Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino

by Julián Herbert

  BRING ME THE HEAD OF QUENTIN TARANTINO

  Also by Julián Herbert in English

  Tomb Song

  The House of the Pain of Others

  BRING ME

  THE HEAD OF

  QUENTIN

  TARANTINO

  STORIES

  Julián Herbert

  Translated from the Spanish by

  Christina MacSweeney

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2017 by Julián Herbert

  English translation © 2020 by Christina MacSweeney

  Originally published in 2017 as Tráiganme la cabeza de Quentin Tarantino by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, Mexico City.

  The author would like to thank the Mexican Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte for its support.

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-64445-041-3

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-136-6

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2020

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956748

  Cover design: Walter Green

  Contents

  The Ballad of Mother Teresa of Calcutta

  M. L. Estefanía

  White Paper

  NEETS

  The Roman Wedding

  There Where We Stood

  Caries

  The Dog’s Head

  Z

  Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino

  The Ballad of Mother Teresa of Calcutta

  For Armando J. Guerra and Javier Rodríguez Marcos

  Stop kidding yourself: that thing you call “human experience” is just a massacre of onion layers. I use the word massacre in the generic sense, as any old interchangeable metaphor. Although, when you come to think of it, nothing tastes so much of blood as a dismembered onion, sliced on the glass surface of a table, smashed with a knife handle, or quartered with deep cuts. It must be the smell. The spray of clear liquid blinds the eyes of predators with tears and makes everything reek of vegetal flesh and hemorrhage, of hard, crystallized iron, blood flow, and vapor rather than solid matter. It’s also true that when crushed, with its peeled, shorn stalk still attached, the onion looks less like a plant than a dead bug. So, yes: don’t kid yourself, that thing you call “human experience” is just a massacre of onion layers. There’s no getting away from it, particularly when it comes to telling a story. The first thing we do is choose the most perfect, most transparent, least damaged onion layer that happens to come our way.

  That being the case, a few weeks ago I suggested to an old friend (after the signing of a contract and submission of an invoice on my part in exchange for the promise of a given sum of money) that his memoirs should open with the following anecdote:

  Max took advantage of his rank in the French offices of Petróleos Mexicanos to fly from Paris to Montpellier. From there he took a cab to Sète to visit the tomb of Paul Valéry. It was the fall of 1981. Jorge Díaz Serrano had just stepped down as head of the state-owned company after cutting the price of oil. As part of the strategy of future presidential candidate Miguel de la Madrid to curb the extravagance of the soon-to-be-defunct government, the European headquarters had, for months, been pounded by the heavy artillery of auditors. Max, however, was not anxious; he merely found the situation irritating: the loss of his company car and driver was an annoyance. He’d spent the spring and summer commuting to and from work on the metro. Every weekday morning, he admired the gradual decomposition of the lacquered hairstyle of a chic, unwashed Parisian office worker. It was the image and scent of that putrefied hair spray that led him to open the safe containing the details of a government bank account to which he had exclusive discretional access. The balance was close to ten thousand dollars. Max assigned part of this sum to cover the expenses of his journey to Languedoc-Rousillon.

  He was unmoved by the sight of Valéry’s tomb, located on a secondary avenue of the necropolis and perched ignobly on a downward slope, very close to a standpipe with a leaky faucet. The coastal cemetery did, however, seem to him a perfect flawed gem, with its tombstones in the form of family albums, the roses made of glass, metal, or plaster in black granite vases, and the spectacular view of the Mediterranean. And then there was Sète: the market stinking of fisherman’s ass; the Portuguese migrants, easily prostituted among the rocks on the shoreline; the bars where the only dish on the menu was also the house specialty: grilled clams and vin de pays de l’Hérault … All so pathetically picturesque that Max decided to make his stay indefinite.

  That Wednesday, early in the afternoon, Basurto called.

  “We’re in the shit, Doc. They’re taking us apart.”

  Maybe it was because that morning he’d had sex with a construction worker equipped with a laudable combination of menacing muscles and passive preferences, maybe because he’d ordered a kir royale with his lunchtime clams—something he rarely did; whatever the case, Max was feeling invulnerable.

  “Tell them to go to hell.”

  “I’ve just handed the keys to your office to some middle-management type from the embassy,” replied Basurto. “Good luck, Doc.”

  And then he hung up.

  Max let the handset fall to one side of the desk. His best bet would be to check out of the hotel, buy a new suit and tie, and take a plane to Paris. Or Mexico, he thought. While he was visualizing these possibilities, he lay naked on the bed, groaning:

  “Harrrupps, harrrupps.”

  (Max always says that a groan, uttered while lying completely naked on a rented bed, is like transcendental meditation.)

  “Harrrupps.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Qu’est-ce qui se passe là-bas, merde?”

  Max sprang from the bed.

  “Je vais bien, merci.”

