Hunger's Brides (60 page)

“And therefore,
signor
, to delight in evil … is to love.”

“Good girl, I knew you'd see.”

“Oh I see more. I see how this makes a certain breed of man a kind of victim—at least in his own eyes—
fiorced
to commit evil in the pursuit of love.”

“And don't forget,” Silvio nodded appreciatively, “this breed of man is at the same time forced to love even in the pursuit of evil … especially in the pursuit of evil. Meanwhile—”

“Meanwhile the Ambassador of Milan was about to say that I must then surely see how committing evil, even as it deepens his horror of solitude, also deepens his capacity for love. Therefore,” I went on, so eager to play the game, so keen to feel the braid around my throat tightening, “to love replenishes the well from which evil springs.”

“Brava, regazza!
An observation altogether worthy of the hero of our play—”

“Yet you've also no doubt considered,
signor
, that to desire solitude sufficiently—
heroically
let's say—is to make love, for that man, both unnecessary and impossible, while removing all limits to his delight in evil.”

“Delightful! Utterly delightful. You,
joven
,
†
are everything they said you were and more.”

“And you,
Señor Embajador
, are nothing they said you were.”

Who was he really?

“Come child. We've begun so well. You don't want to join all these other clerks of love—insisting I find a fixed address.”

I stood there in the moonlight listening to him hammering away at love. At retrograde, reactionary love that shuts the door on change, at baseless, insubstantial love—a pious vow like peace on earth or universal brotherhood. How love imposes closure, a passivity—not to choose but to be
chosen
. Love as an end to creativity, to questing, to living …

And though there was not a single premise I could not have dismantled, there was something in the whole, in the relentless energy of the assault, an echo of something faceless yet familiar, that I had glimpsed before.

“Still, if we must have hypocrisy,” he said, his delight evident by now, “I much prefer the hypocrisy of women to that of men, don't you? I mean that for a woman, just as for a man, to delight in evil and to love both act upon the greater horror of solitude as cause and effect. But a woman … a woman transforms this horror into a positive, an
active
quality. She nurtures it, and it, her. Even while she is loving and sinning, this horror—the fear of loss and emptiness, this fear of becoming an empty vessel—is never far from her soul. And so, with the new anti-Christ of tonight's play, women share a special
genius
for evil, do you not think so? And a special sensitivity to the solitude it implies. Thus do they love and sin more intensely than a man, and it is this that nurtures him in his pursuit of them—even as he himself indeed becomes more … womanly.”

So we played on under a watchful sky. The smile, the candour calculated to disarm. Into every woman's life walks at least one like him, the consummate player who knows all the steps of the dance, the feints, the pretended disinterest. How to make a show of hating hypocrisy, how to make himself an ally of the worm in her soul. And then, for all his mastery and virtuosity, to win completely, absolutely, he has to break the rules. The same rules that have served him so well.

Silvio broke the rules, but only after he had ground me down, outplayed me at a game I played with all my heart but only half my mind, a game I'd never seriously imagined losing. I never imagined how.

Hot with wine, the tumult of the evening—with years
of games
—my blood ignited. I had had enough of moonlight. I put my fingers to his lips, the lips of Leonor's lover. I had had enough of talk. I put my fingers to his heart, show me where it hurts, show me how. I placed his fingertips beneath my breast. Say it here, yes, and here, yes, and yes and here. God, my Lord God, how I wanted this, with a want and a craving that crept and called in me like madness. At that moment I would have permitted him anything, had he only asked and not taken. At that moment I would have gone with
joy …
He could have swept me up and brought me to his bed through the whole crowded ballroom.

He could have told me I was his second choice.

U
NDERWORLD

11 Dec [19]94 Mexico City

B
ULL ROAR OF A GREAT BOULEVARD
. Over the meridian squats a replicant Arc de Triomphe—new world Champs Elysees, swift metallic flocks, Elysian van of horns trumpeting triumph. Maniacal rose-bowl parade fun / knelled through the stone archway.
Arco Triunfal
that heralds my allegorical arrival / portalled portent, gather your omens where ye may.

Fifteen unmarked lanes each side—a shoaling river of cars it takes ten minutes to ford. Never cross on WALK crossing at the corner is for suicidal sitting ducks, never stop looking left and right J-Run don't walk in the middle of the block. Run headswivelling incessant—run graceless run. Thrill of danger in my guts—let's call this fun, more than I've had in years.

Headswimming chestpained bends on the far shore. The air's most travestied region—two kilometres above the sea. I walkandwalk ears ringing, spots of darkness skating in my eyes like waterbugs. Copper tongued—
my mouth is full of blood
but no it's this air this—tasty, odorous, colour of ash—gas.

Sharp right at the next corner into the quake zone. Low rent housing in the middle of the business core ten years after the Big One—five minutes' walk to work at the stock exchange buy now! Upscale vagrant lots of rubble—foundered tumblewalls, concrete wracked and insubstantial. Catch glimpses of colour, laundrystrung or hampered, ladies hauling water in oilcans.

See stone-soled children play rubblefield football, while infant archaeologists—solemn, slow—sort crushed rock and cokebottle potsherds.

Olfactory gusto—
¿Te gusta, a ti?
—to smell is to taste is to swim in an excremental infusion a million molecules of dogbaby-shit-per-cubic-metre-tea, but flowers too and frying onions tobacco soap—a funksea.

Ssst—oye, bonita
. What are you drawing there in your notebook? Why don't you draw my picture,
chiquita
, I love you. Whistle past the graveyard / hum the hymn hyaenal / hear the packhunters gathering for a fresh meatkill. Me. Sharp left to a main street.

