When young Reynolds finds her, the girl is floating in a pool. Julie,
Julie, calls her young lover, and the girl, who has been face down in the water
for who knows how many minutes, coughs and calls his name. All my fucking life
I’ve never seen anything like that, says the black guy.
Just then, the Mexicans appear (the verb
to appear
will
appear often in this story), fifty yards away. They’ve gotten out of their car
and are looking on; one is sitting on the hood, another leaning against a
fender, and the girl is up on the roof; only the wounded guy is still inside,
watching or trying to watch them through the window. The Mexicans make menacing
gestures and threaten them with a litany of punishments, tortures and
humiliations. This is getting nasty, says the black guy. Follow me. They enter
the city’s system of sewers. The Mexicans follow them. But the labyrinth of
tunnels is sufficiently complicated for the black guy and the young couple to
lose their pursuers. Finally they reach a refuge that’s almost as welcoming as a
nightclub. This is my place, says the black guy. Then he tells them the story of
his life. The jobs he’s had to do. The constant presence of the police. The
hardbitten life of a North American working man in the twentieth or twenty-first
century. My muscles couldn’t take any more, says the black guy.
His place isn’t bad. He has a bed, where they lay Julie down, and
books, which, so he says, he’s picked up over the years in the sewers. Self-help
books and books about the revolution and books on technical subjects, like how
to repair a lawn mower. There’s also a kind of bathroom, with a primitive
shower. This water’s always clean, says the black guy. A stream of crystal-clear
water falls continually from a hole in the ceiling. We all build our places with
whatever we can find, he explains. Then he picks up an iron bar and says that
they can rest; he’ll go out and keep watch.
It’s always night in the sewers, but that night, the last night of
peace, is particularly strange. The boy falls asleep in a shabby armchair after
making love with Julie. The black guy falls asleep too, mumbling
incomprehensibly. The girl is the only one who doesn’t feel sleepy, and she goes
into other rooms, because her appetite has begun to rage again. But with a
difference: now Julie knows that self-inflicted pain can be a substitute for
food. So we see her sticking needles in her face and piercing her nipples with
wires.
At this point the Mexicans reappear and easily overpower first
the black guy, then the son of Colonel Reynolds. They look for the girl. They
shout threats. If she doesn’t come out of her hiding place, they’ll kill the
black guy and her boyfriend. Then a door opens and Julie appears. She has
changed a lot. She has become the indisputable queen of piercing. The leader of
the Mexicans (the biggest guy) finds her attractive. The sick Mexican is lying
on the ground, begging them to take him to a hospital. The Mexican girl is
comforting him, but her eyes are fixed on the new Julie. The other Mexican is
holding the colonel’s son, who is screaming like a man possessed; the
possibility (or the strong probability) that Julie will be raped is more than he
can bear. The black guy is lying unconscious on the ground.
Julie and the Mexican go into in a room and shut the door. No,
Julie, no, no, no, sobs young Reynolds. The Mexican’s voice can be heard through
the door: That’s it, baby. C’mon, let’s get that off. Holy shit! You really do
like those hooks, don’t you? Kneel down baby, yeah, that’s it, that’s it. Lift
up your ass, perfect, oh yeah. And more stuff like that until suddenly he starts
yelling, and there are blows, as if someone was getting kicked, or thrown
against a wall, then picked up and thrown against the opposite wall, and then
the yelling stops and there’s only the sound of biting and chewing, until the
door opens and Julie appears again with her lips (and in fact the whole of her
face) smeared with blood, holding the Mexican’s head in one hand.
Which makes the other Mexican go crazy; he pulls out a pistol, goes up
to Julie and empties it into her, but of course the bullets don’t harm her at
all, and she laughs contentedly before grabbing the guy’s shirt, pulling him
toward her and tearing his throat open with a single bite. Young Reynolds and
the black guy, who has recovered consciousness, are gaping at the scene. The
Mexican girl, however, has the presence of mind to try to escape, but Julie
catches her as she’s climbing a metal stairway that leads to the mouth of the
upper sewer. The girl kicks and curses furiously, but then, yielding to Julie’s
greater strength, she lets go and falls. Don’t do it, Julie, the colonel’s son
has just enough time to say, before his sweetheart’s teeth destroy the face of
the Mexican girl. Then Julie extracts her victim’s heart and eats it.
