wasteland valley, poor salt castle awaiting the oncoming tide of sulfur: and I see Jakob looking at me in the rearview mirror, it seems with an expression of understanding and compassion, while Brother Thomas drones his empty monody of hollow words and windy ideas, and it seems to me that the rest of the Monks have gone to sleep like tired children, or perhaps died like old hatreds, none of them hears me and it wouldn’t matter if any did, for this is my city, not theirs. And from the trunk comes an infant-like moaning that the roar of the open muffler suffocates. No, the Monks are not sleeping or dead. They are awake, whispering with each other, preparing the scene that will follow this Judgment Scene for which Jakob, good German, is responsible, a farce trial full of legalisms and empty of blood. It’s true that Brother Thomas has spoken as fervently as an itinerant tent-preacher with one eye on the Holy Spirit and the other on the redhead in the third row. But he has convinced no one. Brother Thomas in his role of defense attorney is a shyster and a fraud. He’s a switch knife with a blade of soft rubber. A hammer with a cork head. The tiny pellet of a boy’s BB rifle. Yet he goes on: “Try to understand, try to see it. We were liberators, not oppressors. We were the only mortals in ten thousand centuries who had dared to feel and acknowledge the evil within us, who had the courage to act out that evil instead of crippling and smothering its power.” He throws his sombrero high in the air and it floats down and is leaped upon by dogs barking from the sidewalk. Long-snouted dogs with slobbering mouths and eyes of feverish razor blades. “We could love as you could not, for as you could not, we could also hate.” He collapses on the seat beside me. “We demanded to be hated bitterly, because we knew that only if we were hated could we be loved with equal intenseness.” He coughs.

All of us are silent and now we’re there. “To the left,” I say. “Park at the filling station. They know me there.”

“No, no one understood,” Boston Boy Franz murmurs as he swings the convertible into the station. “Why couldn’t anyone understand?”

White Rabbit Elizabeth stares at him with disgust. “Oh, I understand. You wanted me only because…”

“Yes! Believe it, Bette. Don’t fool yourself.” He takes her hand and twists it.

“Let me go, damn you! You wanted me only to make your peace with yourself. You had to have a woman like me, any woman, didn’t matter who…”

He turns her and pins her arms to her buttocks. “No, you’re wrong. Not even that.”

I sigh and want to get out of the car. I don’t want to understand too much now. If everything becomes too clear, I’ll lose interest. I have come this far because I wanted mystery, an approach to the mystery that is left, genuine and baffling, once the pseudo-mysteries of similarities and contrasts dissolve. I wave a hand to the man coming out of the filling station toward us, but he doesn’t recognize me. I vault out of the car. “Hey, José! We’re going to leave our wheels here. Okay?” Nothing can be heard from the trunk of the car now. José suddenly smiles. “Yes, sir! For a minute I didn’t know you.”

“No, not even that,” Boston Boy insists. White Rabbit has taken off her glasses and without them her eyes are small and a little crossed. “You didn’t understand,” goes on Boston Boy, who has jumped out after me. White Rabbit stands there, slow to react. We move toward the street. Suddenly she is shouting.

“You’ve got to tell me! You’ve treated me just like Javier!” She runs to one of the gasoline pumps. “And at least he never tried to deceive me!” She grabs the hose by the nozzle and drags it toward us. “I always knew what he wanted, that I had to pretend to be another woman.” She squeezes the trigger and gasoline showers upon us. “No, he never tried to deceive me!” We run to the sidewalk, away from her, and she lifts the nozzle so that the stream of gasoline arches after us. “He made me play games.” José grabs her from behind, around the waist. “I had to go late to a party so that he could come even later and find me there and pretend I was a new love.” She tries to bite José’s hand. “A love he had never known before.” Both White Rabbit and José are drenched with gasoline now. “He would arouse me, then deny me satisfaction.” José hoists her high, kicking, wriggling, and she lets the hose go. “He offered me one humiliation after another.” Her skirt is up and I can see her lovely thighs and a glimpse for a second of her crotch glistening copper under the cold glare of the filling station’s powerful mercury lights, and my breathing has quickened. “He made me share his own humiliation, his failure, but at least…” She falls to her knees, soaked with gasoline. “At least he was willing to gamble that I could take it and survive it.” She has a box of matches in her hand. “No, he never deceived me.” Good God, I am thinking. And this is how you ought to be, little White Rabbit, nameless White Rabbit, the way I and any man must want you. My prick is stiff and I think to myself, I have what you’re asking for, White Rabbit, and I want to give it to you. José, red with fury, is putting the nozzle of the hose back in its hanger. “I always knew his game, always.”

She gets to her feet and crosses after us. She comes toward us holding the box of matches extended. We all stink of gasoline. None of us dares move. I think: you don’t have to put a match to me, little gringa nun. I’m hot enough already. She lights a match and stares first at the flame and then at blond Boston Boy Franz: she doesn’t even glance at the hard bulge behind my fly. She says to him, after waiting several long seconds, “And you…”

“Here, wait a minute,” Boston Boy grins. He opens his frock coat and from the inside pocket takes out a creased envelope, from the envelope a letter. Jonathan Nathan Richardson. Greetings. Having passed all tests. Will present yourself for induction. Proceed then directly to Basic Training Camp X, South Carolina. And so off friend Boston Boy will go, Uncle Ho, to call upon you with gifts of napalm and lazy dogs.

White Rabbit laughs and touches her match to the letter. It burns like a bamboo Buddist Monk.

They chuckle and begin to sing the Marines’ Hymn, everyone except White Rabbit, Jakob, and myself, who have something of a sense of propriety.

“Look, we better go inside quick,” I say to them. “The cops keep an eye on this place.”

No one moves. They are holding themselves stiff, at attention. From the halls of Montezuma … Sure, the goddamn bastards began their legend right here in Mexico.

Boston Boy moves closer to her. I would like to hold a match to him, his yellow beard and hair. He takes her arm. “No, Lisbeth. I didn’t want you for that. I swear it. Not to wipe away a guilt I never felt for a moment.” White Rabbit lifts her face, washed of its makeup by the gasoline, a face without eyebrows, without lips, without shadows, a face with slightly crossed eyes.

“Then why?”

“You’ll die if I don’t explain everything, won’t you?” He speaks with his voice softer and softer. “To possess again a girl I had lost years ago.” His voice drops to a whisper in her wet hair.

“Come on, come on, we have to get inside.”

“What? Hanna? Who is Hanna?” Not a muscle of her face moves. Face of the sea, of the green wet earth, of dry flame. Everyone stares with phony seriousness at Jakob while Boston Boy raps his knuckles on the brass door and the eyes of Gladiolo appear in the peep window. “I don’t know who Hanna is,” says Boston Boy. “I never knew her well.” Gladiolo stares at us, sniffs, sees and recognizes me. “Order, order,” snaps our judge. “The witnesses will testify in turn.” “Did you fall into an oil well or something?” asks Gladiolo, sniffing. His face is rouged and powdered, his eyes are made up.

The Capitana, the madam of the house, greets us and leads us through crowded drawing rooms. It’s an old building, from the end of the last century. The stink of our gasoline-drenched clothes overpowers smells of powder and perfume and ripe fish. The whores are in a group at the foot of the wide stairs quietly jabbering with each other while their customers, tight pants and narrow lapels, drink at the bar and the girls’ pimps circulate with drinks on embossed metal trays. The Capitana, shaking her head and fanning her fingers delicately back and forth in front of her nostrils, guides us to the stairs. “The girls with you probably want to be alone, I suppose, very secluded, eh? We have some fine shows later in the evening. The drinks will come up in just a minute. Cigarettes, whatever you care for. How many girls do you want? I have to admit,” shaking her head and chuckling a little, “that I don’t know which of you want girls and which want men. You there in the red pants, how about it, pussy or prick? Unbutton, joven, and let an old woman have a peek at you.” Rose Ass-Long Dong unbuckles his belt and drops his pants and the Capitana stares. “God save us! Girls, take a look at the way this man is hung!”

Long Dong-Rose Ass is pale, his hair is like straw, his nose a little like Pinocchio’s. He speaks, softly, “It’s that I wanted … to be a witness of something…”

“Witness?” cries the madam. “With that hose between your legs, you only want to watch? Ah, come off it, don’t be selfish. Ay, papacito.”

Long Dong sits bare-assed on the edge of the bed. The room is very large and has no windows. The windows have been bricked up, plastered over. Once, perhaps, there was a balcony to the right. “And maybe,” Long Dong goes on, “that’s all I have been. I’ve remained merely a witness. Only a looker-on. But I swear I didn’t know it.” Judge Morgana has jerked off her boots and she falls on top of Long Dong. “The witness will be coherent or shut his mouth.” She shuts his mouth for him, with kisses. Long Dong quickly undresses her. “Capitana,” I say, “dry our clothes for us, won’t you? This night will be longer than a forest road, deeper than the mountains of the sea. And none of us is Sanforized. Tell the girls to be a little less impatient. To step back and stop biting their fingernails. Better: make them look the other way.” “Let’s get the hell out of here,” a whore mutters. “They don’t want us.” “No, they’re not serious clients. They’ve just come for the kicks.” “But my God, look at that man’s prick! He’s hung like a Piedras Negras bull. Like a Zacatlan burro.” “Ay, what a shaft, what a baseball bat!” “Girls, listen!” cries the Capitana. “We’ll hold a raffle for him!” She stands like an oak. An old oak with hanging moss, her double chins. “We’ll raffle him off. Get them undressed.” They crowd around us, laughing, murmuring, on their knees with their heads bowed, trembling with excitement and with satisfaction in the servility of their roles. Professionals, their hands expert. They are ancient slave girls. They are cinnamon-skinned geishas, pockmarked, overperfumed, undressing their lords and ladies, ourselves, who stand like statues. Long Dong and Judge Morgana are alone in the bed. An enormous bed such as you don’t see any more. Four posts carved with vines and topped with urns. A high headboard. A red silk coverlet. Long Dong the muddled witness but the experienced lover; Morgana the passive judge naked except for the black garter belt that hangs upon the bones of her hips like a cowboy’s cartridge belt without cartridges. Long Dong is saying: “If I could only get my thoughts straight. But it seems that everything happened so long ago. We all had that dream. Didn’t you have it?” “Who wants to buy her chance in the raffle? The chance of a lifetime, girls. You’ll never see another to equal it.” While the trial continues:

“What dream? Please relate it. Dates and facts.”

“The dream with which I left Mexico and my mother?”

“Continue. In detail. Don’t summarize.”

“The dream that took us to Greece?”

“Remember carefully. Precisely.”

“The dream of the thirties. Of my early reading, of the romantics…”

“The witness will please define what is a romantic.”

“Someone who paws your dream.”

“That is sufficient. Go on.”

“Everything is impending. Everything is an aberration. Both the beautiful and the criminal.”

“You need not follow chronological order. Let the first be last.”

“I can say on oath that I have remembered Raúl and Ofelia only to try to know whether they lived for my sake. But I don’t want to go on talking about them. If I can, I’ll stop.”

“The witness will endeavor to be born again.”

And the girls wait, staring at Long Dong’s blooded razor, his lecherous shadow, his Nestle tower, his golden banana, his octopus nerve, his black fish. “Who wants in the raffle?” “Here, Capitana, here’s my ten pesos.” “Here’s mine.” Stone ear of yellow-kerneled corn. Slim head of a slant-eyed fox. Fur of a puma. And the humpbacked older woman, squat Elenita, the towel girl, with her wrinkled elephant skin, tough hide that will never serve for a lady’s gloves. “Pay up, girls, pay up.” The Capitana’s teeth grin like piano keys. “What’s he saying to her there?” “Christ knows. They’re speaking Chinese or something.” “… And the point is, a few minutes ago the attorney for the defense spoke about rediscovering the unity we have lost. About desire fulfilled simply by being desired. And I realized…” “Yes, my love. Deeper. A little deeper.” “… that both the poets and the criminals…” “You, too, Elenita? You can’t resist a horn like that either? Well, pay up, pay up. God will choose the winner.” “… could be born of the same mother. Sade is named Auschwitz. Lautréamont is Treblinka. Nietzsche is Terezin…” “No more now. The cards go into the chamber pot and each of you will draw one. The girl who draws the rooster wins the cock.” “… And our dream, the dream I could never write, was born of the spirit of those times…” Into the white chamber pot drop the cards one by one: the Soldier, the Serpent, the small Negro, the Watermelon, the Rooster … “… and was part of those times and had to die with those times…” “Quick, my love! Now, quick! Don’t worry about who’s next. Come for me now, I’m first.” She has her legs locked around his waist. “… to end with the end of that world which had crippled all of us…” The Charro. The Skeleton, with its tapers. The Hunchback. One card for each whore. “… and the only way to destroy that world was to do just what the attorney for the defense said. Put everything to the test. Compel reality to submit itself to will and our purpose. Our desire that no man had dared to feel before…” The Capitana hoists the chamber pot and shakes it well, rotates it, mixes the cards. “Wait your turns. No cheating. Everything square and aboveboard. We’re whores all right, but we’re honest whores.” “More, my lover! More, more!” “… So there had to be two revolutions instead of one. One in the world. One within ourselves.” “Oh, my love, my love, my love!” “Victory for will and desire at last. At last an end to the terrible oppositions that for centuries had isolated us from each other. Yours and mine. Word and action. Dream and waking. Body and soul. Homeland, flag, family, property…” He stops. If he were to go on, his words would be drowned, he would have to squirt them out as foam.

“And was that your dream too, Elizabeth?” asks Brother Thomas.

The whores draw their cards one by one and hold them face side down. At a signal from the Capitana, they all turn the cards over. “Ooooooh, nooooo! Look who has the rooster!” “God, what luck!” “What saint did you pray to, Elenita?” “But she doesn’t know her cunt from a hole in the ground. She’s no more a whore than I am a copper.” “If that black-haired bitch who came with them hasn’t tired him out, you’ll be flying high in a minute or two, Elenita.” “A pearl before a sow … shit, shit!” And the Capitana, the only gentle voice: “Put down your towels, Elenita. Your chance has come.” “Better have an alcohol rub first. You’ll need all the pep you can find.” “We were cheated. Capitana, you did that on purpose!” “I? I didn’t do anything. Didn’t you see her draw it herself?” So Elena the towel girl wins the raffle. Short stooped figure wearing black cotton stockings, a checked gingham dress, a tattered white sweater. The towel girl. Flabby breasts. Wrinkled face. Sinewy arms. Brown hands accustomed to wiping away blood and semen, to cleaning the cunts of whores and the pricks of apes like King Kong, monarch of the jungle. Elena of the warm washcloths, the soft white towels, always ready, quick, Long Dong is yours, you can forget your towels for a while.

