A Lush and Seething Hell Read online

  We drank enough to be unsteady and I took my leave of him. The next Sunday, we watched a film about a musician who knew a song that could kill vampires. And the next, a masked wrestler fought a golem. The next, a story of an auditorium haunted by the ghost of a vicious luchador. And on and on, week after week. The Eye laughed through all of them. We had grown comfortable with each other. Our relationship—I cannot call it a friendship—grew. What lay between us was more than friendship. We were outcasts, together.

  Only when he left his wallet at the table one night did I learn his Christian name. I took it and opened it and withdrew his Spanish driver’s license.

  Rafael Avendaño.

  2

  Rafael Avendaño is a name every Mageran knows. While no South American poet is more famous than Pablo Neruda, no poet is more infamous than Avendaño. A son of extraordinarily wealthy parents, he once stabbed his wife with a paring knife at a cocktail party when he discovered she had been having an affair. It being a paring knife, she lived to make him regret it. She took his daughter and forbade him to see her ever again.

  A tamer moment for him.

  Avendaño wrote of outrageous sex acts, French whores, and Indonesian courtesans. He drank heavily and smoked marijuana and loudly proclaimed the benefits of cocaine. He glorified boxers and the false masculine ideal. He admired American writers like Bukowski and Mailer and traveled to New York and Paris and kept the society of artists and bohemians. He dressed handsomely and was in the newspaper social sections. It’s reported that he once had a fistfight with two literary critics at a book event in Mexico City and beat them both soundly. They sued him as vigorously as he had assaulted them. He thumbed his nose at the Mexican legal system and in an interview in a Mageran newspaper—La Sirena—vowed never to return to Mexico, calling the whole country the “shit stain between the asshole of America and the cunt of Colombia.” In response, Mexican president Ordaz declared him an enemy of Mexico and banned him, specifically, from returning. Thousands of Mexican patriots vowed to kill him if he was ever seen in their country again. In a follow-up editorial, Avendaño reveled in his new status.

  For my part, I had never liked his writings very much. The poems were self-indulgent and misogynistic. If they did not celebrate drunken womanizing, then they were pensive and shallow explorations into the most rudimentary and puerile existentialism. I was conscious of the fact I did not claim him in my curriculum. My first thought at knowing his identity was if he would ask me of that omission—a completely irrational fear, on my part, but there nonetheless.

  A beneficiary of Esteban Pávez’s socialist programs—the hallmark agenda of our deposed Mageran president—Avendaño had reputedly committed suicide along with his friend on the day of Vidal and his junta’s coup.

  “You know who I am,” he said, after he’d returned from the restroom. He looked to his wallet. “I can see it on your face.” He smiled.

  Like many older men, he dribbled when he urinated, for there was a discoloration at the crotch of his tan linen suit. It was quite prominent. Avendaño did not seem to care. I half considered him as a Zorba that, through some alternate fate, became an artist and scholar. He loudly ordered another pisco and sat down, at peace with the world.

  “It was becoming hard to think of you only as ‘The Eye,’” I said.

  He nodded. “Of course. I would have just told you.” He shifted and lit a Bali. “I think I offered on our first night together.”

  Knowing his history, “our first night together” made me uncomfortable.

  “You did,” I said. “The world thinks you are dead.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a big world. I’m not, nor have I ever pretended to be dead.” He paused. “Well, except once, but that was dire circumstances.” He looked at me. “You are reevaluating me now. I am no longer the jolly old fool who pays for things because he’s smitten by your beauty.”

  “I’m not beautiful and you’re not smitten,” I said.

  He looked sad for a moment. “True.” Part of me had wanted him to say, yes, yes, you are beautiful, but real life doesn’t work like that. “I pay for your drinks because you’re Mageran and friendless. Because you are young and very poor. And because my kindness is infinite.”

  Almost everything he said made me want to respond with profanity. Or laugh madly.