At this point, a voice says: So you think you’ve won, you whore.
Julie turns around and what we see is the last Mexican, now fully transformed
into a zombie. The two of them begin to fight. Julie is helped by the black guy
and her boyfriend and for a few seconds it looks like she’s going to win. But
Julie’s victims pick themselves up and join in the fight, and zombies, it seems,
are ten times stronger than normal humans, which means that the fight inevitably
begins to go the Mexicans’ way. So our three heroes flee. The black guy takes
them to a room. They barricade the door. The black guy tells them to go; he’ll
try, God knows how, to stop the zombies. Julie and young Reynolds don’t have to
be told twice, and go off to another room. At one point in their flight, Julie
looks her boyfriend in the eye and asks him, just with her gaze or maybe with
words, I can’t remember now, how he can still love her. Young Reynolds replies
by kissing her on the cheek, then he wipes his lips and kisses her on the mouth.
I love you, he says, I love you more than ever.
Then they hear a yell and they know that the black guy is gone.
There’s no way out of the room where they’ve taken refuge; it’s full of old
furniture piled up chaotically, but with passages between; it’s like a labyrinth
of the transient, of things without the will to last. I have to leave you, says
Julie. Young Reynolds doesn’t know what she means. Only when Julie uses her
extraordinary strength to throw him under some armchairs and broken-down washing
machines and faulty or obsolete television sets does he understand that the girl
is prepared to sacrifice herself for him. He hardly has time to react. Julie
goes out and fights and loses and the Mexican zombies are coming for him. With
tears streaming down his face, young Reynolds tries to make himself invisible,
curling up into a ball of flesh under the pile of junk.
The Mexican zombies, however, find him and try to drag him out of
there. Young Reynolds sees their hungry faces, then the hungry face of the black
guy and Julie’s face, watching him, showing no sign of emotion. At this point,
Colonel Reynolds, escorted by three of his men, kicks down the door and starts
blowing away all the zombies with the special gun. All the time he’s firing, the
colonel is calling his son’s name. Here I am, Dad, says young Reynolds.
The nightmare is over.
The next scene shows the colonel comfortably seated in his office
proposing to his son that they go to Alaska for a vacation together. Young
Reynolds says he’ll think it over. There’s no rush, son, says the colonel. Then
the colonel’s on his own and he begins to smile to himself, as if he can’t quite
believe how incredibly lucky he’s been. His son is alive. Meanwhile, young
Reynolds has left his father’s office and started walking through the
underground passageways at the base. There’s a look of deep uneasiness on his
face. Gradually, however, distant noises begin to penetrate his self-absorption.
He can hear shouts and howls, the cries of people for whom pain has become a way
of life. Barely aware of what he’s doing, he starts walking toward the source of
the cries. He doesn’t have to go far. The passage turns a corner and there is a
door; it opens onto an enormous laboratory, stretching away before him.
He is warmly greeted by some military scientists who have known him
since he was a boy. He continues on his way. He discovers a series of glass
cells. The Mexicans have been placed in them, each in a separate cell. He keeps
walking. He finds Julie’s cell. Julie recognizes him. The colonel’s son puts his
hand on the glass and Julie puts her hand up to his, as if she were touching it.
In a larger cell some scientists are working on the black guy. He could become a
great warrior, they say. They are sending electric shocks through his brain. The
black guy is full of hatred and resentment. He howls. The colonel’s son hides in
a corner. When the scientists go for their coffee break, he gets up and asks the
black guy if he recognizes him. Vaguely, says the black guy. All my memories are
vague. And fucking strange, too.
We were friends, says the colonel’s son. We met by the river. I
remember an apartment on 30th Street, says the black guy, and a woman laughing,
but I don’t know what I was doing there. The boy frees the black guy from his
chains. Freed, he walks like a kind of robocop. A zombie robocop. Don’t attack
me, says the colonel’s son, I’m your friend. I understand, says the black guy,
who goes to a shelf and takes down an assault rifle. When the scientists come
back, the black guy greets them with a volley of fire. Meanwhile the boy frees
Julie and tells her that they have to flee again. They kiss. The soldiers try to
take out the black guy. As Julie and her boyfriend are sneaking away, she frees
the Mexicans. More soldiers arrive. The bullets destroy some containers where
body parts are kept. Viscera and spinal columns crawl over the floor of the
laboratory. A siren begins to shriek. In this pitched battle it isn’t clear
which side has the advantage, or even if there really are sides, not just
individuals fighting for their own lives and for the deaths of the others. Over
the PA a voice is repeating: Block the passages on level five. My son! shouts
Colonel Reynolds and rushes down to level five like a madman.
