The Ground Beneath Her Feet (72 page)

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure, the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn’t be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving belief of the reader in the well-told tale.

The myths, you may have noticed, require their protagonists to be stupid. To walk blithely into mortal danger, blind to the most obvious traps.

(All this and probably more, I permit myself to say. I have not spoken like this, so exhaustively, so unrestrainedly, in a long time. And I repeat, I do not believe in hubris, the crime of thumbing your nose at the gods, and therefore I also do not believe in the coming of Nemesis. But I have sworn to tell everything and so I must also say that before what happened happened I made these, in the eyes of believers, no doubt injudicious remarks.)

Let’s go to my hotel room and get fucked up, Vina briskly proposes. A snort of soma, a sip of ambrosia. Sure, I’m up for that. Lead on, my queen. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I am in the position of a mortal man petitioning a so to speak goddess for love. Vina and Adonis: like that. I am aware that humans do not usually come well out of these encounters.

But the non-existent gods, too, can fall.

Her style, these days, is late-eighties ultraglamour; no more hippie (or radical) chic. Très movie star, with an extra shock ’n’ roll twist of out-rageousness. Tyler, Gaultier, Alaïa, Léger, Wang, but most often Santo
Medusa: his all-in-one technicolor-beaded catsuits, his shocking-pink
smokings
worn double-breasted over a shirtless torso, his chain-mail mini-dresses slit to the waist. Vina and Tina, people say, are slugging it out for the ageless-diva crown.

This is the hotel room. This is the woman I love. These are some of the last moments of her life on earth, her life above ground. Every stupid thing she says, every crack she makes, every heart she breaks, these are things I will forever hug to myself, to save them from the
barranco
, the abyss. This is the CD she plays:
Raindogs
, the honky-tonk blues as reinvented and growled out by Lee Baby Simms. She starts singing along with Simms, low and slow, and the hair rises on my neck.
Will I see you again / on a downtown train
. The walls seem to be swaying to the music. It’s like Valéry, I remark.
Le roc marche, et trébuche; et chaque pierre fée / se sent un poids nouveau qui vers l’azur délire!
Valerie who, she shrugs, not caring, lost in music and smoke.

She’s on her way to Guadalajara, the city where time stops. To Guadalajara and beyond.

This is us, making love. She always made love as if it were for the last time, that was how she did everything, how she led her life; but for us, though neither of us knows it, this in fact is the last time. The last time for these breasts. The breasts of Helen of Troy were so astonishing that when she bared them to her husband at the fall of Troy, Menelaus was unable to do her harm. The sword fell from his nerveless hand. This is the woman I love and these are her breasts. I run this tape over and over in my head. Did you show the earthquake your breasts, Vina, did you bare them to the god of storms, why didn’t you, if you did you might, you surely would, have survived.

These are the breasts of the woman I love. I place my nose between them and inhale their pungency, their ripeness. I place my cock between them and feel their swollen caress.

This is Vina, talky as always after sex. She wants to beef about the problem of age for female singers: Diana, Joni, Tina, Nina, herself. Look at Sinatra, she says. He can hardly stand up, there are notes he can’t even dream about any more, and somebody should kill that animal sitting on his head, but he’s a guy, therefore these are not career problems. (Yes, she puts herself up there with the Voice. She’s a Voice too. She has no false modesty. She knows her artistic worth. Tina and me,
she says, we’re re-writing the book. Not Fade Away, that’s the new title, honey. We’re telling you how it’s gonna be.)

She’s on to the younger generation, its inadequacies, its complaints. Here’s Madonna Sangria again, still obsessing in
Rolling Stone
about the female body. Not its uses but its abuses. Not sex but gender. Will you listen to the low-grade grumpiness in this grouchy kid, Vina growls, talking mostly to herself. Man, we had high octane. We had
rage
. To whine about guys?, to complain about mom ’n’ pop?, just wasn’t in it. We had the generals and the universe to fight.
My boyfriend left me, men are assholes?
Give me a break. I’ll take the good-time girls any day. Bop she bop. She bop shewaddywaddy. (She’s singing now.)
She’s so fine …

Bullshit, she snarls abruptly. She’s wasted and more than half asleep but she’s arguing with herself. Always was a man pulling our strings. Ike Turner Berry Gordy Phil Spector Ormus Cama. Ike Spector Berry Turner. A man is for power and a woman is for pain. I’ll say it again. Orpheus lives, Eurydice dies, right?

