The city slides past us in glimpses and fragments. Brother Thomas takes off his Mexican sombrero with its decorations of dark silver roses and waves it over his head, greeting the World, the Universe: “You will never understand because today you feel that you have proven yourselves right and anointed in contrast to the demonstrated insanity of the accused. Yet nevertheless he is your savior. His rich insanity remembered what all of you had forgotten, that every goddamn one of us is capable of cruelty as far as cruelty can go, of total pride, even of a little suffering.” The Monks have begun to sing, quietly, Pretty Woman, Holy Mamma, have mercy on me. A traffic cop blasts his whistle at us. And my city, I tell them, though they don’t hear me, is falling apart into islands between which we make our lonely voyages, we see no one standing on his own feet, we see nothing, the rich live hidden in their phony reproductions of colonial-period palaces behind high walls topped with pieces of broken glass, as if with barbed wire, while the poor live hidden in the ruins that are left of the authentic colonial palaces on the impenetrable other side of deserts of pavement where living men are never seen: we see only speeding cars and overloaded speeding buses and trams, everyone is locked up in a steel capsule that orbits on rubber wheels, and the schedules of these transitory planets are so arranged that their trajectories never cross, no one ever meets his brother, no face ever gazes upon a comrade face, we forget in our alienation that others exist too, and indeed we fear to encounter another existence because that might lead to an understanding of the value of our own and end in mutual murder: oh, my Mexico City, impoverished metropolis with feet of clay, poor village greasy as tuna candy cakes, village that stretches, like an oil slick, the length and breadth of the wasteland valley, poor salt castle awaiting the oncoming tide of sulfur: and I see Jakob looking at me in the rearview mirror, it seems with an expression of understanding and compassion, while Brother Thomas drones his empty monody of hollow words and windy ideas, and it seems to me that the rest of the Monks have gone to sleep like tired children, or perhaps died like old hatreds, none of them hears me and it wouldn’t matter if any did, for this is my city, not theirs. And from the trunk comes an infant-like moaning that the roar of the open muffler suffocates. No, the Monks are not sleeping or dead. They are awake, whispering with each other, preparing the scene that will follow this Judgment Scene for which Jakob, good German, is responsible, a farce trial full of legalisms and empty of blood. It’s true that Brother Thomas has spoken as fervently as an itinerant tent-preacher with one eye on the Holy Spirit and the other on the redhead in the third row. But he has convinced no one. Brother Thomas in his role of defense attorney is a shyster and a fraud. He’s a switch knife with a blade of soft rubber. A hammer with a cork head. The tiny pellet of a boy’s BB rifle. Yet he goes on: “Try to understand, try to see it. We were liberators, not oppressors. We were the only mortals in ten thousand centuries who had dared to feel and acknowledge the evil within us, who had the courage to act out that evil instead of crippling and smothering its power.” He throws his sombrero high in the air and it floats down and is leaped upon by dogs barking from the sidewalk. Long-snouted dogs with slobbering mouths and eyes of feverish razor blades. “We could love as you could not, for as you could not, we could also hate.” He collapses on the seat beside me. “We demanded to be hated bitterly, because we knew that only if we were hated could we be loved with equal intenseness.” He coughs.
All of us are silent and now we’re there. “To the left,” I say. “Park at the filling station. They know me there.”
“No, no one understood,” Boston Boy Franz murmurs as he swings the convertible into the station. “Why couldn’t anyone understand?”
White Rabbit Elizabeth stares at him with disgust. “Oh, I understand. You wanted me only because…”
“Yes! Believe it, Bette. Don’t fool yourself.” He takes her hand and twists it.
“Let me go, damn you! You wanted me only to make your peace with yourself. You had to have a woman like me, any woman, didn’t matter who…”
He turns her and pins her arms to her buttocks. “No, you’re wrong. Not even that.”
I sigh and want to get out of the car. I don’t want to understand too much now. If everything becomes too clear, I’ll lose interest. I have come this far because I wanted mystery, an approach to the mystery that is left, genuine and baffling, once the pseudo-mysteries of similarities and contrasts dissolve. I wave a hand to the man coming out of the filling station toward us, but he doesn’t recognize me. I vault out of the car. “Hey, José! We’re going to leave our wheels here. Okay?” Nothing can be heard from the trunk of the car now. José suddenly smiles. “Yes, sir! For a minute I didn’t know you.”
“No, not even that,” Boston Boy insists. White Rabbit has taken off her glasses and without them her eyes are small and a little crossed. “You didn’t understand,” goes on Boston Boy, who has jumped out after me. White Rabbit stands there, slow to react. We move toward the street. Suddenly she is shouting.
“You’ve got to tell me! You’ve treated me just like Javier!” She runs to one of the gasoline pumps. “And at least he never tried to deceive me!” She grabs the hose by the nozzle and drags it toward us. “I always knew what he wanted, that I had to pretend to be another woman.” She squeezes the trigger and gasoline showers upon us. “No, he never tried to deceive me!” We run to the sidewalk, away from her, and she lifts the nozzle so that the stream of gasoline arches after us. “He made me play games.” José grabs her from behind, around the waist. “I had to go late to a party so that he could come even later and find me there and pretend I was a new love.” She tries to bite José’s hand. “A love he had never known before.” Both White Rabbit and José are drenched with gasoline now. “He would arouse me, then deny me satisfaction.” José hoists her high, kicking, wriggling, and she lets the hose go. “He offered me one humiliation after another.” Her skirt is up and I can see her lovely thighs and a glimpse for a second of her crotch glistening copper under the cold glare of the filling station’s powerful mercury lights, and my breathing has quickened. “He made me share his own humiliation, his failure, but at least…” She falls to her knees, soaked with gasoline. “At least he was willing to gamble that I could take it and survive it.” She has a box of matches in her hand. “No, he never deceived me.” Good God, I am thinking. And this is how you ought to be, little White Rabbit, nameless White Rabbit, the way I and any man must want you. My prick is stiff and I think to myself, I have what you’re asking for, White Rabbit, and I want to give it to you. José, red with fury, is putting the nozzle of the hose back in its hanger. “I always knew his game, always.”