  It took him a couple of hours and a great many costly international conference calls to get a full picture of the situation. Things were worse than he’d realized: not only had they sealed his office and frozen the official accounts at his disposal, but also they were discussing the possibility of declaring him a fugitive from justice. His immediate boss demanded that he present himself in Mexico City to respond to charges of an alleged megafraud involving overpricing in the acquisition of replacement parts. In addition, the auditors had found a cellar in Paris, registered in the name of PEMEX, full of assault weapons thought to be destined for the Nicaraguan government. Max hadn’t even been aware of the existence of that cache. He laughed silently: for five years he’d been the valet parking for delegates and government ministers who, without consulting him, were dreaming up and carrying out lucrative scams. Now he was going to have to take the rap, a
nd his prosecutors would be the same individuals who were lining their pockets while handing him tips. Although he’d been in Europe for eight years, he decided that he’d never in fact left Mexico.

  The next plane from Montpellier to Paris was scheduled for eleven that night. Max managed to get a seat on a connecting flight to Mexico City, departing from Charles de Gaulle at six in the morning. He could take a cab and spend three breakneck hours in his Parisian apartment. Perhaps. There was always the option of killing time in a bar, except that he wanted to stay sober until he showed up at the head office; he had a mild stomachache and it seemed stupid to go on abusing his digestive system twenty-four hours before the decisive battle. He could also cruise around Pigalle and find a prostitute, but he was in no mood to stick his dick into the amoeba-infested rectum of some obtuse, melodramatic migrant woman. To his way of thinking, the most irrational but also the most healthful choice would be to spend a solitary, sleepless night in the corridors of the airport.

  I know the details of this story because I live under a curse: people like to tell me things and I can’t stop them, because that’s how I earn a living. I run a consultancy that specializes in evaluating and editing memories. Have you appreciated the juicy anecdotes told by some dull mayor at a patriotic dinner? Do you feel sympathy for the jaded singer bled dry by her handsome young husband? Are you moved by a book relating the hard work and personal tragedies of a telecommunications magnate? Do you by turns relish and feel horrified by the clever remarks and murders of some narco sicario who has been in prison for twenty years? Do the justifications of the stocky megalomaniac former president who left your country in ruins intrigue you? Then it’s me you love: the majority of those revelations were designed in my office. I’m a personal memories coach, and that’s why there isn’t a blank page I wouldn’t dare to get overfamiliar with. I’m the true author of the history of Mexico.

  Everyone calls me El Negro. Yesterday I was a miracle worker, today I’m not even a shadow. I write anomalously, anonymously, by the piece. Every now and then I achieve some exceptional prose. I could have been one of the many fleeting new voices of Mexican literature, one of those kids who sell a handful of books over four or five years, only to become what they really are: glorified absurdities. I could have been one of them but I refused. Instead I studied business at Monterrey Tech. I refused because writers are a demented gang on overdrive who wouldn’t be capable of finding a hat to shove up their own asses. I refused because I’m smart: I want to be corrupted by money, not flattery.

  I discovered my talent (not for writing but for listening) in third grade. Miss Diana would occasionally ask me to stay back during recess to help her organize and check my classmates’ homework. I was more than pleased to agree: she was a freckled redhead who smelled slightly of paella but also of lime juice, and wore tight-fitting white tops with wide necks, the sort I’ve always bought for my women. While she was putting ticks or crosses in notebooks with a bicolor pencil, she would tell me, all teary-eyed, about the dreadful things her boyfriend did to her. In a trembling, depraved voice (I know it was depraved because I was a child and she transmitted her narrative through unintelligible, moist murmurs), my teacher would detail those obscenities in terms that excluded the flesh. And that’s why the images of torture and sexual abuse that came to my mind at the age of nine now appear in my adult fantasies as large-format, grainy close-ups showing people having sex with their clothes on.

  Before the bell sounded, Miss Diana would dry her tears and pretend to regret her disclosures:

  “I don’t know why I tell you these things. You’re too young to know what demons adults are,” she’d say, stroking my hair and then asking hopefully, “When you grow up, you’re never going to treat your girlfriend like that, are you?”

  I’d say no, I never would. Then later, when I got home, I’d masturbate, evoking the catch in her husky voice until I finally felt a dull thump in my coccyx. Ejaculating before you can actually ejaculate is one of the most brutal experiences I know.

  Was I ever really a child? I guess not. I’ve always been an ear: a fleshy seashell that oozes wax and strains everything it dreams through tiny teeth.