In the hot season, snakes leave their dens. Their old skin is no longer good enough, and abandoning their solitude they go out into the sun to join their brothers in a tangled mass and wriggle over the trampled fields of Eden, scraping across the bristled earth until their skin is pulled away in strips and they become naked skeletons with egglike eyes. And I don’t know who touches whom when Rose Ass-Long Dong-Javier rises from the bed and we all pile in. I don’t know what he says to Elenita, the runt, twisted, ugly towel girl who has seated herself on a stool beside him, still holding her stack of towels, while the Capitana amuses me with the black kiss and a pair of socks that I think belong to Jakob fly past my nose.

“I wrote a short book. I left my mother. I met a woman and we went to Greece. That much I know is true. At least I believe it is true. But the world didn’t change. It denied me and refused to notice me.”

“Look, young señor, the rooster!”

“I wanted to be one with the world, with my dream, with art, action…”

“Look, señor, just look.”

“Did I lose confidence in the strength of my desire?”

“See, señor, I have the rooster.”

“Now let me try to stand beside Franz. Accuse me too…”

“I won, señor! I won!”

“We are just alike. Except that what was action in him in me was only possibility, latency. In me it lacked all greatness, all courage. I have been a kind of larva Franz.”

“I won the raffle, señor.”

“Try to see it, Elenita. We were told that the world could be made over only when we all acted together, as one. A single man, alone, could do…”

“The raffle, I won the raffle!”

“But history never thinks. History acts.”

“And my prize, señor? What about my prize?”

“My isolated desire could do nothing. Nor could love, the proclamation of the desire we all have.”

“Aren’t you going to be nice to me, señor?”

“Can love be a summary of everything the world is? Can we be one with the world by making ourselves one with a woman?”

“That’s in God’s hands, señor. Are you going to force me to be satisfied just watching?”

“And isn’t love really a struggle, a resistance, a desire: like the world, something we must conquer or let conquer us? Doesn’t one lover always impose his being upon the other, prevent the other from becoming what he might? And … what? What the hell comes next? Damn my memory, I’ve…”

“Elena! Elenita! A towel to Number 6! Damn it, where has she taken off to now? Elena! Why in God’s name do we pay her? All she does is sit and listen to the drunks make their confessions. Elena! I’m dripping like a sponge, damn it, hurry up!”

“Touch it if you want to, Elenita.”

“Oh, I want to, señor.”

“You have very pretty hands.”

“I have to have something pretty. The rest of me…”

“I like your hands. They’re heavy as two wet stones. They’re heavy as a bag full of silver.”

“That’s from carrying the towels all the time. Sometimes my arms are so numb I can’t feel them.”

“Is it enough for you just to watch?”

“But I ought not to have entered the raffle. Meddling in something that isn’t my business. They’re going to be mad at me. They’ll holler and yell at me. Better put the little rooster back and let someone else … Thank you, young señor. You’ve been kind.”

“They’re yelling for you already. Is it true that you listen to men’s confessions, Elenita?”

“Yes, when they’re drunk they like to talk and they know I never tell. But I have to go. They’ll fire me if I don’t hurry.”

“Sit still. I’ll pay them for the time you stay with me. What do you earn?”

“Just my tips, my meal. Now and then a drink.”

“Come here, Elenita.”

“No, señor. Not to the bed. They’ll get mad.”

“Come here, Elenita. Come and listen to my confession. Just listen, that’s all. Can you understand me?”

“No, I never understand. That’s why men talk to me. While they’re waiting, before or after, they all talk to me, like cloudbursts they talk. And I forget everything, every word. I can’t remember. They call me forgotten Elenita, the forgetter. Yes. That’s me.”

“Come here and forget some things that don’t mean anything.”

“No, señor. I’m not the one for you to do this with.”

“Lie down.”

Jey joneybonch. Loveydovey. Hazme un huequito, cherriblossom. Foqui-foqui …

“I’ll put the light out now.”

“Ay, señor, señor!”

“Good, Elenita? Deep enough?”

“Oh, my God. Everybody fuck everybody.”

“Do you smell my Negro friend, Elena? Who ever made up that lie that Negroes smell different from the rest of us, worse? Touch the blond señor’s whiskers. Rub the back of our girlfriend who has no eyebrows. Jakob, what the hell are you doing with your socks on in bed? Listen, Elena, while I ask Jakob a few silly questions. Are you trying to shape up by making love, Jake? Don’t you know that while we forget it the world goes its own way? Don’t you see that in your battle, which is exactly like mine, my first dream, that dream of far away, of rebellion, you have been defeated too?”

And I am among, beneath, between the tangle of bodies, half suffocated. The absence of laughter frightens me. The cadaverous solemnity in which none of us touches any of the others, in which we are all kept secure by the mask of the language we are speaking, English, English too in the mouths of these dark Mexican whores with their joneybonch and foqui-foqui, and when Rose Ass puts out the light, every hand is withdrawn from the skin it was touching, darkness snatches our pleasure away from us, our hands flee to refuge against their own bodies, and the lingua franca of young, beardless Rose Ass forces isolation upon all of us who understand his Germanic English … “The destroyers of idols have now become the idolizers of idols…” and Rose Ass lies like a thin sardine on the edge of the silent, creaking bed, pressed against Elena the towel girl … “… Triumphant rebellion becomes the new institution, the law of the new oppression imposes respectability upon all until we must flee to imagine an untouchable madness, to feel the new sickness that has come to infect us…” and the foreign tongue immobilizes the whores, restrains their mockery, protects us from them, and in their own way they are part of our game too, listening without understanding as he says in English:

“What is left of our dream?” and White Rabbit, sighing beside me, pushes away all the cold arms and replies:

“The tragedy of the little tragedies. Tragedy without a tragic mask. Loss of illusion. Understanding at last what is really possible and what is not.”

“The testimony of the witness is accepted,” whispers Judge Morgana. A pillow is over her face. I think to myself, Christ, what a bitch of a judge. She carries her ceremonial wig in her crotch, well soaked now. They stand her on her head in the courtroom of Old Bailey and she pronounces sentence with a wriggle of her umbilicus and no one understands her. And there she is, when Rose Ass turns on the light again and everyone cries out and covers his mouth and the whores leap from the bed and crouch on the floor and seize handfuls of toilet paper and wipe between their legs, take alcohol and begin to rub each other’s backs and thighs: the old show has ended now, this is the new show, and there is Morgana our judge with her legs high, propped against the mahogany head of the bed. Rose Ass says quietly: “I don’t know. I still don’t know.”

White Rabbit is standing and Rose Ass reaches into the enormous pocket of her trench coat and takes out a lipstick. He begins to draw something on Morgana’s belly.

“The witness is impertinent.”

“No. ‘Avez-vous déjà giflé un mort?’ ‘Avez-vous déjà tué un juif?’”

He draws on her belly the head of Cyclops Cyclon-B, the eyeball belly button of a clown with Tyrolean mustaches.

“That was what I wanted to say…”

The Capitana of the house, disappointed because for her nothing happened during the darkness, hands the attorney for the defense his charro pants and he puts them on, draws them up over his buttocks, stuffs in his balls, while he talks: “Love is good even when it’s sad. We love most those who hurt us most, for we know at least we matter to them.”

“Words, words, sophistry,” Jakob growls. He pulls up his socks while White Rabbit moves among the whores, who are departing, who open the door, ask for towels, receive our clothing, now dry and ironed, and Elena is pushed out of the bed, for her the party is over and she must return to her duties, but White Rabbit closes the door, steps in front of her, takes her by the sloping shoulders and holds her, facing us, holding her by the hair, and says to her: “Why can’t they accept it? Why must they live with ghosts?” She puts a finger under Elena’s chin and lifts it. “Why don’t they prefer a living woman, despite the responsibilities she imposes, to the women of their imaginations?” Elena tries to smile. To close her eyes, to participate in this new show. “Is a flesh-and-body woman a chain around a man?” “A chain of flowers,” smiles Elena. White Rabbit Ligeia goes on, “Why do they give their love to creatures that are as unreal as dreams, the harems of their masturbation, the seraglios of their eunuch impotency?” All of us look at Elenita, short, crooked, dark. Like a good fighting cock, she raises her arms high and closes her eyes and begins to strut before us. She tries to dance. “Why don’t they prefer to love a woman, damn it, a woman who walks, sleeps, eats, pisses, menstruates?” But Elena’s dancing is that of a wooden doll or puppet. One two three, onetwothree, two small steps forward, one back, an ancient Indian ritual dance of beginnings, of terror placated. She is embarrassed as she shuffles before us in her buttoned sweater and her cotton stockings.

White Rabbit has been holding Elena up. Now she gives her a push and the towel girl sprawls on the floor. “Goddamn it, won’t anyone love me? Must I always be the repetition of some adolescent nightmare or the preview of some senile dream in order to have a man make love to me?” Elena lies on the floor softly squealing like a hurt small pig. The whores have gathered around their madam like chicks around the hen and the madam stares at White Rabbit first suspiciously and then with hatred while the whores cry, “Shut her up! Get her out! Call Gladiolo! They’re all of them crazy! The police will come! She’s gone out of her head! See what happens when you let women in!” White Rabbit speaks as if she doesn’t hear them: “What have you given me? Where are my children?” And it is sure there will be an earthquake when there are so many omens and White Rabbit goes slowly to the great bed and we all watch her, our backs against the walls; sure it will rain in Sayula as she lies down and all of us see the bed become a stage: the four-poster throne-bed of this house of many beds, an ancient vast bed such as you never see these days, of heavy solid mahogany, its head high and varnished, and sure rain is falling in Yucatan as Rose Ass tries to leap into the bed after her and Brother Thomas and Jakob grab and hold him and he cries to her: “No, you promised!”

And now the Chontalpa is flooding and roses of the Virgin are growing in winter and White Rabbit is joined by Witch-Judge Morgana, who leans on one of the vine-twined corner posts and seems to be waiting. “Yes, I promised. Never to mention it.” White Rabbit spreads her legs and Morgana throws aside the huge pillows and draws back the blankets and her hand, day’s white spider, moves limping across the red sheet and the whores know that now the show has started, the real show, and Morgana understands how to build her suspense, like Peter Lorre, Dragoness, when he played the Hairless Mexican Porfirio Montezuma Count of Ombú, her hand is the day’s spider and it moves slowly across the red silk searching, seeking, smelling out milk and stars while the Capitana and her whores avidly eat peanuts and crush the empty hulls and throw them to the floor where Elenita the towel girl still lies, the forgotten forgetful one. I want to ask the good Capitana how she came by that bed. But the Capitana is the Capitana and she is peeling grapes with an air mixed of sensuality and boredom while her eyes fasten on the white spider that walks upon Morgana’s fingernails, drunk, alone, as if it carried with it lost but recoverable greatness, such greatness that no mere immediate and transitory pleasure is possible. So inch by inch the spider of the day advances toward the waiting, motionles, pink and silver fly of the day, an immobile fly fixed by the gold pins of a collector of insects between White Rabbit Ligeia’s spread legs.

“Capitana, may I ask where…”

“Be quiet, caifán, be quiet. Would you like a grape?”

The slow sobbing of the forgotten towel girl on the floor is the wind that spreads the sails of the criminal hand now leaping, turning, advancing, retreating across the red silk, scratching the air, rolling, mimicking, chatting, commanding, movement that has become as agile and clear as spoken words and just as loud; and Elena lies on the floor among wads of sperm-smeared toilet paper and puddles of alcohol and heaps of empty peanut shells and the pile of shoes, the laces of which are sleeping worms that Morgana’s moving claw with only a tiny slip, an infinitesimal imprecision, can change into the guardian serpents of the pyramid.

“Tell me where you got that bed, Capitana, or I’ll make them stop.”

“Go ahead, caifán, make them stop. Who cares?”

Laces, worms, snakes. The fingers are suddenly still. They are near the prey but they do not tremble. It is within reach, but they don’t seek to touch it. The crimson fingernails are the knives of a ritual slaughter, but they do not cut. The fly has been hypnotized. Or maybe it knows how to metamorphose itself, when the moment comes, into hollow air filled only with the trills of crickets, into a chameleon mist that will blow away, leaving only naked transparent emptiness between White Rabbit’s open legs. The fly is not afraid. Its own love requires humiliation and it knows that all true violence is motionless, that all authentic chaos is a mirror held before order and clarity, that virtue is a summation of individual sins. White Rabbit lifts her open legs like a rabbit that moves one of its ears in order to hear better the step of the hunter and thereby reveals its hiding place. Her thighs tremble. The fly is prepared for the attack, for it knows that attack will finally bring peace, that it must inevitably become a victim, and it insists that its sacrifice be voluntary and free: they will devour me alive, but I shall have accepted death before they impose it. And so White Rabbit’s vagina trembles, pulses while the whores chomp their peanuts and Elena sobs, and the spider fingers of Morgana enter and spread, rotate, vibrate, grind chocolate or coffee or meal or spume or oil or hops or sand or mud, mix the fruit of the ocean, slide in and out and from side to side and the whores moan and fall on their knees and with one hand over their mouths and the other in their crotches begin to masturbate beside the heap of shoes, beside forgotten forgetful sobbing Elena: flies swarm into the comb of rich honey, a coyote leaps upon the throat of a lamb, salamanders give birth to man-dragons, and in the remote and secret lairs of the world women breed with wolves and men with hyenas that new races of creatures may be created which will never be known by the ants who live in the anthills of the cities: the whores cover their mouths and their cunts that the juices of their pleasure may not leak away, and Brother Thomas, masturbating as fast as he can, shouts almost incoherently that the great labor of destruction requires all the strength and patience of life, and Rose Ass moans: “You promised, Ligeia, you promised! Did you want me to be no more than Raúl was? Dead one Sunday after having lived every Sunday buried in the pages of the newspaper, the gossip columns or the bullfight advertisements, or in the pages of his account books or his Missal? Did you want me to wear forever the shroud that I fled from, escaped from with you? Was that why we lived together?”

