by Louis Armand
Regen told me once about how, in primitive tribes, people would try to get rid of their pain by beating a tethered goat. A scapegoat, she called it. When everything you can see’s violent and futile, you try to pass it off onto someone or something else. Anything else. A wall, a carcass. You take an object and fill it up with all your hate and bury it somewhere no-one’s ever supposed to find it.
I used to think about that sometimes in the wrecker’s yard, our secret place, our haven. Like the old bathtub out in the vineyard, it was a kind of lifeboat on a hostile sea. Lying with Regen there beside me, touching me, her words in my ear. I thought about her constantly. Fantasised about the time when we’d be free. I fantasised about her even while we fucked. Her voice, like a voice you hear in dreams, pouring over me, through me, giving form to a shapelessness within. Thoughts I was barely conscious of. Deadly thoughts. Murderous thoughts. But she taught me patience, also. Deliberation. She ordered the chaos. Defined purpose. Except that revenge is never the thing it seems.
10. NUESTRA SEÑORA DE LA PAZ
You have to learn to use time, instead of trying to kill it. Blake told me that, walking the streets of La Paz, cocaine dialling his mind into a higher state. As he walked, he created. He moved through the crowd like the shadow of a rope dancer. With a word he made the fields and terraced hillsides. Dropping a reed blossom, he made water flow.
The market stalls as we passed them spilled over with the smell of raw meat, goat stomachs, chicken feet. Last days of the wet season.
We’d met by chance, at the second class bus station. He was leaning against the wall beside a payphone, scanning the crowd. I heard his voice before I saw who it belonged to.
“Hey, muchacho.” A hand coming out from the shadows. I flinched. But instead of a knife, it held a cigarette. “Tienes fuego?” I picked it for a sucker move, shoulders tense. The crowd was blocking the exit. He shook his head, showing his teeth.
I mumbled something and tried to edge away.
“Ty vole!” he laughed, pulling an American lighter from his shirt pocket and snapping a flame out of it. He took a long drag and scrutinised me through slit eyes before he exhaled, blowing smoke in my face. “Your Spanish stinks, muchacho. You talk like a goddamn Slovak.”
*
Blake made it his business to ride over to the bus station every other day, to size up the new arrivals, the girls from the coca fields of Chapare. The militias were cracking down on the growers, muscling them out. Refugee kids streamed into the city slums. Blake hustled like a pimp. Flesh-trading.
My instinct was to stay clear. It was the right one, but I didn’t. The very thing that set my mind in flight attracted me. Something about him, some signal, some immediate sense of danger. Not that I was afraid of him. I was afraid of myself. Something deep down inside me, something I’d glimpsed the night Regen disappeared.
I’d been running ever since then. First Hamburg. Night train up the river. Border cat-and-mouse. And from Hamburg in a merchant ship to Veracruz. The vast oceanic sense of my predicament. It closed in on me like a prison cell. Fingers tapping against the bulkheads – the many-headed beast of insomnia – a whirlpool at the end of the night, waiting to drag you down into the depths – a gaping mouth cropped out with teeth.
In Veracruz I lay in a cubicle room drinking myself unconscious, expecting at any moment to have my throat slit. Visions of naked-lightbulb desperation. Drifting through a bleak, monstrous fog. Sobered up long enough to hitch a bus west through Zapatista country, military checkpoints. In Tapachula, hustled on the zócalo. Learnt to use a knife. Learnt that when you commit a crime, you’d better know what you’re doing. Smuggled cross-border. Big ugly kid. Dark ancient Tartar blood. Black hair, slit eyes, ungainly. Maricón. Slept in the markets among the dogs. Camouflage.
My throat itched all the way south to Panama City, Trujillo, Moquegua. Drank to find a still-point, without ever getting there. To dissolve the floors of memory. The flaws of memory. Stealing from life-post to life-post. Multiplying my petty crimes. On the other side of time, a face leered after me, blood in its eyes. Demon of nightmares. Supai. Death god of the ancient Incas. God of sacrificed children. God of insatiable hunger. I could hear everywhere the swarms closing in. The swarms in the waves of the sea. In the wind. In the hollow chasm of the ear.
