The Man With No Borders

by Richard C. Morais

  “Yes, well, let’s leave it at that. No more of these dark discussions. Do you want some tea?”

  My wet hands made the edge of the newspaper wilt and tremble. I folded it up quickly, to hide my sins, and smiled at my wife.

  “What you made me last time. It was delicious. That smoky tea.”

  Over the following days, I could not stop thinking of Lena, the tilt of her ass, the back of her head, her creamy shoulders resting on my stomach. Erotic images of her thrust up into my consciousness at the most inappropriate moments. They came to me on the tram, in a meeting with a client, when standing with Lisa and the boys at the Migros supermarket checkout. Just the thought of Lena would moisten my palms and make my crotch tighten. It made me pant, feel alive.

  One day, unable to stand the confines of my office anymore, too distracted by thoughts of Lena to work properly, I went for a walk. I came out of our bank building, turned left, and headed down the Bahnhofstrasse to the lake.

  Seagulls surfed the air, coiffed women with wicker baskets were out shopping at the flea market, and the blue-and-white No. 4 tram was serenely gliding up the boulevard. I stared over the rail, at the lapping lake below, and tried to examine what was going on.

  What was it I wanted from Lena? Just sex? What void did she fill?

  I searched and searched my thoughts and came up with nothing that made sense. I couldn’t understand what I was hungering after. Right then, however, I sensed a force present in the lake. I cupped my eyes and peered hard into the rippling water, and saw the toothy snout of a blue-gray pike poking out of a hole, waiting for prey to drift past.

  The next foray into the night occurred a week later. It came much easier. A difficult work assignment meant I was again alone in Zürich, rather than driving back to the family and the farmhouse. It was 11:00 p.m. and I was in the penthouse, pouring myself a vodka tonic, restlessly flicking between the boring Swiss TV stations.

  When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I grabbed my coat and headed outside. I wasn’t sure where I was going at first, but found myself walking the darkened backstreets of the Niederdorf, making my way, like a salmon smelling his way back to his river, to the same little square where I first saw Lena.

  She was not there. An empty coffee cup, with a pink smudge at the edge, stood on the wall next to the garbage can. I picked up the cup, held it in my hand. I had no evidence Lena had left this cup, but I fervently believed she had, and it seemed, to me, the most precious object on earth at that moment.

  I became more determined to find her. I arranged to be in town for the rest of the week, and for four nights in a row, I compulsively stalked the streets, hunting for her, late into the night. I hungrily fished every city pocket I could think of until I finally saw the back of her short-cropped head, this time down near Central. Her streetwalker’s pose was unmistakable.

  She was facing the opposite direction, in the same blue Nautilus down jacket, and was again puffing on a cigarette. I came in from behind and threw my arms around her. She was much taller than I remembered and I whispered into her neck, unable to cover up the longing in my voice. “Oh, you sweet thing. I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind.”

  “Hola, guapo. Qué quieres?”

  I was, for a moment, stunned, unable to grasp what had just happened or how to respond to this man turning, with a grin, to leer at me. Perhaps most disorienting of all was his remark—“Hello, handsome. What do you want?”—in my mother tongue, as if he knew exactly who I was already.

  I reeled back, revolted, and angry. But I didn’t walk away. My feet stayed firmly rooted to the pavement. There was something about the young man—something familiar, like he had known me all my life and perhaps longer.

  “Forgive me. I thought you were someone else.”

  He coolly flicked away the nub of his cigarette.

  It was an arrogant and dismissive gesture, so familiar to me, and it instantly brought to the surface a vision of Juan. It was not the vague baptism image triggered by Lena’s stud earrings, but the full-blooded thing, so real a picture of my brother I could almost feel him there with us at the tram stop, close in age to when he died.

  The man before me, in his late twenties, shifted his weight from his front leg to his back leg, and his impatient fidgeting brought me back. I looked at him, he looked at me, with his black and hungry eyes—and it felt like he was undressing me. I blushed.

  “Hombre, it’s all over your face. You’re aching for a journey to the other side. I’ll take you there, guapo. Come on. Let’s have some fun.”

