That evening I went down to the Americana to sell my camera, an expensive Leica I had bought in Berlin in ’32 (I still took photographs from time to time, mainly portrait shots of people I worked with). Juan, the patrón of the Americana, had offered me two hundred pesos for it.
The fiesta was more or less over. It was a bluey warm dusk. A band was playing and some people were dancing in the Plaza Zargoza at the end of the main street. Mercifully, all the fireworks seemed to have stopped. For once the Avenida Emilio Carraza was empty of cars. Beneath the nutant trees — strung with bunting — two exhausted policemen collected the NO SE ESTACIONAR signs. It was hard to imagine that all Europe was at war. For the first time I realized how easy it was to be neutral.
The Americana terrace was crowded with families. I made my way through the tables into the dark bar and asked for Juan.
“Mr. Todd, at last!”
I turned round. It was Dusenberry, smiling in a friendly way. I hadn’t seen him for weeks. Ramón Dusenberry was half-Mexican, half-American. He lived in San Diego, California, but kept a large house outside Rincón where his mother stayed. He was a slim, fine-boned man with a neat goatee. He was in the newspaper business. He owned a chain of local papers on both sides of the border. He was brown-skinned and dark-haired, but spoke English like an American.
“Hello,” I said without enthusiasm. The fiesta had depressed me.
“Still here?”
“For my sins.”
“You owe me a hundred dollars. The U.S. remains stubbornly neutral.”
I laughed and then felt sick. Briefly, with passionate terseness, I outlined my position to him. One of his slim hands lightly tapped the marble surface of the bar. It looked like an elegant woman’s hand — light brown, hairless, shiny-nailed, very clean.
“Well, what are we going to do with you, Mr. Todd?”
I sighed. “Don’t tell me this is an affair of honor.… Look, I’m broke. Flat, stony. Skinned. No tener un centavo, mate.”
He ignored my aggression. I apologized.
“I am, really. I’m even trying to flog this camera to Juan.”
“You a photographer?”
“Yes, of course. I’m a motion picture director, for heaven’s sake.”
“Ever worked for newspapers?”
“I was a newsreel cameraman in the Great War.” I suddenly felt old. I muttered, “You know—’14–’18.”
“Got a car?”
“What is this? Yes.”
He smiled. He was handsome in a faintly sinister, overrefined way. “You’re just the man I’m looking for.”
That was how I became a newspaper photographer for the Tijuana, Tecate, Rumovosa and Mexicali Diarios. During the weeks I was employed I presided at a dozen weddings, four fiestas, two mayoral inaugurations, several livestock shows, a warehouse fire at Mexicali, the arrest of a rapist in the village of Agua Hechicera, the Miss Baja California 1940 beauty pageant and, my scoop, the collision of a freight train with a lorry full of oranges on the railway between Mexicali and Nuevo León. My shot of the body of the lorry driver lying on a bed of spilled oranges was syndicated throughout Mexico and even, so I was told, made the pages of some American magazines.
Ramón Dusenberry paid me twenty-five dollars a week plus bonuses. I stayed on at the Vera Cruz, partly out of affection for the place (seediness has its own allure for the seedy) and partly to save money. I abandoned my plan of returning to Los Angeles; someone or something was blocking that route far too effectively. I decided instead, when I had some money saved, to make for Tampico and try to book a passage on a merchant ship heading for Britain. If that proved unsuccessful I would head down to British Honduras or cross over to the West Indies and make my way home from there.
It was curious, however, how a job relieved a lot of my anxiety. I had the Mercury repaired and drove up and down the border to whatever assignment one of my four editors deemed worthy of photographing. I took a strange pleasure in these trips, motoring through the dusty arid landscape along the badly paved highway parallel to the border. I had some coarse linen suits run up for me in Mexicali; I acquired a taste for mescal. I became a well-known figure in Rincón and opened a bank account in the Tijuana branch of the Banco Nacional de México, where my savings steadily accumulated. I was told that it was something of a social cachet in the border towns to have the gringo photographer turn up to cover your wedding. In short, I began to settle in.
Then, one evening in the middle of April, I turned down the Avenida Emilio Carraza and parked my car in front of the Vera Cruz. I had just returned from photographing the winner of the five-thousand-peso prize in the federal district lottery. The hotel owner’s daughter, Elisa, who acted as receptionist, handed me a message.
“Meet me in the bar at the Max, seven o’clock. Monika.”
I shaved, changed my shirt and went to meet her. She was waiting in the bar. She looked hot. A combination of the day’s lingering warmth and the Max’s ceiling fans contrived to dishevel her carefully waved hair. The little vertical creases in her upper lip gleamed with perspiration. We embraced, my palm on her damp bare shoulders,
“My God, what’s happened to you?”
I looked at myself in the bar mirror. “Nothing.”
“You don’t look … We were worried about you.”
It was a measure of my new contentment that I had stopped writing letters to my friends. No one had heard a word for weeks.
We went to the Americana and had a cold beer beneath the colored lights in the fresno trees. Monika’s hair was backlit with blue, green, red. I felt a surge of affection for her. I never expect to inspire friendship, let alone loyalty. These moments, these gestures, disarm me. I took her hand.
“It was sweet of you to come looking for me. But I’m fine. Well, I am now.”
“Eddie Simmonette’s in town. He wants to see you.”
“Eddie? Where’s he been? I must have written him a dozen letters.”
“Nobody knows. But he’s rich. He’s bought a film company. Werner’s already working for him.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants you to make a film.”
“Jesus Christ!”
Over dinner in the Max I explained my new travel plans to Monika. Vain months of trying to get a visa rendered other attempts futile. I was somehow going to make my way back to Britain.
“What’s the latest war news?” I asked. “We’re a bit behind here.”
“Oh God, I can’t remember.… Nothing much. Something’s going on in Norway, I think.” She took my hand. “You must come back. Eddie has plans.”
“Wonderful. But how?”
She smiled.
“Simple,” she said. “We’ll get married.”
I married Monika Alt on April 23, 1940, in the offices of the U.S. consul at Tijuana. Mr. Lexter officiated. My best man was Ramón Dusenberry. The other witness was Miss Raffaella Placacos Díaz, Lexter’s secretary. Two hours later we drove across the border into the United States. As the spouse of one of its citizens, I was passed through Immigration with no delay.
VILLA LUXE, June 26, 1972
I remember today, for some reason, a conversation that took place when
I was teaching Elroy Cooper.
Apropos of nothing he asked, “Can God hear everything we say?”
“No,” I said without thinking.
“Why not?”