The Stars at Noon

by Denis Johnson

  “Are we in a hurry?” I wondered.

  “There you have me. It just may be we’re not in anything at all—if you get my meaning, because I’m not sure I do myself.”

  “No. I get it. I agree.”

  “And so then, cheers,” he said.

  He wasn’t happy. But couldn’t I change all that with love? It was one of those moments again . . . Nothing so sad as the heart that cries, I can change, I can change! But we made love, and he went back to sleep . . . The Englishman did his sleeping in the mornings. And he was always able to sleep soundly in a moving car.

  But he didn’t sleep at night, because he didn’t drink enough rum.

  I did. I drank a little in the mornings—to wake up—and I drank a lot in the evenings—to sleep.

  Oh well . . . Thus anointed I kind of coped. My poor Englishman drank only grief and fear, and he was drunk enough on that.

  But he managed to rest a little every morning, and he was cheerful when he came out three hours later. It was good he was in shape to be reasonably sociable and gracious, because I wasn't alone.

  I’d gone for a walk, and when I’d come back into the restaurant I’d found an American sitting there all by himself, a young redheaded man wearing round rimless sunglasses; he had a cute little red beard, too.

  He invited me to watch him eat breakfast—how could I have turned down a chance to observe?—and told me all about the wonderful places he’d experienced on this, his first trip to Central America for the consulting firm by whom he seemed to want people to think he was employed.

  He was eating a beans-eggs-rice collision called gallo pinto—a Costa Rican dish, the first instance I'd seen of it here in Nicaragua.

  From the sound of things, a whole extended family was building an ark out in the kitchen, but no one came out to wait tables. We were the only customers—it was a dead place because it required money, and you can bet nobody in that town had any.

  “Was that ABC Consultants,” I asked him, “or did you say XYZ?”

  He just laughed.

  What did I know, I could never keep track of all the initials stamped on the documents and stencilled all over the buildings—P.S., Partido Socialista, MAP-ML, don't ask me what that stands for, FSLN, don’t forget OIJ, and in the Barricada headlines for the last three days running: CIA.

  He told me, “Look, these businesses—you should have seen the place we stayed at in San José. There was a swimming pool outdoors and another one indoors, there was a gambling joint right in the building—a casino, you know, with all that green felt. The outdoor pool was just for decoration. You can't swim in that cool weather, it’s in the mountains. They have all kinds of money, these outfits we consult for; I mean the budget can be—you think these countries are poor, but it’s only the poor people who are poor . . . We stayed at a mansion in the hills about a month ago, really an unbelievable spot, all we were doing was putting together an assessment on this one outfit, the owner put us up. The company president.”

  He had a sad, worried look about his face as if he thought he’d be misinterpreted or disbelieved.

  “And what was the full name of this company you work for?”

  “We’re out of Connecticut, consulting is a weird game—to spell it out, businesses and industries hire us because they don’t trust their own interpretations of their own data, and frankly, it’s ridiculous what they pay. It’s just silly. I’m not kidding, like right now I’m working on a report and if I need something I snap my fingers, like if I needed to hire you to consult for me, if there was something I needed you to do for me, I could drop an envelope in your lap with, what?—God, I don’t know—it’d be easy as hell to scrape up about a thousand. A thousand U.S. I’ll tell you, they don’t let me sling around that kind of money up in Hartford. I don’t stay with any company presidents up there, either.”

  Considering the pace of his mindless lying, it was quite a trick that he got any food in his mouth at all.

  He’d finished his breakfast by the time the cook came out from the kitchen, through a door behind the bar, and assembled himself before me. Defending his right to be a waiter, as it were. I pointed at the consultant’s empty plate. “The same. And coffee. And half a glass of rum.”

  “It gets me,” the consultant said when the cook was gone, “how everybody down here seems so impolite. Like the way you just ordered your food.”

  “Impolite?”

  “Nobody says please or thank you.” Suddenly an aching homesickness shone out of his face.

  Now we talked about every part of the United States of America we’d ever either of us set foot in.

  “I believe I’ll have some rum and papaya juice,” he told the cook when I received my breakfast.

  “Who are you consulting for down here? Why on earth would anybody want to do business with the Sandinistas?”

  “It’s not the Sandinistas. Central America—this whole area is a gambler’s paradise. Everybody’s down here giving the odds a shake in whatever game they feel like playing, basically—in all seriousness, there are wheat conglomerates looking around down here, can you fathom that? Transportation people, resort people, oil interests, you get the picture. But anyway, I mention oil, my report happens to be about some aspects of the petroleum outlook, or the principal part of it concerns petroleum—matter of fact, your friend gets a little ink, even, I mean the guy you’re traveling with, if he’s the same person I’m thinking of. But—I’m not saying anybody wants to move their whole operation here, that’s not what I mean, but the local business people are serious and level-headed, we’ve got a strong administration up north, and we realize now that we can risk investments in the region because we already have a stake in Central America, we’re committed here, and so on and so on,” he said, giving the last few words a certain resonance by raising the glass and saying them into his drink.

