Felipe stared at the enormous stone cross: “No, I have never visited it. You see, I went away more than four hundred years ago.”
The little man, until this moment obliging, if indifferent, looked for the first time at Felipe’s face, his attire, his general appearance. He stammered: “By my faith … you see, so many tourists pass this way … all alike … I always say the same things … I know the words by rote…”
And eyes rolling, he threw his cap to the ground and ran from Felipe yelling and waving his arms, his grating voice echoing through the mass of carved rock: “Come one, come all. Hark what I say! There is a man there who claims to have been gone for four hundred years! Come, come, come hear what I have to tell!”
That night, seeking protection for his terror and hunger among the stunted growth of scrub oak and juniper, blackberry and hawthorn clinging to the craggy mountainside, and listening to the always closer sound of the horns and the sputtering torches of the night hunt, the occasional sound of a gun and the unceasing barking of the mastiffs, Felipe approached a small bonfire burning in the hollow of a rock, carefully protected from the north winds.
An instinctive sense of relief and gratitude impelled him to throw himself at the feet of the man watching a battered old coffeepot, and slicing a rough loaf of bread.
The mountaineer patted Felipe’s snout, and he raised great liquid, mournful eyes to gaze into those of the man who offered him a slab of bread and a slice of ham. The eyes were black, but the hair was blond and tightly curled, the skin swarthy, the nose long and beautiful, and the lips sensual.
Snout and fang, Felipe tore at the ham and bread. Nearer and nearer came the fearful sounds of the hunt, but by the side of this young mountain man, his friend, he was no longer afraid. He even understood the words when the man, his booted feet stamping out the remains of the fire, spoke, slowly, and with a tinge of uncertainty in his words, but with the clear intent of being understood by the wolf: “Yes. The truth is this. If I speak of a place, it is because it no longer exists. If I speak of a time, it is because it has already passed. If I speak of a person, it is because I desire him.”
THE LAST CITY
It must have snowed for several hours. The river has risen. The current inundates the stone Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma. Dark waters whirl about the prow of the Ile Saint-Louis. The Luxembourg is shrouded in white. The Montsouris garden recognizes itself in a desolate dawning light. A terrible white beauty blinds the Pare Monceau. Frost outlines the china-ink trees of the Montparnasse cemetery. Snow blankets the Père Lachaise cemetery like a late sacrifice. Snowy tombs of Francisco de Miranda and Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac and Porfirio Díaz. Silvery webs in gardens and pantheons.
Gilded webs on the smooth ceiling of the apartment in the Hôtel du Pont-Royal. The red suite. Flaming velvet. Outside, the snow is a melted standard and the river the lion rampant of the banner. Inside, white stucco. Vines. Cornucopias. Cherubs. Plaster sculpture. Red velvet and white plaster. Mirrors. Stained. Spotted with age. They multiply the space of the narrow apartment.
Long ago the elevator cage ceased to function. Tarnished bronze. Beveled crystal. Outside. On the other side of the double door. You have not opened it. Not in a long time. You avoid the mirrors. They are enormous, full-length, with opaque gold frames and peeling quicksilver. Others are small, hand mirrors. One is black marble, streaked with blood. Another, very small and square, covered with fingerprints. Another, round, its frame crowned with a two-headed eagle. Another, triangular. Many more. You avoid them. The Argentinian Oliveira warned you: none of them reflects the space of the place you inhabit. A string of narrow rooms: living room, bedroom, dressing room, bath, each opening onto the next. No mirror reflects your face. You touch them; you do not look at them; you do not look at yourself. You touch everything with your only hand. Buendía, the Colombian, warned you when you arrived in France: Paris seems much larger than it really is because of the infinite number of mirrors that duplicate its true space: Paris is Paris, plus its mirrors.
Late in life an aged Pierre Menard proposed that all beasts, men, and nations be apportioned a supply of mirrors that would reproduce infinitely their and other figures and their and other territories, for the purpose of appeasing for all time the imperative illusions of a destructive ambition for possession, although dominion only assures us the loss of what we have conquered as well as what is already ours. Only to a blind man could such a fantasy occur. And of course he was, in addition, a philologist.
Oliveira, Buendía, Cuba Venegas, Humberto the mute, the cousins Esteban and Sofía, Santiago Zavalita, the man from Lima who lived every minute wondering at what precise moment Peru had fucked everything up, and who had come to Paris a refugee like all the others, wondering, like all the others — with the exception of the Cuban rumba-rhythm queen — at what moment Spanish America had fucked everything up. You haven’t seen them lately. If they are still alive, even today they are surely declaring, along with you, fucked-up Peru, fucked-up Chile, fucked-up Argentina, fucked-up Mexico, the whole fucked-up world. Today: the last day of the dying century. Today: the first night of the next one hundred years. Although deciding whether the year 2000 is the last year of the preceding or the first year of the coming century lends itself to infinite discussion. We are living within a shattered specter. Only Cuba Venegas, that flabby, garish old rumba queen with the swelling heart-shaped buttocks, maintained her strange Antillean optimism to the end, singing melancholy boleros in her sung-out voice in the lowest dives in Pigalle. She said, unaware of the paraphrase: “All good Latin Americans come to Paris to die.”
Perhaps she was right. Perhaps Paris was the exact moral, sexual, and intellectual point of balance between the two worlds that tear us apart: the Germanic and the Mediterranean, the North and the South, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin.
On the anniversaries of their respective deaths, Cuba Venegas carried flowers to the tombs of Eva Perón in Père Lachaise and of Ché Guevara in Montparnasse.
How long ago seemed those nights on the top floor of the old house in the rue de Savoie when everyone used to get together to drink the bitter maté prepared by Oliveira; the blond Lithuanian Valkyrie would put tangos on the record player, and serve pisco and tequila and rum, and everyone played the game of Superfuck, a card game in which the winner was the one who collected the most cards representing ignominy and defeats and horrors. Crimes, Tyrants, Imperialisms, and Injustices were the four suits of this deck, replacing clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds.
“W’ich is bes’?” inquired Cuba Venegas. “T’ree or four of de beeg business, or de rrrrrun of de ahmbassador?”
“It depends,” said Santiago, of Lima, Peru. “I have five of a kind: United Fruit, Standard Oil, Pasco Corporation, Anaconda Copper, and I.T.T.”
“‘Oh, frohm Cooba wis de music!’” cried the rumba queen. “Henry Lean U’will-son, Choel Poyn-sett, Espru-ill Bra-don, Chon Pueri-phooey, an’ Nattani-yell Debbis. W’at de fock you t’ink of dat, baybee?”
“‘My bitter heart, conceal your sorrow…’” you murmured, and turning to address the mute, Humberto: “I’ll give you an Ubico and two Trujillos for three Marmolejos.”
“Do you know how”—Oliveira commented in his unmistakable Porteño cadence as he dealt the cards—“Marmolejo came to power in Bolivia? He joined the line filing through to greet the President on the day of the celebration of national independence, and when he came to the President in the line, emptied his pistol into his belly. Then he removed the Presidential sash, fastened it across his chest, and walked out onto the palace balcony to receive the acclamation of the crowd. What do you have, Humberto?”