City of God (39 page)

The former Guatemalan death squad commander who is next on the list owns a restaurant in a mall in Queens, just off the Long Island Expressway. Presumably this is a story whose closure is more conveniently accomplished, involving a short cab ride from the F train at Queens Plaza. But ex-
Times
guy is alarmed in spirit by the sociological complexity of a mall restaurant in Queens. He stands in front of the restaurant looking out on the thousands of parked and parking cars, the shopping hordes, the chain megastores, he hears the shouts of mothers, observes the bitter staring ahead of children gripping the chrome railings of their strollers. The air vibrates with the continuous whine of unending traffic going in opposed directions on the adjoining
L.I.E., suggesting to him a mindless mimicry of purposiveness. Masses of terraced red-brick tenements filling the sky, filthy fluttering pigeons homing in on scraps of junk food, children darting on their in-line skates between the parked cars, cruising packs of fashionable teenagers with their floppy jeans, unlaced Air Jordans, and reversed baseball caps. . . could any clear moral distinctions be drawn, or principles acted upon, in this bedlam of free people? This was not an appropriate venue for high seriousness, nothing ethically important could happen here.

But when he steps inside the restaurant itself, his spirits immediately revive. The room is lit in permanent evening. Haciendic decor, with latticed alcoves behind each banquette. The tables are covered in starched white cloth and at each setting is a crystal water glass. The waiters wear bolero jackets. A pleasing unlocatable sound of falling water erases any errant sound of the out-of-doors. It is the lunch hour and perhaps two or three tables are occupied by men in suits—no women or children anywhere. Sitting at the bar talking to the underworked bartender, a man in a blue blazer turns to look at him as he enters: Ex-
Times
guy's heart kicks in, it is the Guatemalan colonel of the clips, a trimly built man with a good tan, a hairline beginning well back on the crown, and a thick black mustache. Not recognizing the patron, he leaves the welcoming ritual to a waiter and turns back to the cigarette in his ashtray.

Ex-
Times
guy, his gorge rising, sees in that glance the same ranking arrogance that presumed to decimate the intellectual class of a country for the country's sake while managing to murder villagefuls of peasants in the bargain.

But this is just a surveillance visit. Twice more he will come for lunch by himself, and each time his death-squad restaurateur is there, at the bar, and each time he offers no more than an impassive glance before he turns his back to the room.

Third time ex-
Times
guy is seated at what is now his table. In his breast pocket is a ten-inch Carborundum steel carving knife purchased from the Hammacher Schlemmer store on Fifty-seventh Street. Two young men in dark suits and rep ties join him. Neat young fellows with short, crop-eared haircuts. No trace of accents as they speak to him, ask him if he's from around here, working here or living here. That's none of your business, says ex-
Times
guy. And who the fuck are you? I don't recall asking you to sit down. We have credentials, one of
them says. Let's see your fucking credentials. In due time, the other one says.

The room is otherwise empty of diners and the waiters have disappeared. Owner at the bar crushes his cigarette, stands, saunters over, and sits down on the opposite side of the table. I am Guillermo your host, he says, smiling, a bright, blinding smile of capped teeth. And I am the avenging angel, ex-
Times
guy says. He is feeling bold, suicidal. The two young government men without appearing hurried are in an instant standing behind him, at either shoulder. Guillermo is laughing, tilting his chair back on its rear legs. You are not the first to make this claim, he says but certainly, of those, the least prepossessing. He is now even more amused by his own wit, genuine laughter cascades from his mouth of white teeth. Ex-
Times
guy can actually see the pink palate and the fleshy flap of the uvula. He cannot grab the knife in his breast pocket, because the two young men are pinning his shoulders to his chair. In a mindless rage he strains at their grip, half rises, lunges, and spits in the notorious death squad commander's face. Who instinctively jerks backward. This carries him over, and for an instant ex-
Times
guy sees the new unscored leather soles of his shoes. Cacophonous chair splinterings, shouts. Lungfuls of breath basso-belched from a body. But the sound of a skull cracking against a mall restaurant floor of wood-grained plastic affixed to a concrete base, he would later reflect, is less resonant than the sound made by a skull cracking against a brick lawn-retaining wall. They are different sounds, of different pitch. Of course the quality of skull bone may have something to do with it. But whereas he knew immediately the old man in Cincinnati was dead, he did not know, running through the mall parking lot toward the L.I.E., that he had spit the Guatemalan colonel to death. It wasn't until he read his
Times
the next morning that he learned he'd struck again.

—We were lining up Pem's books, taking them out of the cartons and putting them in the shelves of the newly finished top-floor library of the EJ synagogue. Most of the volumes had been in storage since his departure from St. Tim's.

Everett, he said, try not to read each book before you shelve it, okay?

Some good stuff here. How do I get a library card?

