Far South

by David Enrique Spellman

  Fischer as prophet.

  ‘I watched him operate up here,’ Mills said. ‘He creates situations where that becomes obvious. That’s our theater. Maybe he’s a fucking megalomaniac; or maybe he’s one of the sweetest and most genuine guys on the planet… it depends on who you talk to.’

  He put his shades back on.

  The world as theater: I’d been acting all my life and I’d never known it. I’d even had a different name. My so-called father and my so-called mother had been knowingly acting all their lives to convince me I was someone I was not.

  ‘I’m going to find him,’ I said.

  Mills tilted his head up. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the shades but the smile was wry. He looked away again toward the sun.

  ‘Look, just think,’ Mills said. ‘He got Carlos and Ramón going after Arenas… Gerardo just wanted them to act… real and present, you understand? And Gerardo knew that would have a ripple effect on all those people around them: on everyone at Temenos, for example, the theater company, and on Gerardo himself, of course. He always included himself. On whoever came into our orbit… like you, okay? Gerardo must have known that Arenas would have all kinds of criminal and political connections, but something made him do it; all these connections would all come to light…’

  ‘Clara and Miriam told me that he wasn’t political,’ I said.

  ‘Gerardo’s not political,’ Mills said. ‘He just grew up in political times. Dangerous times. He made it part of his theater, that’s all. The way I see it, Gerardo knew that if he just disappeared, all these criminal and political connections and our involvement in them would be given a far sharper focus; and people, like us, or like you, would wake up to something awesome, something special, something mysterious if we all started to look for him. He has an instinct for this. That’s my theory, anyway. For what it’s worth.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ I said.

  This was Mills’ vision of things. I didn’t believe him. Was this what Dean Mills wanted to believe of Gerardo Fischer? That Fischer was some kind of mage, a seer of visions. There was a kernel of truth in it, of course. Fischer’s disappearance had certainly stripped away the masks of my own life, of the people in my life. But that was pure chance, wasn’t it? Mills’ theory was just a way of coping with Gerardo’s loss, wasn’t it? Some crazy fantasy that Gerardo was always in control, always right, would show up when he wanted to.

  Ana and Clara wouldn’t believe the same as Mills, would they?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I think you’re wrong. People care about him. Ana and Clara and Sara are terrified that something awful has happened to him.’

  I stared across at the old biker’s tanned face. The sun was behind his head. Its rays lit him up with a kind of saintly glow.

  ‘He did it to Damien Kennedy in Italy,’ Mills said. ‘Seduced him into the company and abandoned him in Rome.’

  ‘But he’d warned him beforehand. He didn’t just disappear.’

  Dean Mills shrugged.

  Could Fischer have disappeared without telling anyone? I didn’t think so. He must have known that the fallout could have been devastating. Especially when someone like Arenas was involved. I knew this. I knew this first hand.

  ‘Fischer wouldn’t do that,’ I said. ‘Nobody would.’

  ‘Gerardo has never been afraid of any danger,’ Mills said. ‘Or upsetting people. You better know it.’

  I better know it?

  ‘You were close with Damien Kennedy.’

  ‘Close as anyone,’ Mills said.

  ‘He went off with Francesca Damiani to Montevideo.’

  ‘He always did have a shine for Francesca.’

  ‘Do you think Gerardo might be in Montevideo?’

  Mills shook his head.

  ‘As good a place as any,’ he said.

  Mills didn’t know where Fischer was. I left him staring into the bright rays of the sun. I walked back across the parking lot. Is it better to know? Is it better to know? Tell me. I don’t know what to believe.

  I climbed up the path to the ridge. If Fischer had deliberately disappeared, it was he who had done this to me. I’d certainly had my mask stripped away. Stripped away my name, my previous life. Where was Ana? Could Fischer have taken off for Uruguay, and Damien Kennedy and Francesca Damiani gone across to Montevideo with him? I couldn’t believe that, could I?

