Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino

by Julián Herbert

  The circus and that toxic debacle taught me how to put my body on the line. It’s a lesson I forgot for years. Or rather, for years my only way of seeing was through a rearview mirror: my acclaimed photographic portraits of people destroyed in car crashes. At that time my sexuality was exultant. Abstinence is like a dome of excess where all the fantasies of resentful desire end up. Touching bodies, weighing their levels of vitality and mortality: it’s the most perfect form of love. And I made love to fat, thin, and old women; to teenagers obsessed by the almond scent of their own anuses on the fingers they licked; to skeletal women whose clitorises had more bite than pure chlorophyll; to divorcées who knew exactly when you should stop moving; to travelers with a talent for invoking the ghost of another man in your body; to very short housewives who warned you from the outset that they are not going to suck your dick; to prostitutes conscious of the moral superiority their salaries gave them; to firsttime orgasmers whose gratitude was deeply embarrassing; to beautiful blondes whose good manners made the whole thing feel like a sneeze; to actresses who came without moaning, looking at you obliquely through a fire … I made love to healthy women. That was my defect.

  I’d had it up to the back teeth with selling monumental frontpage tabloid images to art dealers and gallery managers. But more than anything, I hated having my passions so compartmentalized: sex in one place, acrobatics in another, and in a third vector—static, with no direction, severed from everything I thought real—my ability to register how a body is born into the state of grace of putrefaction. It was immediately clear to me that the only area where I could bring these three mysteries together was gonzo porn. My first option was necrophilia. I even managed to practice it on a couple of occasions. There’s no human experience beyond the reach of a bribe. The advantage of the dead was that they took my acrobatic spirit to the limits of improbability, particularly since I had to perform with a Sony HVR-V1U in one hand. But an insoluble aesthetic problem arose: I had to fake even the mildest expression of desire. The worst part isn’t the lack of an erection: Cialis solves that. It’s breaking a taboo and getting nothing more than boredom in exchange.

  The HIV hooker thing was a revelation I owe to my ex. She was, as usual, bending my ear about sexual ethics (I hate LGBTQ activists: they are all just closet nuns). She said: You can’t go around doing those acrobatics without a rubber (the thing is that I’ve never liked condoms; my infidelities were unprotected). That was the moment when I decided to get a divorce. My NEET son was still living at home, but he was an adult, so that was no big deal. The problem was battling with my then wife, who is so responsible, serious, and mature that intellectually she’s stuck—I suspect—at the age of nine.

  In no time at all I was outlining my project to the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte: I was going to fuck seropositive women and film our sexual encounters. It was the only way I could think of to add a touch of eroticism to insipid latex. I was instantly admitted to the network and, in addition, earned thousands of dollars on the international media art circuit. What man wouldn’t want to walk through the doors of the Museo Reina Sofía with the stealthy excitement of someone sneaking into a small-town porno theater?

  I’m in the dark, projecting photographs of candidates for my next series onto the wall. Vianey bursts in, clearly upset, her eyes moist: they shine in the bright light of the projector. In her hand is the body of a hummingbird. Vianey is a lapdog. A pregnant lapdog. She says: Oh no, this poor thing’s dead too. I reply, So what do you want me to do about it? Can’t you see I’m working? Put it in the garbage.

  I push her out of my studio, close the door, and turn the key.

  It’s a lie: I’m not working. It’s been months since I last enjoyed the gestation of my pieces. I produce mechanically. I am, in the least praiseworthy sense of the expression, a procrastinator of my own orgasms. I’m a NEET too. Just like Vianey and Nazario, just like my son, like the whole fucking world: I don’t exist and I don’t produce. I hate having to put on the rubber and, at the risk of damaging my health, enter pleasingly curvaceous bodies that, in the end, are nothing more than virus soup: the castoffs of a language. I’m no longer doing it for the aesthetics. Not even for the politics. I’m doing it for the money.

