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.
&
nbsp; 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 i
f 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.”