THE SECRET OF EVIL
This story is very simple, although it could have been very complicated. Also, it’s incomplete, because stories like this don’t have an ending. It’s night in Paris, and a North American journalist is sleeping. Suddenly the telephone rings, and someone asks in English, with an unidentifiable accent, for Joe A. Kelso. Speaking, says the journalist and then looks at his watch. It’s four in the morning; he’s only had about three hours sleep and he’s tired. The voice on the other end of the line says, I have to see you, to pass on some information. The journalist asks him what it’s about. As usual with calls like this, the voice gives nothing away. The journalist asks for some indication, at least. In impeccable English, far more correct than Kelso’s, the voice expresses a preference for a face-to-face meeting. Then, straight away, it adds, There is no time to lose. Where? Kelso asks. The voice mentions one of the bridges over the Seine. And adds: You can get there in twenty minutes on foot. The journalist, who has had hundreds of meetings like this, says that he’ll be there in half an hour. Getting dressed, he thinks it’s a pretty stupid way to waste the night, and yet he realizes, with a slight shock of surprise, that he’s no longer sleepy, that the call, in spite of its predictability, has left him wide awake. When he reaches the bridge, five minutes after the appointed time, he can see nothing but cars. For a while he stands still at one end, waiting. Then he walks across the bridge, which is still deserted, and after waiting for a few minutes at the other end, finally crosses back again and decides to give up and go home to bed. While he’s walking home, he thinks about the voice: it definitely wasn’t a North American voice and it probably wasn’t British either, though he’s not so sure about that now. It could have been a South African or an Australian, he thinks, or a Dutchman, maybe, or someone from northern Europe who learned English at school and has since perfected his command of the language in various Anglophone countries. As he crosses the street he hears someone call his name: Mr. Kelso. He realizes straight away that it’s the man who arranged to meet him on the bridge, speaking from a dark entrance way. Kelso is about to stop, but the voice instructs him to keep walking. When he reaches the next corner, he turns around and sees that no one is following him. He’s tempted to retrace his steps, but after a moment’s hesitation he decides that it’s best to continue on his way. Suddenly the man appears from a side street and greets him. Kelso returns his greeting. The man holds out his hand. Sacha Pinsky, he says. Kelso shakes his hand and introduces himself in turn. Pinsky pats him on the back and asks if he’d like a whiskey. A little whiskey, is what he actually says. He asks Kelso if he’s hungry. He assures the journalist that he knows a bar where they can get hot croissants, freshly baked. Kelso looks at his face. Although Pinsky is wearing a hat, his face is a pasty white, as if he’d been locked away for years and years. But where? Kelso wonders. In a prison or an institution for the mentally ill. In any case, it’s too late to pull out now, and Kelso wouldn’t mind a hot croissant. The place is called Chez Pain, and in spite of the fact that it’s in his neighborhood (in a narrow side street, admittedly), this is the first time he’s set foot inside, and perhaps the first time he’s even seen it. Mostly he frequents establishments in Montparnasse with a dubious air of legend about them: the place where Scott Fitzgerald once ate, the place where Joyce and Beckett drank Irish whiskey, the bars favored by Hemingway and Dos Passos, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Pinsky was right about the croissants at Chez Pain: they’re good, they’re freshly baked, and the coffee isn’t bad at all. Which makes Kelso think — and it’s a chilling thought — that this guy could well be a local, a neighbor. As he considers this possibility, Kelso is seized by a shudder. A bore, a paranoiac, a madman, a watcher with no one to watch him in turn, someone it’s going be hard to get rid of. Well, he eventually says, I’m listening. The pale man, who is sipping his coffee but not eating, looks at him and smiles. There is something intensely sad about his smile, and tired as well, as if it were the only way in which he could allow himself to express his tiredness, his exhaustion and lack of sleep. But as soon as he stops smiling, his features recover their iciness.
THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN
Things are always happening by chance. One day Belano meets Lima, and they become friends. Both live in Mexico City and their friendship, like those of many young poets, is sealed by a common rejection of certain social norms and by the literary affinities they share. As I said, they’re young. They’re very young, in fact, and full of energy, in their own way, and they believe in literature’s analgesic powers. They recite Homer and Frank O’Hara, Archilocus and John Giorno, and although they don’t know it, their lives are running along the brink of the abyss.
One day — this is in 1975 — Belano says that William Burroughs is dead, and when Lima hears the news he goes very pale and says, He can’t be, Burroughs is alive. Belano doesn’t insist; he says he thinks that Burroughs is dead, but maybe he’s mistaken. When did he die? asks Lima. Not long ago, I think, says Belano, feeling less and less sure, I read it somewhere. What intervenes at this point in the story is something that might be called a silence. Or a gap. A very short gap, in any case, and yet, for Belano, it opens up and will last, mysteriously, until the century’s final years.
Two days later, Lima turns up with proof, and it’s indisputable, that Burroughs is alive.