He laughed, he is happier these days, but I meant it. I put aside a small stack of his guys I have to read: Tillich, Barth, Teilhard, Heschel.

That's about right, he said after glancing at my choices. But as you will see, all these brilliant theologians end up affirming the traditions they were born into. Even the great Kierkegaard. What do you make of that? I mean, when your rigorous search for God just happens to direct you back to your christening, your bris. . .

—Up on the stage of the grand ballroom of the Waldorf, one actor after another extolling the evening's lifetime-honoree film director. How he taught them, brought out the best in them, changed their lives, and so on. All to be expected. Directors hand out the jobs.

But then two or three writers on the program come up to extol the evening's lifetime-honoree film director, telling of the superior artistry with which he wrought movie magic from their humble books and screenplays. Not quite the same mechanism working here as with the dependent actors, because how many times can any author expect to sell movie rights to a particular director? No, this is something else, call it the denigration of the literary. A sacrament of the movie culture, the denigration of the literary is most satisfying when performed by the literary folks themselves.

The ballroom, softly lit, chandeliered, all aglitter. A big-time black-tie evening. I am fortunate enough to attract the wine waiter just before the lights go down for the showing of the famous scenes. . .

When movies began they were shown in storefronts, dumps, you paid a nickel and sat down on a bench. They were silents, of course, one-reelers, and everyone made them, they were cheap to make, people made them about their own lives. They told the stories of their lives, how they lived in hovels, tenements, how they worked for pittances, how they were fired from their jobs by bosses in suits and ties, how when they were old they were fired, how when they spoke up they were fired. They showed themselves at street corners talking to
one another, going to one another's houses, they showed themselves in public meetings electing from among themselves their union leaders, they showed themselves going on strike, marching in the streets, carrying placards, getting run down and trampled by mounted police. Blacks showed themselves getting lynched, women showed themselves molested and pushed down on the floors of their kitchens, girls showed themselves giving birth in alleyways, drunks showed themselves dying with the delirium tremens, babies showed themselves dying of starvation, old people showed themselves being stuffed into pine boxes and dropped into graves. They all loved these movies about themselves and the truth of their lives. Sometimes a pianist played to go along with the action. But the audiences talked back to the films, stood to give advice, screamed warnings at the dangerous moments, cheered at the triumphs over villainy, cried when the lovers stood before the altar, and in all ways carried on to the extent that some poets in the audiences thought if they could only record the audiences talking back to the films, new films could be made about audiences watching themselves in films and talking back to them. And then films about those films, and so on into infinity. Obviously, some ontological order had to be established and this came about naturally as the competition among films created a demand for longer, more complex films. That meant filmmakers could no longer afford the cost of their films and so they went to banks and insurance companies for the money. This money was duly tendered, thus making banks and insurance companies the solemn judges of just what films were to be made. These judgments were made and a business class of professional filmmakers arose to effect them. The banks and insurance companies liked films showing peace between the unequal races, and happy workers and smiling shop foremen and well-dressed well-fed children and monogamous husbands and wives and hyperfunctional families as smoothly running as if on ball bearings going to church and being greeted and blessed by kindly gray-haired pastors. These films showed people driving in their motorcars, marveling at the heroism of cowboys, they showed villains as rough-hewn sociopaths standing apart from normal God-fearing human beings, and they showed love as the driving force of all life. They found loose-limbed, acrobatic little fellows to take pratfalls and show the comedy of life, and they showed pompous fat ladies getting their comeuppance, and self-impressed fat
men getting taken down a peg or two, and they showed cross-eyed cops falling over each other in their efforts to apprehend kids with peashooters and they showed darling children with chocolate cake smeared over their faces and comedy teams pushing pies into one another's faces, and gradually evolved a system of social archetypes into which they fitted physically appropriate persons they renamed as actors and found a place in the California sun to generate on an orderly industrial basis these corporate movies, which, whatever their period, contemporary or historical or futuristic, demonstrated to the audience watching them, now sitting in dark, palatial theaters built just for the purpose, that movies were a form of life to which life must aspire, as it has now shown every sign of doing.

—This past Sunday, Pem and Sarah and Sarah's boys walk over to Central Park to meet me and a new friend of mine, Miss Warren, at the specified tree near the western edge of the Sheep Meadow.

Miss Warren is a freelance magazine writer born and raised in New Orleans. In certain journalistic circles she is something of a celebrity. I met her at a publishing party and have known her for a week and I can't imagine what beautifully maladept instinct of mine has persuaded me to bring her here.

All New York is out this afternoon. We stroll around, watch some softball, find a grassy spot for ourselves, unwrap the deli heros, uncork the Snapples, and prepare to have one of those balmy, ritually relaxing Sundays when the sense of loss is in every heart and a nonspecific melancholy seems to permeate the air.