  There was a time when Vianey was my votive offering; the Eucharistic body of my greatest creations. I didn’t have to go looking for her: she turned up at my home with a CV, the lab report showing she is HIV positive and wearing a lacy top, a blazer, and a red miniskirt. She’d studied at the San Carlos Art Academy but had dropped out. She’d worked as an assistant to Carlos Amorales, had done a residency in Los Angeles under Mario Garcia Torres, and boasted of having once, in her adolescence, slept with Gabriel Orozco. She was a conceptual-art groupie; an intelligent, beautiful twenty-something with a vagina dentata that secretes poison. What more could a manly man washed up on the humiliating shoreline of old age ask for?

  We made eighteen gonzo-porno-AIDS movies together. And with the profits we bought a house. Vianey planted gladioli and purple morning glories in the garden.

  We haven’t had sex for a couple of months. In part this is because the antiretroviral treatment based on Zidovudine and Indinavir produces spectacular bouts of nausea. But it’s also because she’s just about ready to give birth and her clitoris is so beleaguered by her guts that she climaxes in a matter of seconds. And it’s also in part because of how much I hate myself through her because of those dead hummingbirds. Is it her fault that she’s got a bird of ill omen in her belly? I’m the guilty party for having chosen to create and procreate in the language of death. As Mallarmé, that indisputable prince of NEETS, said, “Destruction was my Beatrice.” My semen is a cemetery.

  The first time we filmed together (I say “we filmed” because Vianey was never content to be merely present on set: she’d grab the camera and take shots of me to demonstrate the irrationality of my acrobatic pleasure, of my skirting around the edges of her deadly infection with no defense other than 0.03 millimeters of polyurethane), something was established between us, something profound, more important than the disease or the bitter scent of the vulcanized sheath: we were in love. We’ve always, ever since that first time, been in love. And everything (the sex, the profits, the image, the curator-ship of five international biennials, the flagrant imbecility of Avelina Lésper, the dead birds) has been transformed into horror since we’ve become what radical art should never be but ends up being in spite of the people who make it: emotion.

  I don’t know how she got pregnant. I never removed the rubber. She tells me the baby’s mine and I believe her. But even so, I can’t call it “ours.” The odds of it being born with the curse of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome doesn’t allow me that luxury. When she told me, I had myself tested and I’m not infected. That isolates me from them. That and the hummingbirds. Something in the internal force of my second child is killing the symbols of the sweetness, velocity, and fragility of the world. I lie awake at night thinking that my need to observe and my loved one’s suffering will soon give birth to Death: not simply a sick human being but an entity that destroys everything it touches. A Romantic extermination machine. I used to believe that I was free of such superstitions. Nevertheless, I’ve spent nine months suffocating under the sublime pillows of German idealism. Dammit.

  I’ve come to the conclusion that God is a NEET. It’s not so much that he doesn’t exist, but that he has been switched off. Someone, in the Dark Night of Time, blindly tripped over the cable and disconnected him. What we learn of Evil enlightens us for a few short moments, like a match that quickly burns out between our fingers. But reality is still a darkened bedroom, and inside that room we all possess hidden animals.

  The day has arrived. We’d booked it a month in advance. The birth is going to be by cesarean section. The gynecologist tried to refuse me access to the operating room for security reasons, but I changed his mind with a simple gesture: I showed him my CV, my awards, the letter confirming I was a member of
the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte; fetishes that give me the title of Honorary Platonic Aids Sufferer.

  We spend the whole day in the clinic. My son, my ex-wife, and a couple of journalists drop in to see us. I’ve drawn the curtains, closed the windows, put down the blinds; expensive clinics like this have gardens, and it’s spring: where there’s a garden, there are also hummingbirds, naive warriors that Vianey’s unborn child frizzles as if they were mosquitoes flying around a cobalt-blue light bulb.

  We go into the OR at midday. First I have to don my disguise: a nurse helps me put on a pale blue gown, a plastic hairnet, surgical gloves, a mask … Before doing this, I wash my upper torso. Although immaculately clean, the luxurious bathroom where I carry out these sanitary procedures reminds me of something you might find in an abattoir. It must be that subtle stink. The clinical smell of blood. A ferrous body odor dowsed in boiling water.