  A thought struck me. “Did you know who I was before we became friends?”

  “No,” he said. “But after El mundo de los vampiros, I visited the university, searched for Isabel Certa, and read your writings. You are very good. A little dry for my taste. I especially enjoyed your paper ‘Neruda as Prometheus: The New Poets of South America.’ I liked the mention you gave me, but you seemed to not appreciate my genius. I hate academic papers that get too pretentious in their titles. So . . . cheers.” He took a drink.

  I waved that away. “I don’t know what to think. About this. About you.”

  He shrugged again. He made it look so effortless. He was old, but for an instant, I could see what women might find attractive in a younger version of him.

  “What really happened to your eye?” I asked.

  “I plucked it out. That is true,” he said.

  “That is shit.”

  “No, it’s not shit. It is the truth.” He paused, thinking. “Put out your hands.”

  “Bah,” I said.

  “Put them out.” He put out his. Their mottled backs were specked with liver marks.

  I put mine out. He took them in his.

  “When you throw a ball, which hand do you use?” he said.

  “The right one.”

  “And when you shoot a rifle?”

  “I don’t have a rifle.”

  “Surely you’ve shot a gun?” His hands were warm, dry. Like the cover of a cherished leather-bound book.

  “No.” I looked at the people in the café, certain they were all staring at us. They weren’t.

  “A bow and arrow, like Artemis?”

  “The right one.”

  “Ahh,” he said. It was an exhalation. A pregnant pause, signifying nothing except delay. He was thinking, his single eye shifting in its socket as he studied my face very closely. “There might come a time when your eyes see too much. Or too little.”

  I pulled my hands away. “This is nonsense.”

  He laughed, sitting back in his chair as if it were all a joke. “Look with the lesser eye.”

  “Both of my eyes are lesser. The ophthalmologist in Coronada said I have weak eyes.”

  Avendaño laughed again. It was a phlegmy laugh, thick in his throat. He often wiped his nose and eyes, hocked up wads of yellow sputum. He was like my grandfather in that way. Men of a certain age cease caring about the impression the fecundity of their bodies makes on others. It’s a selfishness and privilege that has always rankled. Yet it was almost impossible to stay disgruntled with The Eye, despite his indifferent narcissism.

  I laughed with him. He could be very charming when he had a mind to be.

  He withdrew an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. “I have to go away.” He placed the letter on the table. “I need you to take care of some things while I’m gone.”

  I stammered. The Eye laughed and ordered more drinks.

  I opened the envelope. It contained a key, a slip of paper bearing an address, and a check from the Bank of Barcelona for a hundred thousand pesetas—more than a whole year of my teaching salary. I placed them back in the envelope and set it between us on the café table.

  Questions filled my head, and my mouth could not catch up. “Why? Why me? Where are you going?” I held up the envelope. “What is all this shit?”

  “Money for you. An address and the key to my apartment,” he said. “I do not know how long I will be gone, and I’ve made arrangements for my rent to be paid for a long while. All of my books and papers are there and need some organization. You can leave them as they are, if you wish. But, should you have an urge to tidy up or—”

  “Where the fuc
k—” I realized I had raised my voice. I lowered it, leaning closer into the table, palms flat on the surface. “Where the fuck are you going?” I whispered.

  “Where do you think?” He withdrew a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and threw it on the table. I unfolded it and picked it up. It read -19.5967, -70.2123. The scrawl of a woman’s name in pencil. Nivia.

  “What is this?” I asked, but I already knew, just as I had always known where he was going. It was a simple enough cipher. Longitude and latitude.

  He was going back to Magera.

  3

  He tells me about a letter arriving from Santaverde, a slip of paper within, and the name of his ex-wife at the bottom. No message, no plea for help. The Eye did not know who had sent the numbers and did not think anyone in Magera even knew he was still alive, though he had never tried to hide it. However, he had not published anything since Pávez’s fall.