A toss of a coin put me on a bus to La Paz. The treacherous road inland from the coast, the mountain road winding and winding. Black serpent through hot jungle. Black serpent, eyes afire, twisting and thrashing. Brain-juice fermenting deep down in its gut – spleen, gall bladder, pancreas. Coiling down through primitive invertebrate nauseas. The road turns and turns. Spewed-out onto the altiplano. I drink and it turns. The earth turns under it. The moon over the high cordillera. Over grey scrubland strewn with trash. Egg-like. Irregular. Cracking open. A snake’s head forcing itself out.
*
“The world,” Blake said, “is the great educator.” He named himself after a dead poet. A madman. An evangelist of the son who kills the father and becomes the father. A naked revolutionary in the garden of earthly delights. “Only in vice and weakness,” his voice said, “are men born equal. In the free world, every man’s a gaoler and every man’s in a prison of his own making. Democracy? The freeman disdains his freedom. He’d rather set himself in chains. Never forget, it’s us or them.”
Like a guerillero retreating to the last outposts of sanity in a war against the mass dream, Blake drifted. He did everything and nothing. He raped and pillaged. He survived. He went all the way down and made it back out.
“The ethics of history is man himself. But ethics, or art, like a man, can be broken and twisted and snuffed-out.” So said Blake. I tried to imagine him in a secret police cell under Bartolomějská street. A pillowcase over his head doused with piss. Cigarette burns. Rubber hose. Refusing to confess his crime. Which alone was his crime.
Blake was no hero. He survived on instinct. Opportunity. Paradox. Shovelling shit wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to a man. He took one look at me at the bus station in La Paz and laughed. “Ty vole!” The small woman behind the ticket counter watching us under heavy eyelids. A large Hispano-Olivetti beside her. Breasts under white cotton blouse sagging on folded arms. Two sunburnt foreigners talking gibberish.
“How old are you?” he asked, out on the street. But he cut himself short. “Forget it,” he said. “Who gives a fuck how old anyone is. You live, shit and die. And any day short of the last is old enough. May as well take what you can. This place is full of kids who’ve run away from something. Orphans, a lot of them. Grist for El Alto,” pointing through the rain at the sprawl.
La Paz was built at the bottom of a canyon, high up on a plateau. El Alto is the slum spilling over the rim. A bleak hillside of raw concrete, corrugated iron and sheet plastic. A proletarian warren of brothels, coke dens and militia hold-outs owned by somebody. Nuestra Señora de la Paz. Our Lady of Peace. Blake lived in the border zone, a mile above the city, in a room in the courtyard of an old infirmary. A dead tree stuck up through the floor. Rain cascaded through the roof. Flies asleep everywhere. He shared the place with a growing tribe of old women and whores. They traded on the kids he brought from the station. He worked them in, looked after them for a while, passed them on. I thought of Regen. St Pauli. The Ace of Spades. Dead thoughts.
Justification was never part of Blake’s game. “Never apologise,” he said. “And never explain.” Said I had to work my mind if I didn’t want to end up in the hole. I’d made do with chance. Slow anger. Mind of an ox. I tried not to stand out. Shrunk down into myself. People looked through me, like there was something they didn’t want to see. This big ugly shape bearing over them.
I can’t remember how I ended up living in that room, in the old infirmary above La Paz. I was always looking for somewhere to hide. To go numb.
*
In the frozen late December rain, we rode in a taxi through narrow streets. People thronged around the cantinas, firelight gl
owing on faces leering from doorways. Blake stopped the taxi at different places along the way. Buying. Selling. Cutting deals. We waited at a bodega for someone he knew. One of his connections. We drank dark Brazilian rum. There was a girl, pregnant, maybe six months, with green plastic sandals and a blanket, sitting on a crate inside the doorway, a basket full of cheap umbrellas at her feet. Part of her skirt tucked between her knees to stop it from getting wet. Blake said something to her. Then the connection arrived. Money changed hands. When we left, the girl came too.