Colonel Landovski shoots the black guy to bits and is devoured in turn
by the Mexican girl. The soldiers repel an attack mounted by bloody pieces of
human flesh. The second attack, however, breaks through their lines of defense
and they’re devoured by tiny scraps of raw meat. There are more and more
zombies. The battle becomes totally chaotic. The colonel reaches level five.
Through a window he sees his son and Julie, and gestures to show that the
passage is still open, there is still an escape route. The colonel’s son takes
Julie by the hand and they head in the direction that his father indicated. I’m
hurting all over, says Julie. Don’t start that again, says the boy, when we get
away from here you’ll feel better. Do you believe me? I believe you, says
Julie.
In the passage that hasn’t yet been blocked, Colonel Reynolds appears,
unarmed, his shirt drenched with sweat, not only because he hasn’t stopped
running but also because the temperature on level five has increased
dramatically. Colonel Reynolds’ face has been transfigured. It could be said
that his expression resembles that of Abraham. With every cell in his body he
calls out his son’s name and repeats how dearly he loves him. His military
career, his scientific research, duty, honor and his country are all swept away
by the force of love. Here, through here. Follow me. Hurry up. Soon the doors
will shut automatically. Come with me and you’ll be able to escape. All he gets
in response is the sad gaze of his son, who at this moment, and perhaps for the
first time,
knows
more than his father. The father at one end of the
passage. The son at the other end. And suddenly the doors shut and they’re
separated forever.
Behind the son there’s a kind of furnace. It isn’t clear whether the
furnace was there already or whether the fire caused by the zombie rebellion has
spread. It’s some blaze. Julie and the boy hold hands. Come on, Julie, says the
boy, don’t be afraid, nothing will separate us now. Meanwhile, on the other
side, the colonel is trying to break down the door, in vain. His son and Julie
walk toward the fire. On the other side, the colonel beats at the door with his
fists. His knuckles go red with blood. I’m not afraid, says Julie. I love you,
says young Reynolds. On the other side, the colonel is trying to break down the
door, in vain. The young lovers walk toward the fire and disappear. The screen
goes an intense red. The only sound is a machine gun hammering. Then an
explosion, screams, groans, electrical sparking. On the other side, shut off
from all this, the colonel is trying to break down the door, in vain.
S
CHOLARS
OF
S
ODOM
for Celina Manzoni
I.
It’s 1972 and I can see V. S. Naipaul strolling through the
streets of Buenos Aires. Well, sometimes he’s strolling, but sometimes, when
he’s on his way to meetings or keeping appointments, his gait is quick and his
eyes take in only what he needs to see in order to reach his destination with a
minimum of bother, whether it’s a private dwelling or, more often, a restaurant
or a café, since many of those who’ve agreed to meet him have chosen a public
place, as if they were intimidated by this peculiar Englishman, or as if they’d
been disconcerted by the author of
Miguel Street
and
A House for
Mr. Biswas
when they met him in the flesh and had thought: Well, I
didn’t think it would be like this, or: This isn’t the man I’d imagined, or:
Nobody told me. So there he is, Naipaul, and it seems that all he can notice are
outward movements, but in fact he’s noticing inward movements too, although he
interprets them in his own way, sometimes arbitrarily, and he’s moving through
Buenos Aires in the year 1972 and writing as he moves or perhaps only wanting to
write as his legs move through that strange city, and he’s still young, forty
years old, but he already has a considerable body of work behind him, a body of
work that doesn’t weigh him down or prevent him from moving briskly through
Buenos Aires when he has an appointment to keep — the weight of the work, that’s
something to which we shall have to return, the weight and the pride that he
takes in his work, the weight and the responsibility, which don’t prevent his
legs from moving nimbly or his hand from rising to hail a taxi, as he acts in
character, like the man he is, a man who keeps his appointments punctually — but
he
is
weighed down by the work when he goes strolling through Buenos
Aires without appointments to exercise his British punctuality, without any
pressing obligations, just walking along those strange avenues and streets,
through that city in the southern hemisphere, so like the cities of the northern
hemisphere, and yet nothing like them at all, a hole, a void that someone has
suddenly inflated, a show that is strictly for local consumption; that’s when he
feels the weight of the work, and it’s tiring to carry that weight as he walks,
it exhausts him, it’s irritating and shameful.