  The fact was, he couldn’t do anything to us. If he was an American, then he was just as lost as we were.

  “What do you mean, about my friend?”

  He wore a cheap watch and a class ring from someplace. He had that fair redhead’s skin—like the Englishman’s—permanently blushing with the heat, nicely mated to his blue summer sports shirt with the sweat bleeding through.

  “He’s one of the characters,” he said. “Haven’t you noticed? All these entrepreneurs are kind of boiling around down here, and at the same time, you can’t fail to notice, there’s a strong and violent proletarian movement well launched in El Salvador, entrenched here in Nicaragua, brewing in Belize and also Guatemala. And in order to feel more secure, the most paranoid entity in the hemisphere, you know who I’m talking about, it must do everything in its power to mess up the balance around here.”

  “You mean the U.S.”

  He looked at me, quite obviously baffled. “God!” he laughed. “Why don’t you stop being ridiculous? I mean the Castro government in Cuba. They have to do whatever they can to fuel the proletarian movement. It’s the only way Castro can keep from sinking.”

  “What’s this got to do with your report? And what do you mean by bringing up my friend?”

  “All this has a lot to do with my report, because the report is about this region. And balance is what this region is all about.”

  “But what has your report got to do with my friend?”

  “There he is. He’s heading this way.”

  The Englishman had just come into the restaurant and paused at the bar to get a drink.

  “What has your report got to do with him, I asked you.”

  “Like I say, I don’t even know if it’s the same guy.” He tried to disarm his next statement with a laugh: “He wandered through and received scrutiny.”

  The Englishman probably heard this but didn’t know it referred to him as he pulled up a chair and sat down.

  “The Central American countries go on searching,” my host resumed, “for their best way, not necessarily Castro’s, not necessarily ours, a series of political experiments
conducted under military restraint. Always held in check by the military. That’s not our style, but it’s theirs, so why not?”

  “Why not indeed?” the Englishman said just to be participating.

  “But what do I know?” our consultant friend said.

  “You probably know whether or not to recommend the food,” the Englishman suggested.

  “If you’re hungry, get some—it’s pretty good, not bad at all.”

  “Rather simple fare, I noticed.”

  “You mean—on the menu?” the consultant said.

  I said, “It’s the first gallo pinto I’ve seen. We’re getting closer to Costa Rica.”

  “So, are you guys heading for C.R.? What goes on for you down there?”

  “Nothing special, as I understand it,” the Englishman said.

  “The menu gets better,” I said.

  “But not the rum.” This was the consultant’s conjecture, as he looked down into his glass. Although he was the phoniest human I’d so far met in the flesh, he slugged back his liquor with a satisfaction that couldn’t have been faked. “What other good stuff can I expect up here?” he asked.

  “Have you been around Managua much?”

  “I’ve only been here one day, tell the truth.”

  “Well, they don’t have anything up there. The cities can’t cope.”

  “None of the stuff they have in Costa Rica? No coffee? No sopa negra?”

  “Sopa negra!” I agreed. “I love it!”

  “And what’s that made of?” the Englishman asked. “Sounds fascinating.” He hadn’t touched his drink.

  “Black beans. Turtle beans,” the consultant told him. “Don’t they have it up here in Nicaragua? Black soup?”

  “Only in the sense,” the Brit said, “that it seems to be all around us.”

  “I’m not surprised.” The consultant was knowing. “Their socialism doesn’t work. They’ve got the biggest army going,” he announced, “and not one turtle bean.”

  Now we had a stupid silence, the kind that always descends on people who are half in the bag.

  “I’ve been down in San José for about the last—almost a month,” the consultant said.

  “Do you ever get over to the Key Largo?” I asked him.

  “That place? It’s a whorehouse.”

  “It’s got a sort of entertaining ambience,” I submitted in its defense.

  The Englishman took the wheel. “And have you ever been to England.”

  The redhead answered, “My mother is from England.”

  “Oh, what a coincidence. But then we’re all cousins, I suppose, if you seek back far enough in the history of things.”

  “I’m sure we're very closely related,” the American said.

  The Englishman’s breakfast came along, and he ate it, although he seemed to be suffering silently, especially when a reckless feeling came over me and I started talking about my trouble with the Central American money market.

  I was onto the rum and papaya juice now, a grisly concoction, overly sweet.

  They probably wondered, the both of them, what the hell I thought I was doing. I held forth bitterly on the subject of the war in the northern provinces and then got on to bad-mouthing the Vice-minister at Interturismo, the man who’d helped me find lodging for cordobas instead of dollars.

  The redhead laughed a lot and kept interrupting with requests for more details, for clarification, for first and last names.

  The Brit signalled me horribly with his eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him right in front of this alleged consultant, “he knows all about us anyway.”

  But my Englishman looked even worse, as if his foot were being crushed and he mustn’t scream, when the redheaded man claimed to have an arrangement to sell cordobas across the border for Costa Rican centimes and I said, “Oh, really.”

  “We’re all agreed, Nicaraguan money stinks,” the consultant explained. “I wouldn’t have bought any in the first place if I didn't have someone to sell it back to.”