  Fischer couldn’t have known that I would discover who my true parents were. He couldn’t even have known that I’d be hired to look for him. But, according to Mills, that wouldn’t have been the point: Fischer would know that whoever set out to look for him would discover something about himself: whoever that happened to be. And that’s what I’d done, hadn’t I? I was the living proof of Dean Mills’ theory.

  I had to stop thinking like this or I’d end up a paranoid basket case.

  Why should I continue looking for Fischer now?

  For the money? For Ana? To discover something more?

  Could Ana have been in on Gerardo’s disappearance? Could she have hired me to make it look like the theater company didn’t know where he was in order to protect him from Matas and Arenas? I didn’t know what to believe any more.

  For over thirty years I’d believed I was the son of Juan Manuel Pérez and his wife, Inmaculada Concepción Guzmán Pérez. And now I wasn’t.

  Was that Fischer’s gift to me? I’d been invited to take part in a game: a game without fixed rules, a role-playing game that led to the discovery of unknown truths.

  Thanks, Gerardo.

  Did I want to stay in it?

  I could stay in if I continued to look for Gerardo Fischer.

  Yes… I’d continue to look for Gerardo Fischer.

  I was involved in a serious game. Whoever I was.

  From the outside, Damien Kennedy’s house was just as much of a construction site as the last time I was here, although now, I could see the skylight had been framed in. I tried the lock on the door. It was open. Just like Fischer’s house had been open according to Ana. Had she been lying to me? Where was she now? Why didn’t she call? I’d left a message on her voicemail.

  The ground floor of Kennedy’s house was just as much concrete and dust as the last time I’d been there, but the kitchen had been cleaned out: all the pots and pans were clean and upside down on the draining board of the sink. The mate gourd was empty and clean.

  I climbed the concrete stairs.

  The floor of Kennedy’s bedroom-cum-living-room-cum-studio had been swept, although the dried paint drips hadn’t been removed from the plywood panels. No paint tubes, no palette, no brushes. No sign of Kennedy’s clothes or books or anything else. The mattress had been stripped and propped against the wall. The blackened empty pot with its hard membrane of dried rabbit-skin glue was still on the floor just in front of it. The bed-frame revealed bare floor below its wooden slats.

  One thing rang true to me about what Mills had said.

  I wasn’t going to find Gerardo Fischer unless he wanted me to find him.

  The black drape still hung over the scenery construction that Kennedy had said he’d been working on. I pulled the drape down off the top of it and the heavy cloth tumbled to the floor.

  I was in front of a life-sized reproduction of the Porta Magica in Rome, just as it had appeared in Kennedy’s illustrated diary. I laid my hand on the black surface between the painted pillars. The black surface, hinged on some slick castors, split and swung back. Latin and Hebrew letters, and planetary ciphers, danced in front of my eyes. I stepped through the open door and it slid shut behind me. I was inside a black cube, so dark that it was as if all light, all time, every memory could be absorbed by it. I couldn’t see the hands in front of my face. I stepped forward in the pitch darkness and a tiny spotlight came on. It lit up a card that rested on Damien Kennedy’s paint-spattered easel. I stepped back; the light went off: I stepped forward; it came on again. The card on the easel had a border of stylized artemisia flowers that framed the words for a si
mple sign that the theater company would probably set up on the stage, or in the foyer of a place where they might perform.