  He was smiling and his teeth flashed and dazzled white in the tram station’s harsh light. He was handsome—his face chiseled, mottled with two days of stubble—but my eyes kept on returning to those flashing teeth.

  “Yes, you are right. Take me to the other side.”

  “All right, then.”

  I looked down at the ground. “But I have no experience. I’m afraid.”

  He put his big hand on my shoulder, gave me a reassuring squeeze, and, again, produced that devastating smile. “Don’t be scared, guapo. I am just the man to take you there. Trust me, we’re gonna have so much fun.”

  He grabbed me possessively just above my elbow, told me his name was Miguel, and then began steering me through the streets of the Niederdorf, wherever he wanted, like I was a mere boy in the thrall of an older and experienced man, rather than the other way around.

  Somewhere in the quarter’s backstreets, we climbed the creaky stairs of a gray-stone building. At the top of the staircase, in the black-light landing, a bearded bouncer was wearing leather and studs. He was scowling down at us.

  “He’s with me.”

  Miguel turned in my direction, rubbed his fingers together, and I scrabbled in my pants for my money clip. He pulled fifty Swiss francs from my pile of bills and told me to put the rest away. The bouncer stamped my wrist from an inkpad, and stepped to the side, gesturing with his head that we should proceed. We pushed through the club’s bronze-metal door. I figured that Miguel earned an under-the-table commission from bringing richer, older men to the disco. I didn’t care.

  The thump of the speakers, the dance floor moaning around the bend of a dark corridor, was a physical assault and I winced at the music’s meaty presence. The music had the opposite effect on Miguel. His hands rose, like a flamenco dancer might raise his uncurling fists, his eyes half closed with music and lust.

  “Donna Summer. ‘She Works Hard for the Money,’” he yelled over the music. “Hombre, that’s my song. Love it. Tú tambien, guapo?”

  But I could not respond. I was frozen stiff, petrified, like I had just entered hell. I mustered all my strength, to turn and bolt back outside, but Miguel must have sensed this, because he quickly turned on his worn-down Cuban heels and pushed me hard against the wall. The sheer physicality of this—the scratch of his rough stubble, his body pushed against mine, our crotches pressed together like prayer hands—left me immobile, like a fly paralyzed by a spider bite.

  Miguel was behind me now, a hand heavy on each of my shoulders, breathing and whispering in my ear, pushing me forward down the curve of the corridor. There was a stuttering strobe light, smoke, a thicket of men, and suddenly I was there, too, on the small dance floor. Miguel put his arms around my neck and began to grind his hips against me, his erection pushing against mine. “No,” I said angrily and tried to pull away. But he laughed and held me tight, and Miguel’s swaying hips, the music, the musky smell in the air, his hands around my back—it all swept me to the other side, filled that part of me where the dead normally sat.

  “OK, you’re ready,” Miguel breathed in my ear. “Now let’s get a room.”

  I rented a room for us at La Chinoise, a small hotel up on the high backstreets of the Niederdorf, where the lobby was fittingly red and whorishly lacquered. A black vase full of white lilies sat luridly on the reception desk.

  Miguel stood back as I handed my credit card to the front-desk night manager, who effic
iently checked us in with that discreet Swiss manner, his head down and facing the ledger, never up and gawking at what was so obvious.

  We took the elevator to the fourth floor. The swing of that lacquered white door into the compact hotel room was sobering, and I became acutely aware that crossing this border would bring me into a lower ring of hell, a subterranean level so deep I might not ever emerge whole from it—if at all.

  So I hesitated, stood back, and let Miguel pass first. But the young man was feral, had instincts like a dog, and he pulled me inside the room, once again silencing my inner voices with his arms wrapped tight around my back, so I was pinned and couldn’t move, his lips hard against my neck, his breath in my ear.

  “I am going to take you to paradise, guapo.”