And luminous and patient, she who is mortally wounded, wounded by her own wounding, shows us the scar of her hurt, the tired, vitiated splendor of seasons long gone by, the damp, opaque heat of what Morgana’s wet and glacially cold hand finds and draws forth from between White Rabbit’s spread legs while the room becomes silent: a cross of wires and a blood-smeared little puppet, a tiny doll of thread and porcelain and hard crusts of bread with eyes of black fish eggs: she draws it forth and suspends it from one finger and moves it as we, her audience, stare, a little living pendulum the swinging of which makes our eyes roll, our shoulders tilt, the walls of the whorehouse room swing back and forth also. We stand with open mouths and narrowed lids, seeing, disbelieving, whores and Monks alike hypnotized by the tiny doll that has emerged from a phony labor in order to challenge and dismay our long-nailed hands, our anal copulation, our putrefying bodies swarmed over with clouds of black flies, our grotesquely smiling severed heads of bulls and wild boars, savage and stuporous, while the miniature figure of a man is carried high by the gigantic claw of an insane falcon and Morgana watches us and calmly makes the puppet sway back and forth, back and forth.

“Some show, eh?”

“Oy, Capitana, is this for real?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, the bitch had it hidden somewhere.”

“You’re letting that gringa make a monkey of you. Of course it didn’t happen.”

The Capitana is the Capitana and merely peels and eats her grapes. I, on the floor on my knees, listen to the whores’ mockery: children of servitude, daughters of eternal serfdom, toilers and carriers, dwellers in the cabins of labor and the whorehouses of bitterness, how can you answer us except with venom, what weapon against us is left to you? How can you survive except by scurrility and vulgarity? How except with mocking obscenities can you hatchet the air and cut yourselves free from a world you detest and create a world you may be able to love? I hear them, their jokes, their curses, but I don’t look at them. I stare at the rumpled bed with its carved posts and its huge pillows among which lies White Rabbit who says that she is Elizabeth who is known as Ligeia who is famed as Helen who is visited by men because she is known to be the prostitute of the temple who is adored as Holy Mary, Mother of our Savior. Morgana’s hand is a white pigeon and you, White Rabbit Dragoness, are yourself alone and at your feet, which are our foreheads, lies the doll of wire and clay smeared with clots of blood and semen, and Brother Thomas is standing with an open mouth that for once has nothing to say, nothing to defend, while Jakob stares transfixed at the false fetus and Rose Ass who now is not Long Dong covers his eyes and turns away and only Boston Boy is unaffected, self-possessed, observing everything with the dispassionate calm of a touring Oriental potentate. Across the flat sky of the room the Capitana tosses the butt of her cigarette, the guiding star that will cross the courses of the planets swings into its trajectory and traces a curve to the chamber pot where the sun will consume the earth and the times of the sea will be put back.

Boston Boy seats himself on the floor next to the manikin. He throws several coppers down beside it. He sucks on his joint of marijuana and exhales a thick mouthful of smoke above the holy little infant. I stare at him with surprise. Son of a bitch, you can never be sure of anything with these Monks. Now he wraps the doll in toilet paper and hands it to Elena, who has been watching, waiting, crouching and hoping with an old desire that she has never forgotten. She accepts the small bundle. She holds it to her breasts and begins to croon to it. She looks at us with pride, with hauteur. And you, Dragoness, standing now and feeling only curiosity, ask: “So you saved it, Elena?”

Elena the towel girl does not understand but smiles and goes on crooning.

“Protect it. Hide it. Don’t let them chop off its head. Don’t let them throw it out with the trash. Don’t let them put it into their death ovens. Hold tight to your lost child.”

“The statistics on those ovens are grossly exaggerated,” says Boston Boy Franz.

“If there had been only one child alone, that would have been too many.” Your voice is cold, Dragoness. You spread your arms.

Now both Judge Morgana and Elena the towel girl know what they must do. Elena covers the doll and holds it between her breasts as she hurries to fetch White Rabbit’s clothing. Morgana goes to the trench coat and searches through its voluminous pockets for tubes and bottles of beauty creams and lotions. You stand rigid, White Rabbit Ligeia, like a statue, white-skinned Ligeia who, thanks to the debility of your will, still belongs neither to the angels nor to the damned; you wait, pale Mother Mary of the temple and the brothels, and allow Elena the forgotten forgetful one to put your stockings on you, to stroke her hands of burned stone the long smooth length of your legs.

“Don’t let them force you into a taxi in the middle of the night, Elena. Don’t let them take you to the factories where angels are made, don’t let them abandon you in the black palace of Herod. Watch over what you yourself carry hidden. Watch over it, little Elena with your body of a grape, don’t let them scratch it out of you, don’t let them make it disappear, don’t let them make it become invisible. Your child may be the last child ever to be born in all the world, Elena.”

Morgana, fraud as a judge, as a maid not much better, with both hands dabs an astringent fluid pat pat pat on White Rabbit’s face. Yes, you must use your beauty, enjoy and display it, my Pepsicoatl. And you, our patient looker-on, our observer who has followed us on our twisted journey through this long night and will, I trust, continue with us until dawn breaks, you, my kind, my generous, my all-necessary reader, are you aware that the women of the great United States of America spend more each year on cosmetics than the entire national income of the Estados Unidos de … México? Elena snaps the yellow garters around your thighs, Dragoness White Rabbit, and Morgana anoints your slender neck with lotion. And your eyes are accusing, damning fingers as you look from Boston Boy to Rose Ass and say bitterly:

“Where are my children, damn you? And do you think that you’ve won now, simply because my children are dead? Do you think I’m all alone now, that my life ended with the lives of my babies? Shit! You’re fools. You think it’s so easy to destroy a woman’s life. But the life of a woman doesn’t let itself be destroyed except by the woman herself, and she must act from her marrow, her core. You outside her can’t touch it. Haven’t you seen them, imbeciles? Haven’t you seen them this very night, selling pop in that little store, playing hopscotch in the dirt? Won’t you see them again tomorrow, silent, half naked, rolling around in the dust beside the highways and the rice fields, on the land where battles are fought? They’re the life of a woman, you idiots. Of all women.”

Morgana’s fingers work upon the blank white lime-washed skin and form a new face. Elena is fastening the garter belt with two copper hooks. Morgana offers lipsticks: flamenco pink, icy coral, skeletal smoke, lunatic livid. White Rabbit chooses a subdued red.

“You’ve been able to exhaust and destroy my sensations, to tire my touch, to offend my smell. But that was all. No more. Not my life. And today my senses hate and condemn you and my hatred is a long patient waiting that is far from its end. And just as long-lived as my hatred will be the love that sustains my hatred.”

She caresses your cheeks, Dragoness. She prepares your lips. Elena offers you your panties with their copper-colored lace and you lift one leg and then the other, crying, “Becky, Becky, wait for me! I’m coming back now! I’ll believe everything you taught me, even if it costs me the sanity it cost you. I’m coming back, Becky, Mamma. We’ll settle our accounts with these damn men once and for all.”

Morgana is finishing. The last touches: eyebrows, eyelids, the lips again. And now we know this woman who formerly was faceless. She raises her naked arms and fastens her hair at the back of her neck with a copper-rusted ribbon. Her naked arms, bronzed from the sun, then the tossing movement with both hands. That is how we always see her, her arms raised while she ties up her hair with a ribbon. Sometimes in profile, sometimes from behind, sometimes in front as if she were a turning statue with a windblown blue curtain for her grape-leaf garment. From in front, in profile, from behind, as Morgana slowly turns her, makes her drop her hands. We inspect Morgana’s work. Kneeling, Elena looks on. “Yes, Becky,” the woman with the new face says quietly, “the God of Israel exists and lives, though far from us. He is not merely one more fantasy created by these mock men who love women as if they were dreams and dreams as if they were women, who murder innocent childen with abortions before birth and gas chambers after birth. No, Becky. God is real.” She is a beautiful Jewess. A beautiful dark-skinned Jewess whose beaded sweat we can see on her temples, in her armpits, on her upper lip, at the division of her breasts. A dark-haired Jewess of black prolonged orgasms. The discovery of America. Land-ho. Bullshit. “I’ll come home, Becky. I’ll make one more voyage and come home.” Elena covers her with the damp trench coat and her arms drop.

“Elenita,” says the Capitana, “peel me a grape.”

“When are you going to tell me the story of that monster of a bed, Capitana?”

“Get them out of here, caifán. With a little order and dignity, please. Who’s paying, you? Gladiolo, make out his check and wait downstairs. When you go out, caifán, try not to attract the attention of every cop in the colonia. We have a little protection, but not very much. And God knows what would happen if anyone was to find out about this witches’ Sabbath you and your … The dough, caifán, let’s have the dough. That old bed? Bah, it came in handy, didn’t it? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“But you’ve been here for years, Capitana. I know you know about it.”

“Years, caifán, you said it. Long years and a few happy days.”

“I believe you were here when the house first opened.”

“Yeah. And I remember you, too. You were just a squirt kid who used to come in to have his horn sharpened every now and then. I remember, all right.”

“Be careful with the step, Capitana.”

“Always the gentleman, caifán. Thank you, I appreciate it. Look, please don’t bring these werewolves of yours back again. It’s indecent to have that many in one bed at the same time. The prestige of the house suffers.”

“You heard the madam, werewolves. Move along. There’s blood in the streets.”

“I suppose you’ve forgotten how I was in the old days.”

“Forget, Capitana? How could I? A sugar dumpling. A ripe mango. Just to look at you was enough to make a man…”

“Yeah, and today, a pot gut and double chins. But still lively, old man. And still smart.”

“Tell me about that bed. I’m curious.”

“Why not, if you want to know? I don’t mind telling you. It’s just that I hate to remember. I don’t like to go back to anything. It hurts, you know. Not always. But often, too goddamn often. Well, the bed. When we moved in, the house was empty except for the patio, where there were canaries in cages, and for that big bedroom, where the bed was. We let the canaries die. Who cared about canaries? There wasn’t another stick in the whole house. Oh, yes, the bead curtain that we still have between the bar and the living room. And a bottle of morphine tablets hidden away behind the bed. With a syringe and a needle or two. What do you think of that, eh? But I don’t know. Maybe she was dying of cancer or something. The señora who owned the house, I mean. And yes, there was a painting, a portrait of that honest lady. The head of a woman, but her face was the face of a little girl. So, she had died and her son had sold the house and everything in it except the canaries in the cages and the big bed and the painting and the bead curtain, and you know who was the buyer and what business began. They said that the son would be back to get the bed and the painting. He wanted them in memory of his mother. But he never showed. We didn’t complain. Beds like that aren’t made any more. It’s given us damn good service. Hah, just imagine, that gentle girl-faced lady passed her entire life in that bed. Slept there, fucked there, gave birth there, dreamed there, finally died there, all alone at the last with her Sacred Heart of Jesus hanging on the wall and her memories watching her from the shadows. A decent, Godfearing, well-bred lady, as proper as white gloves. And now in less than half a lifetime, how many thousands of broads have spread their legs on that old bed. Shit, caifán, what can you be sure about in this mess we call life? That saintly lady has been rolling in her grave, I suppose, while we were rolling on her mattress. Thanks for coming tonight. It’s good to see old friends sometimes. Come back again. It’s your own home, you know, any time you want it. Open the door for him, Gladiolo. Those kids, though … keep them out in the pasture where they can kick up their heels as they please. In the barn…” The six Monks filed past her silently. She squeezed my arm and pulled my ear down to her lips. “Listen, caifán, come back all by yourself some evening. Don’t forget your little mango. Shit, you can die crossing the goddamn street. Better to do it in bed, eh, fucking your fat old hot mama.”

The door closes behind us and we are alone and exhausted. Once we are in the ancient Lincoln convertible, no one will speak. No one will know where we are going, why we are going there. I will know nothing except that I want to write what they have told me, that they have told me enough and more than enough, and to put it down on paper well, cleanly, truly, will be to face all the sand of an endless desert. I will betray them. I’ll have to, for as my cousin Pepe Bianco shut up among his books in his place on Cerrito in Buenos Aires puts it, every novel is a betrayal, an act of bad faith, an abuse of confidence. For at bottom we are most contented with what appears to be, with what goes on monotonously day after day and by its repetitiveness earns, and perhaps deserves, the name of reality. I don’t give a damn in the drugstores on Broadway. Fiche moi la paix in the cafés on the Boulevard St-Germain, Andate a fare un culo in the restaurants of Piazza Campitelli, Me importa madre in the supermarkets along Insurgentes, Me importa un corno in the movie houses of Lavalle, and who knows how the hell they say it but we can be sure that they say the same damn thing in the hotels of Mayakovsky Square, at the camp grounds of the Tatra, in the shops on Carnaby Street. So why do we wear ourselves to less than shadows writing books that say only that the reality that matters is a false one and that death awaits us unless we protect ourselves with lies, with appearances put on like wigs, with lunatic aspirations, the aspirant lunacy, to be precise, of a book. Truth bares its teeth at us from every side. Our lie isn’t what threatens us. What threatens is truth, which waits as patient as a diamond and makes us drowsy and satisfied, conquers us with contentment so that it can overcome us as we were first overcome in the beginning of everything. If we were to let it, truth would annihilate us. For “truth” is the same as the beginning and the beginning was nothingness and nothingness is death and death is the enemy, so let us all lie together, or surely we shall all lie alone. Truth would like to offer us a vision of the beginning, of life before it learned to doubt, before it was contaminated by idea. And that vision is precisely the vision of the end: the other face of creation is apocalypse. And the “lies” we spinners of tales tell betray “the true” simply in order to hold away from us, from all of us, that day of judgment when the beginning and the end shall be one. Yet nevertheless literature pays its homage to original, mortal, entirely unacceptable might; we recognize it because we must if we are to control and limit it. Not to recognize it, not to limit it, is to open the door on the fanged wolf of assassinating purity. And if that happens, all of us end up very small brown turds, Daddy-oh and Big Mama, desiccated and scentless.