Years go by. Occasionally, just occasionally, and without knowing why, Belano remembers the day on which he arbitrarily announced the death of Burroughs. It was a clear day; he was walking with Lima on Calle Sullivan; they’d left a friend’s place and the rest of the day was free. They might have been talking about the Beats. Then he said that Burroughs was dead, and Lima went pale and said, He can’t be. Sometimes Belano thinks he can remember Lima shouting: He can’t be! It’s impossible. Unjust. Or something like that. He also remembers Lima’s grief, as if he’d been told of the death of a very dear relative, a grief (although Belano knows that grief is not the right word) that persisted through the following days, until Lima was able to confirm that the information was incorrect. Something about that day, however, something indefinable, leaves a trace of uneasiness in Belano. Uneasiness and joy. The uneasiness is actually fear in disguise. And the joy? Belano generally thinks, or wants to believe, that what lies hidden behind the joy is nostalgia for his own youth, but what lies hidden is really ferocity: a dark, enclosed space busy with blurry figures, adhering to one another or superimposed, and constantly on the move. Figures that feed on a violence they can barely control (or can only control by means of a very strange economy). Although it seems counterintuitive, there is an airy quality to the uneasiness provoked by the memory of that day. And the joy is subterranean, like a geometric ship, perfectly rectangular in shape, gliding along a groove.
Sometimes Belano examines the groove.
He leans forward, he bends over, his spinal column curves like the trunk of a tree in a storm and he examines the groove: a deep, clean trace, parting a strange kind of skin, the mere sight of which makes him feel nauseous. The years go by. And they rewind. In 1975 Belano and Lima are friends, and every day they walk, unknowingly, along the brink of the abyss. Until one day they leave Mexico. Lima sets off for France and Belano for Spain. From now on, their lives, which have been joined, will follow different paths. Lima travels through Europe and the Middle East. Belano travels through Europe and Africa. Both fall in love, both try in vain to find happiness or to get themselves killed. Eventually, years later, Belano settles
down in a village by the Mediterranean. Lima returns to Mexico. He returns to Mexico City.
But things have happened in the meantime. In 1975, Mexico City is a radiant place. Belano and Lima publish their poems, usually together, in the same magazines, and participate in readings at the Casa del Lago. By 1976, both are known to, and above all feared by, a literary establishment that simply cannot stand them. Two wild, suicidal ants. Belano and Lima lead a group of adolescent poets who have no respect for anyone. Anyone at all. An unforgivable offence for the literary powers that be; Belano and Lima are blackballed. This is in 1976. At the end of the year, Lima, who is Mexican, leaves the country. Shortly afterward, in January 1977, Belano, who is Chilean, follows him.
That’s how it goes. 1975. 1976. Two young men sentenced to life. Europe. A new phase beginning and — as it begins — pulling them back from the brink of the abyss. And separation, because although it’s true that Belano and Lima meet in Paris and then in Barcelona and then in a railway station in Rousillon, their destinies eventually diverge and their bodies move apart, like two arrows suddenly, inevitably, veering off on separate trajectories.
So that’s how it goes. 1977. 1978. 1979. And then 1980, and the ’80s, a black decade for Latin America.
All the same, every now and then, Belano and Lima hear news of each other. Belano, especially, hears about Lima. One day, for instance, he hears that his old friend has been hit by a bus, and miraculously survived. The accident leaves Lima with a limp for the rest of his life. It also converts him into a legend. Or that’s what Belano thinks, anyway, far away from Mexico City. From time to time, a friend who lives in Barcelona has visitors from Mexico, who bring news of Lima, which the friend then passes on to Belano.
THE COLONEL'S SON
You’re not going to believe this, but last night, at about four a.m., I saw a movie on TV that could have been my biography or my autobiography or a summary of my days on this bitch of a planet. It scared me so fucking shitless I tell you I just about fell off my chair.
I was stunned. I could tell right away the film was bad, or the sort we call bad — poor fools that we are — because the actors aren’t much good and the director’s not much good and the cretinous special effects guys are pretty hopeless too. But really it was just a very low-budget film, pure B-grade schlock. What I mean, just to be perfectly clear, is a film that cost about four euros or five dollars. I don’t know who they conned to raise the money, but I can tell you that all the producer shelled out was a bit of small change, and they had to make do with that.
I can’t even remember the title, really I can’t, but I’ll go to my grave calling it The Colonel’s Son, and I swear it was the most democratic, the most revolutionary film I’d seen in ages, and I don’t say that because the film in itself revolutionized anything, not at all, it was pathetic really, full of clichés and tired devices, prejudice and stereotypes, and yet at the same time every frame was infused with and gave off a revolutionary atmosphere, or rather an atmosphere in which you could sense the revolution, not in its totality, but a fragment, a minuscule, microscopic fragment of the revolution, as if you were watching Jurassic Park, say, except the dinosaurs never showed, no, I mean as if it was Jurassic Park and no one ever even mentioned the fucking reptiles, but their presence was inescapable and unbearably oppressive.
