I was looking at the books from above in a spacecraft coming in for a landing.
A purple twilight lay over the sad languorous city. We were driven to a villa on the outskirts of Lima. The house was surrounded by the usual high wall, topped with broken glass like sugar crystals on a cake. Two floors, balcony on the second floor, bougainvillea climbing over the front of the house.
The driver carried the luggage in and gave us the keys. He also gave me a guidebook in which certain shops and business addresses were checked.
We had a look around. The furniture looked like a window display: solid, expensive, undistinguished. Glassed bookcases were filled with leather-bound encyclopedias, Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, books on the flora and fauna of South America, bird books and books on navigation. Nowhere did I see any indication that anyone had ever lived there.
Consulting a map of Lima, on a glass-covered coffee table spread with some issues of the National Geographic, I looked up the addresses. All in or near the Mercado Mayorista. One was an art-supply store....Hmmmm....I had already decided to fabricate the complete books if I could find the right paper. In fact, I felt sure that this was exactly what I was being paid to do. An address in the Mercado was Blum & Krup Import-Export. This was my contact.
The Mercado Mayorista of Lima occupies about four square blocks. Here vegetables, fruits, pigs, chickens and other produce are brought in by truck from all over Peru to be unloaded and sold. The shops, booths, bars, and restaurants are open twenty-four hours a day. The only thing comparable to the Mercado Mayorista is the Djemalfnaa of Marrakesh. The Djemalfnaa, however, has been a tourist attraction for so long that millions of cameras have sucked its vitality and dimmed its colors.
The Mercado is seldom visited by tourists and is no conceived as a folkloric spectacle. It has a definite function and the folklore is incidental. Street performers gather here because there are always spectators with money.
We walked on, passing little restaurants serving hot fish soup, meat on spits, brown bread ... bars with jukeboxes and boys dancing, Chinese restaurants, snake charmers, a trick bicycle rider, trained monkeys. Very faintly I could hear the pipes of Pan.
Some distance away there was a small circle of onlookers. A boy was playing a bamboo flute. He was about fifteen years old, with yellow hair, blue eyes, and a dusting of freckles on a broad face. Looking into the boy's eyes, I experienced a shock of recognition. His eyes were blank and empty as the blue sky over the market, devoid of any human expression: Pan, the Goat God. The music went on playing in my head, trickled down mountainsides in a blue twilight, rustling through glades and grass, twinkling on starlit streams, drifting down windy streets with autumn leaves.
I decided to visit the art-supply store alone. What I wanted would be under the counter. Anyone handling that kind of paper and ink would be into art forgery, probably passports and documents as well. Two visitors would queer the deal. Kiki wanted to look around the town anyway, and Jim needed some photographic equipment.
The store was on a dingy narrow street near the market. There were some dusty canvasses, easels, and tubes of paint in the window, reminiscent of the rubber sandwiches served in Swedish bars to legitimize the sale of liquor. When I tried the door I found that it was locked. I knocked, and the door was finally opened by a middle-aged man with heavy rimless glasses who looked at me suspiciously.
"Vous voulez?"
"Du papier, monsieur!"
"Entrez." He stood aside and locked the door behind me. A fattish woman with frizzy blonde hair and large diamonds on her liver-spotted fingers sat at an ancient cash register. She had been reading Le Figaro, which lay on the counter. She looked frightened. So did he. War criminals, I decided matter-of-factly. French collaborators.
"J'ai besoin de papier pour une tâche spéciale.... Des livres qui devraient paraître anciens."
He nodded and something like a smile touched his thin lips. "Par ici, monsieur."
He led the way to a back room containing a long oak table and several chairs. Iron cabinets with cylinder locks occupied one wall. He looked at me sharply.
"Ah oui." He gestured to the cabinets. "L'histoire, monsieur, à votre disposition ... quelle époque? Vous cherchez peut-être un codex mayan? Un papyrus d'Égypte? Quelque chose du Moyen Age?"
"Plus récent ... Dix-huitième ... environ 1702."
"Et l'auteur, monsieur? Gentilhomme, courtisane, voleur?" And the author? Gentleman, courtesan, thief?
"Pirate américain."
"Parfaitment." He opened a little casket with a key from his vest pocket and selected from it another key. With this he opened a cabinet in which I could see packages in cubbyholes, and brought out several packets tied and sealed with red wax.
"De Boston."
"Parfaitment." I examined the parchment carefully, holding it up to the light and looking at it under a magnifying glass. I nodded and smiled. "Très bien."
"De l'encre?"
"Oui."
He opened another cabinet full of bottles and jars and tubes.... "Ça."
I brought out my portable kit and ran some tests. "Ça marche ... ça marche....j'ai besoin aussi de couleurs.... C'est un livre illustré."
"De couleurs parfumées, monsieur?"
"Mais bien entendu ... d'hachissh, d'opium, du sang, du rhum, encens d'église, de latrines, du pourriture ..."
The package came to $10,000 plus $300 of regular art supplies.
"Alors, monsieur, vous avez le temps pour un cognac?"
"J'ai toujours le temps pour ça."
We start making books. I write the continuity. Jim does the drawings. We have the address of a modeling agency which puts us in touch with the film underground. We are in the right place.
Lima is the film studio of the world for far-out porn and snuff films, mostly on contract to collectors and governmental agencies. Only the third-rate material finds its way into the open market. The best camera work, processing, special effects, and actors of all nationalities can be had here for a price.
Jim sketches a scene in the rough. We stage it with live actors and then photograph it. Then Jim projects the color shots onto our paper for the finished product, which is something between photography and drawing and looks quite a lot like the Iguanas' "joke books."
Monsieur La Tour sells quality merchandise. The books seem to age two hundred years overnight. I am working mostly on my pirate story line. but since I am sure of the quality of the goods, I will invest some more money in Mayan and Egyptian papers and colors, and do two snuff films—a Mayan number called The Child of Ix Tab, and an Egyptian number called The Curse of the Pharaohs.
Ix Tab was the patron saint of those who hang themselves, whom she would transport straight to Paradise. In this number a young aristocrat is hanged by Ix Tab, who then gives birth to a superpotent Death Baby. The boy who plays the young aristocrat has a classic Mayan profile, and Ix Tab, spotted with decay, is a versatile pro who also plays in my Egyptian number as the evil sister of Tutankhamen—she has him strangled and gives birth to a Scorpion Goddess.