The Cool School (51 page)

“Then, at the points, three of them, where the two grand circles intersect (east, north, west) you will witness something truly extraordinary: an extra sun at each. Four suns and a whole sky on fire. When you have seen those four suns, turn around and tell your devils to pull their pants up and point you straight to the nearest town.”

Four years later, Pedro and I found ourselves together again for the first time, sitting at a table by a mirror in the Café Estrella in Pochutla. The cafe faced out on the marketplace, opposite the jail. Glancing in the mirror, I could see that both of us were skeletally thin, and our eyes bright and bloodshot. In my hair and beard there were traces of gray that I had never seen before. Pedro was beardless still. Both of us wore the crazy-quilt of rags known in that part of the world as la túnica polimita de Joselito (“Little Joseph’s coat of many colors”).

I found myself staring into a bowl of black coffee, breathless with rapture. Oblivious to me, Pedro worked at carving a pipestem, shaping it from a stick of wood known as jewelwood. Having roughed out a pentagonal star at one end of the pipe, Pedro took up an ice pick and hollowed out the inside a bit farther, then resumed where he had left off on the star.

Not even the most flagrant of the invisible had ever yet had any serious trouble in Pochutla, so the town was a favorite stopping place. There was what we called a supervisor there, an old man who could if need be go to the authorities on our behalf. But the local Commander’s friendliness to us had always been so genuine, though distant, that none of us had ever needed help from the Pochutla supervisor since the previous Commander’s day. (The present incumbent was his nephew.) Not that the old Commander had been harsh, only his role in those times had been a much more serious one than that of his successor, or at least he had taken it more seriously.

A generation earlier, the town had been invaded by a group of wandering midgets who were tinkers and bootleggers by trade. They sold and also drank absinthe in enormous quantities. The reason they had come to Pochutla was that the tomb of a long-dead saint named Pepe was there. During his lifetime some two generations before that, the midgets’ forebears had frequented and revered him. Now their
tribe was dying out, and they decided to camp next to his tomb, having long claimed him as their patron and protector. Pepe was always said to be the wormwood-eater’s friend. Once settled in, next door to the tomb, they set up shop as repairmen and traffickers as usual.

Late one night, the old Commander decided to get rid of them. Soldiers roused the midgets at bayonet point; they were given one hour to pack and leave. That same night the old Commander had a dream in which Pepe rebuked him. The saint looked just as he had in life, except in the dream his white beard reached all the way down to the ground. When Pepe finished, the old Commander noticed that a crack had opened at his feet and smoke was rising from it. He leaped out of bed, shouting.

Soldiers went after the midgets. When they were overtaken and persuaded, with much kindness, to come back, the old Commander entertained them in the street in front of his house and (remembering the dream) said over and over:

“Pepe is your friend. He loves you . . .”

We invisibles encountered real trouble only when we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the attractions of the city. There we were viewed as untouchables.

In the capital, for instance, because a newspaper publisher whose brother was a senator had denounced our order as an anachronistic and malodorous impropriety, policemen kicked and punched those of us they had arrested until they were themselves exhausted. Then in the middle of the night the victims would be pushed, more dead than alive, into the back of a truck and driven out to an empty spot on the highway to be discharged with warnings never to return.

For his part, Pedro had long since resolved never again to visit the big city. We were now staying at a settlement in the salt swamps south of Pochutla, some ten miles inland from the sea, an area so flat that from the top of a stepladder placed anywhere one saw the ocean glistening in the distance like a curved blade. Between oneself and it, there was an unending expanse of reeds running in all directions, billowy yellow, and bounded on the east by the snaky brown, blue
and white outlines of the mountains which defined the approaches to the Wilderness bordering Pochutla to the south.

The swamp settlement served only as a rest stop for transients, and as in all such places there were only a few permanent visitors, a supervisor, and a handful of old men who had decided to remain until their death.

Built on an island of dry ground, the red mud huts we were living in formed a circle round an inner square at the center of which there was an immense and ancient olive tree, its trunk and branches forming an umbrella beneath which we spent long days outdoors in dry weather.