  “Poetry’s been burned from me. You need two eyes for that,” he said.

  “You can’t go back to Magera,” I said. “You will be shot. Vidal is a beast now that Los Diablos’s assassination attempt failed. He won’t have forgotten you.”

  “I was never a friend to Marxists,” he said.

  “But you were friends with Pávez. And look what happened to him. Do you think anyone there makes such distinctions?”

  “Still. I must go. I am old and have nothing to lose,” he said. His brow furrowed, a craggy landscape. Thoughts crossed his features, like the surface of a dark, silted river, hiding danger beneath. “My daughter is there. She would be grown now. She might still be. And I fled. At some point every exile must return home.”

  “Not every exile,” I said. They had jailed my mother when I was eight. She held meetings in our little house in Coronada, and later, when we moved to Santaverde. Fiery meetings with many young, unshaven men carrying books and smoking. The soldiers came and arrested everyone in our house. Mama locked herself in a bathroom and put me out a window before they took her, and I ran to the home of Puella, our kind neighbor who would give me milk. Mama never came home. When my father returned, haggard and bearing wounds all over his body, he spent the following years drinking himself to death from anger and guilt. And fear. Fear they would take him again and do whatever ANI—the secret police—did. When I enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires, I think he decided to die. A week after matriculation, he emptied a handful of painkillers into a bottle of vodka.

  I would never go back; there was nothing there to bind me.

  Avendaño sighed, looked pained, as if a great, invisible yoke pressed down on him. “At the end, there were things that—”

  “That what?”

  “Defied comprehension. Or my attempts at it,” he said.

  He pushed the envelope at me. I pushed it back.

  “What is the location on the paper?”

  “It’s an area on the coast in the northern part of the country. Past Cachopo.”

  “That’s nowhere and nothing,” I said, using his own words. A game we played. Saying things we’d said before back to the other.

  He shrugged. “It’s not nothing.” He pushed the envelope at me once more.

  I racked my memory. A barren area, even on the shore—blue salt to the west, brown scree and sharp hills to the east. They mine things up there, in that barren land. I looked at The Eye closely, trying to penetrate him as if by the force of my gaze alone. His ever-present and indolent mirth failed. Something in his demeanor changed. The ease and arrogance, like a pattern of light on a bedroom wall at night, became the figure of a real man, made of pain, and a history of suffering. The rumors that surrounded Avendaño were simply a cloak he pulled about himself. He might have been the rake, the sot, the womanizer, but that was when he had two eyes.

  “Take the envelope,” he said. “I need your help.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” I said. A hard thing for me to admit. The movies, the walks in the Parque de Huelin, the long discussions of Magera and poets and the meaning of art—he had filled a part of my life I did not even know I had been missing. “Who will teach me about luchadores and buy me dinners?”

  He smiled and took my hands in his large warm ones and squeezed. Then he pressed the envelope in them.

  I kept it, though it was difficult.

  * * *

  The Eye flew from Málaga to Barcelona the next day, and from there to Paris and then west, across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires. He told me he would rent a Jeep and drive across Argentina to Magera because he wanted to check in with some of his ex-wife’s family in Córdoba and in order to avoid any trouble with Vidal’s men at the Santaverde airport. I wished him well and told him I would make sure no thieves pilfered his papers, and that, as they say, was that. The next day, after I was through with classes, I went to his apartment.

  Opening the door, I found a note left in the small atrium. There is a cat, for your protection. Feed him. He had signed off with a rudimentary drawing of an eye.