Yeah, but you’re Orpheus too, I start to tell her. It’s your voice that’s making the enchanted stones of the city rise deliriously into the blue, that causes the city’s banks of electrical images to dance.
Oraia phone
, the best voice, we all know to be yours, not his. And meanwhile he’s the one sinking into his otherworld-underworld, and who’s going to rescue him, I bite my tongue because this is the opposite of the line I have flown south to pursue:
Who if not you
. Instead I say, It’s time men like him started rescuing themselves.

And I go on, Anyway, Orpheus dies too. And having said it, I want to rip out my tongue. Wrong, wrong! But what’s said is said.

Vina’s sitting up in bed now, stone sober and suddenly, illogically, mad as hell. You think you can walk in his shoes, she says. You think you can sleep in his hollow. In your dreams, Rai baby. Never in a million. You came all this way to tell me you want him dead?, maybe you’ll want me dead too, if I don’t bow down before your will, before your fucking
dick
. You came down here to murder love and call the murder love.

No, that’s not it, I say uselessly. Dionysiac Vina has risen up in wrath, goddess of pleasure and destruction. Go, she orders, and miserably I obey.

The next day in Guadalajara—I’ve followed her there too, but I’m
on my own, barred from backstage, unable to reach her by hook or crook or carrier pigeon—I wander wretchedly, with my thoughts
shooting out all over the place
, as Moses Herzog says. There’s a woman bishop now in the U.S.A., maybe I could call her, she could probably get through to Vina and I don’t know somehow on a sisterly basis intercede. Stroessner’s out in Paraguay, a coup, but the day they announce a world shortage of dictators will be a cold day in Hell. I see where they executed the Sikhs who carried out the Quadruple Assassination. Say hi to Cool Yul for me, guys, maybe he’s not so cool no more, not where he’s at.

You’re changing, she said to me. Don’t stop
.

Metamorphosis, this is what I need to explain to her, is what supplants our need for the divine. This is what we can perform, our human magic. I’m talking now not about the ordinary, quotidian changes that are the stuff of modern life (in which, as someone said, only the temporary is contemporary); nor even about the adaptive, chameleon natures which have become so common during our migrant century; but about a deeper, more shocking capacity, which kicks in only under extreme pressure. When we are faced with the Immense. At such a hinge moment we can occasionally mutate into another, final form, a
form beyond metamorphosis
. A new fixed thing.

Three of us passed through a membrane in the sky and were transformed by the experience. That’s true. But what is also true is that those transformations were not at that time completed. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that we entered a transit zone: the condition of transformation. A transitional phase in which we might have been trapped for ever, which only the imperative force of the Immense can force towards completion.

The Immense has shown its face to Ormus Cama. He has become the agent of that revelation. For him, whatever the consequences, there can be no going back.

For Vina and myself—this is what I need her to understand—the Immense has taken the form of our lifelong, intermittent but inescapable love. Thus, if she will only leave Ormus for me, our lives will change entirely, we will both be altered in astonishing ways, but the new form which then emerges—she and I, together, in love—this will last for ever. For ever and a fucking day.

Putting the screws on her? You bet. I repeat: only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become. Lichas, hurled into the waters by Herakles, drained of life by fear, turned into a rock. Turned
for ever
into a rock, you can go and sit on it—on him—right now, in the Euboean Gulf, not far from Thermopylae.

This is what people get wrong about transformation. We’re not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We’re not science fiction. It’s like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn’t afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won’t turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It’s
done
.