The girl had a name I couldn’t remember. Blake knew her. The infirmary, when we finally got there, was a derelict colonial pile teetering on the brink behind a high wall. The wall was covered in old torn-up election posters and graffiti. Broken bottle-glass cemented on top. Downstairs it was quiet. Blake led us through half-a-dozen rooms to the converted courtyard. Light filtered down from an upstairs balcony. Music.
The girl with the green sandals sat on a mattress on the floor with her basket of umbrellas while Blake kicked on some jazz and laid out a dozen lines on an old writing desk. I stood there taking in the surroundings, feeling generally out of place. The girl gave me a vague look, the way you look at something you don’t really see. If it weren’t for my face, I’d probably be invisible. It’s not distinctive, or the cops would’ve had a field day with me, but it’s ugly. An ugliness you don’t forget even if you can’t describe it.
I’d arrived from the coast with nothing but the ratty Mexican suit I was wearing. A passport. A razor. A stash sewn into my boots. I’d left a bag and a book in a hotel room in Trujillo. Nothing much in the bag but dirty linen. The book was a sheaf of yellow dog-eared pages held together by a thick red elastic band. I remember it because it had no name and it was the first book I’d ever read from beginning to end, though it never seemed to finish. It was about everything and nothing. For a while I found in words the emptiness and silence I’d searched for in the bottle. But it wasn’t enough. What the words merely communicated, I needed to become.
“Welcome to La Paz,” Blake said. “Make yourself at home.” I took a plastic fold-up chair that was upturned in a corner and sat on it. The place stank of mould and dead cigarettes. I leaned back and waited. Blake snorted. “You’ve got to try this shit,” he said, shaking his head. “Better than anything money can buy.” He passed a rolled-up dollar bill. I did a couple of lines and he was right.
The girl yawned. She was barely more than thirteen. Blake said something and she put her basket aside and turned around on her knees, the mattress sagging beneath her. There wasn’t any ceremony. He lifted her skirt, undid his fly, spat on his cock and fucked her. The girl picked her teeth the whole time. When he finished he went back to the desk to do a couple of more lines. Jerked his head at me to take a turn with the girl and walked out, singing as he did:
I love you my little child
Your eyes are two salt statues
That melt like a beautiful day
In the hollow of anyone’s hand.
There were voices in the corridor. Laughter. The girl looked over her shoulder at me. She had a face like a million others. Asked if she could do it lying down this time. Her back ached. She spread herself out on the mattress, skirt gathered up in folds beneath her paunch. I thought of the dumb life taking form within her. Afterwards, Blake peals off a couple of American dollars. “For the kid.” She seemed to accept all this with calm dignity. Bored. He stroked her head. We went back outside. Left the girl in the street. A few blocks down, Blake led the way through a gate into a garage with a fire burning in a halved 40 gallon drum. The garage was full of people watching a football game on a television in the corner. A woman in an apron came and went, bringing food on plastic trays. Fried plantain. Salteñas. Humitas. Fritanga. Chicharrón. Boys trading cigarettes and booze. Singani. Pisco. Stale tobacco smoke. Quechua voices.
*
Things continued this way. We drank. Rode taxis. Cruised the bars. The purpose was fixed. A type of nihilistic rationale presided over everything. Months slipped by. The sun at altitude, razor-edged. The wind off the altiplano. I stumbled drunk from one night into the next, a carnival effigy. Another year of my sentence passed. I felt nothing, watching the dark-eyed Aymara girls. Daughters of conquistador slavery. Knee-high boots, dancing the Entradas. Los Caporales. Las Morenadas. Midnight behind the street markets. Parted thighs and mouths. We were descending into the time of Pachakuti. White noise chaos. Sleepless for weeks on end, strung out on coke. Smoke coiling from a cigarette, a girl’s blue ribbon, unconsciously caressing it.
Time began to lose its meaning. A sickness had taken hold of me. The mindless carnival turned ugly. I sat in the room and stared at a crack in the wall. I watched it, day and night. Sometimes voices came from the other side of it. Lights. Whispers. The infirmary filled with strangers. Men with machetes, fresh from Chonchoroco. There was violence brooding in the north, in the east. The militias were burning the villages.
