Bad Nature
or With Elvis in Mexico
•
Javier Marías
Translated by Esther Allen
A NEW DIRECTIONS PEARL
For someone who’s laughing in my ear
No one knows what it is to be hunted down without having lived it, and unless the chase was active and constant, carried out with deliberation, determination, dedication and never a break, with perseverance and fanaticism, as if the pursuers had nothing else to do in life but look for you, keep after you, follow your trail, locate you, catch up with you and then, at best, wait for the moment to settle the score. It isn’t that someone has it in for you and stands at the ready to pounce should you cross his path or give him the chance; it isn’t that someone has sworn revenge and waits, waits, does no more than wait and therefore remains passive, or schemes in preparation for his blows, which as long as they’re machinations cannot be blows, we think the blows will fall but they may not, the enemy may drop dead of a heart attack before he sets to work in earnest, before he truly applies himself to harming us, destroying us. Or he may forget, calm down, something may distract him and he may forget, and if we don’t happen to cross his path again we may be able to get away; vengeance is extremely wearying and hatred tends to evaporate, it’s a fragile, ephemeral feeling, impermanent, fleeting, so difficult to maintain that it quickly gives way to rancor or resentment which are more bearable, easier to retrieve, much less virulent and somehow less pressing, while hatred is always in a tearing hurry, always urgent: I want him now, I want him dead, bring me the son of a bitch’s head, I want to see him flayed and his body smeared with tar and feathers, a carcass, skinned and butchered, and then he will be no one and this hatred that is exhausting me will end.
No, it isn’t that someone would harm you if given the chance, it isn’t one of those civilized enmities in which someone takes a certain satisfaction in striking a name off the list of invitees to the embassy ball, or publishes nothing in his section of the newspaper about his rival’s achievements, or fails to invite to a conference the man who once took a job away from him. It isn’t the betrayed husband who does his utmost to pay back the betrayal—or do what he thinks will pay it back—and see you betrayed in turn, it isn’t even the man who trusted you with his savings and was had, buying in advance a house that was never built or going up to his eyeballs in debt to finance a film when there was never the slightest intention of shooting a single millimeter of footage, it’s incredible how the movies lure and delude people. Nor is it the writer or painter who didn’t win the prize that went to you, and believes his life would have been different if only justice had been done back then, twenty years ago; it isn’t even the peon thrashed a thousand times by the vicious and abusive capataz who is the owner’s right-hand man, the peon who yearns for a new Zapata in whose wake he’ll slip a knife all the way down his torturer’s belly and, in passing, across the landowner’s jugular, because the peon, too, lives in a state of waiting, or rather of that childish daydreaming we all fall into from time to time in order to make ourselves remember our desires, that is, in order to keep from forgetting them, and though repetition would appear to be in the service of memory, in fact it blurs and plays tricks on memory and mutes it, relegating our needs to the sphere of that which is to come, so that nothing seems to depend on us right now, nothing depends on the peon, and the capataz knows there is a vague or imaginary threat and suffers from his own dream, a dream of fear that makes him the more brutal and vicious, repaying in advance the knife thrust to the belly that he receives only in dreams, his own and those of others.
No, being hunted down is none of those things; it isn’t knowing that you could be hunted down, it isn’t knowing who would come to kill you if another civil war were to break out in these countries of ours, so prone to war, so full of rage, it isn’t knowing with absolute certainty that someone would stamp on your hand if it were clutching the edge of a cliff (a thing we don’t usually risk, not in the presence of heartless people), it isn’t fearing a bad encounter that could be avoided by walking down other streets or going to other bars or visiting other houses, it isn’t worrying that fate will make a mockery of us or the tables will be turned against us one day, it isn’t making possible or probable enemies or even certain but always future ones, committing transgressions whose atonement lies far ahead, almost everything is put off, almost nothing is immediate or exists in the present, and we live in a state of postponement, life usually consists only of delay, of signs and plans, of projects and machinations, we trust in the indolence and infinite lethargy of the whole world, the indolence of knowing that things will come about and come to pass, and the indolence of carrying them out.
