Avila's friends and hangers-on were numerous: there was a cigar-smoking half-Korean silversmith and his father, a white-bearded painter and calligrapher; a plump, short-haired woman ceramicist who was interested in kundalini yoga; several jazz musicians, a poet, a man who owned a sandal shop. The most frequent visitor was Darío Hernandez, who was from Uruguay. He was an expert in building large armatures and in scaling up figures; Avila had no work for him now, but gave him small sums of money when he asked for it. Darío had a girl-friend, Peggy Wood, a ripe young woman with a sullen mouth and a mane of dark-blond hair; they were married or living together, Gene was not sure which. Often in the evening they came together to the loft, but other times Darío came alone, and when Gene left he was still there.
Peggy Wood's clothing surrounded her like a loose cocoon: she wore heavy sweaters and skirts within which her body moved with slow grace. In her silences there was something that was all the heavier for being unspoken. Sometimes Gene glanced up and found her looking at him with an expression that made him uneasy.
It was not clear what Gus Vlismas' principal occupation was. He had various things for sale, which he carried around in his pockets: sometimes gold rings and pendants, sometimes small Japanese carvings in wood or ivory. He was a silent partner in various business enterprises. He knew where to buy almost anything at a discount; he could fix traffic tickets.
One evening he unfolded a little packet of white paper and showed Gene the heap of tiny stones it contained. "You should buy diamonds," he said. "Diamonds are the world's best investment. They always go up, never down."
"I don't like diamonds."
"You don't like diamonds?" The gold tooth showed in an incredulous smile. "What do you like?"
"Opals. Star sapphires, things like that. I like some of the semiprecious stones -- agates, jasper."
"Do you know, my young friend, how much a flawless one-carat diamond is worth today?"
"I don't care how much it's worth."
One morning Gene saw an envelope on the table; it had a foreign stamp, and was addressed to "Sr. Manuel Avila O." "What's the O for?" he asked.
"O-eenz," said Avila, and spelled it: "0, apostrophe, h, i, g, i, n, s. That is my name, Manuel Avila O-eenz, but if I use it here, they call me Mister O'Higgins." Avila's father, he said, had emigrated to Colombia from Mexico; his mother belonged to an old Colombian family, descended from Irish settlers. "On my father's side, too, there is Irish blood. So I am maybe one-quarter Spanish, one-half indio, one-quarter Irish. Here they call me a mick-spick."
He had studied at the National University in Bogota, and later in Mexico City, where he had known Orozco and Rivera. He had also worked as a stone-cutter in Yucatán for a sculptor named Obregón. He had lived in many places; he talked with nostalgia of Rome, London, Paris.
"If you liked it there so much, why did you come to New York?"
He shrugged. "The money is here, and besides, I like New York because it is crazy. Other places crazy too, but not like this. Everything is sex, the toothpaste is sex, but there is no sex, only frustration. To me is like a big machine making energy that goes in the air. I am here now seven years, and still I get excited when I walk on the street."
Avila and Darío spoke together sometimes in English, more often in rapid soft Spanish. After a while Gene began to pick up the sense of what they were saying. Darío, who had a streak of malice, never used Gene's name when he was talking to Avila: he called him el pollito, "the little chicken."
One afternoon when he heard Darío use this phrase, Gene turned from his modeling and said, "No soy pollito."
The two looked at himjn astonishment. Avila said, "Asi, żhablas espańol?"
"Un poco."
"Bueno." Avila turned to Darío and said something Gene did not quite catch, and they both laughed; but there was a glint of anger in Darío's eye when he looked at Gene. After that he began to use other nicknames: polla, which was like pollito, only more insulting because it was feminine; maricón, which Gene understood to be more insulting still, although he could not make out what it meant even after he had looked it up in Avila's Spanish-English dictionary. When Darío spoke to Gene directly, he was polite, even friendly, but always with an edge of mockery in his voice.
Presently Avila began correcting Gene's grammar when he spoke Spanish. Gene read the books Avila gave him, and discovered in himself an appetite for words. He began to realize that a language was not just a set of arbitrary symbols but a way of looking at the world; there were things that could be said in Spanish very easily and simply that could be said in English only with difficulty, or not at all; and it was the same the other way around. It took six words in Spanish to say "flush the toilet," but there was a single word that meant "to dig around the roots of vines."
When Gene's clay figure was done, Avila came over and looked at it, turned the stand to see the other side, turned it back. The head was simple and stylized; Gene had made it a bald old man in order to emphasize the domed shape of the skull, and also to avoid the problems of hair. He had built up the head with bits of clay, then smoothed them with his fingers until all the curves flowed into one another: the arched nose, the cheekbones, the brow.
Avila said, "This your idea of an old man? Jesus Christ!" He dug his strong fingers into the clay, pulled it off in great lumps, threw it back in the bin. "Take your sketchbook, go over to Washington Square, for God's sake, draw some old men."
Gene dutifully went out with the sketchbook, came back with many drawings, and started afresh. When the second piece was done, Avila said, "Better? A little, maybe." He threw the clay in the bin.
Gradually he came to understand what Avila meant by art: it was a flowering of form that could only come about by working and reworking the material until the original shape had been transformed through many deaths and rebirths into something that had never existed before and could not have come into being except by this torment. A sculpture by Avila was a multidimensional object, shimmering with self-references, containing in itself the vanished forms of previous conceptions, and at the same time it was integral, itself and nothing more, as self-explanatory as a flower or a shell.
One morning he found Avila at his bench playing with some little brass shims, tilting them against each other to make tent-shapes, stacking others on top until they fell down. His eyes were vacant; he did not seem to be watching what his fingers were doing.
Later Gene saw him cutting the shims with a pair of tinsnips, making narrow rectangles of various sizes. After lunch he began cementing the pieces together to make curving shapes like staircases, or like fanned-out playing cards. At the end of the day he had assembled these into a standing hawk-headed figure, a bird-man or man-bird whose arms seemed in the process of turning into wings, or the wings into arms. The next day he took it apart and started over.
"That was beautiful," Gene said. "Why didn't you keep it?"
"Not what I want," Avila grunted. He spent the next two days building up another figure, larger and more complex than the other, and took it apart. The third version occupied him for a week. It had horns now, ending in little brass balls, and it stood in a haif-crouching position as if prepared for flight.
The next day, while Gene watched in fascination, he made a two-piece rubber mold around the figure, then a plaster shell to cover the mold. When the plaster was dry, he took the shell and the mold apart, carefully inspected them, and put them back together. He melted beeswax in a pot, upended the mold in its shell, supporting it in a bucket of sand, and poured the hot wax in. After a few moments he poured it out again, leaving a thin coating on the inside of the mold. When he took the mold apart, he had a hollow wax image of the figure, but the tips of the horns were missing.