At El Batey Restaurant, specializing in comidas criollas, the phallic jukebox is playing a phallic song, and everyone has their attention fixed on each other’s asses, and Rouenna is gossiping with some friend about which of the waitresses is pregnant and whose boyfrien’ has just been sent upstate for ten years, but all I can see in front of me is a plate of glistening limes, a little red prick of Tabasco sauce, and a bottle of Presidente beer, the top of which comes perfectly wrapped in a sweaty napkin—the small pleasures of a beleaguered world. And I’m waiting, waiting, waiting for the metal pot filled with asopao de camarones, or “soupy shrimps,” as the menu calls them, waiting to surrender to ajillo, for there is more garlic in the pot than water or rice or shrimp even. And soon I am filled with cold Presidente, hot Tabasco, and the basso profundo reverberations of garlic in my estómago. I rise from my chair, grab the gossiping Rouenna, and carry her to the impromptu dance floor in back, beneath the television set perpetually tuned to the exploits of the local baseball team, the Jankees. We try to dance, the slowest dance in history, but mostly we just stand there and stare at each other, making little animal noises, the purrs of set-upon cats, the steady whine of basset hounds, which the jukebox all but drowns out with its thick salsa beats. And we kiss. Garlic and sweat and pure love, we kiss.
I’m a little drunk as Rouenna helps me back to her place on 173rd Street and Vyse, past the senior-citizen troublemaker in the Chicago Bulls wife-beater who always threatens to kill Mister Softee, the rather innocuous mobile ice-cream vendor, and past the Jehovah’s Witnesses Hall, now being reverently approached by women with tinfoil-covered platters of pigeon peas and rice. There’s a wedding on, and Rouenna winks at me, meaning When, already?, and she smiles at me with just the hint of gentle mockery that I’ve always appreciated, that in and of itself manages to reduce me a little, manages to cut out the shrimp and rice and boil me down to my essential desires—a girl, a city, a libertine but tender way of life.
I thought I was Differrent and had a Special Story to tell but I guess I’m not and I dont.
Oh, my poor sweet baby.
37
The End
I found myself at a party at Nana’s house. With drugs, no less. A cauldron of black infinity smelling like the back of a public bus. This was lanza, the local drug that had inspired Saint Sevo the Liberator to his visions of Sevo brotherhood and Svanï annihilation, the trip that launched a thousand trips, mostly to the grave.
We were in Nana’s bedroom, sitting around the cauldron, which was perched atop a hot pot, waiting for the miniature shrubs to boil over so that we could all breathe in the fumes. When a thin mist appeared, I started inhaling with gusto. I was trying to forget the electronic message I had just received from Alyosha-Bob, telling me to stay the hell away from the Nanabragov family and to get out of Absurdistan now. A disaster was imminent, according to him. I decided not to worry myself too much. One of the teenage True Footrest Posses had just plundered the Emporio Armani. How much worse could things get?
Nana had invited her best friend, Sissey, who had recently watched us make love, and Anna, the mediocre Russian blonde who worked at the American Express office. The girls were in a brilliant mood. They were doing their best Gorbigrad accents, pretending they were hookers trying to pick up KBR workers at the Hyatt’s Beluga Bar. “Golly Burton! Golly Burton!” they hooted. “You buy me Coke! You have lucky lady back home? I better. I wear thong-g-g. Thong-g-g. I wear thong-g-g. Up my ass I have thong-g-g.”
I tried to imitate a swashbuckling American oilman. “Up your ass?” I said. “I know somethin’ else I can put up there!”
The girls exploded with mirth. They lifted their legs in the air like dying bugs and convulsed rhythmically. As they were all lying on the same bed, opposite the one that supported me, I could see their young asses, all in jeans, forming a tight row: in this pantheon, Nana’s was the biggest, spilling over and beyond the Miss Sixty label, then came that of her dark-haired friend Sissey, with a passable half-moon, then the pert, tiny cantaloupe of the Russian’s behind. “Fat Uncle on the bed,” Sissey shouted to me. “Fat Uncle on the bed! Come on over and visit us, Fat Uncle!”