But sometimes there is neither indolence nor lethargy nor childish daydreaming, sometimes—though rarely—there is the urgency of hatred, the negation of reprieve and cunning and stratagems, which are present only if improvised by the intolerable resistance of the one being pursued and exist merely as setbacks, without other power than to cause a slight adjustment to the planned trajectory of a bullet because the target has moved and evaded it. This time. But never again, or that’s the hope; if the bullet went astray, the only thing to do is fire again, and again and again until the mark falls and can be finished off. When you’re being hunted down like that you feel as if your pursuers do nothing but search for you, chase you twenty-four hours a day: you’re convinced that they don’t eat or sleep, they don’t drink or stop even for one second, their venomous footsteps are incessant and tireless and there is no rest; they have neither wife nor child nor needs, they don’t need to pee, they don’t pause to chat, they don’t get laid or go to soccer games, they don’t have television sets or homes, at most they have cars to pursue you in. It isn’t that you know something bad could happen to you someday or if you go where you should not go, it’s that you see and know that the worst is happening to you right now, the thing you most dread, and then the hunted man doesn’t drink or eat or stop either; or sometimes he does, staying still more out of panic than from any certainty of being safe and sheltered, more than a stillness, it’s a paralysis, like an insect that doesn’t fly away or a soldier in his trench. But even then he doesn’t sleep except when exhaustion undermines what is happening right now and deprives it of reality, when all the years of his former life reassert themselves—it takes so long for habits to fade, the idea of an existence that isn’t short-term—and he decides for an instant that the present is the lie, the daydream or nightmare, and rejects it for being so incongruent. Then he sleeps and eats and drinks and has sex if he gets lucky or pays, stops to chat for a bit, forgetting that the venomous footsteps never stop and are always moving forward while his own perpetually innocent feet are detained or don’t obey or might even be bare. And that’s the worst thing, the greatest danger; you must not forget that if you’re fleeing you can never take off your shoes or watch television, or look into the eyes of someone who appears in front of you and might hold your attention, my eyes only look back while those of my pursuers look ahead, at my dark back, and so they are bound to catch up with me always.
It all happened because of Mr. Presley, and that is not one of those idiotic lines referring to the record that was playing the night we met, or to the time we were careless and went too far, or to the idol of the person who caused the problem by forcing us to go to a concert to seduce her or just to make her happy. It all happened because of Elvis Presley in person, or Mr. Presley, as I used to call him until he told me it made him feel like his father. Everyone called him Elvis, just Elvis, with great familiarity, and that’s what adoring fans and detractors alike still call him even after his death, people who nev
er saw him in the flesh or exchanged a single word with him, or, back then, people who were meeting him for the first time, as if his fame had made him the involuntary friend or unwitting servant of one and all, and this may be normal and even justifiable, however much I disliked it, for the whole world already did know him even then, didn’t they? And still does. Even so, I preferred to call him Mr. Presley and then Presley alone, by his surname, when he told me to drop the Mr. that made him feel so elderly, though I’m not sure he didn’t later regret the request a little, I have a feeling he liked to hear himself called that at least once in his life, Mr. Presley or señor Presley, depending on the language, at the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. And that—the language or its decorative fringes, its most ornamental aspects—was what brought me to him, when I was hired to be part of his entourage of collaborators, assistants and advisers for what was supposed to be six weeks, that was how long it was supposed to take to shoot Fun in Acapulco, which I think came out in Spain under a different title, as usual, not Diversión en Acapulco or Marcha en Acapulco but El ídolo en Acapulco. I never saw it in Spain.