The Monks understand me. Sure, they understand. That’s why bearded Boston Boy has his foot against the floorboard and we are whirling along Insurgentes like a projectile that knows it has a target. I would like to know what that target is, to learn if it is the one I suspect. But we are all too tired. I look at their faces, carried beside and around my own in the illusory immobility of togetherness, and I see that I don’t really know who they are or who they were a moment ago, much less who they may be an hour from now. April’s night wind, Mexican wind of dust blown from the dry lake beds of the flat valley, twists and disfigures those young faces, and perhaps among them there is someone I have never known: may not this same wind, born of land that once was water, may it not whip the muffler worn by a German student who takes the 7:15 tram, toss the hair of a pair of young lovers on a Greek island of goats and pebbles, drift golden fog around the heads of the baroque statues of a Karlsbrücke, beneath the Tropic of Cancer throb the lost polyphony of a great requiem, dissipate the gaseous warmth of a Jewish block in Manhattan, touch closed the eyes of an old man seated in the sun on a bench in Mexico City’s Alameda Park? I confess I don’t know. There are many things I don’t know. Ask me some other day. Maybe I’ll be wiser then. Now, at this moment, seated within this night-hurtling ancient Lincoln, I refuse to admit that if I should relax my will and my imagination, the six young faces and bodies traveling with me would be carried away into darkness like so many tiny sparks from a dying fire, that they, like the wind, the car, the night itself, are my creatures, and if I should cease to sustain them with my creative love, they would disappear in a whirl of transparent circles, vanish even from memory. Yes, I speak of loving you, my six Monks, for you are my six Monks, my six Monkkin, Monkkernels, Monkkites, Monkkings, Monkknights, Monkkittens, Monkknaves, and as with me you race through this April night at something near a hundred kilometers an hour, we see together my compatriots pushing their carts down the aisles of open supermarkets bright with light, buying canned goods that bombs may fall a little sooner on Peking, the world be saved a little sooner for freedom and Palmolive soap, standing before rotisseries that slowly turn with chickens under the arm that the helmeted Marines may cross the Rio Grande in the north and the Bío-Βíο in the south and we ourselves become the last Vietnamites; we see them emerging from Sears carrying a new aspirator that the world may become one wide field of burning napalm, see them climb into their Chryslers and Plymouths and Dodges that the universe may achieve the New Order of peace and tranquillity and decency sans all upsetting spectra, yellows, blacks, reds, and all unsettling specters like you, my Monkkeeners, my Monkkreatans, my Monkkristers, my Monkkillers. But now it isn’t my wind I hear. I never huffed and puffed up a wind that wails like that, that blinks its red light and waves its gauntleted hand for us to pull over and stop in front of the illuminated glass box of the Comercial Mexicana, where pleasant families, we can see them from our car through glass and more glass, an aquarium of a market, pass along shoving their carts and baby carriages, carrying their wire baskets and their children drowning among bottles of catsup and heads of lettuce and boxes of Kleenex provided to wipe away their snot as they wail. And the boxes of Kleenex and the files of artichoke militia (dry beneath their scales, Pablo) suffocate with so many children heaped on top of them and the man in brown raises his goggles and swings off his stilled wheels and swaggers toward us on shining boots as he takes out his ticket book and his pencil and Boston Boy assumes an expression of innocence. Play it cool, now, Boston Boy. Just play it cool. The cop wants fifty pesos and that’s all he wants. Viva the Emperor President seated upon the Great Pyramid. Si haut que l’on soit placé, on n’est jamais plus haut que sur son cul, quoth Cousin Michel, the Old Man of the Mountain.

“Ninety kilometers an hour, señor. At the very least. Don’t give me that innocent look.”

“No, no, Officer. I’m not innocent.”

“So? You admit it?”

“Everything, Officer. I admit everything.”

“Take it easy, young man. You’re going to force me to haul you in.”

“I’ve nothing to hide. I’ll confess everything.”

“And remember, the young ladies will have to go with you…”

“That makes no difference. I accept my responsibility. In reality I never wanted to find her. I was afraid.”

“If you’re planning on spending the night in the bust, you have every reason to be afraid.”

“The truth is, I thought she was safe. They had told me that the musicians were going to be excepted, that they weren’t going to touch them…”

“No one is safe in the peni, young man. No one.”

“I tell you, she wasn’t really in danger. There was no need for me to do anything. Why should I? The danger would have been to draw attention to her.”

“In the peni they don’t respect anyone. Not even grandmothers. Do you understand what I mean, young man?”

“Yes. In those places it’s best to be invisible. If I had let anyone know I was looking for her, it would have been like pointing her out to them. They would have noticed her, while before they didn’t. Do you see what I mean, Officer?”

“What I see is that on top of speeding and reckless driving, you’re drunk. Polluted, if the young ladies will excuse the word. Stoned. Even your hands are shaking. Let me have a whiff of your breath.”

“If I found her, I hurt her. Not to find her was a favor to her. To see her only from the distance. And I would have put myself in danger, too. Well, I accept that. But I would have lost the confidence of my superiors. Maybe I would even have lost my job. And it was my first assignment. I had studied to build and now, in the midst of all the destruction, I had been given an opportunity to build. What more could I ask?”

“Look, señor, don’t try my patience.”

“And one day she saw me and didn’t recognize me or didn’t want to recognize me, all she saw was my uniform. ‘Let me pass,’ she said. That was all she said.”

“I don’t think you have a very clear idea of Mexico City’s peni, young man. Drug addicts and perverts. Not the best of company. And the cells are cold as tombs.”

“Then what, Officer, if it had turned out that she hated me? What if she had rejected me? Wasn’t it better for both of us to remain apart in our separate worlds united only by our memories, Prague, the Karlsbrücke, that summer of concerts in the Wallenstein Gardens, the Requiem? The hope and the promise that we had been in those young days? Wouldn’t that seem wiser, Officer, more rational?”

“They don’t wear kid gloves in the peni, señor. They aren’t exactly polite and well-mannered. Try to understand the situation you put me in. I don’t want to force a night in the peni on anyone. But…”

“And escape? To try to escape?”

“Ah, just try it, young man, just try it. Plenty have tried and no one has made it yet.”

“To end up, both of us, electrocuted on that damn fence, trapped by the dogs of the Hundenkommando, executed by a volley against the death wall? Or simply caught and shipped off to the ovens of Auschwitz?”

“Look, my friend. I’m trying to do you a favor. Stop speaking Chinese to me. Show a little more respect for authority.”

“No, Officer, there was no way out. The only intelligent thing was to accept the situation and wait. She was one of the musicians and the musicians were safe. The war would end one day. Why risk our lives foolishly? And to top it all, she was pregnant.”

“You’re one of the lippy kind, aren’t you, buster?”

“To top it all, she was pregnant.”

“But lip won’t help you now. Look, man, look…”

“She hadn’t been faithful. She had promised to wait, that I should be the first. It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t return to her, Officer. Did I declare the war? I thought about trying to save her. I swear I did. I made plans, I thought about it night and day. But, in her condition, escape was out of the question. We would have had to wait until the child was born and leave it with someone. Then maybe we might be able to make it. And the war might end first and everything be forgotten and forgiven…”

“Christ, you people inside the car, isn’t there a good God-fearing Mexican here who can explain the facts of life to this crazy gringo? You, señor, you with the mustache, you look like a Mexican, can’t you tell this fool to shut up?”

“But they had to sing. They didn’t know how to protect themselves. All they had to do was present a performance. Instead they presented mockery and a challenge. They were fools, Officer. Shouting, shouting Libera me…”

“You understand matters, señor. You don’t want me to take you people to the station any more than I want to take you. But one good turn deserves another. And when you’re dealing with a man who has authority on his side…”

“Li-be-ra meeee!”

“Señor, thank you, thank you. You understand things.”

“And after that, what could I have done? They themselves had condemned themselves to death. They themselves, all alone, when they could have been safe. Who was I to try to intervene now? I, the young architect assigned to the camp, a minor functionary, a Sudeten at that, not even a German, maybe a man whose loyalty was none too sure, just a young man who knew how to do what he was ordered to do, was I going to go to the Commandant and beg that Hanna Werner be excepted from the shipment of the musicians to Auschwitz? I? I was going to beg that her newborn baby not be sent off to Treblinka? A baby who was not even my son? Doesn’t that make you laugh? I was going to intervene? Lift my hand and condemn myself too without helping her, who was already condemned beyond hope? I? I could have been that crazy? Write that down, Officer. It’s a good joke. Write it down to laugh over with your comrades.”

“Look, young man, don’t tempt me now.”

“Write it down. I would cross the course of the stars, I would put back the times of the sea…”

“I tell you, there’s no problem now. Don’t let your foot get so heavy, that’s all. Shake. We’ll part friends.”

And Jakob, immutable at the side of blond Boston Boy Franz Jellinek, looks at the cop and possibly says something that we cannot hear, something that is carried off into the night by the wind of the Valley of Mexico, jugular wind, wind of the palaces of the albinos, wind of the hunchbacks and the peacocks, while the man in brown walks back to his wheeled pony pocketing the fifty pesos that was all he wanted in the first place and that I finally handed him, and now we have to rest, to unwind, to go home to my squatter’s castle and have a drink and a smoke, but Boston Boy, wearier than any of us, lets his head drop forward upon the steering wheel and obviously is going to take us nowhere. Silently Jakob gets down and comes around the car and opens the door and shoves Boston Boy out of the way and starts the car and with a grinding of gears we move off while I look a last time at the parents with their children and their baby carriages and their market carts and I ask myself if a terrible mixup may not happen at any moment, any Sunday dinner, if the artichokes may not be given the breast to suck while the babies are boiled in oil. So we move away under the stars and the wind, and Morgana, coming back to life as if after a long sleep, yawns and asks White Rabbit if she remembers the games she and Javier used to play in the evenings after supper and Rose Ass says that he remembers, they played war games, made riddles, for example, about the tonnage of the British destroyers in the battle of the Río de la Plata, or quizzed each other: who is von Rundstedt, Ligeia, have you ever heard of him? Or Timoshenko or Gamelin or Wavell. Brother Thomas has quietly found a little placard among the confusion beneath our feet and with adhesive tape is affixing it to the side window, and the placard reads

FATE L’AMORE NON LA GUERRA

and Rose Ass throws a tube of toothpaste out on Avenida de la Paz, for we are on our way to San Angel now, and Morgana finds other tubes and bottles for him to throw away as he laughs, and everyone begins to sing popular songs: Goodness hides behind its gates but even the President of the United States must sometimes stand naked. Là dove c’era l’erba ora c’è una citàààà, I need a place to lie down, and they comment, Bob Dylan, Celantano, Il ragazzo della Via Gluck, It’s all right, ma, I’m only bleeding. Yester-days, they shout in chorus, cheerfully. And this morning, the morning that I shall write about some day, will be a waif dawn that does not know its name. Midnight has sounded and beyond the alley that leads to my old house the crickets are trilling and Jakob swings off the Beltway and parks on a side street and we all get out with a feeling of reluctance. Brother Thomas will sing without words now, that sweet basso humming, that violent gentleness which is natural to those of us who live at the extremes of life in order that others may live in its golden midriff. Bearded Boston Boy will open the lid of the trunk and take out his now inert little bundle and once again conceal it under his long-skirted frock coat, his coat that flaps like the eyelashes of an English Romantic poet’s most sensitive hero: and Ezekiel has told us that cities are the heads of Goliath but I say that David is the knight who wanders the plains of the world’s streets, from David Rastignac to David Herzog, while Morgana our judge and White Rabbit my love who refuses to be my love walk arm in arm squeezing each other around the waist and Rose Ass, hopelessly tied to their apron strings, follows strumming his guitar and asking:

“Did we go together to Greece, Ligeia?”

He strums his guitar and accompanies Brother Thomas’s humming and awaits White Rabbit’s reply. But she has well learned the cunning cleverness of the Aztec mysteries and now is offering our judge a bribe, winking at her as we troop across the Beltway, saying, finally: “That I’ll never reveal to anyone. It’s my secret and I’m going to hold to it. What difference does it make now, anyhow? I’ve stopped lying. From now on my testimony will be very simple: just the truth.”

“Does the witness swear that all she has said is not the truth?” Morgana asks, kissing White Rabbit’s ear. “We shall overcome,” sings Brother Thomas. White Rabbit nestles in Judge Morgana’s arms: “No, it was true, in a way, God and Perry Mason willing.”

Yes, we shall overcome … some day. What difference did it make now? Anything. And what he had never understood was that her lie was simply in answer to his lie. Joshua will fight the battle of Jericho and the children of the street will sleep wrapped in newspapers on sidewalks near the modern, indispensable Beltway that permits us to whirl from our residences in the Pedregal and Coyoacán and San Angel to the center of town in fifteen minutes or better. He had loved her only because he could disguise her as other women. She had retorted to that insult in the same way. The lies they had told each other came together and added up to speak one lonely truth. The walls will come a-tumblin’ down. And Juan Soriano has said that his father fought in the cavalry in the revolution precisely so that gentlemen of means might ride the wonderful Beltway in their Cadillacs. “The truth? What’s the truth? I could just as well have told you that I was born right here in Mexico City, not in New York, the daughter of a family of immigrant Russian Jews. Is there anything so strange about that? There were many such immigrants and today they are bankers and movie producers and mathematicians and biologists and owners of department stores. And what’s wrong with them for being those things? I could have told you that I was raised in Mexico City, not in New York. Therefore I admit that everything I have said is false, in a certain sense. The places and names were false. But not the people.” We’ll look over Jordan and what will we see? The lights of the San Angel Inn Restaurant, brothers. Fifty gleaming new and expensive very large and very small cars parked outside. And what shall we hear? Silver and glass tinkling against silver and glass, and the whirring wings of a covey of mariachi musicians. “Not the people, I didn’t change them. My mother was exactly as I said she was … but in Colonia Hipódromo, or in the Bronx? And my father, too, but did he sell his sharp razors of excellent steel in a stall in La Merced Market or in a market in New York? What’s truth … you pays your dream and you takes your reality. And Jake my brother was murdered not in Central Park but in the Parque España, killed not by Harlem Negroes but by some goddamn Mexican kid bastards.” A band of angels will be comin’ after me and after you also, brothers. A-comin’ for to carry us along that long long trail that forever keeps winding into the land of our graves where if our dream boats ever come in we’ll have it made for at least one more cup of coffee and one last piece of ass. So she fled also. And studied there, and they met. That much I believe is probably true. “Do you believe me now?” Do we believe her, brothers? Why not? Liars are the easiest of all to believe.