  The next morning, I sipped my espresso with a shaky hand, puffed nervously on a cigarette. The glass-enclosed breakfast room atop the hotel was filled with morning light and giant palm fronds and white-painted wrought-iron furniture, like a Victorian winter garden had been transported to the high Niederdorf. I was still intoxicated from the night before and almost unable to talk, filled as I was with joy and guilt and shame and a few other emotions I had never experienced before.

  Miguel was hungry and chatty. He tore open a hard roll and smeared it with quince jam. “That was fantastic. I slept so well, señor.”

  “Coño! Call me José.”

  “I tease you. It’s a term of respect.”

  “It makes me feel old and disposable. Just call me by my name.”

  “So, how many children do you have?”

  I shifted my weight. “I have three boys.”

  “You stud.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Your background. What does your father do?”

  “No idea. He walked out on us when I was six. Never saw him again.”

  There must have been something pained in my look, because Miguel stiffened and said, “It’s OK. That was a long time ago. I am over him.”

  I reached over and squeezed his arm.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “Just because. You touch me.”

  “You are loco, I think. Bueno, guapo. I have to go. It’s my ten o’clock. The Sweet Freak.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Today is Wednesday. It’s time for my regular.”

  “I mean, why do you call him the ‘Sweet Freak’?”

  “He’s seventy years old and likes to sit on my lap in a diaper.”

  My revulsion must have been evident in my expression because he snapped, “What’s that face, cabrón? Who are you to judge? You shouldn’t be like that. He is absolutely harmless and quite sweet—and that two-hour session with him pays my rent for almost the entire month.”

  I could not stop my “journey to the other side,” as Miguel called it, and six months later, the two of us were in India, following a porter down jungle-choked cliffs, our backs wet with trickling sweat. A Portuguese client had inherited a property from a deceased relative who lived in India, and I had to figure out a way to quickly and quietly liquidate the coconut plantation and get my client’s assets out of India and safely into an offshore tax haven, without, he instructed, his estranged wife becoming the wiser.

  Miguel jumped at the offer to join me on that trip to Southern India, his precise words—“Fuck yes, guapo! Count me in!”—making me laugh.

  Those days at the resort in Kerala were, for me, heaven on earth, starting with that first moment when the porter took us down the cliff path that meandered gently through the orange-red flowers of pagoda plants and the intoxicating scents of the joy perfume tree. The house’s low-slung roof and pagoda-like eaves gave us the delightful impression it was bowing at our arrival.

  “Coño,” Miguel said appreciatively.

  Far down the cliffs, through the flowering jungle, there rose the cawing of strange and colorful birds, and through the branches you could just make out the caramel curve of a beach. We could hear the pounding waves of the Arabian Sea, which, straight ahead over the treetops, stretched out platinum to the horizon.

  A hammock hung in one corner of the shaded terrace, a simple wooden breakfast table stood in another, and as we marveled at the view, the porter unlocked the bungalow’s carved door, as grand as any entrance to a temple. In its cool and dark interior, we found a library, a writing desk, a couch and tea table; in the corner alcove, there stood a massive teak bed dressed with white linens, under a mosquito net.

  It was surprisingly cool. Rattan fans rotated overhead, and a breeze from the sea, coming in through the mosquito screens across the windows, wafted into the room the intoxicating smell of jasmine, sprigs of which were lying across each windowsill. A butler, in orange collarless shirt and black pants, came out of the shadows and stood by our side.

  “Welcome, sirs. I hope you had a pleasant journey.” He opened a carved cabinet, revealing a small and humming refrigerator. “Water is kept here. If it gets too hot, this is the switch for the air conditioning. And this is your bathroom . . .”

  He flung open a back door, revealing a private walled-in courtyard and garden, open to the elements. A toilet and shower stood out in the open, but were protected from rain by being just under a set of roof eaves. The far stone wall was covered in vines bursting with dainty blue flowers, and below it stood a stone plunge pool the color of which—deep emerald, blue, gold—I had never seen before.

  Miguel clapped his hands in delight. “Oh Dios mío. Thank you, guapo, for bringing me here. I’ve never been in a place like this.”

  “My pleasure.”

  I turned and tipped the porter. The butler tried to unpack our bags for us, but I said we would do so ourselves and tipped him to go away.