Broken sidewalks / sclerotic, narrowed arterium of vendors warey with watch straps extension cords blender blades sport socks. Adidas bags for the unathletic—pauper Samsonite. Cheap blasters blare brazen pirate music—cassettes adollar apiece—prepare to be boarded! Newsstands papervendors self-possessed resellers of obsolete textbooks—this collapsing rubble of perished technology.

Overhead a featureless sky bounded by the sootstained enthusiasms of fifties office blocks. Bauhaus bowwow byebye. Into the Centro Histórico Centre of History, the spiral's eye. Colonial construction, arched architecture of darkness and light, igneous and granite geometrics. The ground is porous, illfounded. Massive block-long buildings list to left and right, angling like bombed battleships sunk at shallow anchor.

Sidewalks like cheesecloth—worn and holed—knee-deep trash-sinks—cripple machines. Beggarmakers. A million people a day stepping around holes in their lives. Or inside.

I can't bear to see the cathedral. Not today.

O happy day I stumble onto the
Palacio de Bellas Artes
—Palace of the Beautiful Arts—whither the ugly ones?—but this place is a dream of white marble domes and columns and muscled friezes and awestruck I mount the broad steps. Surely they will bar me entry to this mosque of loveliness. Inside, unshod, sandals in my hands I walk the cool parquet. Soaring murals of pain and blood, insane greed and longings betrayed. And at the margins, pale glimpses of my bookfed ignorance of this land writ large, ten metres high. Walls a soulswept panorama, floors cryptcold—above, a skull-lifting cupola a cranial vault / brain pan trepanned by a chromatic stainglass EXPLOSION. Vertigo, a slumping on the stairs.

Señorita
, you're not unwell? Skinny guard skinny moustache gentle eyes rustygun. No I'm not unwell. Sometimes the beauty is too much, no? Yes,
señor
, sometimes the beauty is too much.
Gracias
—a thousand graces, I'm all right now.

Outside across the street a fifty-storey office tower, the only one around. Tower of Babel of Rubble-in-waiting, detumescence forestalled. Earthquaked it will swing like a pendulum like a lightbuoy a lightning rod for calamity.

Down into the metro, embowelled earth / refuge from the thunderbolt sky, this copper air.

BIENVENIDOS AL METRO DE MEXICO—WELCOME /
WILKOMMEN / BIENVENUS / NAHUATL SUN SALUTATION—100 STATIONS / 200 KILOMETRES OF TRACK / FIVE MILLION PEOPLE MOVED DAILY HALF A MILLION KILOMETRES—to the moon and back through the shortcut guts of the underworld. To the dead lands. Troglodyte sons of the dog, fetching the bones of a lost race of men. No Eloi beyond this point, abandon all hope, ye the well-heeled who enter here.

Waiting, waiting, the platform a dammed flood of passengers massing—a streaming anthill, a hive. Xenophobic flutter in my guts flushed like quail. Rising pressure a high distant whine a rising wind—heralding an ochre rubbertired train … dopplered deceleration. People dis- and embarking, turbulent collidings.

But even whirled and battered, half-drowned, I am schooled in this people's incomprehensible restraint, their regret, absence of malice: these trains affront an outraged, deepheld courtesy.

Packed cars, stockyard buzzer, swish of doors. Basset-eyed gentleman of the primordial school—broad-knotted polyester tie, frayed collars and cuffs, impeccably clean—half-stands to offer me his seat. I smile in declining, strange cheek-tweaking musculation this. Salmon in sardine cans, the diffident press of bodies—hairspray, aftershave, mesquite, soap. Censered return to the olfactory sea.

The ochre-train's vulcan whine rises and coils whiplike over its groaning burden. This human cargo, this packtrain of burrowing burritos spurred by the
neo-gachupines
. These tender-hearted llamas on the Andean brink of despair.
Inframundo en llamas
. Landlocked submariners—what's the weather like up there? Pressganged landsmen who inwardly cringe at each sonar ping, at the sinister wash of ventilation props.

At each stop they spill debotched from this subterranean bottle-plant—hopes replenished, lungs decarbonated, goals recalibrated—consumptive discards returned. Recycled refills, these, bobbing up, rising to the light, redeposited at the famished gates of a pearling sky. And such a school of entrepreneurship they rise from!—neo-con worldbank wetdream—a million MBAs in humility. Ambulant vendors elbowing apologetic through the cattlecote with their sharecropper's haul. Pitchmen's singsong patter more dove-croon than hawking—selling scissors, slide rules, palm calculators / palmed contraband, psalmed bookmarks / keychain thermometers—what's body temperature?
Refugee-army knives, penlights / biographies of Mexican Nobel laureates / Aztec herbologies / tricks with rope and lariats / tiny brass padlocks against the crime wave.

Then, sweet moment of stillness—write it … quiet, a solemn concentration, the passing of a precious gift: suckling a newborn, a young Indian mother teaches her daughter—cleanfrocked glossyhaired—her alphabet, from a scrap of stock quotations.

And these, the deracinate holders of common property, how have they trespassed against thee, O great Captains of Calvinist Industry?

I ride for hours, train after train, scanning light-panels advertising the same: cosmetology, astrology, typewriter repair, keypunch dexterities. Parchment illustrators, programmers in Pascal and other dead hieratics—join a fraternity, wear a uniform—cloak, cowl and lifeguard whistle—preserve undead knowledge through the dark age to come.

I try to turn away from glaze-eyed children selling gum—
chicles … chicles!
—from these, the glued and leaded IQs of a lost generation. Train after train, through this tatterdemalion pandemonium, we are god's freak retinue limping through the holes in our lives. Jesters poets minstrels / the blind and pocked and crippled, playing ballads, early Beatles / protest, folk/ranchero, a cappella salsa. Guitar/banjo, clay flutes and fingerdrums …