Pem points out to Sarah's boys how they can track the movement of the sun as it flashes in the windows of the residential towers of Fifth Avenue. They respond politely, but they are wearing their baseball mitts and, having seen the big guys, are ready for action. Pem rolls up his sleeves. Okay, he says, let's hustle. The boys run out to their imaginary positions. Pem keeps up the palaver, each successful catch or throw draws his praise, each dropped ball his encouragement. Sarah watches. The older boy, Jake, now nine, has filled out since I last saw him, his hair is his mother's light brown, and he has her fair skin and
wide-set blue eyes. He's reached the age when he can pick the ball out of the air with his glove hand and whip it back to Pem on a line in a somberly casual exhibit of skill. Pem, catching the softball without a glove, is hard-pressed to keep smiling. The younger kid, Davey, about five, is dark-haired, wiry, a dead ringer for his father. His tosses sometimes arc backward and land in the grass behind him, and on the catch his outstretched glove doesn't quite meet the ball as it arrives. He is undeterred in his ineptitude, then suddenly angry, slamming his glove down and going to sit sulkingly in Sarah's cross-legged lap for consolation.

Now, through all of this, Miss Warren is talking away in what seems to me an attempt to establish her sisterhood with a woman scholar of her own generation, though she is not naturally curious as a journalist is supposed to be. This is not a conversation of questions and answers but more like a monologue:
The New Yorker
has just accepted her piece about the Muslim extremists in Afghanistan. She will use the money to pay off part of her debt to a divorce lawyer, who has not done all that well by her. The divorce lawyer actually offered to let her pay off her bill with sex? Her ex-husband, and what a mistake that was, is a famous philologist who teaches at Princeton, one of those obsessively neat and tight-assed, basically fag types, who expected her to be the perfect little academic wife. “Doesn't that beat all?” she says.

“Davey,” Sarah says gently, lifting her son to his feet, “they're calling you. Go on back and play, you'll get the hang of it if you keep trying.”

Miss Warren, with numerous tendrils of her red-blond pile of hair escaped from her comb, wears her one and only outfit, day and night and for all continents, her khaki multipocketed bush jacket, soft shirt, fatigue trousers, lace-up boots. Around her neck, a blue railroad man's kerchief, carelessly tied. She chain-smokes long, thin cigarettes. She is tall and blowzy and sits hunched over with her legs in the full lotus, her jacket pockets bulging with her cell phone, beeper, cigarettes, pads, Palm III organizer, and, for all I know, a couple of grenades.

In Peru to write about the Shining Path guerrillas, Miss Warren fell in love with one of their leaders? He was killed in a skirmish and the Nationalistas cut off his dick and sent it to her in a box at the school in Lima where she had gone to lecture.. . . In Sicily, to do a piece on the culture of poverty there, she lost her way and was picked up by three farmhands, who dragged her into a barn and took turns fucking her.
She somehow got away? She found a village and told an old woman what happened, who told the local mafia chief, who invited Miss Warren to watch the men being executed the next morning in the town square. Which she did?

Every once in a while, Sarah Blumenthal glances at me with what I read as the inevitable question: Is this woman really the mythomaniac I think she is? I have to admit Miss Warren's tales of adventure are a touch exotic for a Sunday in Central Park. But having heard them before, I am of the opinion they may really have happened. Part of the trouble is in the style of narration, the diction of the locker room and the breeziness of tone together suggesting the utter inconsequence of the horrific events being reported. So the truth or falsity of these tales really isn't the point, Miss Warren sets off alarms in either case.

She is saying now the superintendent of her building in Soho is a fat old slob of a lecher who likes to walk into her loft unannounced hoping to see her in her underwear. As soon as her application for a gun license comes through, she will take out the piece and scare the shit out of him, and if that doesn't work she'll shoot the fucker.

Sarah's eyes are lowered and I imagine that she's thinking no longer of the woman I have brought this afternoon to the park but of what possibly could have possessed me to do so. It is a good question. Pem and the boys are engaged in the game of running bases, lots of shouting and laughing as he huffs back and forth between the two of them to avoid being tagged.. . . In this shining arcadian New York scene Sarah has to be coming to terms with the fact that I have a life beyond following Pem around, and that it is likely to include a weakness for the profane mysteries. I feel a distinct hollowing spasm in the solar plexus. I am not serious about Miss Warren, though she is quite an armful, and her appetite is honorably congruent with her sexual self-advertising. But in what is left of the afternoon, I will make a point of showing my pleasure in her company, especially in view of the ambiguous politeness she will have inspired in these clerical folk. In fact I am grateful to her. She has served to establish me in some new and distinctive filial relationship with Thomas Pemberton and Sarah Blumenthal. . . as if they are the long-married couple and I am the younger sibling or son who has brought his date around. Though they have not said anything to me, I am anticipating that they will soon marry. Pem said some time ago that I should keep my distance. And that is
what by these self-revealing, self-degrading means I am apparently intent on doing.