Oh, horrible flash — her lips on my neck, the kiss of death.
‘Spare me the gruesome details,’ I said.
His sardonic laugh.
‘My answers already stuck in your craw? You just got here. Aw, did he come all that way for something he doesn’t want to know about? Prometheus with his smoking matchstick! Hahaha!’
A black, exploding star at the center of my chest. He slams his glass down on the table. He says, ‘Love is what she called it, and played the flute on my hollow bones. And you, you belonged to your mother. She even gave you her name, or so I hear. Praise the day I left, that way you had her all to yourself, that’s what little boys want, isn’t it? Mommy all to themselves? With no one to interrupt their dirty little fantasies? When you’re playing with your little weenie?’
I leaned across the table, my fists clenched.
‘You’re going too far now.’
My breath caught.
‘You have no right. .’
He shook his head.
‘You should have more of me in you. This is pathetic. Tiring. Please just go away.’
I stood up, holding on to the edge of the table, and shut my eyes for a moment. I took a deep breath.
‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘You sent me a postcard. I’d just turned fifteen. You wrote that I was supposed to love you. Why?’
‘I wrote that?’
‘Love me, on a postcard from Colombia.’
He frowned and puckered his lips in disbelief.
‘Says nothing to me. Must have been someone else.’
The expanding star filled my chest, my body. To kick the life out of him, slowly and methodically, singing euphorically all the while.
‘You’re not the first,’ he said. ‘Trying to define yourself by giving me a whipping! So that’s why you came.’
O delirium! O infernal tumor in my head!
He swung his arms and parried like a boxer.
‘Ho! Whoa! Ho! Came here to make mincemeat out of your old man, huh? Well just try it, patsy boy.’
I shook my head.
‘Look at yourself. Disgusting. I don’t have to whip you. You did that yourself a long time ago.’
‘Whoo! Right to the head! Drink up, boy. Talk to me. Months go by around here without me hearing one intelligent, well-put word. Everything around here’s a commodity, every rock, every shoelace, every word. I don’t understand the Indians, and what I do understand I don’t like. I’d rather have Negroes. They’re stronger, better, but almost impossible to get. The Negro doesn’t like it here, the interior. They stay on the coast. And you can hardly blame him, the Negro, for wanting to be at liberty to fry his fish and fornicate at will. Around here we all rot away. Everything. It’s a digestive tract. Illiterate insects eat your books, grind Der Wille zur Macht and any old operating manual into the same powder. Your watch and a truck crumble away under the same corrosion. It’s fascinating. In this world, where you’re dead to the world, you can actively take part in your own nonexistence. In fact, you’re not even there anymore, you look around in amazement at everything that’s still standing, at everything that keeps itself going on the last shreds of rage and willpower. The idealist and the believer see beauty and meaning in that, in nature, but those things can be conquered by the will. The focused will. That destroys them. But indifference, indifference always beats you in the end. Always. That’s the armor the gods have adopted, indifference. Stone for stone, I blow those thrones right out from under their asses. They’ve scared us so badly with their abysses! The gods on high, they laughed themselves silly. But they weren’t expecting to see a horizontal abyss, the abyss that stretches out like a yawn! All his life a person fears the depths, but dies on the flats. You understand, boy, that’s my meaning, that’s the meaning of all destruction. Only destruction has a permanent character.’
How long must I have listened to that crackling broadcast? I had already heard the sacred earnestness of his words outside there, in the scream of stone. I drank and listened and went under in the man who was my father.
Later we left the hut, into the humming night, beneath that big yellow moon come out to play. In the depths below the fires were going out. He was staggering out in front of me, down the slope, towards the only place where a light was still shining. We climbed the steps to a half-open barrack where a pockmarked Negress was serving aguardiente to the last of the workmen. When he stepped out of the dark onto the rough plank floor, they all fell still.
‘Hola, campesinos!’ he roared.
They nodded. The woman filled two glasses. The men were sitting at wooden trestle tables covered in glasses and bottles. The generator behind the building was throbbing off-beat with the Vallenato from the speakers. On the makeshift counter, beneath a bright light, was a bowl containing chunks of meat in red sauce. Occasionally the woman waved a flyswatter over it.
‘Maria, donde están las chicas?’ Schultz asked.
The woman shrugged, then shouted something to one of the men. Shuffling to his feet, he disappeared from the circle of light. Later they arrived, the camp followers. Fatigued faces, their dark eyes thick with sleep. Schultz’s favorite was a Creole girl with thin calves and little breasts that were round as balls. He bared his ruined teeth.
‘I taught this one to eat with a knife and fork.’
She sat on his lap and called him Papita. Beneath her petticoat you could see her panties. The other two aimed their attentions at me, but when the conversation died after only a few words, they left me alone. The men seemed to breathe easier now that there were women around. Schultz grabbed his girl by the scruff of the neck. She thrashed about like a wild kitten. I tried to keep my eyes open for danger, but the burning in my gut made me careless. I stamped on the plank floor in time to the music.
‘These here are the stupidest assholes in the whole world!’ Schultz called out from behind the girl. ‘They don’t know a damned thing, but give them a bottle and they think they know it all.’
When he laughed, all conversation stopped.
‘As soon as it’s got Indian blood in it, it’s fucked. No use for anything. Listless slaves. Not a thought in their heads. Aimless, tragic peoples. Maria!’
She filled his glass, the captain of this ship of the damned.
‘Take Conchita!’ he shouted. ‘A pussy like a baby’s. You do like pussy, don’t you, boy? You’re not a faggot, are you? Hahaha! Tengo un hijo maricón!’
The women chattered with laughter, the men flashed their teeth uneasily and avoided my eyes.
‘Did your mother make a faggot out of you, boy? Is that what you came here to tell me? Daddy, I’m a turd-burglar? A chip off the old block, that boy, maybe he’s more like me than I thought. I fucked that mommy of yours up the old poop-chute too. That changed the expression on her face, put a little color in that pale complexion!’
My fists shot out like stilettos, one, two, three times, left and right, he fell backwards onto the floor, girl and all. He lay there laughing on the planks, the blood running from his mouth. The girl scrambled to her feet and ran away. No-one did anything, no-one dared to do anything, an icy calm had descended on me. He tried to pull himself up on a table leg.
‘You’ve got a mean punch for a faggot.’
My foot shot out and caught him in the ribs. He writhed like an eel on a glowing grill.
‘Filthy little bastard!’ he panted. ‘Tell that slut to come back here. Tell her to come back, goddamn it!’