Squatting in two parallel rows facing one another, we played the pebble game. As the game proceeded, both spectators and players kept up a continuous nasal drone the whole time, punctuated only by the click of the pebbles and the beat of a drum played by an aged resident.

The purpose of this game was twofold: it could be used for gambling or as a method of divination, thus resembling almost any other game. However, we set no store by material possessions and had no interest at all in predicting future events. Nevertheless, we surrendered ourselves body and soul to this game of nonexistent stakes and meaningless prognostications. Quitting for the day, an hour or so before sunset, one of us might tell his brothers how he had been to the bottom of a sea teeming with luminous fishes and plants, while another, who could have told how his soul had been ravished into the center of a rainbow, said nothing. At other times, the lives of various paragons of preceding generations were related. One whose name was Serafin I often heard cited as a prodigy.

Serafin had worn woolen clothes exclusively. He refused to put on any garment that was not one hundred percent wool. He wore his hair long, never married and renounced worldly things. All that he had was his mother. Her he honored with absolute obedience. Serafin traveled constantly, but never set out without his mother’s permission, and he always returned on the exact date set by her. He smoked
tobacco mixed with rifa, was afraid of the dark and could not sleep by himself. Nor could he endure the neighing of horses or the braying of donkeys. He had the gift of second sight. When an inhabitant of any of the villages through which he passed in his wanderings was about to die, Serafin was likely to appear briefly and then, wraithlike, vanish. This always happened at dawn, so that the mere sight of him at that hour came to be taken as a sign that someone must die within the day. Serafin had a prodigious memory. It was said that he had spent some months in a flying saucer where he met with scientists from another planet who taught him their language, their names and the names of their cities.

The evening meal was the only meal of the day in our settlements. The fare varied according to season and the number of people on hand. Sometimes it consisted of nothing more than a pot of boiled mallow root. We were not prevented by this diet, however, from enjoying happy dreams during the hours of darkness. Each night we gathered round the fire with our pipes, some in small groups round a waterpipe, others sitting alone or in pairs with the smaller pocket pipes. We filled the pipes with the ground-up leaves and flowers of the rifa plant (sometimes mixed with a pinch of Mixtec tobacco) and thus made up for our indifference to the pleasures of eating with an unbounded appetite for the joys of smoking rifa, so much so that the inhabitants of the region had a saying to the effect that if there were no more rifa left on the face of the earth, the invisibles would nonetheless have a little something left over.

On the question of how this plant first came to be discovered, we used to tell the story of a king of old who was out walking one day with his top adviser and noticed a plant whose distinctive odor aroused his curiosity. Uprooting it, he dried the stems, flowers and leaves, then ground them up. Later, after taking them in a mixture of cloves and honey, he was filled with a mysterious bright, warm feeling. When the adviser asked whether he was satisfied with the experiment, the king replied.

“ana h’tloc a rifa
(I was looking for precisely this!).”

Thus both the name of rifa (“precisely this!”) and rifa itself were discovered on the same day.

Mixtec tobacco, which we not only sometimes mixed in pipes with rifa for smoking but often chewed while trekking cross-country, was the only kind we ever used. This tobacco was endowed with the most energetic properties, twenty to thirty times more powerful than the ordinary leaf. Our order had used it for the past thousand years, ever since one of the invisible was initiated by a hermit who made him a gift of some cured leaves, together with the following charm:

Chew me and be strong,

Drink my juice, your every member

Will tingle all day long;

Smoke me and remember.

Not that the introduction of tobacco was without serious consequences for us. Because of it, a number of heterodox brethren withdrew to hermitages near or actually within the Wilderness, where—typically—each would build himself a hut, live by fruit-gathering and clear a patch of ground, with his sole object to grow tobacco plants, to live in their midst and to chew and smoke them day and night.

All of us without exception had two pipes, one pocket and one water. The waterpipe consisted of a long stem inserted in a fat earthenware bowl, which rested on the ground, with a hollowed-out smokehole of conventional type, whereas the pocket pipe was simply a length of hollowed wood with a small metal bowl.