I rolled right over and into their waiting arms, and they grasped me the way young girls tackle a puppy. “Fat Uncle loves you,” I croaked, and we all started giggling. I eased into the mass around me; there were breasts and a piece of earlobe, not Nana’s. We breathed in and out together. The breasts were warm and the earlobe needed sucking. It struck me: we were high.
The idyll was interrupted by a knocking. I looked up. Faik the manservant had pressed his ugly mug to the windowpane. “Oh, go give him some money,” Nana said.
It was a terrible imposition, and yet I could hardly care less. Doing one thing was as good as doing another. I decided to put on my legs, but they were already attached, rather roundly, to my thighs. Now it was time for my feet. There they were! “There’s a lucky break,” I said. “I have two feets and two leggies.” The girls started giggling once more, their laughter dissipating into breathy French sentences that I could not understand.
Man, was I high.
Outside, Faik was perched on a unicycle. A tuba was attached to the handlebars in place of a horn, and his sailor’s cut had given way to a spotted leopard’s scalp. In fact, he may have been a leopard-man of sorts, Faik. Who knows with the Moslems—they really are different from us. “I saw you and Nana and Sissey and the Russian girl, and you were all touching each other,” he said.
“Oh, God,” I said, “you’re right. We were touching each other. Ears and breasts. It was so loving and tender. I wish the rest of this fucking country were more like that. Those girls are just so great. You’re so great, Faik. Yes, you are. A great, great leopard.”
“I want three hundred dollars,” Faik said.
“See, that’s great, too,” I said, ladling out the money. “Other people would have asked for four hundred.”
“Are you drunk?” Faik asked. “Did you and the girls smoke lanza? Then I want another hundred dollars.”
“That’s absolutely fair,” I said in English. “I can do business with a leopard-man like you.”
I noticed, in a kind of roundabout way, that I was losing verticality. “Are you following me?” Faik said. I looked around. I had apparently walked him down the stairs and into the inner courtyard.
“Oh,” I said. There was a palm tree and a plane tree in the courtyard. Which tree would win in a race? I wished I were an environmentalist. “Hey, Faik,” I shouted, but he was quickly pedaling away on his unicycle. “Where are the girls? I want to go back to the girls. Where are you going, you leopard? Take me with you!”
“Wow,” I said to myself. “This is turning into one Sergeant Pepper’s kind of day.” I whistled a few bars of “Lovely Rita.” Maybe I was back in the States already, but this time armed with a journalist’s visa. Now I just needed to write everything down and file my story before the deadline. “I wonder where the grown-ups are, anyway?” I said to the palm tree. “You can talk to me. I won’t use your real name.”
The palm tree wasn’t talking. Probably protecting the plane tree. “I want girls,” I said, and with the fair sex in mind, I started knocking on the heavy wooden doors around the courtyard. No one answered. I walked into one of the rooms and saw a dying middle-aged woman spread out over a golden duvet. It was my mother. “Oh, poor girl,” I said. “Poor girl.” I couldn’t believe I was calling my mother a girl, but there it was, the feeling that she was younger than me and in need of my help. I cradled her face, trying to make out the familiar features, but her entire head was covered by a giant tube sock, two blue stripes around where her mouth should have been. “Good,” I said. “You got the American socks. The search is over.” My mother put her cool white fingers between my neck folds and made a quizzical sound through the tube sock. “Last eighteen years?” I said. “Many things happened. First, communism died. Then Papa got rich. We went to the Alps. I got circumcised something bad. Then they put Papa into the ground. A pretty Jewess brought gardenias. Then I ended up here.” The alabaster hand wiped my mouth and skirted the edges of my lonely nose. A gust of sock air emerged out of my mother’s neck and formed a series of inverted Cyrillic letters, like when Americans try to learn Russian. “What?” I said. “Sure, I’ve got a girl, but she’s nothing like you, Mommy. I mean, it’s like you always said: you get what you pay for.”