  When I come out, Vianey doesn’t recognize me in my doctor’s guise: she looks at me with that detached, ecstatic sweetness you can bestow only on another human when you’ve been internally dispossessed. I don’t recognize her either: I know it’s Vianey because the disjointed geometry of her body—for a second I recall the shattered organisms I used to photograph during my car crash days—has her face. But it’s as if the photo of a sado-porn model had been stuck over the portrait of your first high school girlfriend. I take her hand and we know each other. We are anything at all: a thing that’s still alive. Naturally, I haven’t brought my video camera today; that would have been in poor taste.

  The operation lasts over an hour. The gynecologist, the virologist, the anesthesiologist, the nurses, the pediatrician: every one of them the best that a famous contemporary artist vanquished by Reality can afford. Among the thousands of people I’ve seen lately, they are the only ones that don’t look to me like crappy little NEETS.

  My baby suddenly exits from its mother’s belly; the doctor shakes it and it responds with its first war cry. Is it a healthy cry? An ordinary cry? A contagious cry? I won’t know until they do the analysis.

  The gynecologist passes the tiny body to the young pediatrician. She cradles it, cleans it conscientiously, puts what looks like a white gnome-hat on its head. Then she carries it to the scale and puts a gigantic stethoscope to its chest while Vianey’s abdomen is being sutured. The pediatrician turns to me and says, Well, the heart seems fine. Suddenly, she leans against the steel operating table and falls to her knees. Sorry, she says. Give me a moment, I feel terribly dizzy. For an instant I believe my worst fears have been realized: the hummingbirds were just an omen, a rehearsal; Vianey and I have conceived the Exterminating Angel. With lucid madness, I wait for all those wise Galens in their ridiculous gowns to drop dead around me, one by one. I wait my turn for the Void to tear me, too, from this disgusting uncertainty …

  But the pediatrician’s dizzy spell passes. Today isn’t the Last Judgment. So I’ll have to bear the burden of this anguish for at least one more night. The doctor places the newborn in my hands. I say to that scrap of flesh: How are you doing, you frigging NEET? How are you doing, my prince, my pinch of sugar, my little ninja, my sun? And I stroke his ears and tiny toes.

  Then they snatch him from me and take him away to carry out the necessary retroviral tests.

  The Roman Wedding

  For Saíd Herbert

  There isn’t a single car left in the Cadereyta prison parking lot, and the sun is beating down like a bottle-blow to the head. We park in the last space in a triangle formed by a concrete wall, a patch of open ground, and the security hut, get out of the Cutlass, sign the pig’s logbook, and walk along a narrow corridor between chrome chain-link fences topped with razor wire. An hour later we see him coming. We recognize him in the distance as he passes through the second gate.

  “Looks like he’s been soaked in Fab,” says Nelson.

  “Shut it.”

  “Like they used lashings of it. He’s more washed-out and faded than the ghost of Don Manos. God rest his soul.”

  I dodge behind to punch him in the ribs. Nelson’s six-foot-ten frame doubles over as if I’d hurt him. Bebito passes through the last two gates, I go to meet him, and we hug, Nelson catches up, hugs us both in his clumsy-bear way, and we return to the parking lot, our arms still linked across one another’s shoulders. There are pigs every few yards along the corridor, and you don’t open your mouth around pigs. We climb into the Cutlass in silence. Nelson is at the wheel with Bebito in the passenger seat. I’m in the back.

  “Who came up with the coin?” asks Bebito as soon as we close the doors.

  “Uncle Chapete. A present from Maruca.”

  “Fucking old bat. Her and Urko.”

  “Urko’s taking care of the funeral.”

  “How much did they give you?”

  “A hundred thou.”

  “Miserable tightasses.”

  “You got it, man. It came to eighty. You want change?”

  Bebito looks at me in the rearview mirror. His eyes are brimming with tears.

  “Hey, you’re my bro. When have I ever asked for change?”

  This makes me smile: I haven’t had a contract for three weeks. That twenty thousand will get me through the month. Then I remember that my father’s body is lying waiting for someone to wash it, apply makeup, dress it in a suit and tie, and all my enthusiasm evaporates.