White Rabbit continues speaking to our good judge, Morgana, but Boston Boy, moving in on her like a crab on a clam, kisses her dull red lips. Damn him, damn her, damn their kiss, damn the bitter envy I feel. The only answer fate permits us is such bitterness. Two young people, kissing in front of the prickly-pear hedge that walls my decayed garden. That’s all. It’s common enough. It happens all the time. Yet it makes me lose my virginal and precious cool for a moment during which I become Javier, Elizabeth, and Franz, and in their names surge with a deeper bitterness. Yonder damned kiss is a bird I shall never wing again. It’s impossible. And neither will they, ever again, put their lips together quite that same way, in the street, young, hot with hostility they don’t even pretend to conceal, exposing themselves most innocently to loss of freedom in the discovery of love, without the fear and anger we have learned to hide behind our boredom, our lack of curiosity: ahhh, so what, so what? So we have passed the line, brothers, and they have not even come to it yet, that’s so what. And to have gone beyond everything is not to have gone at all. Except home again to this thick and bristly hedge whose secret entrances and exits I believe I know, gentle home sweet home, Eden subverted by outcast sons who prefer to march off across the deserts of the world armed with the jawbones of asses to being shut up in safety, who march forth wearing boots and return home on stretchers bleeding with the prodigal open wound of that subtle whore Malinche, traitoress mother who fucked the enemy that you and I, my compatriots, might some day be born. Or do you really think it would have been better if the Spaniards had been defeated and we had gone on living under the Aztec fascism? Who was Cuauhtémoc? Baldur von Schirach, brothers, leader of the Tenochtitlán Jugend. And wiser far than he, the Mexican women let it happen. Eternal bitterness in return for a lasting destiny that I have to admit we haven’t quite found yet. But we shall, man. We shall.

So: we’ve returned and we cross my garden with its volcanoes and mountains of trash and its lakes and seas of mud. We come to my make-believe castle, that elevated place of turrets, spires, battlements, and towers where we may besiege ourselves and be besieged, where we can stroll into the observatory and align our lives with the stars, my pyramid, my fortress, my basilica, in one word, my pad, which if you should happen to pass this way, mark it well, soul brother, is your pad too, any time, any time at all. We climb the corkscrew steel stairs, curled conch-shell listening post, sentinel always alert, and file into the enormous living room which at the moment is dark as Satan’s asshole and equally as cold, yet docile and willing to greet us as we may greet it, to suit its shadows and colors and smells to the light and color and smells of whatever we may feel and be. And what do we do as we enter? Do we light the candles and build a fire in the fireplace and smoke and cough and hum and sit down on the old chairs and the dirty reed carpets and ask for a drink and paint our lips and scratch our balls and glance at our reflections in a mirror in the darkness? No, not quite. One of us who is a priest although he wears Ivy League garb and carries a black portfolio that ought to be carried by a lawyer or a traveling salesman moves forward and opens the portfolio and takes out and offers a small paper bag that contains desiccated dream. The Monks accept and put the bits of mushroom into their mouths and chew slowly, at the same time beginning one of their throbbing litanies, chanting with a single voice, we are erring truth, we are the lonely crowd, we are the sacred tumult. We, the black pigeon, the scarred face of the crippled child, the thorn crown. We the waiting sand and the salt wild earth. In the darkness they form a circle, clasping hands, a circle from which I am excluded, yet into which I feel drawn. Jakob, in the middle of the circle, cries harshly, loud above the beat of their chant:

“I, Jakob Werner, born in the year zero, condemn to death Franz Jellinek, born two thousand years ago.”

I draw away from them, feeling alone and ironic. I know what they want. They want to transform my helpless room into four damp prison walls, into a charged electric fence. They would like to heap its corners high with fresh-chopped hair and discarded dentures and spectacles and toothbrushes. They would like to change it into a wandering and endless gray labyrinth of cells and corridors and kennels and wooden bathtubs and hooks upon which hangs sweat-drenched clothing that tomorrow must be worn again. They would like to make it echo hollowly to the slap-crack of a rubber-hose lash, to the click-snap of padlocks. Their chant goes on and I begin to tremble. We are the androgynous pages. We are the cherubs of innocence. We are the spell-cast virgins. We are the rite and the lamb that is sacrificed. We are promise and the memory of promise. We are neither men nor women nor good nor evil nor body nor spirit nor essence nor accident nor real nor ideal nor consciousness nor instinct. Their voices are not loud, yet they seem to fill the room until it overflows with sound. They sway in the darkness, their hands locked, their weight balanced light on the balls of their feet, and the darkness sways with them and I must hold myself rigid to resist that beckoning movement, that movement that can never be described because it is forever unknown, even to itself, full of portent for them and senselessness and fear for me. I move away from them mentally, taking refuge in the thought that this is my dwelling and they, my guests, must vanish the moment I cease to envision them. I think of Gershon and Becky, of Raúl and Ofelia. It is their dwelling too, here they were born, here they died, here they lived their tired and repetitious lives that Javier and Elizabeth might be born and love and marry and hate. I think of them, but I find myself full of bitter doubt: why were they born after all? Why did they have to die? The Monks are moaning now: Medusa struggling for life again, the Furies giving vent to blood-red rivers of hatred. This is not their dwelling, nor have I ever known their parents. They are themselves alone. The different, the alien, the new, above all the new: that which has never been repeated because it has never existed before. And what their fecund chant is telling me is the cold counsel that our story is not the only story, that there is another and greater one in which ours seems less than a brief nightmare reserved for a few restless seconds in the eternal sleep of death. Now I know that they are hunters on the scent of a prey who is myself. No words I can shout can stop them. No reason I can hold to can long withstand the destructiveness of their single incandescent intuition. Why did Becky go insane, I ask myself. Was it so that her daughter’s insanity might merit the name of reason? Why did Raúl disappear? Was it so that Javier’s flight might seem a march toward an encounter? I tell myself to keep thinking. Don’t stop thinking. Don’t hear them. Don’t see them. Take out a match and light a candle. Carry it to the corner where the old trunk stands, dusty and cobwebbed, with its blackened brass locks and clasps. A vast old steamer trunk such as they don’t make any more, a trunk large enough to pack the world itself in, as empty as space, with as many drawers as there are stars. I work the locks open one by one. Now, with my hand on the trunk, I can turn and face them again. I say to them quietly: “An old man ripe with wizardry sold me this trunk. A smiling old Jew who lived and kept shop near Tacuba and was forever putting his tongue into the gap of a missing front tooth.” They face me. I point to the tattered, faded labels of the Lloyd-Triestino Line, the seals of the Greek customs. “He was an old Jew who dealt in forgotten junk and lost worlds, like this trunk. More than dealt, he was a collector.” They have stopped their chant and are listening to me and watching me. It is I, not Medusa, who has been reborn. I swing the two halves of the trunk open. One side stacked with small drawers, the other a single vast compartment stuffed with clothing, bundles, boxes, a violin, the lean neck of a bass viol trailing a tangle of broken strings, a heap of coal-dusty top hats, you name it. The Monks approach me and I take out my first exhibit, a small net, like a woman’s hairnet, for the mustache. With a grave flourish I present it to bearded Boston Boy and with a grave smile he dons it. Exhibit Two, the broken violin, I offer to Jakob of the Ivy League costume and the black portfolio. Then a torn and yellowed poster with the words GARBO LOVES TAYLOR. Rose Ass accepts it. A Currier and Ives print: the sleighs, snow, peaked rooftops of New England winter; this I give to pale White Rabbit. For Rose Ass, a 1928 Montgomery Ward catalogue. For Boston Boy again, the printed program of a concert in Prague’s Wallenstein Gardens: “In 1856, Brahms found the title of his German Requiem in an old notebook that had belonged to Schumann, his teacher.” Now a worn leather money pouch, as heavy as silver; I give it to dark Morgana and she empties it out into her hands, a cascade of small pebbles still wet from the sea, some brilliant as mirrors, some yellow as mustard, hemispheres of the hours of the deep, sculptured eggs, sepia moons, the playthings and the treasures of children and the poor. White Rabbit reaches to snatch the pebbles away from Morgana, who holds them against her breasts like jewels. And everyone is looking at Brother Thomas, for he has been given an old stereopticon and is staring through its lenses, inserting and withdrawing quickly the double-imaged cards that I remove from one of the drawers and hand to him. They crowd around and ask to have their turns to see those faded photographs that look as real as dead and half-remembered life: the castle of Hradcany in Prague, a teashop on Avenida Santa Fe in Buenos Aires, a path with a bench near a bridge in Central Park in New York, the lions that guard the agora of Delos, a nude by Modigliani, the body of assassinated Leon Trotsky laid out for burial, a still shot of Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel, another of John Garfield in The Fallen Sparrow (with Maureen O’Hara and Walter Slezak, Elizabeth), the entrance to the fortress of Terezin with its legend: Arbeit Macht Frei. They grab the stereopticon and pass it from hand to hand, on to the next, before the last has had a clear view. No one notices the portraits of the comic-opera monarchs I offer, Wilhelm and Franz Josef, or the lovely, hand-tinted photograph of La Belle Otero wearing a pair of Turkish slippers and nothing else. Now I come to the battered round tins of old motion-picture films upon which scribbled labels, stuck with glue that after all the years is still bad-smelling, show the titles: Golem, Nosferatu, Der Blaue Engel, Vampyr, Das Rheingold. I let the yellowed film slide between my fingers, a slow march of Caligari’s broken images, squares of brown and blue and yellow that in five acts relate the stories of authority and its phantoms, of reason and its collapse, of crime and its pleasures, of the behavior that one finds in lunatic asylums and nightmares as if these were the only real settings appropriate to acts that in the street or the office go unnoticed, mere normality. I come to the garments. To one side I toss a turtle-neck sweater that is still damp, still smelling of salt air, a pair of corduroy pants with the ass worn thin, a woman’s suit from the thirties, its jacket cut mannishly and its blouse of piqué, a cocked tricorn hat, some wooden shoes, a leather Tyrolean vest, a brown uniform, an old greatcoat with a high hood, a striped gray coat, thin and cold, with the star of David shining in dull faded yellow on its breast. I come to the bottom of the heap, to the clothing that I want to offer them. The purple-red cloak of a Catholic cardinal for Brother Thomas, who puts it on and with finger across thumb gravely blesses us. A hood of black and scarlet for Rose Ass. Rich embroidered cloths, like medieval hangings, for pallid White Rabbit; a rain cape for Judge Morgana. A cope, also embroidered with a depiction of the Apocalypse, for Blond Boston Boy. And beneath everything, small and heavy, wrapped in red silk which I unwind layer by layer with less haste than uncertainty, for I’m not sure where he is now or who he is or what he may be up to, I’m not sure whether this is the beginning or the end of my show, a puppet dwarf which I lift at last and introduce to them, trying with one finger to hold his flaccid neck stiff. My six Monklins move back a step or two and shake their new costumes. I stick my fingers into the puppet’s mouth and transform his expression of frustrated fury into an amiable smile. Yes, despite everything, he will condescend to visit with us. I turn his head a little and he looks back thoughtfully into the trunk, at the nest of tiny gravestones of tiny dolls with blond and black wigs, dressed in crinolines and boots and carrying whips, small dolls with little phalluses of plaster, at the paintings which hang over them, sailboats entering a harbor, wheatfields under the sun. He nods approvingly and the Monks stare as I seat him upon my knee. The Monks stare and step back, except for Boston Boy Franz, who slowly kneels beside the single candle. I touch the mustache and beard of my little puppet, a scanty but carefully trimmed beard. They know that he is about to speak and he does speak in a resonant baritone that has nothing to do with his deformed small body, from which one would expect shrillness. “You have shattered my repose, young man,” he says gravely, accusingly to Boston Boy. “One has a right to rest occasionally. The landlord of the trunk assured me that it was a quiet and tranquil establishment.”

“You must forgive us, sir,” Boston Boy replies just as gravely. “We did not know that a tenant had moved into the trunk.”

I remove the little man’s gloves and make his courteous but inquisitive eyes pass around the room. I squeeze his diaphragm lightly, and he sighs.

“So we meet again, my young friend.”

“Yes,” says Boston Boy, nodding. The little man on my knee sighs again. His legs dance in the air as he stretches his small boots, protected by spats, as if he were trying to reach the floor.

“I was asking myself what had happened to you. I wondered what you and your friend had done with my dolls and my paintings.”

“As you see for yourself, Herr Urs, they are still with you, there in the trunk. No one touched anything.”

“Yes, so I have observed, and with a certain relief, I confess. Yet it is true that I was thinking of presenting everything to you, young sir, to you and your friend, as a remembrance of your neighbor, myself. But the attack came upon me too suddenly. I miscalculated and in the end did not have sufficient time. I had told myself: I shall present my works to these young gentlemen who are so polite, well-reared, and understanding. But it need not be done until the last moment. Then, when I lie upon my deathbed, it will be not less a gift but will become also an inheritance, and they will understand it as such. But I didn’t have time. I miscalculated.”

“It doesn’t matter, Herr Urs. I have often dreamed of your dolls and paintings.”

“Yes, my young friend, that would be only natural. Perhaps after so many years you see things clearly. Do you chance, perhaps, to recall what I said to you then?”

“Certainly, Herr Urs. You told us that you wanted to reproduce, on canvas, the old buildings and the old streets, so that something would…”

“Yes, so that something would remain after they had been demolished and forgotten.”

“Exactly, sir. You also said that you painted each of your works twice. First when you looked upon your scene with the eyes of repose. The second time when your vision was exalted. And that between the two views, we could be sure, there existed a great abyss.”

