The Hungry Blade

by Lawrence Dudley

  “This is a self-portrait?” he said. “Different versions of you?”

  “We are all multiple beings, although women much more so than men.”

  “How so?”

  “I think there are many different voices in our heads. For instance we are repelled by violence but often attracted to those men who practice it. Or what are we to be? That is a question. Madonna or whore? Also a trap. Men are simpler, they want what they want and they are what they want.”

  “Perhaps. We have our contradictions, too. But, yes, a man is what he does. I have always thought that.”

  A man is what he does, Hawkins thought, that is what I have always believed. What I have done … makes me what I am? What am I now, then? Now I’m supposed to do the very thing Eckhardt and Falkenberg were trying to do? What’s the difference between me and them? I am the very thing I wanted to fight, he realized. I have become my enemy. How did this happen …

  She set a box out and threw a sheet over it.

  “Sit here.” And so he sat down, still numbly looking around the studio. She picked up her brush, ready to go. “Well,” she said expectantly.

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you going to take off your clothes?”

  “What!”

  “You need to take your clothes off. I want to paint your scars too. They were interesting. I need to see them again.”

  “You didn’t say anything about taking any clothes off!”

  “Well, of course. Artists’ models shed their clothes. They have done it for thousands of years. Have you looked at any of those paintings? Been in a museum?”

  “I don’t—” This was not what he expected, it seemed, well, something …

  “I saw you half naked when you were getting dressed. That’s when I asked. You didn’t seem very bothered then.”

  “I was in a hurry—I guess I was—didn’t seem—you looked like a man, in your suit—it—”

  “You forgot that I was a woman?”

  “Of course not!”

  “For the love of god, they’re just clothes.”

  “Just?”

  “What is the big deal?”

  “Eh—”

  “Here. Silly scaredy-cat.” She stuck her tongue out and began unknotting her tie, whipping away the shirt, tossing it aside, naked to the waist underneath it. “Come on.” She bent over, untying her shoes. She stood back up, kicking the shoes off, her breasts bobbling slightly. “See? Only clothes.”

  Only … Well, hardly, Hawkins thought. She was young and very pretty. Her attractiveness was no longer hidden or camouflaged under the baggy confines of a guayabera or a man’s boxy suit with its padded shoulders emphasizing the manliness of its owner. All her femininity was now impossible to ignore or miss. Her pomaded hair, slicked down tight all these days, was also lifting off in the heat, fluffing out on its own, a dark corona around her head. Then she lightly tossed the pants aside as if they were not freighted with the weight of centuries of tradition and custom and endlessly rationalized censure and inhibition—an airy nothing. All was exposed, head to toe, including her pubic hair and the private space that waits. She picked up the palette again, gesturing with it. “Well, come on, are you such a big coward?”

  That jogged Hawkins out of his momentary paralysis. It wasn’t that he was offended—he was no prude. Or that he sought to defend and restore whatever standard of conduct he was brought up with, even if deep down he didn’t believe in it. He wasn’t given to the reflexive conformity to which so many people instinctively surrendered themselves. Nor was it a sense of inhibition.

  No, it oddly echoed Corrialles’s massacre at the airfield, her demand radically out of the normal routine of life. Things went along as expected. That was the normal, quotidian fabric of life, the security of predictability. Apples were now falling up from trees. Life suddenly seemed off-kilter, but also, freer. Restraints were broken. Liberated. The excitement of a dog unexpectedly off the leash, looking around with wide eyes. What’s here? What’s next?

  He began quickly pulling it all off, unknotting tie and unbuttoning shirt at the same time, kicking off the loafers. The speed was instinct, not decision, the way when swimming you throw yourself into cold water rather that torturing yourself an inch at a time.

  “No. And you know I’m not, that’s not—”

  “I’m sorry. I know. Unfair of me. Want some tequila anyway?”

  “Sure.” She fetched a bottle. He took a swig and sat down as she directed him into position. The liquor was warm and good. She returned to her palette.

  He’d been naked with women, of course. But like most people they only saw each other that way in the gloaming of a bedroom or hallway. But now here the two of them were, in the light and apparently unafraid. He took another sip, sliding the smoky warmth over his tongue. She began happily painting away, limning out the outlines of what she wanted with broad strokes.

  Sitting still—simply sitting—was something he wasn’t used to doing. But it was good to have an enforced moment to rest and think. I knew she was a woman, he thought, but the way I met her at Frida’s Casa Azul, thinking she was a teenaged boy, seemed to have disarmed me, or perhaps inoculated me against seeing her as a woman, although I still knew it. That governed my expectations to come. Now I am seeing her anew, as if for the first time.

  Then he thought, I now am like a real artist, like Riley, actually seeing, looking at the world, the people around me, actually seeing her anew, too. Is this a revolutionary act? Or her ordering me to undress? Men aren’t used to having women order them to undress. We may want revolution, but are we comfortable with it when it occurs? I wasn’t at first. Still—I seem comfortable now …

  There are so many things I did not see. I came here and saw what I wanted to see: the things or people I wanted to fight. Was it a form of tunnel vision? Maybe more like a pair of tinted lenses that colored all that I saw. I was closer to that artist who painted those oh-so-quaint images of sleepy men in sombreros than I would care to admit.