We thought of these two pipes as a pair of demons, the waterpipe a female and the pocket pipe a male. This demonic couple we imagined to be in league to bewitch their owner and keep him in a state of enslavement, for the pocket pipe was forever glued to its owner’s lips while on the road or otherwise employed, and the waterpipe was the companion of our nights next to the embers of a lone campfire or with our brothers in the darkness of a cave, smokehut or hostelry.

So important were these pipes that nobody ever willingly traveled
without both male and female. One of us, an aged man named Dáfnis, whose twofold beard overspread his weathered chest as whitely as the wings of the Pentecostal dove, losing his male pipe in the neighborhood of Candelárias, even went so far as to declare that he would not proceed one step farther, but built himself a hut where he kept a black she-goat which he named Lucky.

On market days, Dáfnis would appear in the center of Candelárias, accompanied by the black goat. Setting up his waterpipe he would hold forth for hours, surrounded by a crowd of locals who listened attentively to everything he said. Snapping his fingers at the end of a peroration, Dáfnis would send the pipe circulating from mouth to mouth. He would then point out, for the general edification, that Lucky the goat was perfectly clean, and above all not covered with flies:

“This,” he would affirm, pointing to the pipeful of rifa, “knocks them out of the air!”

Dáfnis concluded by forcing the goat to eat a large bolus of concentrated rifa. He then also put the mouthpiece of the pipe to the animal’s lips, shouting:

“Find me a husband for this woman!”

The goat endured all this with perfect docility but soon exhibited signs of agitation, at which bystanders would nudge one another and grin.

After a few years Dáfnis and Lucky disappeared, leaving an empty hut behind. It was generally assumed that the black goat had at last presented her master with a compatible mate for the widowed water-pipe.

We all lavished particular fantasy on the embellishment of our female pipes, tying colored rags of every description round the bowls—ribbons, bits of coral and cowrie shells, snailshells, brass buttons, picture buttons and likenesses of the Virgin Mary and the saints, pearls of every grade, policeman’s whistles, bells, little mirrors, locks of hair tied up at one end with a length of scarlet thread, pierced coins, scapularies, tin soldiers, Maltese crosses, holy medals,
gold watchbands; and yet none of this ostentation ever led us into vanity or an infatuation with physical beauty. We never forgot that by the very act of dressing up the female pipe we were channeling away from ourselves the energies of an ogress who delighted not only in enslaving her owner but in obliging him to go to work in order to fit her out in finery—“ogre brocade” we called it.

“A bonfire smothered in ashes” is what a famous recluse of our order once called the settlement where Pedro and I were staying. It maintained a close bond with another, identical in organization but high in the mountains some forty miles to the southeast, close to the Wilderness. One could reach the mountain settlement by a trail running straight, and it did run straight as the proverbial die, from Candelárias. It was said of the two that their fates were joined and that whatever happened, good or bad, to either must infallibly happen to the other. Both were wide open, their rule being absolute hospitality with no distinction being made between good, bad, rich, poor, visible, or invisible. Thieves, robbers, even murderers had more than once enjoyed the enigmatic privilege of our welcome. On one occasion within living memory, our swamp settlement had gone so far as to harbor an escaped mass murderer for a little more than a year before he finally vanished.

It was a well known fact that in both places our gardens had never been molested by birds or insects; our pantries had never seen rats, mice or cockroaches; there were no flies anywhere; and the cats never took anything but what was set before them.

How I Became One of the Invisible
, 1992

Seeking a literary life in Paris in the fifties, Barnard graduate Iris Owens found it, taking up with Alexander Trocchi, who converted her to his way of making a living, writing pornographic novels for the Olympia Press’s notorious Traveller’s Companion Series. Under the name Harriet Daimler she wrote such works of literary naughtiness as
Innocence, Darling, The Pleasure Thieves,
and
The Woman Thing.
Under her own name Owens wrote two novels, both semi-autobiographical embellishments of her adventurous life:
After Claude
(1973), the brilliant opening of which is excerpted here, and
Hope Diamond Refuses
(1984). Iris was a friend of mine and few tongues inspired more fear and laughter in close proximity.