“Indeed. And now as then, time must be left to decide the destiny of my work. It could not be judged then. Or even today. Heroism is comprehended only when its embittered enemies have disappeared. Then, finally, judgment can be made without prejudice. And I must confess, dear young friend, that as I repaired each little doll and painted each of my paintings, I felt myself heroic. I ceased to be poor and deformed and alone and became…”

“A small god, Herr Urs. A household god, one of the family.”

“Thank you, sir, thank you. I would never have ventured to put it quite so myself, but you are right. Let me tell you something. When I was very young, like all of us I was a believer. But the faith that I had sucked in with my mother’s milk merely returned to me a clear reflection of my deformity, for our faith is a mirror that reflects ourselves, it is a shadow we cast, one that follows us so persistently that we can escape it only by great effort. Faith makes us, therefore, place our reliance and even our very being upon the fundament of appearances, and takes its conviction not from the invisible but precisely from what is always seen. And for me, obviously, such dependency would have been fatal. For a time I consoled myself with the thought that perhaps I had been chosen for a miracle of transfiguration. But eventually I came to the end of my patience and decided to renounce entirely the possibility that some day I might be a guest at a wedding where there would be only water and I would turn it into wine. I abandoned my childhood faith, in exchange for knowledge. And I discovered then that knowledge is secret, that it has two faces, one of which, twisted and deformed perhaps as my body or perhaps as strong and beautiful as my hands, has been kept hidden by what we call civilization since the very beginning of what we call civilization. That therefore knowledge asks questions that cannot be answered, for half of existence is denied it, unless it descends into the buried world where the truth of creation is yet to be found, even after so many centuries. It was a surprising discovery, young sir. It changed my whole life.”

“A contagious discovery, Herr Urs. When Ulrich and I went to your room, we felt ourselves surrounded by something infectious that we could neither touch nor name.”

“Freedom, young sir, simply courageous human freedom. The freedom of the committed and dedicated rebel, which someday will infect the entire world.” My little man moved his fingers rapidly, delicately, as if he were playing a piano. “Full liberty induces sickness in us, of course, for we have always believed that we are healthy only when our liberty is limited.”

“You weren’t free, none of you, goddamn you!” Jakob shouts at Boston Boy or maybe at the manikin on my knee or maybe at myself, I am not sure which. “You were slaves! You were Germans, Germans! Phantoms hunting across the wasteland armed with the asinine jawbones of a sheep Volk!”

“Ach,” the little man smiles sadly, “why are your friends always so raucous? Things are not quite so simple as he seems to think. I suggest that you avoid most firmly the road that he has chosen. One must keep in mind, after all, that there are certain risks which if we dare to hazard them lead to reward far greater than any wealth. I left my works hanging in the room where I died, my only gift to the world, the sum and meaning of all my days, yet without the slightest expectation that they would be greeted by applause. The idea of triumphant success was altogether foreign to me. Do you believe that I wanted to evangelize the world, tempt it, bribe it, convert it? Oh, no, no, never, my young friend. I never offered youth a change of soul, nor did I suggest to the cities of the desert that they abandon their obeisant servility. I believe, quite the contrary, that everything that survives feasts eventually, when the opportune moment comes, upon the fruits of its tenacity. My triumph was not, is not in the noisy world but far from it, alien and isolated. My freedom is precisely my isolation and my victory is to hold myself apart, identifying with no one and with nothing except, perhaps, nothingness itself. I am, so to speak, young sir, a dark star that wanders along through the darkness of space casting invisible light upon those who are far away and bathed in the stolid sun, contaminating them, infecting them, as you so aptly put it. If I should allow myself to be touched by other lives, to mix and fuse into their mass, I would instantly cease to be who I am. I can tempt only because no one can recognize me. I die the moment I am discovered moving through this emotional chaos with which men comfort themselves for their misery and console themselves for my apartness. For I have done what none of them has ever dared to do. And no one knows, nor will I tell, whether my punishment may not be my reward.”

White Rabbit slowly advances in her glistening brocade robes, her hair mussed and her eyes vacant. As she passes Jakob, he stops and holds her. “No, Jeanne. Don’t go near him.”

My little man stretches out his beautiful hands. “She need not come near me. I laugh at distance, my friend.” I make his small fingers caress the satin of his dressing gown. “Ah,” he says softly to White Rabbit. “So we meet again.”

“Jeanne. Jeanne.” Jakob seems shaken by confusion. He searches for words while the little man on my knee polishes his tiny fingernails on the quilted silk lapels of his dressing gown. “Jeanne,” Jakob says finally, “don’t be afraid of your visions. Love your menstruation and your seizures, Jeanne, your orgasms give you life and health. I swear that, Jeanne. And they give life and health to me, too. Don’t feel ashamed. Don’t be afraid. Don’t run away to that false world of words that can be mastered so easily. What is hard, Jeanne, is to master the real, damned, unfortunate world of horrible shame and silence and defeat et cetera.”

White Rabbit advances and touches the blue pagoda and dragons of Herr Urs von Schnepelbrücke’s red dressing gown. She lets her fingers touch, and she stands motionless. Jakob does not dare move either. But he speaks to her, softly, earnestly: “Don’t believe their lies, Jeanne. No poet is a prophet of torture. No philosophy proclaims the justice of murder. They speak of evil, Jeanne, so that we may see it before us and accept it as part of life so that we will corrupt ourselves with it, Jeanne, and in our isolation from each other it may overcome us. Jeanne, don’t let yourself be defeated, my love. Neither your body nor your thought will be evil if you let yourself love, if you touch and let yourself be touched. He’s afraid, Jeanne. Always remember that he is afraid. He doesn’t want life to come near him. He wants to save himself alone. Alone and through the evidences of death that offer him his illusion of being…”

“My dear young sir!” Herr Urs says politely. “Everything is permitted, after all.” Jeanne steps back from him with an expression of loathing and falls upon the floor twisted, strangled, vomiting out the testicles of goats and devils transformed into hairy worms. Jakob covers her vomit with one hand. “Yes,” he replies to the little man on my knee, “all life is permitted. But not death. Not death!” Jeanne laughs and groans and her heart beats wildly and she trembles from head to foot. With a certain difficulty, my little man crosses his legs.

“Heresie, Treeson, Wytchcrafte, Belial, True Libertee, Namon, Bludthyrstee, Homicide,” cries White Rabbit, the tormented nun. She clutches her sumptuous robes and asks us to throw her into the river. She writhes on the floor murmuring “Fyre, Sulfure, Darkness, and a most Abominable Stink.” Jakob holds her in his arms and makes himself part of her convulsion. He puts his lips to her clenched teeth and whispers, “No, Jeanne, not you and I. Your suffering will be a chance for greatness. You and I shall struggle against ourselves, Jeanne. We’ll try and fail and try again and fail again, and go on to the end of all the ancient contradictions in order to live and repeal them, ridding ourselves of our old skin and exchanging it for the fresh new skin of the new contradictions, those that will await us then. We shall struggle alone, without hurting others, neither faces nor crosses, neither heads nor tails, neither eagles nor suns.”

“I fear that won’t suffice, young man. No, it will never be enough. You will be forgiven much too easily. What I suggest is that you do what can never be forgiven. Only so do you make it worthwhile to humiliate yourself seeking redemption.”

“A man doesn’t need victims merely to abandon solitude,” Jakob whispers in White Rabbit’s ear. She murmurs the simple words of childhood: “Mother? Father? Papa? Juanita? Vacation? Vacation?” She points her finger at the little man on my knee. At seated blond Boston Boy. Now, her fist closing, at the window. By the movement of her body she begs the window to come nearer and offer her, though she has lost the strength to speak, an opportunity to flee. Jakob caresses her gently. “Don’t give up, Jeanne. He says that his power is in his isolation, but he must have victims to escape solitude. Believe in me, Jeanne. Believe what I tell you. We shall oppose his collective violence with our individual violence. We shall make history with our lives so that he cannot make history with our deaths.”

The little man laughs. “There will always be a power, an order, an enthusiasm that will permit me to win my converts. How foolish people are, with their drums and bands, their flags and parades. So raucous, so raucous. Bah, who needs a black shirt? It’s enough to wear mere flannels. Caesar needs no disguise. He is Caesar, and he knows it. If he is mistaken for the plebe in the street, all the better. He can melt into the mass on the street, then, and invisibly attain what he seeks. And I shall be at his side.”

“We will be fallen masters, but our own masters,” Jakob whispers, turning White Rabbit’s face tenderly between his hands. “Constant pain and great happiness we will have. I promise you only that.” “But I don’t feel anything, Jakob,” she replies. “There are sores on my nipples but I don’t feel them. I don’t feel the fire burning my feet, or the nails in my palms…”

“Pah, promises, indeed,” the little man chuckles. “From afar I shall tempt you to abandon every promise you have ever made. Come to me. I too am eternal.”

“I hear music,” Boston Boy interrupts.

“Be quiet, my young friend. Listen to it and enjoy it and keep quiet.”

“I see light falling around us.”

“Idiot, you see nothing of the kind. No one is talking to you.”

“Herr Urs, you have told me of my temptations. My homeland. My blood, my imagination and my memory, even my love. Tell me … No, excuse me. That’s the master of ceremonies’ line.”

“Fool, imbecile, you have no right to ask questions now. You have been condemned.”

“I? And what of you, who infected me?”

“As he has infected every servile bellhop who stands in the lobby of every hotel awaiting his precious tip,” pronounces Judge Morgana, advancing.

“As he has infected every teenage Fascist who stands, disguised as a Tyrolean youth or a Bavarian maiden, on the German frontier with a fistful of shuttlecocks that he throws at passing cars in order to preserve the memory of Germany’s greatness and the hope that she will be great again, that the little map of Germany today will become once again the map of Germany’s vast dream.” Jakob holds White Rabbit tight in his arms. “Tell me,” he says to her softly, “where was your home?”

“In Holland, sir. Father. John. Vacation. We will take the train and go on a long vacation.”

“And you?” to Morgana.

“From beyond the Oder, sir. We had traveled south, also by train, to Czechoslovakia, and as I was getting down from the truck that took us to the fortress, I dropped my doll and its head broke. I remember I cried. Someone touched my head.”

“And you?” to Rose Ass.

“Bratislava, on the Danube. I can hardly remember it. I was a child. The dogs were howling. It was cold. They undressed us and separated us and someone made a bitter joke, Arbeit Macht Kalt.”

“And I? I the son of Hanna Werner who died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz in October 1944? I, her son Jakob, who at the age of two weeks was sent from Terezin to Treblinka? And you, the rest of you, the chorus of the children’s opera at Theresienstadt, didn’t you admire the efficiency and dedication of your captors? Weren’t you pleased by the excellent construction of your prisons? Didn’t you feel warm and protected by your guards’ fanatic attention to the least detail? Could you ever point accusingly to the slightest want of foresight, to the slightest frivolity in the treatment you received? My God, what did you want? To live in a cell built by Franz Jellinek was to be safer than on a Lufthansa flight.”

“Bah!” snorts Herr Urs. “The ghetto has contaminated all of you. And the infection of the ghetto is real infection.” His hands are out of my control now. They touch the keyboard of an invisible piano, trip off grotesque fluttering arpeggios, strike violent chords, tap a sentimental melody. “Neurosis was born in the ghetto. By fear out of ridicule.” He stares at his fingernails and becomes silent Tired-eyed White Rabbit, sitting now beside the fireplace, exhausted but serene, wrapped like a magician in her opulent robes, finally looks at him neither afraid nor attracted:

“No. You don’t understand anything. The ghetto taught us that nothing ever ends. Nothing is ever resolved. Everything has to be lived and relived and relived, over and over, again and again.”

“Yes. You may be right.” The little man on my knee is becoming every moment softer, yet more rigid, between my supporting hands. “Just once, only once, my dear friends, I myself lost my calm patience and succumbed to the temptation to live life over again.” I set him down on the floor and his legs double under him like rags. “Pride blinded me. Just once, to be sure, yet that was enough. Before that I had lived with true humility. But that one time, having flesh, I was weak. I wanted an immediate demonstration of my powers. I betrayed my role, which ought to have been one of simple, steadfast waiting. The role of pride so strong it could survive by itself alone, supported by no act, by nothing.” I raise his arms over his head and make him walk, feebly, tottering, an infant of twelve or thirteen months, toward the trunk. “I decided to take the chance. To die simply that I might return to life on the third day and prove who I was, that there was at least one other Savior, not merely one.” I lead him to the trunk and wrap him in the red silk coverlet. “And on the third day, I did indeed rise. I came out of the refrigerator and took some pills and went back to my room and covered myself with my sheet, my face with a pillow. And waited. And now … Gute Nacht, meine Herren und Damen. Ich muss Caligari werden. Ich muss nach Hause gehen.” I cover the yellow face of Herr Urs von Schnepelbrücke with a little cloak.

The only requiem is spoken by Boston Boy: “No man has a claim on eternity. Yet our every action demands no less.” He turns and faces Jakob. “Wasn’t I a man in spite of everything? If I was inhuman, nevertheless didn’t I go on being a man? Whom do I harm today? The scar on my soul has healed. A soul of jelly, like Javier’s, is far more guilty than mine. Forgive the great dreams, brothers, and punish the foolish little naps. Brothers, brothers, hasn’t twenty years with a clean conscience been enough to earn forgiveness for what was at most a guilt of abstention, a submission to a temptation which I swear I never clearly understood?”

Judge Morgana laughs dryly. “Sure, man, sure. Go back. You’ll be honored by the whole nation.”

“Go back,” says Rose Ass. “You’ll be given a job at Krupp.”

“Or at Farben,” chimes Jakob.

“Or maybe in the Bundeswehr,” says White Rabbit.

“Why even go so far?” booms Brother Thomas’s bass. “Just head north to Laredo and cross the border. That’s where the busy factories are today. You can get yourself a job making napalm or detergents that wipe away the color of the skin.”

“On the contrary, he must go further,” Jakob says. “Duty itself calls. More strategic hamlets are needed in Vietnam. The accused is efficient. He’s careful. He executes orders with energy and precision. Such professionalism is invaluable. He is needed urgently in all the prisons and death rows and crematoriums that still must be built. In Cambodia. In Laos. In Peru. In the Congo. In Mexico. In Spain. In South Carolina. Oh, there is a world of building yet to be done. The labor of organizing isolation remains. To be concluded in his image and semblance. A great work, one that requires men of dedication and responsibility. Before the end of the century the entire world must become one single vast concentration camp. Each individual citizen must become a black star wandering through black space, isolated and alone and giving off light, if at all, only invisibly. The accused faces a bounteous future indeed.”