  Crazy laughter bubbled up from somewhere down in the empty cavity of my chest. Had Gerardo Fischer set up this joke for me? Was he letting me know that I was one of them now? I was one of their own. I was in the game. I read the words on the card with the flowered border:

  Welcome to the Real and Present

  Theater Company

  Editor’s Epilogue

  David Enrique Spellman

  The Amtrak train from New York to Springfield was to leave Penn Station at 11:30 am. The PATH train from New Jersey into 33rd Street had been late: signal problems in the tunnel. I raced up the stairs onto Herald Square. The late-July damp heat wrapped me in its cloying blanket. Low cloud had clamped a dank and venomous lid on the city. The temperature must have been around forty degrees. I hustled west along 33rd Street, crossed 8th Avenue and ran down the steps into Penn Station to dodge through the crowd of travelers, beggars, shoe-shiners, cops, and late-morning tourists. Professor María Helena Molina was due to meet me at 3:12 pm in Springfield and take me on to Northampton. I was supposed to give a lecture on ‘New Trends in Latin American Literature and Philosophy since the fall of the Dictatorships’ to the Smith College Latin American Studies Department Summer School. If I missed the train, I’d miss the lecture. I made the escalator for Platform 13 and got down to train level just as the guard was about to seal all the doors.

  I got to my seat. I slid my computer backpack onto the luggage rack.

  Two passengers sat across the aisle from me: a woman I guessed was around thirty years old, with dark hair, slim, very attractive; and a man, possibly slightly older, gaunt, with a shaved head and a goatee beard; both of them, I thought, Hispanic. I could read the title of the woman’s book: Orghast in Persepolis. The title suggested orgy, or orgasm, or Gormenghast. But I could see from the cover that it was a book about Peter Brook, the theater director, close to a namesake. I’d seen three of Brook’s movies and four of his plays but I’d never read that book, Orghast, and somehow I liked the look of it.

  The train eased forward out of Penn Station. Electrical flashes lit up the tunnels and the odd black door in the general blackness, and banks of cables, and red lights that gleamed an instant and disappeared. The train picked up speed. It came out of the labyrinth and the city took shape beyond the window: the suburbs of Queens, row houses, detached two-stories with gardens, low apartment blocks, vacant lots, schoolyards, basketball cages. Across the East River, the clouds were bronze over Manhattan. The train ran north toward the Bronx.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I said it in English because the book was in English. I assumed she was American. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’m curious about that book you’re reading. I really like Peter Brook’s theater work.’

  The young woman looked up. Cool in a pale brown top and linen pants. She seemed quite relaxed about the interruption. The man, her partner I presumed, nodded to me, and resumed looking out the window. He didn’t seem to be the talkative type.

  ‘Oh… it’s about a theater project,’ the woman said. She had a slight Latin American accent. ‘I can’t imagine this ever happening now. Back in 1971, an Iranian woman organized an experimental theater festival in the ruins of Persepolis in Persia. This is before Khomeini, before the Islamic Revolution… I mean… the Shah was terrible but now… I can’t imagine they’d have any grand scale experimental theater there any more, can you?’

  It didn’t take much thinking about. Since July 12th, Hizbullah in Lebanon had launched a series of cross-border rocket attacks against Israel, and had mounted a raid that resulted in the capture of two Israeli soldiers. Israel had been bombing Beirut and had invaded Southern Lebanon. Iran had been accused of supporting the Hizbullah fight. The Middle East had become a theater of war once more. The idea of an experimental theater festival anywhere in the region seemed absurd. The visions of carnage on TV news reports were appalling.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t.’

  But the young woman probably wasn’t thinking about that. She was obviously excited about the book. Her dark eyes got so bright – maybe a reflection of the overhead carriage lights – as she looked straight at me. Something animated about her, charismatic, a wonderful dark and confident voice.

  ‘A woman organized this festival,’ she said. ‘She invited Peter Brook’s theater company. And the concepts here… A new language, Orghast… that English poet, Ted Hughes, invented it.’

  She obviously loved language: a stunning and sharp intelligent woman. I found her fascinating right away.

  ‘Would you mind if I take a look at the book?’ I said.

  She handed it to me with that intense gaze. I looked down at the cover, flipped the pages open at random: the pictures in the center. Even at that time, Peter Brook’s theater group must have been a shock for the locals. Persia. Iran. The more I looked at the text and images, the more I wanted to read the book. I wanted to talk to her about it, what she made of the ideas in here.