But here in Spain, not long ago, I did buy the record that went with it, the original soundtrack, which happened to catch my eye as I was looking for something by Previn. I got it because it made me laugh and brought back memories I’d once decided I would rather forget, just as everyone else in the crew had undoubtedly decided to forget them, and tried hard to forget them, and succeeded: the liner notes to the record once again trot out the old lie that has now been consecrated, the false history. The notes say that Presley never set foot in Acapulco during the making of the film, that all his scenes were shot at the Paramount Studios in Los Angeles to spare him the trouble and the trip, while a second unit crew went to Mexico to shoot landscape stills and footage of locals in the streets for use as backgrounds, Presley outlined against the sea and the beach, against the streets as he rides a bicycle with a boy perched on the handlebars, against the cliffs of La Perla, in front of the hotel where his character worked or wanted to work; he played a traumatized former trapeze artist named Mike Windgren, I always remember names, more than faces. The official version has prevailed, as happens with almost everything, but it is a highly doctored version, as official versions generally are, no matter who provides them, an individual or a government, the police or a movie studio. It’s true that all the footage with Presley that actually appears in the film—as it was first shown and in the video version that exists today—was shot in Hollywood, whenever Presley is on screen, and he’s hardly ever offscreen in the whole film. They were very careful not to keep or use a single shot with him in it that hadn’t been taken in the studios, not a single one that could have contradicted the official version given out by the producer and by señor Presley’s entourage. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t other footage which was cut, painstakingly and deliberately cut, in this case, and possibly fed to the flames or into the maw of a shredder, reduced to a celluloid pulp: not a trace must remain, not a millimeter, not a single frame, or that’s what I imagine. Because the truth is that Presley did go to Mexico on location, not for three weeks but for ten days, at the end of which he not only abandoned the country without saying goodbye to anyone, but decided he had never been there, never set foot there, not for ten days or five or even one, Mr. Presley hadn’t budged from California or Tennessee or Missouri or wherever it was, he hadn’t set foot in Acapulco or in Mexico itself and the person who’d been interviewed and seen by tourists and Acapulqueños—or whatever they’re called—during those days in February was simply one of his many doubles, who were as necessary or more necessary than ever for this production because Presley’s character— in order to get over the nasty shock of having dropped his brother from a trapeze, with the consequent shattering of his morale and his flying brother’s body (smashed to bits)—had to throw himself into the Pacific from the heights of the brutal cliffs of La Perla in the final or rather penultimate scene of Fun in Acapulco, a title on which no one had wasted any great mental energy. That was the official version of Presley’s sojourn in Mexico, or rather his lack of a sojourn; it’s still around, I see, which to some extent is understandable. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that, perhaps it’s just that there is never a way of erasing what’s been said, true or false, once it’s been said: accusations and inventions, slanders and stories and fabrications, disavowal is not enough, it doesn’t erase but adds; once an event has been recounted there will be a thousand contradictory and impossible versions long, long before the event is annihilated: denials and discrepancies coexist with what they refute or deny, they accumulate, add up, they never cancel anything out but only end up sanctioning it for as long as people go on talking, the only way to erase is to say nothing, and go on saying nothing for a very long time.
Thirty-three years have gone by since it happened and eighteen since señor Presley died, and he is dead, though the whole world still knows and listens to and misses him. And it’s the truth that I knew him in the flesh and we were in Acapulco, absolutely, he was there and I was there, and in Mexico City, where we flew more often than we should have in his private plane, trips that took hours, at ungodly hours of the night, he was there and I was there, though I was there longer, far too long, or so it seemed to me, a chase lasts like no other kind of time because every second counts, one, two and three and four, they haven’t caught me yet, they haven’t butchered me yet, here I am and I’m breathing, one, two and three and four.
Yes: we were there, we were all there, the film’s entire crew and señor Presley’s entire retinue, which was far more extensive, he traveled—well, “travel” may be an exaggeration: he moved—with a legion at his back, a battalion of more or less indispensable parasites, each with his own function or without any very precise function at all, lawyers, managers, make-up artists, musicians, hairstylists, vocal accompanists—the invariable Jordanaires—secretaries, trainers, sparring partners—his nostalgia for boxing—agents, image consultants, costume designers and a seamstress, sound technicians, drivers, electricians, pilots, financial expediters, publicists, promoters, press people, official and unofficial spokesmen, the president of his national fan club on an authorized inspection or delivering a report, and of course bodyguards, choreographers, a diction coach, mixing engineers, a teacher of facial and gestural expression (who wasn’t able to do much), occasional doctors and nurses and an around-the-clock personal pharmacist with an implausible arsenal of remedies, I never saw such a medicine chest. Each, they claimed, was answerable to certain others in an organized hierarchy, but it was not at all easy to know who answered to whom nor how many divisions and subdivisions there were, how many departments and teams, you would have needed to draw up a family tree or that other thing, I mean a flow chart. There were individuals whom no one was supervising at all closely—everyone thought they were taking orders from someone else—people who came and went and prowled and milled around without anyone ever knowing exactly what their mission might be, though it was taken for granted that they had a mission, back then no one was very suspicious, Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated yet. All of them had the initials “EP” embroidered on their jackets, shirts, tee-shirts, overalls or blouses, in blue, red, or white, depending on the color of the garment, and any overeager bystander who asked his mother to do a little embroidering for him could have passed himself off as a member of the crew without further difficulty. No one asked questions back then, there were too many of us for everyone to know everyone else, and I think the only person who tried to keep an eye on things a little and supervise the whole group was Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s discoverer, or tutor or godfather or something like that, they told me (no one was particularly well-informed about anything), and whose name appeared in the credits of all Presley’s films as “Technical Adviser,” a vague title if ever there was one. His appearance was quite distinguished and severe and even somewhat mysterious in that motley setting; he was always well dressed and wearing a tie, hi
s jaw set tight as if he never relaxed, his teeth clenched as if he ground them in his sleep, and he spoke very softly but very sternly right in the face of the person he was addressing, making sure his listener was the only person who heard him even if he were speaking in a room full of people, who were often whiling the time away in unbridled gossip. I’m not sure where the title of Colonel came from, whether he really had been in the army or if it was just a whim and he called himself Colonel in nominal fulfilment of some truncated aspiration. But if so, then what was to prevent him from calling himself General? His lean figure and carefully combed gray hair inspired respect and even apprehension in most people, so much so that when his presence made itself felt on the set or in an office or a room the place would begin to empty out, imperceptibly but rapidly, as if he were a man of ill omen, as if no one wanted to be exposed for long to his Nordic eye, a translucent eye, difficult to meet head-on. Though he wore civilian clothing and his demeanor was more senatorial than military, everyone, including Mr. Presley, always called him Colonel.