  “You’re looking good,” says Nelson, his hands gripping the wheel while we wait for a truck loaded with Montemorelos oranges to pass before we join the traffic on the Monterrey highway.

  Bebito lowers the window and looks at himself in the side mirror.

  “I’m lean as a hare. Four months in general population just because Urko didn’t see why he should pay for privileges. They beat me to a pulp.”

  We pull in to a gas station. Bebito tells Nelson to grab some beer and smokes from the OXXO store, then gets out of the car and starts clowning around by my window: he takes off his T-shirt to show off the muscles he forged during his year in lockup. Nelson returns, Bebito puts his tee back on, they both take their seats up front, Nelson starts the Cutlass, Bebito lights a Marlboro, opens a Tecate, and offers me a can. I shake my head.

  “You seen him yet?”

  “Pop? No.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “Your brother.”

  “Muñeco?”

  “Mhm.”

  “He’s your brother too.”

  “Says he ain’t.”

  Bebito takes a swig from his can.

  “That’s Urko, dude. Wants us at each other’s throats.”

  I meet his eyes in the mirror.

  “It’s not Urko. Muñeco’s pissed off with me about the rock.”

  “I’ll tell the asshole not to hold grudges.”

  “No sweat. Anyway, I’m headed back to Zacatecas tomorrow.”

  Bebito unfastens his seat belt and turns to me, his cheek resting on the upholstery.

  “Got any gear?”

  “Nope.”

  “I do,” says Nelson.

  He passes over a small bag and the cap of a pen that he’s extracted from his armpit. Bebito takes a snort and looks at me again in the mirror.

  “No gear, no beer. You down on your luck or what?”

  “I get by,” I answer in English.

  “But why? Have you gotten yourself into a group or some shit like that?”

  “I’ve been going to Narcotics Anonymous for a year and a half.”

  “Where?”

  “Zacatecas.”

  He takes two more snorts, sucks back the snot, clears his throat, passes the bag back to Nelson, and twists his body around so he’s looking me straight in the face.

  “Congratulations, bro. That takes balls. Truth is, you were pissing outside the pot.”

  Nelson is engaged in a duel with a truck driver who doesn’t signal, slows down at curves, but then speeds up when we try to pass.

  “Fucker.”

  “Yeah.”

>   We drive on in silence. When we finally overtake the truck, my brother warns:

  “You were way out of line when you filched that piece of rock from Muñeco. The filth took him for a ride and beat the shit out of him.”

  “He told me.”

  “Pop said he wasn’t gonna kill you, ’cause you’re flesh and blood, but when he saw you, he was gonna put a slug in your ass.”

  I don’t respond. Nelson laughs and cries at the same time. Then Bebito starts. Then I do: the three of us know that I’ll never talk to my father again, that my father is never gonna put a slug in my ass.

  “So what are you doing?”

  “I’ve got a maintenance business.”

  “Maintaining what?”

  “Whatever comes my way: plumbing, construction, wiring, painting houses, waxing floors. I just bought a buffer.”

  “You always liked having something to do. Don Manos used to say, ‘Why don’t you follow your elder brother’s example, you bunch of wasters?’ even to Urko, and he’s not his son.”

  Nelson suddenly brakes to avoid rear-ending a Cherokee. The traffic is slowing down to a walking pace.

  “Are you doing OK?”

  “Unclogging pipes and waxing floors? Can’t complain. But after a whole life spent selling shit, the odd centavo here and there doesn’t make a big impression.”

  “And what did you do with it?” asked Nelson, squeezing in on the motor on the left in second gear.

  “With what?”

  “The rock.”

  “I smoked it. What do you think?”

  “The whole lot?”

  “Well, yeah. You think I’d have joined Narcotics Anonymous otherwise?”

  The traffic comes to a standstill around Parque Fundidora.

  “Sorry. It’s rush hour,” says Nelson. “I’ll try to turn off onto Colón.”

  Bebito opens another Tecate.