  ‘My name’s Spellman,’ I said. ‘David Enrique Spellman.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘A Spanish name.’

  ‘Yes. I was born in New York but my mother’s from Argentina.’

  ‘Have you ever been to Argentina?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, of course. My grandmother still lives in Palermo.’

  ‘Then you speak Castellano?’

  ‘Quite well,’ I said.

  ‘My name’s Clara Luz Weissman. And this is Javier Hernández.’

  The man turned his gaze away from the window to look at me. I nodded to him.

  ‘A pleasure,’ Hernández said.

  He said this in English. Despite the shadow of the stubble on Hernández’s face, and the hollows below his cheekbones, I detected a kind of softness in him, a warmth in his dark eyes. It was the face of a man who had been through something traumatic perhaps, and who was coming out of it older and maybe a little wiser. All this on a few moments’ observation, as if the intensity of these two people’s presence and attention had drawn me into a kind of magnetic field across the aisle of the train to exclude the other passengers.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I said.

  ‘I’m from Buenos Aires,’ Clara said. ‘And Javier’s from Córdoba.’

  ‘My mother’s a Porteña,’ I said.

  Maybe because we’d begun speaking in English, Clara and I didn’t switch to Spanish: even if I had the suspicion that Hernández didn’t seem as comfortable as Clara with the language. And anyway, Hernández seemed content to let her do all the talking. Maybe they weren’t a couple. He didn’t seem to mind her talking to a strange man.

  ‘What brought you to the United States?’ I said.

  ‘I work with a theater company. Javier, well, he’s sort of looking for someone we know.’

  He smiled again and nodded and turned back to looking out of the window. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly; but rather it was as if he could sense the interaction that was going on between Clara and myself and was withdrawing to let it develop without his interference.

  ‘Are you an actor?’ I said to Clara.

  Anyone with a voice like hers must be an actor, I thought.

  ‘No, a producer,’ she said. ‘Our company is putting on a theater piece at La MaMa.’

  ‘A theater piece?’

  ‘It’s called Pablito’s Milonga. It’s about an Argentine living in New York who has lost touch with his roots. He sees Buenos Aires like any other gringo: tango, Borges, labyrinths.’

  I wondered if that was a friendly barb aimed at me. Is that the way she thought that I might see Buenos Aires because I was born in the US?

  ‘A satire?’

  ‘No, a tragedy really. Or a comedy…’ She laughed. She was mocking me. I liked it. ‘I mean… how can Pablito ever go back?’ she said. ‘The stability in the United States is so seductive, isn’t it? The check at the end of the month, everything you need in the st
ores, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Is it a new play?’ I said.

  ‘A few years old.’

  ‘Who wrote it?’

  ‘Gerardo Fischer.’

  ‘I’ve never heard the name.’

  ‘He’s Uruguayan,’ she said. ‘But he worked a lot in Buenos Aires. Then in Europe during the late seventies, early eighties… here, too, in the nineties, but he’s always been on the edge of things. Nothing mainstream.’

  ‘Nothing mainstream, I like the sound of that,’ I said. ‘And this theater company has been going for forty years?’

  ‘Not the same people, obviously; but yes, forty years.’

  ‘How long have you been involved?’

  She held my gaze even as she seemed to be calculating the time she’d been with this company. ‘Oh… over ten years, now.’

  ‘What’s the name of the company?’

  ‘Compañia de Teatro Real y Presente.’

  ‘The Real and Present Theater Company.’

  ‘Here, yes,’ she said.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I teach up at Columbia…’

  ‘You teach theater?’ She reached over and touched me on the forearm. I enjoyed the pressure of her fingers as they rested on my sleeve.

  ‘No, Latin American Studies, but I’m interested in theater… especially Latin American theater…’

  ‘I did my Masters in theater at Columbia,’ she said.

  ‘Really? What year?’

  ‘1995–97.’