My own role was certainly not indispensable but resulted from one of Presley’s caprices; I was hired just for that single occasion. And there we all were, the regulars of his formulaic movies, all copied from each other—Fun was the thirteenth—and the newcomers, all of us present for the indolent shooting of a ridiculous film, without rhyme or reason, at least in my opinion, I’m still amazed that the screenwriter was actually paid—a guy named Weiss who was clearly incapable of making the slightest effort, he hung around the set paying no attention to anything but the music, I mean the music Presley sang at the drop of a hat, with his inseparable Jordanaires or another group of vocal accompanists who went by the offensive name of The Four Amigos. I don’t really know what the plot of the film was supposed to be, and not because it was too complicated; on the contrary, it’s hard to follow a plot when there is no story line and no style to substitute for one or distract you; even later, after seeing the film—before the premiere there was a private screening—I can’t tell you what its excuse for a plot was. All I know is that Elvis Presley, the tortured former trapeze artist, as I said—but he’s only tortured sometimes, he also spends a lot of time going swimming, perfectly at ease, and uninhibitedly romancing women—wanders around Acapulco, I don’t remember why, let’s say he’s trying to shake off his dark past or he’s on the run from the FBI, perhaps some thought the fratricide was deliberate (I’m not at all clear on that and I could be mixing up my movies, thirty-three years have gone by). As is logical and necessary, Elvis sings and dances in various places: a cantina, a hotel, a terrace facing the daunting cliff. From time to time he stares, with envy and some kind of complex, at the swimmers—or rather, divers—who plunge into the pool with tremendous smugness from a diving board of only average height. There’s a lady bullfighter, a local, who has a thing for Elvis, and another woman, the hotel’s publicist or something like that, who competes with the matadora for him, Mr. Presley was always very successful with the women, in fiction as in life. There’s also a Mexican rival named Moreno who jumps off the diving board far too often, frenetically, pausing only to taunt Windgren and call him a coward. Presley competes with him for the publicist, who is none other than the Swiss actress Ursula Andress, in a bikini or with her shirt capriciously knotted across her midriff and ribbons winding through her wet hair, she had just made herself universally desirable and famous—particularly among teenage boys—by appearing in a white bikini in the first James Bond adventure, Agente 007 contra el doctor No, or whatever it was called in Spain; her Acapulcan bikinis weren’t cut very high and didn’t live up to expectations, they were far more chaste than the one she wore in Jamaica, Colonel Tom Parker may have insisted, he seemed to be a gentleman of some decorum or maybe he was unwilling to tolerate any unfair competition with his protégé. Running around somewhere in all that was also a pseudo-Mexican boy, greatly overendowed with the gift of gab, whom Windgren befriended—the two amigos—without knowing why or for what purpose: that boy was an epidemic of talk and was absolutely to be avoided and ignored even in the elevators, which in fact was what we all did every time he came chattering towards us imagining that the fiction carried over into life, since in the movie he was a boon companion to the former trapeze artist embittered by the fraternal fatality and by Moreno the mean diving champ. That was the whole story, if you can call that a story.