14
The show at the Teatro Carlota began at eight and was repeated continuously until two in the morning, though closing time tended to vary depending on the size of the audience and the mood of the performers. If a spectator arrived at eight, one ticket bought him the right to see the show multiple times or to sleep until the usher kicked him out in the early morning hours. This was the habit of country folk on visits to Santa Teresa when they got tired of their cheap hotels, and, more frequently, the habit of the pimps who worked Calle Mina. Those who were there to see the show usually sat in the orchestra seats. Those who were there to sleep or do business sat in the gallery. The seats there were less tattered and the lighting was lower. In fact, most of the time the gallery was sunk in impenetrable darkness, at least as viewed from the orchestra seats, a darkness broken only when the lighting man flung the spotlights here and there for one of the danceable numbers. Then the beams of red, blue, and green light illuminated the bodies of sleeping men and interlaced couples, as well as the huddles of pimps and pickpockets discussing the events of the afternoon and evening. Below, in the orchestra seats, the atmosphere was radically different. People were there to have fun and they came in search of the best seats, the closest to the stage, bringing beer and assorted sandwiches and ears of corn that they ate-previously slathered with butter or sour cream and dusted with chile powder or cheese-skewered on little sticks. Though the show was in theory restricted to those over sixteen, it wasn’t unusual to see couples with small children in tow. In the view of the box office, these children were so young that the show wouldn’t compromise their moral integrity, and thus their parents, for lack of a babysitter, needn’t be deprived of the miracle of Coral Vida singing rancheras. The only thing requested-of the children and their parents-was that they not run too much in the aisles while the acts were under way.
This season the stars were Coral Vidal and a magician, Alexander the Great. The communicative striptease, which was what had brought Amalfitano to the Teatro Carlota, was in fact something supposedly new, brainchild of a choreographer who happened to be a first cousin of the owner and manager of the Teatro Carlota. But it didn’t work in practice, though its creator refused to admit it. In concept it was fairly simple. The stripper came out fully dressed and carrying an extra set of clothes, which, after much huffing and puffing, she crammed on over the clothes of a generally reluctant volunteer. Then she began to remove her garments while the spectator who had joined the act was invited to do the same. The end came when the performers were naked and the volunteer finally managed to rid himself, clumsily and sometimes violently, of his ridiculous robes and trappings.
And that was all, and if the great Alexander hadn’t suddenly appeared-almost without transition and with no introduction whatsoever-Amalfitano and Castillo would have left disappointed. But Alexander was a different thing entirely, and there was something about the way he came out onstage, the way he moved, and the way he gazed at the spectators in the orchestra seats and the gallery (he had the stare of a sad old man but also the stare of an X-ray-eyed old man who understood and accepted everyone equally: the connoisseurs of sleight of hand, the working couples with children, the pimps plotting their desperate long-range schemes) that kept Amalfitano glued to his seat.
Good day, said Alexander. Good day and good evening, kind members of the audience. From his left hand sprouted a paper moon, some ten inches in diameter, white with gray striations. It began to rise on its own until it was six feet above his head. His accent, Amalfitano realized almost at once, wasn’t Mexican or Latin American or Spanish. Then the balloon burst in the air, releasing a cascade of white flowers, carnations. The audience, which seemed to know Alexander from previous shows and to respect him, applauded generously. Amalfitano wanted to clap, too, but then the flowers froze in the air and-after a brief pause in which they remained still and trembling-re-formed in a five-foot ring around the old man’s waist. The burst of applause was even greater. And now, esteemed and honorable members of the audience, we’re going to play some cards. So the magician was a foreigner, not a native speaker of Spanish, but where is he from, wondered Amalfitano, and how did he end up in this lost city, good as he is? Maybe he’s from Texas, he thought.
The card trick was nothing spectacular, but it managed to interest Amalfitano in a strange way that even he didn’t understand. Part of it was anticipation, but part of it also was fear. At first Alexander spoke from onstage-with a deck of cards in his right hand one moment and in his left the next-on the qualities of the cardsharp and the countless dangers that lie in wait for him. A deck of cards, as anyone can see, he said, can lead a decent working man to ruin, humiliation, or death. It can lead a woman to perdition, if you know what I mean, he said, winking an eye but never losing his air of solemnity. He was like a TV evangelist, thought Amalfitano, but the strangest thing was that the people listened to him intently. Even up above, in the gallery, a few crime-hardened and sleepy faces popped up, the better to follow the magician’s rounds. Alexander moved with increasing decisiveness around the stage and then up and down the aisles of the orchestra level, talking always about cards, cards as nemesis, the great lonely dream of the deck, poker-faced players and players who talk a big game, in an accent that definitely wasn’t Texan, while the eyes of the audience followed him in silence, uncomprehendingly, or so Amalfitano supposed (he didn’t understand, either, and maybe there was nothing to understand). Until suddenly the old man stopped in the middle of an aisle and said all right, here we go, I won’t take up any more of your time.