Do you see what I getting at? I’ve never read any of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s Proletarian Chamber Theater, but I’m certain that Lamborghini, with his masochistic streak, would have been happy to watch The Colonel’s Son at three or four in the morning. What was it about? Well, don’t laugh, it was about zombies. No kidding, like George Romero’s movies, more or less; it had to be a kind of homage to Romero’s two great zombie flicks. But if the political background to Romero is Karl Marx, the political background to the movie last night was Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry. Pure French insanity.
Don’t laugh. Romero is straightforward and tragic: he talks about communities sinking into the mire and about survivors. He also has a sense of humor. You remember his second film, the one where the zombies wander around the mall because that’s the only place they can vaguely remember from their previous lives? Well, last night’s film was different. It didn’t have much of a sense of humor, although I laughed like a madman, and it wasn’t about a communal tragedy either. The protagonist was a boy who — I’m guessing, because I didn’t see the start — turns up one day with his girlfriend at the place where his father works. I didn’t see the start, like I said, so I can’t be sure. Maybe the boy goes to visit his father and that’s where he meets the girl. Her name is Julie and she’s pretty and young, and she wants to be — or seem to be — up to date, the way young people do. The boy is the son of Colonel Reynolds. The colonel is a widower and loves his son — that’s obvious right from the start — but he’s also a soldier, so the relationship that he has with his son is one in which there’s no place for displays of affection.
What is Julie doing at the base? We don’t know. Maybe she went to deliver some pizzas and got lost. Maybe she’s the sister of one of the guinea pigs that Colonel Reynolds is using, although that seems unlikely. Maybe she met the colonel’s son when she was hitching a ride out of the city. What we do know is that Julie is there and that at some point she gets lost in an underground labyrinth and innocently walks through a door that she never should have opened. On the other side is a zombie, and it starts chasing her. Julie flees, of course, but the zombie manages to corner her and scratch her; at one point he even bites her arm and her legs. The scene is suggestive of a rape. Then the colonel’s son, who’s been searching for her, appears, and between them they manage to overpower and kill the zombie, if such a thing is possible. Then they flee down increasingly narrow and tortuous underground passages, until they finally make their way out through the sewers to the surface. As they’re escaping, Julie begins to feel the first symptoms of the illness. She’s tired and hungry and begs the colonel’s son to leave her or forget her. His resolve, however, is unshakeable. He has fallen in love with Julie, or perhaps he was already in love (which suggests that he has known her for some time); in any case, armed with the generosity of the very young, he has no intention, come what may, of leaving her to face her fate alone.
When they reach the surface, Julie’s hunger is uncontrollable. The streets have a desolate look. The film was probably shot on the outskirts of some North American city: deserted neighborhoods, the sort of half-derelict buildings that directors who have no budget use for shooting after midnight. That’s where they end up, the colonel’s son and Julie, who’s hungry; she’s been complaining all the time they were running away. It hurts, I’m hungry: but the colonel’s son doesn’t seem to hear; all he cares about is saving her, getting away from the military base, and never seeing his father again.
The relationship between father and son is odd. It’s clear from the start that the colonel puts his son before his duties as a soldier, but of course his love isn’t reciprocated; the son has a long way to go before he’ll be able to understand his father, or solitude, or the sad fate to which all beings are condemned. Young Reynolds is, after all, an adolescent, and he’s in love and nothing else matters to him. But careful, don’t be misled by appearances. The son appears to be a young fool, a young hothead, rash and thoughtless, just like we were, except that he speaks English, and his particular desert is a devastated neighborhood in a North American megalopolis, while we spoke Spanish (of a kind) and lived, stifled, on desolate avenues in the cities
of Latin America.
When the two of them emerge from the maze of underground passages, the landscape is somehow familiar to us. The lighting is poor; the windows of the buildings are smashed; there are hardly any cars on the streets.
The colonel’s son drags Julie to a food store. One of those stores that stays open till three or four in the morning. A filthy store where tins of food are stacked up next to chocolate bars and bags of potato chips. There’s only one guy working there. Naturally, he’s an immigrant, and to judge from his age and the look of anxiety and annoyance that comes over his face, he must be the owner. The colonel’s son leads Julie to the counter where the donuts and the sweets are, but Julie goes straight to the fridge and starts eating a raw hamburger. The storekeeper is watching them through the one-way mirror, and when he sees her throw up he comes out and asks if they’re trying to eat without paying. The colonel’s son reaches into the pocket of his jeans and throws him some bills.
At this point four people come in. They’re Mexicans. It’s not hard to imagine them taking classes at a drama school, or, for that matter, dealing drugs on the corners of their neighborhood, or picking tomatoes with John Steinbeck’s farmhands. Three guys and a girl, in their twenties, mindless and prepared to die in any old alleyway. The Mexicans show an interest in Julie’s vomit too. The storekeeper says the money’s not enough. The colonel’s son says it is. Who’s going to pay for the damage? Who’s going to pay for this filth? says the storekeeper, pointing at the vomit, which is a nuclear shade of green. While they’re arguing, one of the Mexicans has slipped in behind the till and is emptying it. Meanwhile the other three are staring at the vomit as if it concealed the secret of the universe.