II.
Many years ago, before V. S. Naipaul — a writer whom I hold
in high regard, by the way — won the Nobel Prize, I tried to write a story about
him, with the title “Scholars of Sodom.” The story began in Buenos Aires, where
Naipaul had gone to write the long article on Eva Perón that was later included
in a book published in Spain by Seix Barral in 1983. In the story, Naipaul
arrived in Buenos Aires, I think it was his second visit to the city, and took a
cab — and that’s where I got stuck, which doesn’t say much for my powers of
imagination. I had some other scenes in mind that I didn’t get around to
writing. Mainly meetings and visits. Naipaul at newspaper offices. Naipaul at
the home of a writer and political activist. Naipaul at the home of an
upper-class literary lady. Naipaul making phone calls, returning to his hotel
late at night, staying up and diligently making notes. Naipaul observing people.
Sitting at a table in a famous café trying not to miss a single word. Naipaul
visiting Borges. Naipaul returning to England and going through his notes. A
brief but engaging account of the following series of events: the election of
Perón’s candidate, Perón’s return, the election of Péron, the first symptoms of
conflict within the Peronist camp, the right-wing armed groups, the Montoneros,
the death of Perón, his widow’s presidency, the indescribable López Rega, the
army’s position, violence flaring up again between right- and left-wing
Peronists, the coup, the dirty war, the killings. But I might be getting all
mixed up. Maybe Naipaul’s article stopped before the coup; it probably came out
before it was known how many had disappeared, before the scale of the atrocities
was confirmed. In my story, Naipaul simply walked through the streets of Buenos
Aires and somehow had a presentiment of the hell that would soon engulf the
city. In that respect his article was prophetic, a modest, minor prophecy,
nothing to match Sábato’s
Abbadon the Exterminator
, but with a modicum
of good will it could be seen as a member of the same family, a family of
nihilist works paralyzed by horror. When I say “paralyzed,” I mean it literally,
not as a criticism. I’m thinking of the way some small boys freeze when suddenly
confronted by an unforeseen horror, unable even to shut their eyes. I’m thinking
of the way some girls have been known to die from a heart attack before the
rapist has finished with them. Some literary artists are like those boys and
girls. And that’s how Naipaul was in my story, in spite of himself. He kept his
eyes open and maintained his customary lucidity. He had what the Spanish call
bad milk
, a kind of spleen that immunized him against appeals to
vulgar sentimentality. But in his nights of wandering around Buenos Aires, he,
or his antennae, also picked up the static of hell. The problem was that he
didn’t know how to extract the messages from that noise, a predicament that
certain writers, certain literary artists, find particularly unsettling.
Naipaul’s vision of Argentina could hardly have been less flattering. As the
days went by, he came to find not only the city but the country as a whole
insufferably aggravating. His uneasy feeling about the place seemed to be
intensified by every visit, every new acquaintance he made. If I remember
rightly, in my story Naipaul had arranged to meet Bioy Casares at a tennis club.