What happened next left Amalfitano openmouthed in astonishment. Alexander approached a member of the audience and asked him to check his pocket. The man did as he was told, and when he removed his hand there was a card in it. Immediately the magician urged another person in the same row, much farther down, to do the same. Another card. And then a new card appeared in a different row, and one after another the cards-to the cheers of the audience-began to form a royal flush of hearts. When only two cards were left, the magician looked at Amalfitano and asked him to check his wallet. He’s more than ten feet away, thought Amalfitano, if there’s a trick it must be a good one. In his wallet, between a picture of Rosa at ten and a wrinkled, yellowing slip of paper, he found the card. What card is it, sir? asked the magician, fixing his eyes on Amalfitano and speaking in that peculiar accent that Amalfitano couldn’t quite place. The queen of hearts, said Amalfitano. The magician smiled at him the way his father might have. Perfect, sir, thank you, he said, and before he turned he winked an eye. The eye was neither big nor small, brown with green splotches. Then he strode confidently-triumphantly, one might say-to a row where two children were asleep in their parents’ arms. Do me the favor of removing your son’s shoe, he said. The father, a thin, sinewy man with a friendly smile, removed the child’s shoe. In it was the card. Tears rolled down Amalfitano’s face and Castillo’s fingers delicately brushed his cheek. The king of hearts, said the father. The magician nodded. And now the little girl’s shoe, he said. The father removed his daughter’s shoe and held another card up in the air, so that everyone could see it. And what card is that, sir, if you’ll be so kind? The joker, said the father.
15
Amalfitano often had nightmares. His dream (one in which Edith Lieberman and Padilla had Chilean elevenses with tea, buns, avocado, tomato jam made by his mother, rolls and homemade butter nearly the color of a sheet of Ingres-Fabriano paper) opened up and let in the nightmare. There, in those lonely latitudes, Che Guevara strolled up and down a dark corridor and in the background huge diamond-crusted glaciers shifted and creaked and seemed to sigh as at the birth of history. Why did I translate the Elizabethans and not Isaac Babel or Boris Pilniak? Amalfitano asked himself, disconsolate, unable to escape the nightmare but still holding scraps of the dream (beyond the glaciers the whole distant horizon was Edith Lieberman and Padilla having their delicious elevenses) in his empty, frozen, nearly transparent hands. Why didn’t I slip like Mighty Mouse through the bars of the Lenin Prizes and the Stalin Prizes and the Korean Women Collecting Signatures for Peace and discover what was there to be discovered, what only the blind couldn’t see? Why didn’t I stand up at one of those oh-so-serious meetings of leftist intellectuals and say the Russians the Chinese the Cubans are making a fucking mess of things? Why didn’t I stand up for the Marxists? Stand up for the pariahs? March in step with history while history was being born? Offer silent assistance at its birth along the way? Somehow, Amalfitano said to himself from the depths of his nightmare, his tone scholarly and his voice unrecognizably hoarse, masochist that I am, I blame myself for crimes that were never committed: by 1967 I had already been expelled from the Chilean Communist Party, my comrades had run me down and turned me out, I was no longer well liked. Why do I blame myself, then? I didn’t kill Isaac Babel. I didn’t destroy Reinaldo Arenas’s life. I wasn’t part of the Cultural Revolution and I didn’t sing the praises of the Gang of Four like other Latin American intellectuals. I was the simple-minded son of Rosa Luxemburg and now I’m an old faggot, in each case the object of mockery and ridicule. So what do I have to blame myself for? My Gramsci, my situationism, my Kropotkin (lauded by Oscar Wilde as one of the greatest men on earth)? For my mental hang-ups, my lack of civic responsibility? For having seen the Korean Women Gathering Signatures for Peace and not stoning them? (I should have buggered them, thought Amalfitano from the whirl of glaciers, I should have fucked those fake Koreans until their true identity was revealed: Ukrainian Women Gathering Wheat for Peace, Cuban Women Gathering Cockles in an Unremitting Latin American Twilight.) What am I guilty of, then? Of having loved and continuing to love-no, not of loving: of longing. Of longing for the conversation of my friends who took to the hills because they never grew up and they believed in a dream and because they were Latin American men, true macho men, and they died? (And what do their mothers, their widows, have to say about it?) Did they die like rats? Did they die like soldiers in the Wars of Independence? Did they die tortured, shot in the back of the head, dumped in the sea, buried in secret cemeteries? Was their dream the dream of Neruda, of the Party bureaucrats, of the opportunists? Mystery, mystery, Amalfitano said to himself from the depths of the nightmare. And he said to himself: someday Neruda and Octavio Paz will shake hands. Sooner or later Paz will make room on Olympus for Neruda. But we will always be on the outside. Far from Octavio Paz and Neruda. Over there, Amalfitano said to himself like a madman, look over there, dig over there, over there lie traces of truth. In the Great Wilderness. And he said to himself: it’s with the pariahs, with those who have nothing at all to lose, that you’ll find some justification, if not vindication; and if not justification, then the song, barely a murmur (maybe not voices, maybe only the wind in the branches), but a murmur that cannot be silenced.