  “Which manifestation are you now?” he said. “Priestess? Cabbie? Revolutionary?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. All of those.”

  “Ah. All right. The priestess of art driving us to the revolution in a cab.”

  “You understand! Exactly! You see! You are thinking like an artist now.”

  “I’m flattered.” She began humming softly as she painted. He had another swig of the warm liquor. If seeing is a revolutionary act, what am I seeing? he thought. “Am I part of the Revolution here, now?”

  “If you fight for it, if you think it’s worth a fight.”

  “Yes. It’s worth a fight. The Nazis, they wanted a coup. That’s why they came here. I think I was able to break that up.”

  “That does not surprise me.”

  “Righto. Why were they here, otherwise?”

  “You have interesting hobbies, Mr. Art Dealer Businessman. Are you sure you’re not a spy? I think Camarada Trotsky would know one when he saw one.”

  He chuckled. “Hobbies. Maybe I should take up painting.”

  “Don’t unless you are serious about it.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “And General Corrialles?”

  “He was in the thick of it.”

  “That does not surprise me, either.”

  “No, it’s no surprise at all.”

  “You seem troubled, Hawkins. If I stopped a coup I would be happy.”

  “General Corrialles still has the paintings. I should’ve destroyed them.”

  She dropped her arms, the brush and palette smearing streaks of paint on her bare legs.

  “My god! Hawkins! No!”

  At that his numbness, the cool mood, the professional self-protection, finally and abruptly shattered, the way a piece of ancient
porcelain explodes into a cloud of dust and fragments when it falls from a high shelf. Words he was thinking, or didn’t want to think, or thought he alone was hearing, burst out, surprising himself.

  “Riley, I’ve made a terrible mistake. They’re going to do it, there’s going to be—my god, what have I done! What have I become! I’ve become a monster!”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  -63-

  “Some … friends of mine—”

  “Friends? What kind of friends!”

  “All right, certain powers that be. They can organize the sale for Corrialles so that he can stage a coup on his own. Without the Nazis.”

  “My god!”

  “I should’ve destroyed the paintings—”

  “I see—but, Hawkins, how would you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I should’ve found a way, or not gone down this road at all.”

  “But you stopped the Nazis—if you had not come to Mexico—”

  “Yes. That’s true. But I wasn’t for this, I was against a coup.”

  “Against Mexico, the Revolution, you mean?”

  “Yes.” He took another swig, thinking that over. “I now know what’s here is worth fighting for. I’ve seen that. The people in the streets, the need for justice, for a better life.” Another tip of the bottle. “I may not be Mexican, but I’m glad to fight for it.”

  “For the love of Mexico, for the Revolution? Really?” She started painting again, watching him warily.

  Love, Hawkins thought, as the tequila loosened both his mind and tongue, love, that’s what I’ve been missing since that day three years ago when I walked into that plant in East Prussia, hoping to sell some valves, and discovered the Nazis were making poison gas, breaking all the post–World War I treaties. I have been against them ever since. I wanted nothing else except to fight them, against Hitler, that smug, smirking man in the car in Vienna. Because I knew what and who I was against, I thought that was enough.

  But that was not enough, he realized. I didn’t know what I was for, because love is the most powerful way of being for something.

  Love connects you to everything else. He thought of Raul, in his cab down in Veracruz, tapping his fist on his chest, mi corazón—my heart. The people in the Zocalo, listening to Cárdenas, the love in their faces. Or the sailors in the mess room on the Dendrobium, or the pilots in the sky over England, they were enraged because they felt the horror of the reports in their hearts, and they felt it because they loved their families, their city, their country. For unless you love something, why would you feel the horror? You don’t think horror, you can’t think horror, you feel it, you can only feel horror.

  If you don’t love something, it’s a thing like any other thing. Or, if you can’t feel love yourself, you can’t see it in others. He remembered the dead look in Hitler’s eyes that time he had seen him back in Berlin, the way he’d looked at people, as if they were things. There was never love in those eyes.

  Hitler, his people, they were insensitive to the horror they were unleashing because they couldn’t feel or see the love others felt. In exactly the same way the people back in New York and London who wanted a coup were insensitive to the horror of what Corrialles’s little counterrevolution was going to mean. Perhaps it was distance, but they couldn’t see the love others felt.

  Whatever happened—a proposed coup, blood in the streets, death, destruction—either way, it was just another thing that existed or that people did, an abstraction, an emotionless chess game, all soulless calculation. You don’t feel the horror. The Germans dropping bombs on London? Merely another thing. A coup here? A thing. If you didn’t sense or share a sense of what love brought to you or others, you couldn’t feel the horror of anything, and you could talk yourself into doing damn near anything. And so they had.

  And I can see now why I couldn’t feel the horror, he realized. Guarding against my anger, keeping myself safe from tipping my hand to others, even from myself. Yes, it cut me off from my anger but it also cut me off from love and, oddly but truly, horror.