“What the hell do you know?” the accused, still on his knees, says angrily. “What track did I leave? I died, I disappeared, I changed my name. But I swear I looked for your mother’s grave. I went back to Prague, and in those days that was to take a certain chance, believe me. I didn’t find it. She was nameless. An anonymous victim in the mausoleum of all the anonymous victims.”

“But you never though of looking up Professor Maher, did you?” Jakob is rubbing White Rabbit’s feet. “He lived in the same old house, you know, on the same street. All those years during the war he had hidden refugees among his flutes and oboes and helped them to escape. He saved many lives. And he never forgot the young man and the young woman who used to dine with him and afterward talk music and architecture. Professor Maher didn’t try to play it safe during the occupation. He put his neck on the block, again and again and again. And he did it in your names, for your sakes, for the sake of the love he remembered between you.”

“How can you know?” the accused repeats bitterly, standing. “How can you know anything? You were a child, a baby, you couldn’t have talked with anyone. Who told you? That time was not your time. You can’t know that time. It’s forgotten, gone, lost forever.”

“Shall I show you?” Jakob jumps to his feet and goes to the old trunk and begins to open its small drawers and to seize fistfuls of papers that had lain there, Dragoness, for years and years untouched by anyone. He threw the papers into the air, down on the floor. “It’s all here, Franz. Nothing happened that was not carefully recorded. These papers remember. Here. And here. And here.”

The Monks fall upon the papers. The oldest, the most recent. Those that have yellowed, those that still are freshly white. Wrinkled sheets, smooth ones. Perhaps they are searching now for the understanding that will allow them to depart in peace, according to someone’s words. The testimonials of humiliation. The testaments of need and gratitude. The acts of birth and death of our eternally repeated readings. As if such an understanding were possible. As if the irrational were explicable. Have faith and don’t be afraid, Dragoness. This envelope that White Rabbit, acting in your name, recovers from the floor and tears open as you did so long ago when you and Javier returned to Mexico, will explain nothing, even though she reads it aloud to us: Esteemed señor: In regard to your communication of April 12, we find ourselves unfortunately obliged to inform you that for the moment we cannot publish your manuscript, which we are returning to you under separate cover. We remain, most sincerely yours … And Professor Maher’s letter to Jakob will always be no more than a mere succession of syllables, though Boston Boy the blond accused pronounces them as words: She never loved any other man. And I can swear that no matter what he may have done or failed to do, he always loved her. He told me that, here in this very house, seated beside the desk where I now sit writing to you, and I know that he spoke the truth, I am an old man and can recognize truth. When I knew him he was a youth who loved this city, loved music and architecture, above all loved her. Old men are never deceived, Jakob. “Professor,” he told me one night, “never worry about her. I’ll always take care of her. Always. I’ll never abandon her.” I believed him. You will read this when you are a man. I have given you your name and now I give you his. I do not know what happened to him. He was reported killed the very last day of the war, but there was a certain confusion and mystery about the report, his parents believed that it could have been a mistaken identification. At any rate, he never came back, so he may indeed be dead. If he is living, perhaps you will want to seek him out some day, perhaps your spirit will demand that kind of certainty, and perhaps you will be able to find him. Or maybe this letter will merely disturb and distract you. If so, please pardon an old man who loves everyone, loves everyone very much … Nor will anything more enlightening be said by the forgotten pages of Javier’s book, found crumbled in a drawer wrapped in pasteboard covers on which is inscribed, “Pandora’s Box.” Rose Ass reads: The name of the name? Jason? Argonaut? Medea? Nature dies but its names remain, unchanged. Flower, bird, river, tree, harvest are always and forever the rose and the humming bird, the Nile, the spruce, the wheat or the cotton. Death in nature, nature’s passing away, changes no names. But with men not so. The name of a man dies with him. He does not wish to repeat himself, and is willing to pay high for his singularity. But I would be a man who lives on giving names to what has preceded me and what is to follow. Jason. Argonaut. Medea. And this that everything should not need be learned over again, lived over again, from the beginning. Order and Progress? That slogan is neither human nor accurate. Man makes no progress. Every child born is a first creation. He must repeat everything for himself and for the world, all the ancient events, as if nothing had ever happened before his birth. He is the world’s first infant, first child, first adolescent, first lover, first husband, first father, first artist, first soldier, first tyrant, first rebel, and finally the earth’s first corpse … And now Brother Thomas comes upon an ancient, tattered, disintegrating folio which he pages through and begins to read aloud: “This was printed at Uppsala, in 1776, apparently. Listen: In 1703 a magician and charlatan who called himself Doctor Caligari sowed terror and death from village to village and fair to fair, through his obedient serving man, the Sleepwalker Caesar…”

No, Dragoness, they signify nothing. Why should they? They are the letters written and the books written and read by a pair of young lovers who before the war found themselves on a slow ship of the Lloyd-Triestino Line, bound for Greece or for China via Saturn and Sirius, and had therefore light-years of time to kill. They diverted themselves through the long hours at sea, and put the sheets of paper away in the drawers of an empty world. And an old Jew near Tacuba sold me that world very cheaply. The police had caught him peeping at adolescents in a public toilet. He was a voyeur, like you and like me. It was a temptation, he told me, that he could never resist. Now he was going to sell everything he owned and disappear. He was an expert at disappearances. He offered to sell me the cellos and the top hats, the sewing dummies, the funeral hearses, his entire great storeroom in that old palace on Tacuba behind a naked patio with a dry fountain, behind a soaring portal of ductile sinuous stone supported by two twined columns that rest upon the paws of a gigantic cat.

“I, Jakob Werner, born in the year zero, condemn to death Franz Jellinek, born two thousand years ago.”

I am about to laugh, Dragoness. It seems to me that these six young Monks have contracted the very disease they want to cure. I can’t be sure whether their theatrical enactments say anything true about anyone or are simply caricatures put on to put me on, caricature scenes entirely unrelated to the lives they purport to represent, yours, Javier’s, Franz’s. I am sure of nothing except that their trial of Franz has not convinced me of his guilt or of the justice of the punishment they intend to impose. And also that I am the Narrator, goddamn it, and I ought to hold their destinies in the palm of my hand, to make or break and arrange or change just as I please. Yes, I ought to. But my palm feels empty except for the sweat there. Now they are moving toward my door. I step calmly in front of them and without drama, holding fast to my cool, I tell them:

“Cats, you have not convinced me. Not at all.” But they either don’t hear me or prefer to pretend that they don’t hear me. They keep moving forward chanting another of their endless litanies: “He crossed the courses of the stars…” And I would like to jeer at them. To tell them to their faces that they have lied to me. Haven’t they boasted that they play life’s little game alone? That they accept the world as the world is, and that all of us are in one way or another guilty of everything that any one of us is guilty of? I would like to throw those words back at them, but all I can think of at this moment is Isabel … of you, little Pussycat, locked in Javier’s arms in a cheap motel on the road to Toluca.

“He put back the times of the sea…”

They come toward me slowly, shuffling, dancing, chanting, rolling their mushroom-clouded eyes. And I stand before them opposing their hallucinations with my uncertain sanity. Then forgive him, for God’s sake, forgive him, keeping in mind that he also has loved and breathed and …

“He killed the fruit in its seed…”

But today he harms no one. He has been pardoned, time has pardoned him. Javier is ten times less a man, a hundred times more a criminal. He deserves punishment at least a thousand times more. Eh, Dragoness? Enough? Let’s just say that this is a detective story and we have come to the moment when the rewards must be doled out and we do not have to reward sinners as if they were men of justice.

“He has corroded the child’s mouth with the mother’s milk, he has gone into heaven to defile it, he has descended into hell to deliver it from subjection…”

Isabel in a cold motel room with her absurd Proffy, whom she does not seem to find absurd. And White Rabbit is not mine, either. She will never be mine and she is the only desire I have felt this entire night. Shit, shit. That goddamn kiss. And the very convincing way she insulted her make-believe husband. She showed old habit there. Then Jakob, caressing her, holding her in his arms. The tenderness with which he protected her. The way he led her so gently to the fireplace. Jakob is my rival, that’s clear enough.

“He bade the moon to shed poison…”

I can’t tell them my doubt and misgiving. She, pale White Rabbit, may never be mine anyhow, but it’s damn sure she will never be mine if I seem unsure of myself. So adiós, Franz. And after you make your departure, I’ll tell them they were wrong. Not now. Now I shall shout with them that you must not be pardoned, for to pardon you would be to deny forgiveness of all meaning. Only later will I insist that you didn’t deserve to die, that you have paid the price of whatever may have been your crime, paid with twenty-five long years of decency and honesty. Javier and Elizabeth have maintained their hell, heaping more fuel to it day after day. Not you, Franz.

“He bade the air to fall in flame…”

No longer do I stand in their way. I stand against the wall. Let them pass, let them pass. The single candle has been blown out by someone and in the darkness I try to sense them, feel them, smell them. I would like to reach out my hand as White Rabbit goes by. Touch her and stop her and explain my doubt to her and insist: damn it, what did he do? And what difference does it make now to anyone? I shan’t do it. I can’t do it. The six Monks file out and start down the spiral stairs. I know her answer. What Franz did or didn’t do doesn’t matter, man, it’s just that he is the old and we are the new, and the old must shake over out of the way. Yes, the cycle has ended and the new pyramid must be built upon the tired shell of the old. And Franz is that tired shell and so must die. What did he do? Much, little, nothing, it makes no difference. I would still like to know, though. Maybe it’s written somewhere in one of the notebooks, on one of the scraps of paper that I haven’t found yet in the drawers of the trunk. For there are so many of those little drawers. There are thousands. And now I don’t have time.

I gave up the fight, Dragoness, and joined them. Not with much enthusiasm, that’s true, yet with a certain feeble excitement that was enough to swing the balance. I wanted to say, with them, to hell with the old. To hell with my forties. Back to a memory of youth, if not back to youth. You would have done the same. Middle age is not bitching. It’s merely a bitch. So I followed them down the stairs and across my half-assed garden and out into the alley and across the Beltway to the street where their old Lincoln was parked, and I stood as they gathered in a semicircle before the door and pointed to the six small black swastikas pasted there. Five of them bore large X crosses, like the crosses made on fighter planes to show the number of the enemy the pilot has downed. In turn, one by one, each of the Monks stepped forward and put a finger to one of the crossed-out swastikas and curtly explained it:

“Oberscharführer Heinrich Kruger. Organizer of the transportation of the three thousand Jews whose lives were taken in revenge for the murder of the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.”

“Ruby Richter, SS guard in charge of the women’s baths at Auschwitz.”

“Lieutenant Malaquias von Dehm. Participant in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto.”

“Lisbeth Fröhlich, trained nurse. The preparation of poisoned marmalade for the physically and mentally defective children sent to Treblinka.”

“Lorenz Kemper. Factory machinist. The manufacture of cylinders for the gas known as Cyclon-B.”

Who these people were, I don’t know. You’ll find out for me, Isabel. You will make Franz talk and tell you, and then you will tell me. You will help me fill out the file. But I do know that these people are dead, and I know who killed them. Maybe it would be better not to know who they were. Just to forget those hazy years, years of my childhood and adolescence that are fused together in a mosaic, still strangely unfaded, of movies and newspaper headlines and radio reports and crime stories and cracked phonograph records, the written and heard debris of which half our lives is composed. No, I want to know. So you will learn and tell me, Pussycat. I still have you, despite your insistence that you were psychoanalyzed in your nitwit mother’s womb. Yes, I still have you. And somewhere out of sight a distant voice is singing, and far away out of sight on the other side of the fat round world, dawn is rising. Not so far, perhaps, after all, though I have no idea what time it is. The six Monks surround me and we gaze somberly at the swastikas on the door of the Lincoln, the five that bear X’s, the one that remains unmarked. And I say to myself: Of sand water is born, and of water, fish.

“He found out the house of life and destroyed it.”

Did he? Well, maybe he did, maybe he did.

His stand-in, blond Boston Boy, opens the trunk of the old car and quickly slips the bundle he has carried inside his coat into a nest of clothing and rags, a small bundle as alive as I am, moaning, wriggling, resisting. He slams the lid down so that whatever the bundle is cannot escape, cannot attack him. And I had thought, unimaginative shell of the old that I am, that the contents of my prize steamer trunk were rather unusual. I haven’t the slightest idea what Boston Boy is up to. Why should I? The irrational is not to be explained. I shrug. Everyone has relaxed now. The last act has ended. We return now to our real names, whatever they are, to our real being, whatever that is. Brother Thomas smiles and drags a match across his buttocks, across the embroidered silver eagle and serpent. His joint glows. And now we will take another trip, man. We’re going to fly high, cats. High and far, swinging loose, swinging crazy, casting spells, shaking demons, rocking and twisting and always going, going, going, man, going. Let’s hit it, man, let’s split. The road is very long.

* * *

Δ Elizabeth and Javier remained facing the wall of locust gods. They did not look at Franz. They looked at each other, into each other’s eyes. Javier started to say something but Elizabeth closed his lips with her hand and they went on looking at each other. The sea took the light of the sun and reflected and filtered it and sent it back transformed to the sun. The sea of green and blue and violet stripes, colors of the water of life. It overpowers the land of hazy mountains that are like shoulders thrown up from the depth of the sea, pale and blue, that are the backbones of the tired old monster of the sea. And in the harbor of Rhodes, the ship is about to leave. Elena, wrapped in a black shawl, Elena, wrinkled and brown as a nut, but with shining eyes and teeth, stands among the women shouting up at the sky and now and again praying. The women weep, yet laugh between their sobs. Their men are sailing away from them today. Leaving the island to find work in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, wherever laborers are needed. They will cease to be peasants and become servants and mechanics. Black-clad wives weep, old grandmothers, wrinkled and white-haired, thin-lipped, young cousins. All of them have their pictures taken in a group. They stop crying at once, smile for the photographer, curse the clumsy old woman who at that instant crosses in front of the camera. All of Rhodes laughs and cries and makes jokes and shouts farewells. Venders of sesame bread and meat pies. Old women wearing black turbans. Shrieking children. Whistles and shouts of stevedores loading and unloading. The jostling of the porters.