Scientists get angry when laymen misunderstand, for example, the uncertainty principle. In an age of great uncertainties it is easy to mistake science for banality, to believe that Heisenberg is merely saying, gee, guys, we just can’t be sure of anything, it’s all so darn
uncertain
, but isn’t that, like,
beautiful?
Whereas actually he’s telling us the exact opposite: that if you know what you’re doing you can pin down the exact quantum of uncertainty in any experiment, any process. To knowledge and mystery we can now ascribe percentage points. A principle of uncertainty is also a measure of certainty. It’s not a lament about shifting sands but a gauge of the solidity of the ground.

By the same token
, as we say in Hug-me, I get annoyed when people misunderstand change. We’re not talking about the goddamn I
Ching
here. We’re talking about the deepest stirrings of our essential natures, of our secret hearts. Metamorphosis isn’t whimsy. It’s revelation.

In various bars around the Plaza de Armas, the Calzada Independencia Sur, the Calle de Mariachis, I’m learning to tell the difference between tequilas. Sauza, Ángel, Cuervo, the three big distilleries. For me it’s between Sauza and Ángel, but then maybe I haven’t tasted enough of the other guy’s wares, hey, camarero, hit me again, hombre, muy pronto. The white tequila is the cheap hooch; then there’s reposado, that’s three months old; but for the good stuff you should stick with the tres generaciones, the name’s an exaggeration but six to twelve years of ageing are well worth the wait. At some point I check out Orozco’s
Man in Flames
mural. He’s a national institution now, a major brand name, but back in the thirties he had to flee to America,
where he made his reputation, the familiar story, you’ve got to leave home and get the gringos to love you before you get the time of day in your old neighborhood. Five minutes later, usually, you’re called a sell-out, but Orozco is still in favor, lucky man.

She has made her choice and I’m not it. She has chosen not to change.

I wonder with the help of the three generations of the Ángel distillery how to make it through the rest of my life. I am only forty-two years old. Shit, she’s older than I am, what is this, have all the under-forty women in the world written me off? I don’t know. I guess if you drink down all these generations you get to be incredibly old. Three more generations, please, camarero. Here they come, begat begat begat. That’s better. The women look younger all the time. The busboy’s sprouting wings.

If I had a soul I would sell it now and gain my heart’s desire. And another three generations, sir waiter, if you will.

Señor I think perhaps it is already sufficient. Where is your hotel. If you wish it, I will call for you a taxi.

On February 13, 1989, the last but one night of her life (we have been here before), the legendary popular singer Vina Apsara chooses the good-for-nothing greaseball playboy Raúl Páramo, a man given to the wearing of personal jewelry, to be the agent of my sexual humiliation. I’m waiting for her in the hotel lobby when she sweeps in, half naked, already oncefucked, in the arms of this pathetic nonentity who is grinning as dementedly as a village idiot who has won the lottery and whose doom, as things turn out, is even closer than her own. She pauses right in front of me, tongue-twistin’, clutching at him not three feet from where I stand. She is making her point.
You’re nothing in my life, Rai, you mean even less than this punk, so do me a favor, fuck off and die
.

I, however, have received from the lady a lifetime’s instruction in the art of waiting for whatever scraps of herself she may care to throw in my direction. Surrendering the torn remnants of my pride, I bribe the floor security officer and am therefore allowed to spend the night in the corridor outside her suite, sitting on a small folding stool—every photographer has one, along with a nose for trouble and a light
stepladder—and preparing to throw myself at her feet and beg to be allowed back into some dirty back room of her life.

As Vina once sat outside tormented Ormus’s locked door, waiting to be let in, so that she could care for him, so I now wait for her. We are one another’s echoes. We are the ringing in one another’s ears.

Now it’s noon on Valentine’s Day. We have been here before. Here is Vina in the hotel corridor, panicky and uncertain, locked out of her suite, in flight from her dying lover; and here is doglike Rai, her faithful retainer, ready as ever to offer his abject, panting services.