“Pity them,” Blake said, “praying for someone to save them. The benign white god. General Banzer promises the little children democracy. But the Aymara have been slaves for centuries. Democracy’s just a word that’s pornographic and cheap.”
Blake preached revolt. Wirakocha. Dead trickster eyes. More men came. Often he’d leave with them, a traveller camouflaged in rags. Disappear for days on end then re-emerge in cocaine purgatory, face shrunken around his skull, eyes bulging. Eventually he didn’t come back. Nobody paid me any attention. The old women, the whores. I withered into myself, pulp and flesh. I slept. Time passed. A flash of light. Time stood still. I dreamed. Wild fever dreams. Gunfire across the terraces. The air boiling. When I opened my eyes again, my mother was hanging in the tree in the middle of the room. An ecstatic fixity of expression on her face. I sat there listening to the flies as her corpse revolved slowly at the end of its rope.
11. TEMPLE OF LOST SOULS
At the end of the nightmare, someone’s watching me. I know this as I knew it then. The spirit in the dark, behind the eyes, that sees everything I see and sees me also. In La Paz, Blake drove me like an alter-ego. I’d already gone to the bottom of the night and he led me deeper. “We live by extremes,” he said. “The rest is suicide, by the other means.” Where Regen taught patience, Blake taught excess. To know, to kill, to create. But there were no verbs in what he conjugated. Blake dealt by stolen language left incomplete, significations of mutual cruelty, chaos and derangement. And like every teacher, he was a myth.
Lying there in the courtyard in the infirmary, I couldn’t tell how long I’d been alone. I stared for hours at the phantom hanging in the tree until it seemed a fog inside my mind cleared. Then, sitting beneath the tree, I saw there was a boy. He had Blake’s eyes, I thought, as if it were a sign. When he noticed I was looking at him he stood and motioned for me to get up. I struggled. A smell of death came off me, like nail varnish. I swayed and only just managed to stay on my feet. After a while the room stopped spinning and the tree stood still.
The boy led me through the weirdly empty building to the scullery. There was water in a cistern and I drank from it like a man dying of thirst. The water threw up strange reflections. I felt the growth on my face. The slack, wax-like flesh. My eyes ached. I only wanted to sleep, but the boy wouldn’t let me. I could hear voices from some distant place. A rhythmic pounding on barred doors. The boy led me down into the cellar, in an impenetrable darkness. He lit a candle that danced and flickered off stone walls thick with slime. A tunnel veered off into nothingness. I stumbled and crawled. I felt a long tether dragging me along an infinite slope.
When daylight came again, we were somewhere in the El Alto sprawl. All around us, the scent of erupting violence. Distant plumes of tear gas. Echoes of gunfire. There was no rest. We pushed through the streets until the boy somehow conjured a taxi out of the throng. I watched faces blur through the taxi window. The journey was a depthless strip of blackened film punctuated by flaring lights, disconnected landscapes, unknown pe
ople, fever and brain sickness.
From La Paz we drifted north to Cobija. Across salt flats, mountains, lunar valleys. A man on the side of the road, beside a festering donkey. A truck with soldiers leaning out of it, lazily sweeping the scenery with their guns. We passed across the yawning, barren altiplano and the oceanous lakes. Vast stretches of delirium beneath an unrelenting sun. The red calligraphic disc of the heat at dusk. The room in the old infirmary travelled with me. In my mind it became smaller and smaller until, like the sun, it was the size and colour of a plum. A plum with a blackened stalk stuck up out of it and a shrivelled leaf hanging down. I swallowed it whole. The room became me. The corpse. The tree. I no longer knew if any of it was real. It didn’t have to be. It was an emblem. A mark on my burnt forehead. A third eye. A talisman.
The fever never left me. It varied only in intensity. Paranoia. Fear and trembling. From Cobija, across the border and the brown turbid waters of the Rio Acre into Brazil. Vine-entangled jungle paths. North. North-west. West. A demon with Blake’s eyes led me on. Night after night through frenzied landscapes. Then another border and a town called Contamana. And then jungle again. Struggling to keep a foothold. Telling myself I didn’t have the legs for it any more, if only I could lie down and sleep or die. But always another voice, hissing in my ear, driving me on, counting the steps.