“Is Elena seeing a relative off?”

She weeps and shouts. She throws herself against the side of the ship. She tears off her shawl and kneels on the ground. Elizabeth waves to her, takes out her handkerchief and waves again. Elena sees them and raises her arms toward the sky, her knuckles knotted and brown. She spreads her fingers to send a long kiss with her eyes closed.

“Do you think she has come because of us?”

The hawsers are thrown off. Elizabeth says farewell to Rhodes without daring to cry, letting Elena and the women of the island weep in her stead. Voices surge from the brown and rocky earth that is beautiful only because of the sea, the sea across which the ship is now moving. Elena is lost in the crowd, weeping, shouting again and again, fainter and fainter.

* * *

Δ So there we were, Dragoness, that last night which was also the first night, the six Monks, Isabel and myself, seated beneath the gray and green paint-flaking arcade in Cholula on brass chairs around two aluminum tables that belonged to an oyster bar which after darkness fell became a different kind of bar. The oysters lay still in their large jars of gray water. An alcohol-soaked worm hung suspended in my bottle of mescal. Only I was drinking. The others were taking a trip. They were floating, high, far away. “Groovy, groovy,” repeated, every little while, the girl who another night had been Judge Morgana and another year, perhaps, had been a child taken south by train carrying a doll whose head broke. Near us stood a small group of musicians, slick-varnished straw hats, white shirts, drill trousers, playing their guitars and singing, out of tune, the corrido “Benjamín Argumedo.” Lo bajaron por la sierra, todo liado como un cohete. Near us also were women with narrow foreheads, small teeth set in thick gums, hair in short braids or up in a knot, prematurely old, shawl-wrapped women whose bellies were big with the next child while the last held to their hand or slept in their arms or rode behind wrapped in the shawl. The women passed on bare feet, gathered near the wall, stared at us and laughed silently as they exchanged their joking secrets and their secret jokes in voices that could not be heard, words thinly inflected, fused chains of inaudible syllables. Tanto pelear y pelear con el máuser en la mano. I looked impatiently toward the plaza. Toward the street that climbs to the basilica atop the great pyramid which is really seven pyramids nested one within the other. The plaza was empty. It belonged now only to Cholula’s night-wandering dogs, some yellow, some black, all lost, listless, strengthless, hungry, scratching at their infestations of sores and fleas, crippled, emaciated. I looked, but not the Monks. They neither saw nor heard. They were flying high now. To their clothing they had pinned little tin badges, like the stars the sheriffs of the East wear. Make Marijuana Legal. Baby Scratch My Back. LSD NOT LBJ. Abolish Reality. They smoked their joints like black bats and did not see me as I looked toward the street to see if our friends had returned yet, while at the same time, good Mexican campaigner that I am, never say die and all that, under the table I stretched my foot, trying to touch the foot of the girl who another night was pale White Rabbit who was Jeanne Féry the nun who was Helen of Troy who was Mother Mary who was yourself, Dragoness. I reached for her with my toe but she paid me no attention. She and Jakob were holding hands. Para acabar fusilados en el panteón de Durango. I turned to you, beside me, Isabel, leaning against my shoulder with your eyes closed.

“Do you think they’re going to show?”

You didn’t answer me. The mariachi musicians went on playing and the dogs came to our table and looked at us with their large hopeful eyes, red and yellow eyes irritated and rheumy. And I drank my mescal and observed the faces of the six Monks and saw them as taking part in a masque, as wearing disguises the purpose of which was to testify to the ultimate nature of true energy, the energy that changes things, that is never wasted although after exertion it may be lost for a time and then return because it has not really been lost but has simply passed over into the hands of someone else who some other day may perhaps give it back. Their clothing was dusty and spotted with mud and they smoked their marijuana and listened to the musicians playing for them on an April night.

“My head aches,” you said, Pussycat.

“Are they going to show?”

“I don’t know.”

The six young Monks were smiling. For those passing us, their muddy clothing doubtless seemed another detail of their costumes, less obvious than their tin badges. Abolish Reality. Passers-by looked at us, at you and me and at the six Monks, and didn’t suspect us of anything. Why should we be suspected? The six Monks were merely comical, and who was to know that their comedy was that of Laurel and Hardy, who made us laugh and feel surprise and sense the endless possibilities open to man when they dismembered an old car or smashed up a very proper suburban home. Soldiers were watching us, too, leaning their shaved necks back against the columns of the arcade. Pistols in belt, caps-a-cock, cheek or temple or throat lividly scarred by a knife gash, toothpicks between their teeth, watching us and smiling mockingly. And Jakob went on embracing the girl whom I have called White Rabbit, looking at me simply that I should be able to tell myself that what to me might have seemed predestined was to him and in reality his freedom, and that if he could discover, twenty-one years later, its consequences, and convert his aspiration into act, then all of us can be equally free. What he had done, he was telling me in short, that I could tell myself, was that he had acted in the name of all mankind. But as he embraced the girl called White Rabbit, I asked myself what is the line that separates the model from the mere case, at what point does revenge cease to be private and become free and public, carried out to give a meaning that will splash in widening circles beyond the little pebble of existence that happens to be at its center, in this instance the life of Jakob Werner.

Bullshit, I told myself, cut it, drop it, dry up. You’re merely jealous of his youth and the girl he holds in his arms. You’re merely tired and irritated that it should have ended this way, without your having the guts to prevent a crime, a murder, which you did not approve, and at the same time without your having been accepted by the criminals as their comrade, as one of them. You neither prevented it nor participated in it. You merely served as their guide into a strange pyramid which has at its heart a wall painted with crickets. Their guide, not their mentor, all the long length of a lazaret where, thanks to our vital love of cruelty, the isolation lepers live can create the illusion that they are really alive.

“Will they show?” I said again to Isabel.

“I don’t know. I doubt it. They were just sitting there, holding hands.”

“What were they saying?”

“Betty was talking, not Javier. She was telling him that it didn’t matter. That life had to go on.”

The girl called White Rabbit withdrew her foot from mine and looked at me with amusement and scorn. Very slowly she kissed Jakob.

I stroked Isabel’s hair. “If we leave right away, we can be in Veracruz by dawn.”

“No. I don’t want to see the sea now.”

“Would you rather go back to Mexico City?”

“Yes.” She stood up and opened her purse and looked for her comb, her lipstick, her mirror. “Yes. There’s nothing left to do here. Let’s go back. I’m exhausted.”

And the faces of the six Monks observed us with mockery. The black-skinned face. The face veiled by the straw-colored hair of the youth wearing pink pants. The Gothic face, erect over the sharpness of the cheekbones, of the girl in black sweater, black pants, black boots, black everything. Jakob Werner’s half-closed eyes. The divine pallid face without eyebrows and with orange lips, the face of young Elizabeth of the eternally intolerable life that nevertheless is eternally worth being lived. The blond and bearded face of all agonies. They looked at me as I stood beside Isabel. The dark-skinned women with swollen bellies and bare feet looked, and the slobbering drowsy dogs, the sardonic-eyed soldiers.

“Yes, let’s go back. I’m exhausted, too.”

They all looked, smiled, crossed their arms. Ya no vivan tan engreídos con este mundo traidor. I picked up a fistful of peanuts and tossed them at the face of one of the musicians.

“Hey, you! Take it easy there.”

He put down his guitar. A man with thick mustaches. He stepped over his guitar and with the movement of a black panther advanced toward our table.

“Knock it off, drunk. Knock it off fast. Show some respect for…”

I threw another handful of peanuts at his face and the soldiers leaning against the columns of the arcade straightened and put their hands to the butts of their pistols and the big-bellied women covered their children’s heads with their shawls and stepped out of the way as the dogs ran off limping, one foot lifted, hanging in the air, or perhaps only the stump where a foot had been, their bare hides splotched with dry stains, and the soldiers took out their pistols and ran toward us along the arcade where the four musicians were preparing to jump us, beat the hell out of us.

Jakob stood up quickly and quietly and calmly removed a bloody knife from his portfolio.

* * *

Δ You told me all this that afternoon, Dragoness, when they let you visit me.

These places are always far from the usual human walks, from towns and cities. They have to be far, otherwise they would lose their meaning. I don’t know what you had to pay before they would let you in, what you had to do; I don’t want to try to guess. But you had always said, Some day I’ll tell you everything, and I had no reason to doubt your word.

Of course, they made you stay outside my door. Even there you were running risk enough. Your voice reached me very feebly, very low, but then the walls of my room caught it and amplified it. That was why I didn’t move nearer you. I stood facing the part of the wall that pretends to be a window and I caught your voice before it fled from everything, before it died.

You have to do much before you can understand what they say. This tightrope walking is my daily bread, which I eat to understand. As they have never lived, any life that can be called living, they know nothing, not even the secrets of this their place. They have created isolation and believe that four walls can contain it. But nothing is utterly isolated. Nothing, Dragoness.

They would be surprised if they lived here with me and discovered that the absolute silence of the first days is merely the announcement of a universe of sounds which at first are heard one by one, then fused into a pattern, an order. When one of us to his shame tells them, they laugh and say it is all imagination. Be it known it is evil: to live imprisoned. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, the screws tighten. They themselves begin to imagine what we imagine and then we are no longer alone: they also are living imprisoned. They know it and they know that it is contrary to the principle of authority that they themselves attempt to impose. And then they stop your food, Dragoness, so that you won’t have pangs of indigestion. Or they stuff a viscous pap into you because they believe that your imagination is the result of your hunger, which sharpens it. Or they cover the floor with cotton mattresses to shut the sounds away.

So I tell them nothing. I play the mute idiot and keep all I hear to myself. All the voices that come through the stone. The panting of love-making, the shouts of a quarrel. The snapped commands, the fall of clods of earth. The volleys of rifle shots, the crack of a rubber-hose lash. The whining of animals and the crying of children. The night music of an eternal repose and the million footsteps that drag past. The moaning I hear every night when I put my ear to the floor to communicate somehow with someone who must be buried beneath the soles of my feet.

It makes me happy that you have come to see me. You are going to tell me that you and Javier came out of the pyramid dragging the body behind you. The first thing you saw was the parked Lincoln. You left the body lying across the iron rails and took advantage of the sad Cholula night, as silent as falling dust, so dark there at the foot of the pyramid and the church, near the insane asylum, in order to get rid of your burden. You opened the trunk of the Lincoln and he dragged the body up. But inside the trunk you found something you couldn’t have expected. It was something alive, wrapped up like a mummy, a little bundle that stirred and whimpered. You felt afraid. Behind those bandage-like wrappings there was life, perhaps there was even more than one life. Javier was also afraid but with him fear showed itself as action. He went back and got the body and dragged it to the car through the sad silent darkness, the darkness as secret as the deepest recesses of the earth. He took the body by the armpits and made you take it by the feet and between you, with difficulty, you raised it and dropped it into the trunk. Javier wanted to put down the lid at once. You hesitated. When the body of the dead man had fallen, you had heard a soft cry, one that for a moment you let yourself pretend you couldn’t identify, it might have been the cry of a nun in the church on top of the hill pyramid, it might have been the cry of a patient in the nearby insane asylum, it might even have been only the cry of a cricket. But you knew all the time that the cry had come from within the trunk of the car. You reached beneath the dead body and took out the small living bundle and held it in your arms without knowing what it was. Javier wanted you to leave it there. He told you that it wasn’t yours, that it wasn’t any of your business, that he had better put the lid of the trunk down and both of you get the hell out. But you cradled the bundle in your arms and accepted it, accepted everything, knowing that whatever was within those tight wrappings was both yours and not yours, and that the world has many riddles and enigmas that must not be too closely looked into except at the risk of catastrophic destruction. And whom could you ask about it, anyhow? You began to run, Dragoness, not sure where you were going. You could have gone up the steep road to the church, or down the street into Cholula. Or around the pyramid to the asylum. You chose the last, knowing that there would be doctors and nurses at the asylum. You ran to the wide gate of its spacious grounds and put down the bundle where it would be found. Then you went back to your husband, Dragoness, as you always go back to him, to Javier waiting beside the closed trunk inside which lay a new skin to rot in the stead of the skin you had saved from rotting. You will always know whom you have to care for and protect, Dragoness. And let no one say anything about fear.

Now you have to go. I think you have come a long way just to be with me these few minutes, for, as I said, these places are always far removed from civilization. I would like to believe that in order to reach me you had to call upon the influence of important acquaintances, to pay large bribes. Yet I also know that it’s possible you may be locked up here too, just like me. For your parents were as infected, or at least as suspected of infection, as those of any of us. I shan’t say that you have come from the contaminated soil of Nazareth to this earth where live the dead who resuscitate themselves, this palace of Our Lord Lazarus. Yes, Lazarus lives here too. He of the resurrections. He who has given his name to our dwelling place and also to the pyramid and also to the church atop the pyramid. If you stand on tiptoe at the window, sometimes, not always but sometimes, the pyramid and the church can be seen, or at least can seem to be seen.

It’s time for you to go now, Dragoness. Caesar the Sleepwalker serves his immortal master well and if he should suspect I have listened to you he might murder me with a cold in the head, a touch of indigestion, perhaps a twinge of hunger. It’s mealtime, Dragoness. The yellow dog is feeding on the bones of the masked child and will soon be finished with them. I can’t recognize the face of the child, but I am sure it isn’t laughing. Our children never laugh except when they wear comic masks, funny faces of sugar, sweet skeletons and death’s heads that laugh for them. And death is the puppet theater where the sad eyes of our children look and see their own faces on the white skull because they know that, long before their childhood ends, their heads will be white skulls too.

Go, Dragoness, go. The yellow dog is turning from the bones of the child. He is tied only by dirty rags that at any moment may break, and then … I know that his hunger is far from sated.

So long, Dragoness. Take it easy. Stay loose. And don’t forget your ever lovin’

Tonantzintla, March 1962

New York, October 1965

Paris, September 1966