  Max enters Charles de Gaulle with the bitterness of an exile, an aerial Aeneas choosing to pass through the Great Gate of Horn—the waters of the North Atlantic—en route to Hades, to the Federal District thereof. The year 1981 is the Paleozoic era of the duty-free zone, and it’s midnight and all the shops and counters are closed. With nothing better to do than inspect the crevices of Paul Andreu’s architectonic octopus, Max, whose luggage consists of only one bag, walks back and forth along the length of three of the terminal’s four stories: like someone playing a three-dimensional game of hopscotch, he rides the Plexiglas snakes-and-ladders escalators that will become a classic pop image after the release of the Alan Parsons Project’s second album, I Robot, a record the recently dismissed Mexican official will retain in his vinyl collection for over three decades but will never dare to play. He uses up two hours in that way. Lights are being switched off and the passenger areas are in shadow. He stops a couple of times in the restrooms, goes into a cubicle, and shits. Diarrhea. Nothing serious, just a twinge on the left side of his abdomen, and then a solitary lumpy stream of excrement deposited in one of the many heads and Cyclops eyes of the plumbing. Having had enough of traversing the airport’s intestinal tunnels, he goes to his departure gate. It’s still a long time until his plane leaves. He knows he’ll be bored while pondering, amid all the metal and glass, the numbed solitariness of his buttocks against the hard seat. But there’s nothing else on offer: airports are totalitarian states. He whiles away another hour looking out the windows at the blue and red lights on the runway. He has a French gay porno novel in his bag and a copy of The Hydra Head published by Argos: the only book by Carlos Fuentes he has liked enough to finish. But he doesn’t feel like opening either of them. He’s tired, wants to sleep. He’s never been a great reader, even though he’s spent five years doing a good job of pretending he is. Left-wing intellectualism is part of the uniform of Mexican bureaucracy. But books bore him. Movies are his thing. He’s capable of watching five in a row without losing interest, memorizing the credits, the precision of the framing, the sensitive dialogue in Deux hommes dans la ville or Les valseuses, the unnatural intonation of Rocco and His Brothers, which has him hooked …

  He’d arrived in Europe on a temporary visa. It was 1973, he was twenty-nine years old, and a bilateral agreement between the Mexican and Yugoslav governments had furnished him a scholarship to study film directing in Belgrade. He’d arranged his itinerary to include a week in Paris before the start of classes. During that time, his desire to become a socialist cineast was quenched by the vision of the city he’d dreamed of since childhood. The flight to Yugoslavia left without him. He went through a precarious period as a clochard, later doing any job that came his way: from a porter in a sex hotel to the ghostwriter of porno-exotic novels featuring Cecile & Gilles. Then José López Portillo’s government opened a Parisian branch of PEMEX to administer the oil wealth and allow bureaucrats to charge their lavish vacations to the public purse. Thanks to a recommendation from a former boss, our frustrated filmmaker was employed as overseer of the caprices of power: a Ricardo Montalbán for the Fantasy Island of Mexican corruption.

  (Max doesn’t know it yet, but this will be the last time he’ll set foot on French soil. He’ll manage to avoid imprisonment and, after a few years, will regain the right to work in the public sector. His later life will be spent as the head of a provincial electoral body. However, the blue and red lights shining in the distance on the runway will be his final souvenir of Paris. That, and the predawn duel with Mother Teresa of Calcutta.)

  (Every bottle of whisky has a tropical soul: once you’ve undressed it, you note that its ass is bigger and hotter than you thought. As I write this, I’m drinking the last shot from this bottle of Macallan and leafing through a pile of unpaid invoices. My busines
s is going through a temporary crisis. I say “temporary” because I’m confident that this story will serve as a warning to my debtors.)

  Sometime around four in the morning, a man appears at the departure gate. Max observes him: he’s wearing jeans, a drill shirt, a beige jacket, and has a Nikon camera hanging around his neck. Not five minutes pass before another man, also armed with a camera, enters the waiting area and stands by the first. They joke together in French. It’s obvious they haven’t slept from the way they constantly knead their eyes. The one with the jacket is, in Max’s opinion, good-looking: not too young, wiry, graying prematurely, and with manically intense blue eyes, Samuel Beckett eyes. Max tries to catch his attention but the guy ignores him. The next person to arrive is a member of the ground crew—cute, a little heavily made-up, wearing a small red hat, perhaps not very bright: the photographers make crude jokes about her, which she appears not to notice, or maybe she goes through life looking dumb as a protection against lust, the way las brujeres do on TV, thinks Max. A pale, thin, downy-cheeked priest joins them. After him comes an obese woman who introduces herself to the huddle as the public relations officer of something Max can’t make out. Things are livening up in the departure lounge: another couple of photographers appear, three journalists holding Moleskines as if they were IDs, an elderly nun, two TV cameramen and their reporter with no equipment other than a scrawny butt, a big black man, impossible to miss because he’s wearing a red-and-green outfit, and whose V for Victory torso is a delight to Max’s eyes … For a moment the fugitive from PEMEX wonders if he himself might not be the focus of all this early morning paraphernalia. Maybe his situation has been made public and French journalists are about to bombard him with questions about his vile, corrupt behavior toward the Mexican nation, and a priest with the look of an ephebe wants to offer him solace by hearing his confession, and an obese public relations expert is here to plead his case to some judge or other, and some kind soul has sent a guardian angel in the shape of a muscular black body he could, cash down, drool over in the airport restrooms /