  But how … now what?

  A giggle broke him from his rumination. He glanced over at Riley.

  “Hawkins! Come now!” It was a protest that was on the edge of a blush.

  Oh. Damn, he realized.

  “Ah, well, oops. It has a mind of its own.”

  He tried shifting his position, moving his hand and the bottle, trying to hide it.

  “No, I’m trying to paint you that way! Stop!” Another blushing giggle. “You are distracting me!”

  “I am horribly sorry. I am a total failure at this modeling business.”

  “No, no, not your hand there, you’re changing your position again.” She started laughing. He started laughing.

  “Here, perhaps you’re the one who needs the tequila …” He gestured out with the bottle, “I don’t think this was a good idea, I’m a little too relaxed, now.” He stepped over with the bottle. She took a good swig, holding on to his shoulder, lightly caressing it, then they wrapped their arms around each other, still laughing.

  “What are you going to do, Hawkins?” Riley was far from what he had ever expected in a woman. There might have been something off-putting about it before, but now at the sight of her naked body all fears and doubts vanished. The sense of rebellion, her fierce freedom, it was irresistible—he was seeing, too, not only her, but the world anew. For the moment, all else was forgotten, lost in the immediacy of the turmoil he was feeling, lost in rebellion.

  “The most revolutionary thing of all,” he said. “An act of love.”

  -64-

  They were together on the old bed Riley kept in the corner of her studio. She was sound asleep. He could hear the soft whistling noise of her breathing, feel her chest slightly rising and falling, a comforting feeling. Hawkins tried to sleep, too, but every time he started to drift off the reality of what had happened jerked him awake. Corrialles. The paintings. The orders. Send the paintings on. Dear god … first his stomach, then his jaw, then all his muscles would tighten up and the tension would snap him back awake. Then came fleeting pangs of guilt. Days ago I was thinking I should’ve asked Daisy to marry me. Now here I am in bed with Riley. But … I had to go. And she knew that. She understood. She told me to go. It all seemed a long ways away now, anyway.

  Finally, close to dawn, he fell restlessly asleep, and he began to see it all: Parke-Bernet. The auctioneer holding his little hammer high, snapping down, Sold! The uniformed attendants slipped a cover over a painting and started to carry it away. Only they weren’t wearing Parke-Bernet’s gray jackets, they were in tan, they were soldiers, Mexican Army soldiers, wearing helmets, Corrialles’s men. They started carrying off the painting, marching away, to battle, saluting their general on the way. Corrialles was smiling, and why not? He’d gotten what he wanted.

  They turned and marched off the stage, stamping their feet. Their legs, Hawkins realized, still dreaming, their feet, their legs, all red—covered with blood! Up to their knees, leaving bloody footsteps behind them.

  The auctioneer ordered another piece brought up. A vase. Riley’s vase! The one he rescued from the flight school, the one she’d made. Hawkins was laughing now in his dream—ha ha, joke’s on you! The hammer came down again. Then the vase, on a desk at the museum. A man with a mustache, looks like Cárdenas—no, it is Cárdenas! He shakes his head, a small tolerant smile. No. The couple who bought it, a bald man in a gray suit and his wife in her mink stole, turn fire-engine red. The man pounds a fist on the table. Cárdenas points to Riley’s signature inside the glyph. The man and woman disappear in flames.

  Hawkins abruptly woke up.

  “Riley! Riley!”

  She woke with a gasp. “Unh—Hawkins! Are you all right?”

  Hawkins leapt up. “Yes! Yes!”

  “What the hell is the matter!”
/>   “Riley, the beaker!”

  “It’s too early! In the name of god!”

  “No, listen. The beaker. Do you have any more?” He began darting around the room, checking the paintings, the boxes.

  “Why?”

  “It’s the answer. Don’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “Make fakes!”

  “Of what?

  “General Corrialles’s paintings!”

  “Wha—”

  “You, your friends, people like the Riveras, you said there was a whole community of artists here who made money on the side.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “If you could fake that beaker so perfectly, you could fake anything.” She lifted up on one elbow, now fully awake.

  “I’m flattered you have such confidence in my talents, Hawkins. But why? What’s the point? General Corrialles has all the paintings he needs.”

  “We’ll make fakes and switch them. We can stop him!”

  “Hawkins, maybe to most collectors, but not to the museums, the top galleries, you’ll never fool them, you’re going to get caught.”

  “You’re not getting it. We want to get caught.”

  “You’re talking crazy. Why would you want to get caught?”

  He sat down on the bed with her, taking a hand, clasping it.

  “Corrialles is going to have me ship the paintings. We make fakes. Then we switch them. All they have to do is fool Corrialles. Send the fakes on to New York. When they get there, exactly as you say, the real experts at Parke-Bernet will realize they’re forgeries. Probably have a good laugh. Fakes go into the trash, Corrialles doesn’t get his money. There’s no coup. No civil war. No chaos. Peaceful transition of power from President Cárdenas to the new president. The US is free to concentrate on helping Britain, no distractions. You see?”