  “You can almost always sell it to some black-market person or other right at the border,” I said, “the Costa Rican side. Anyone can.”

  “I can get you a better rate.”

  “I’m surprised to hear that. But somehow not totally astounded.”

  “Forgive me for changing the subject,” the Englishman said, his fingers squeaking on his wet glass, “but the elections rather interest me. I wonder if there’s a newspaper . . .”

  From the consultant he got the same look of naked incomprehension he might have by announcing a passion for people’s unwashed feet. “I guarantee you this,” the consultant said finally, “if we kept stalling on elections like these guys—in the U.S., I’m saying—somebody would overthrow the government.”

  With palpable relief the Englishman started arguing otherwise. Latins were accused all too easily of procrastination, it wasn’t quite fair, et cetera. Certainly, the elections were slow in coming by current U.S. standards. “But think back to your own revolutionary era—between your insurrection and the election of this fellow George Washington, didn’t nearly seventeen years elapse? At a comparable stage in the birth of a new Nicaragua, the Sandinistas actually turn out to be quicker off the mark by nearly a dozen years, don’t they?” He wiped his mouth unnecessarily with his napkin and transmitted various subtle pre-flight signals. “Why don’t you and I take a stroll around town,” he said to me, “maybe we can locate a paper. It’s got quite a Spanish feeling, the town, don’t you think so?” he said to the consultant, moving back in his chair.

  “Give me a minute,” I told him, “I’m thirsty.”

  I ordered something cool.

  “Ah.” He sat there with his chair pushed away from the table, and crossed his arms.

  Something seemed to turn over a bad card in the consultant’s head. “Not that free enterprise is much better,” he said out of nowhere. “Down here . . .”

  He looked at the Englishman and said, “Whores, is what they all are.”

  “I—beg your pardon?”

  “I mean they’ll all do it for enough money, any of these women, Costa Rican, Venezuelan, I’m not kidding in the least. Grab one coming out of church sometime and try it. You’ll see what I mean. They’re all lonely as widows, that’s the real truth about them, they haven’t had a man’s hand on their thigh since Jesus was in diapers. Sure, I’ve been around the Key Largo, and I couldn’t tell what part any of those people were supposed to be playing, the men or the women. In the end I’d say, if you’ve got some money to lose, put it down on a horse race or something and go back to the hotel and play with yourself.” We laughed at this and he concluded with a remark that seemed to float before us, “The area is full of amateurs.”

  Then he rode right over it: “So who’s this minister down there you were saying? You don't mean a preacher? You said, yeah, a vice-minister or something? What was his name?”

  “I have a terrible head for names.”

  “He was in the tourist department, or what exactly did you say?”

  “You are, I mean, unbelievably obvious.”

  “I could probably get you in touch with my bankers. You don’t sell your money to the characters right at the checkpoint there. You go all the way into La Cruz—you know it? Yeah? I think they call it that because it's nothing but a crossroads and four petrol joints. Two of them are closed anyway.”

  “I was through La Cruz on my way up here.”

  “I’m going for a paper,” the Englishman said.

  “Look, okay, I’ll set this thing up, I think I can do it.”

  “Nobody asked you,” I said.

  “If you want, I mean.”

  “I really have to be going now I think,” the Englishman said.

  He’d committed himself, he got up from his chair. But I didn’t leave with him: because I felt he was pushing me, he didn’t trust me to keep out of trouble—because he refused to trust me.

  The consultant watched him go witho
ut saying goodbye. “He’s not an American. He’s definitely British, right?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Yeah. But who is he to you, exactly? How long have you known him?” He laughed like a kid. “Well, listen to me!”

  “I don’t mind listening but I don’t feel like answering, you know?”

  “Is his passport for real?”

  It’s a mystery how he managed to beat me over the head with these questions and at the same time make me laugh at the very fact he thought he could get away with asking them . . .

  I told him I'd been with Eyes for Peace. Helping to maintain the integrity of borders in a troubled universe . . . He was contemptuous. The Sandinistas had no future: “Except for the intense involvement of the Castro government and the indirect—in some cases direct—involvement of the Russians, the Central American proletarian movement isn’t a permanent consideration.”

  Oh no no no. Not at all. In fact, they’ll all be gone in a minute or two . . . “Only rum is forever,” I agreed.

  “In the long stretch the movement’s a volley in the Ping-Pong game between the rich and the poor down here, it might result in certain corrections, in many respects it won’t amount to anything, possibly we’ll live to see it pass on, die out, and sometime in the future flare up again. Unless Castro extends his influence and deepens the socialist entrenchment in the politics of the region. In that case we’re not talking about proletarian agitation with a constructive outcome. We’re talking about trained-up Cubes walking all over the toys down here. If Castro has his way too much longer, this whole area's going to be unbalanced for centuries, and our own country maybe gets mixed up in a war.”

  He went in a giant dizzy leap from the general to the personal. “What were you doing back when Vietnam was showing every weeknight on the tube? Demonstrating against it on a college campus?”

  “I’m not that old. How old do you think I am?”