  As soon as they were gone, Miguel was halfway across the room, dropping his pants and shirt and underwear onto the floor on his way out the back door. “I am going to spend the entire week naked,” he yelled, lowering himself into the plunge pool. “This is amazing. Come on! Join me!”

  We swam in the ocean, went shopping in the village, fucked a couple of times a day. We hired a car and driver who showed us the fish markets and then a temple devoted to Lord Ayyappa. We got out of the car and walked past a lake, in which a carved pavilion emerged from the middle of the water, a white-stone temple the color of fine ivory. Around the lake’s perimeter, young men in loincloths and underwear sat on steel rails and washed their hair and armpits, cleansing themselves for the final steps of their religious journey.

  We walked on and the town’s streets began to throng with milling crowds, mangy packs of dogs, young girls selling marigold garlands from reed baskets, entire families sitting tight on a single motorbike, and oxen hauling carts of coconuts. Everywhere we came across large groups of men—with their oily-black hair and big bellies and hairy chests, offset by the colorful saffron-colored mundu wrapped around their legs—getting ready to enter the temple. And the air itself smelled of grilling pineapple and fried fish and burning incense.

  The temple rose before us, like a powerful god’s wedding cake, seven tapered stories of white stone, intricately carved with Hindu deities and thrusting high up into the azure sky. We were jostled, funneled into the temple’s gated entrance. Miguel had, since we left the car, been chatting nonstop about his coming trip to Barcelona, but he suddenly grew quiet and unsure and looked like a boy.

  A lean and unshaven guide in white loincloth appeared before us, offering his services, and I hired him. He told us to take off our shirts. We did as we were told, now bare-chested like all the other men around us.

  The guide spoke unintelligible English, and though we understood only every third word—“pillar,” “Lord Ayyappa,” “Monkey God”—we walked quiet and awed and shirtless behind him, through a series of gates and into the temple’s dark interior passageway. What little light there was came from feeble mine lamps bolted to the walls of the tunnel. Miguel and I exchanged nervous glances over the oiled heads ar
ound us, as the crush of overexcited pilgrims drove us forward, almost against our will.

  Halfway through the tunnel, we could see an opening at the far end of the passageway, and from this murky portal arose strange chants and crashing cymbals and eerie groans.

  Miguel stopped cold in his tracks.

  “It’s OK, Miguel,” I said into his ear. “I am here.”

  Miguel instinctively reared back in the direction we had come, and I, grabbing him around the waist, leaned forward to where we had yet to go. I finally took a heavy step forward, and the way I was holding him tight against my flank, it forced Miguel to lumber forward with me, and the momentum of that step finally carried us down the entire last half of the claustrophobic passageway.

  We were in the temple’s stone-pillared inner sanctum. The cavity opened up, moist and airy and cool like an underground cave. White pillars and rich garlands of orange-and-white flowers slowly came into focus. The thicket of believers miraculously spread out and dispersed inside the massive inner chamber, each group heading to the statues dedicated to their favorite gods.

  Carved stone statues and ropes of marigold and brass trays of smoking incense surrounded us, loomed up in the dark, then disappeared around the next corner. Across the sanctum, I could just make out some men prostrating themselves before Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu, the male gods who coupled in order to give birth to Lord Ayyappa, their powerful son and the deity who was the protector of Kerala. Half-naked men, moaning and in ecstatic states in the dark, cruised around us, giving off a smell of feral heat, and I instantly had the blasphemous thought that this temple and the gay disco were somehow one and the same, just sacred and profane manifestations of the same hunger for transcendence.

  “This is rare for foreigners to see,” said our guide. “Come. You must witness.”

  He waved at us to follow him down a long walkway, lined on either side by pillars carved with stunning images of the mundane world. Their visions came at us as we followed our guide down the path—a lord reigning over a thief’s execution; paupers begging, as hungry tigers behind them prowled the jungle; children playing with their grandparents in a flowering garden, three rearing cobras in the grass. But there were also the most intense erotic images—a man penetrating his wife, two naked women rolling in the dirt.