Bioy didn’t play any more, but he still went there to drink vermouth and chat
with his friends and sit in the sun. The writer and his friends at the tennis
club struck Naipaul as monuments to feeblemindedness, living illustrations of
how a whole country could sink into imbecility. His meetings with journalists
and politicians and union leaders left him with the same impression. After those
exhausting days, Naipaul dreamed of Buenos Aires and the pampas, of Argentina as
a whole, and his dreams invariably turned into nightmares. Argentineans are not
especially popular in the rest of Latin America, but I can assure you that no
Latin American has written a critique as devastating as Naipaul’s. Not even a
Chilean. Once, in a conversation with Rodrigo Fresán, I asked him what he
thought of Naipaul’s essay. Fresán, whose knowledge of literature in English is
encyclopedic, barely remembered it, even though Naipaul is one of his favorite
authors. But to get back to the story: Naipaul listens and notes down his
impressions but mostly he walks around Buenos Aires. And suddenly, without
giving the reader any sort of warning, he starts talking about sodomy. Sodomy as
an Argentinean custom. Not just among homosexuals — in fact, now that I come
think of it, I can’t remember Naipaul mentioning homosexuality at all. He is
talking about heterosexual relationships. You can imagine Naipaul,
inconspicuously positioned in a bar (or a corner store — why not, since we’re
imagining), listening to the conversations of journalists, who start off by
talking about politics, how the country has merrily set its course toward the
abyss, and then, to cheer themselves up, they move on to amorous encounters,
sexual conquests and lovers. All of their faceless lovers have at some point,
Naipaul reminds himself, been sodomized. I took her up the ass, he writes. It’s
an act that in Europe, he reflects, would be regarded as shameful, or at least
passed over in silence, but in the bars of Buenos Aires it’s something to brag
about, a sign of virility, of ultimate possession, since if you haven’t fucked
your lover or your girlfriend or your wife up the ass, you haven’t really taken
possession of her. And just as Naipaul is appalled by violence and
thoughtlessness in politics, the sexual custom of “taking her up the ass,” which
he sees as a kind of violation, fills him ineluctably with disgust and contempt:
a contempt of Argentineans that intensifies as the article proceeds. No one, it
seems, is exempt from this pernicious custom. Well, no, there is one person
quoted in the essay who rejects sodomy, though not with Naipaul’s vehemence. The
others, to a greater or lesser degree, accept and
practice
it, or have
done so at some point, which leads Naipaul to conclude that Argentina is an
unrepentantly macho country (whose machismo is thinly disguised by a dramaturgy
of death and blood) and that in this hell of unfettered masculinity, Perón is
the supermacho and Evita is the woman possessed,
totally
possessed. Any
civilized society, thinks Naipaul, would condemn this sexual practice as
aberrant and degrading, but not Argentina. In the article or perhaps in my
story, Naipaul is seized by an escalating vertigo. His strolls become the
endless wanderings of a sleepwalker. He begins to feel queasy. It’s as if, by
their mere physical presence, the Argentineans he’s visiting and talking to are
causing a feeling of nausea that threatens to overwhelm him. He tries to find an
explanation for their pernicious habit. And it’s only logical, he thinks, to
trace it back to the origins of the Argentinean people, descended from
impoverished Spanish and Italian peasants. When those barbaric immigrants
arrived on the pampas they brought their sexual practices along with their
poverty. He seems to be satisfied with this explanation. In fact, it’s so
obvious that he accepts it as valid without further consideration. I remember
that when I read the paragraph in which Naipaul explains what he takes to be the
origin of the Argentinean habit of sodomy, I was somewhat taken aback. As well
as being logically flawed, the explanation has no basis in historical or social
facts. What did Naipaul know about the sexual customs of Spanish and Italian
rural laborers from 1850 to 1925? Maybe, while touring the bars on Corrientes
late one night, he heard a sportswriter recounting the sexual exploits of his
grandfather or great-grandfather, who, when night fell over Sicily or Asturias,
used to go fuck the sheep. Maybe. In my story, Naipaul closes his eyes and
imagines a Mediterranean shepherd boy fucking a sheep or a goat. Then the
shepherd boy caresses the goat and falls asleep. The shepherd boy dreams in the
moonlight: he sees himself many years later, many pounds heavier, many inches
taller, in possession of a large mustache, married, with numerous children, the
boys working on the farm, tending the flock that has multiplied (or dwindled),
the girls busy in the house or the garden, subjected to his molestations or to
those of their brothers, and finally his wife, queen and slave, sodomized
nightly, taken up the ass — a picturesque vignette that owes more to the
erotico-bucolic desires of a nineteenth-century French pornographer than to
harsh reality, which has the face of a castrated dog. I’m not saying that the
good peasant couples of Sicily and Valencia
never
practiced sodomy, but
surely not with the regularity of a custom destined to flourish beyond the seas.
Now if Naipaul’s immigrants had come from Greece, maybe the idea would merit
consideration. Argentina might have been better off with a General Peronidis.
Not much better off perhaps, but even so. Ah, if the Argentineans spoke Demotic.
A Buenos Aires Demotic, combining the slangs of Piraeus and Salonica. With a
gaucho Fierrescopulos, a faithful copy of Ulysses, and a Macedonio Hernandikis
hammering the bed of Procrustes into shape. But, for better or for worse,
Argentina is what it is and has the origins it has, which is to say, of this you
may be sure, that it comes from everywhere but Paris.