  It was a spacious if cluttered three-room affair stuffed to brimming with books and papers. It possessed a well-appointed kitchen and even-better-appointed bar, but the most striking part of the whole area was that every counter doubled as a workspace. Three typewriters—an Underwood, an Olivetti, and an IBM Selectric—sat in a jumbled palaver on a dining room table as if communing with one another, stones standing in a tide of loose paper, ribbons, pencils, and notebooks. Each typewriter had unfinished writing in carriage and under platen. In the Underwood, a segment of a long blank-verse poem about, surprisingly, a subject that was either a young woman or a hoary old tomcat. It was hard to tell. I enjoyed it more than most of his earlier work. In the Olivetti, a letter to the Mageran Minister of Workforce and Social Security, asking if the minister or any of his agents might have record of Bella Avendaño, who might be living under the name of Isabella Avendaño, or even Isabella Campos, which I assumed was his ex-wife’s family name. I couldn’t help but connect the similarities between his daughter’s name and my own. In the Selectric, typed notes accompanied a sheaf of distressed and rumpled photographs of a pamphlet in Latin that, from all appearances, was titled Opusculus Noctis, and seemed quite gruesome. Having studied Latin intensively in my Catholic youth and roseate stained-glass undergraduate years, I could see quite a few errors in his translation, but it was done well enough that I knew I didn’t want to read more.

  There were books, though not as many academic volumes as one would think, for a lettered man his age. The Eye’s tastes ran toward fiction rather than poetry, and he enjoyed thrillers and crime more than stories of a “literary bent.” There were bestsellers sandwiched among esoteric novels by writers I had never heard of before. Kilgore Trout stood near Archimboldi. A Spanish copy of The Osterman Weekend (El caos omega) leaned into an English copy of Seamus Cullen’s Walk Away Slowly. Many dictionaries—Spanish, Portuguese, and English—and a Latin grammar book ostensibly for his efforts at translation. Among his shelves, he reserved a single full one for his own books of poetry. All slim volumes—La orilla verde (The Verdant Shore), Sobre las mujeres y sus virtudes (On Women and Their Virtues), La carne de Huasos (The Meat of Huasos), Cabeza, corazón, hígado (Head, Heart, Liver), La indiferencia del gobierno (The Indifference of Government), Nubes oscuras sobre Santaverde (Dark Clouds over Santaverde), El Mapocho negro (The Black Mapocho), Fantasma de Pizzaro (Pizzaro’s Ghost)—and many dissimilar-size literary magazines and collections of poetry from regional and communal competitions that, with their different and irregular dimensions and standing sideways to my perspective, looked like a wild thatch of hay.

  I withdrew The Indifference of Government and flipped randomly to a page.

  I dreamed the earth was finished, cinders and ash, and the only

  man left was a man who had not loved dogs. He had kicked them

  when they begged, ignored them on the streets.

  But now, his wife and child lay dead and great brooding clouds loomed

  overhead, noxious m
ushrooms fruiting on the rot of land. He walked

  the streets, calling ¡Quinque! ¡Quinque!

  But his dog would not come. It had died when he was a boy.

  There was more like that, but I did not pursue it any further. I had remembered him from my undergraduate years being more jovial in his verse, and this was darker than I recalled, however shallow and poorly executed. Behind his books, I noticed a curl of yellowed paper. I pushed the books aside and withdrew it. A manuscript, dated 1979. Written during the first decade of his exile. I withdrew the brittle rubber band that encircled it and read the title. Below, Behind, Beneath, Between: Being an Account of the Circumstance of My Torture and Transformation by Rafael Avendaño. It was not thick, maybe thirty or forty pages. And as I riffled through the curled stack, at first blush it seemed deeply personal and intimate, and I think I wasn’t ready for that sort of closeness—letting his words inside my head. I’d been resistant to them even before I knew him.

  I set the manuscript aside and continued to examine The Eye’s apartment. From the small balcony, a glimpse of the Alboran shone sparkling and I was elated with the knowledge that as the line of sight flew, there stood northern Africa in the dark distance: Morocco. The lights of ships winked and flickered on the water. The breeze was cool and fresh. I estimated the apartment’s rent—it had to be at least ten to fifteen times mine. The Eye’s kitchen alone was bigger than my own meager dwelling.