Two to Tango (Nick Madrid)

by Peter Guttridge

  "Maybe I can talk to you about this later."

  "Sure," she said.

  "Will I see you later?"

  "We're all on the same plane to Cusco, aren't we?"

  "I didn't mean that," I said, dropping my voice into a lower register.

  "Have you caught a cold?" she said. I listened to the static on the line for a moment then she continued: "Nick I like to live for the moment, and last night ..."

  "Had its moments?"

  "Moment actually," she blurted, then quickly added. "Who knows what might happen further down the line? Nick, love, I'll see you at the airport. Good luck with Otis"

  She broke the connection and I sighed before I put the phone gently back on its rest.

  Cusco, the old Inca capital high in the Andes, is where things began to get really complicated. The flight up from Lima was uneventful. I was hoping to sit with Catherine but Bridget took the seat next to her. Every so often during the flight I'd be aware of the pair of them looking my way and sniggering.

  I was stuck with Perry wittering on about the Incas.

  "I don't see what the big deal is," he said. "First off you think `Wow!' look at these huge cities and temples made out of these big slabs of stone. And sure they're impressive.You think Egypt and the pyramids. But dig, man, the Egyptians had done it a couple of thousand years earlier.

  "These Incas and the damned Aztecs were running around in loincloths chopping the hearts out of virgins and sacrificing bodies whilst you Europeans were having your Renaissance. Here are your Stone Age dudes living in the fifteenth century.

  "No wonder you got drug barons fighting each other and your general lawlessness in South America now-on their tine-scale they've only just reached the Middle Ages. I tell you, the sooner they wake up and smell the twentieth century the better for all of us."

  I made the mistake of arguing with him.

  "I think you're ignoring their achievements. Just because they went around in loincloths doesn't mean they were savages. And there's no real proof of human sacrifice I don't think. Remember they had no written language so all the accounts we have of them are by Spanish conquerors.You know what they say: history is written by the victors."

  "The conquistadors-you got it right there man. The Inca empire spread from Chile to Colombia. These guys so frigging advanced how come they got conquered by Mister Francisco Pizarro with 179 men and a couple of horses?"

  "The Spanish arrived during a civil war."

  But Perry wasn't having any. On and on he went until in desperation I put on my headphones and pretended to watch the inflight entertainment, an old movie about a bunch of astronauts lost in space.

  The plane landed before the astronauts did. The film kept rolling so those passengers who wanted to see how the movie ended stayed in their seats to find out. Since this plane was due to make the return flight to Lima virtually on turnaround I could see how advertised plane times were only rough guides.

  I waited until Perry had disembarked then followed.

  Back in the rarefied air-we were just over 11,000 feet above sea level-I could see the difference in the quality of the light. There were even higher mountains all around, some capped with snow, some wreathed in mist or white clouds, others clear and acutely defined against the intense blue sky.

  I watched Otis and Horace talking together, Otis with his arm round the much smaller man. Richard drew lily attention to a slight dilemma for the tour in the airport concourse.To help adjust to the altitude new arrivals were encouraged to drink a cup of coca leaf tea, available from several stalls.

  "We have an ethical problem here," Richard said,

  I was startled. Not because there was a problem but because Richard knew the word ethical.

  "We're the Rock Against Drugs tour but here we are faced with coca leaf from which cocaine is made"

  "No problem," Otis said, looking back over his shoulder. "Coca isn't a narcotic, it's a stimulant. Cocaine is just a derivative of the leaf."

  He picked up a packet of coca leaf tea from the stall.

  "I don't know what happens when you make tea, but in its natural state the leaf has some fourteen alkaloids and a handful of vitamins in it. Chew the leaf and it gives a lift when the going gets tough.

  "Maintains blood sugar level when protein intake is low, regulates the heart rate during drastic changes in altitude. Even dulls the appetite. But it ain't gonna get you stoned unless you chew half a trees worth of leaves."

  Ralph spirited Otis and Horace away in a big Mercedes taxi. Bridget sidled up to me.

  "There speaks a rock star-they have, in my experience, unequalled pharmacological knowledge."

  I took a sip of the tea. It was bitter. I waited for some spinach/Popeye reaction on my body. In vain.

  "I was hoping to sit next to Catherine on the plane," I said.

  "Tough," Bridget said. "I would stay away from her for a while. Let her recover."

  "She told you then?"

  "Naturally I'm pleased you managed to get laid at sea-level by the way, so there was no shortness-of-breath problems."

  "No problems at all," I said. I ducked my head closer to her ear so that I could whisper. "I'm not one to boast but she said she'd never had sex quite like it."

  I thought perhaps Bridget had swallowed her tea down the wrong way. She seemed to be choking. It took me a moment to realize it was suppressed laughter.

  "You took that for a compliment did you?" she finally gasped.

  Before I could wonder what she meant, Richard rejoined us.

  "Had a word with Otis.Told him you had something to tell him. Seven o" clock in the hotel bar."

  The taxi ride into Cusco took only ten minutes or so. Cusco was little more than a town but had within its narrow paved streets a phenomenal amount of Inca masonry. But then it had been the capital of the last Inca (Inca was the name of the leader of the tribe of Indians we now know as Incas).

  I told Bridget: "In Cusco almost every central street has the remains of Inca stonework serving as the foundations of a modern home." I pointed to a distinctive Inca wall as we waited at a traffic light.

  "Look. The stonework tapers upwards and every wall has a perfect line of inclination towards the center from bottom to top ..."

  Bridget blew cigarette smoke into my face.

  "It was a mistake to let you sit with Perry," she said flatly.

  We stopped in front of an old wooden gateway on a steep, narrow alley scarcely big enough for the taxi to drive along. Once through the gateway we entered a large luxury hotel built around two cloisters.

  It had once been a monastery-Cusco has a remarkable number of colonial churches, monasteries, and convents alongside or on top of its Inca ruins.

  I had a room to myself so once I'd unpacked I spent the time before my meeting with Otis doing my yoga very slowly. It reminded me of Beatrice.

  I went down to the bar at seven. It was small, with preColumbian artifacts on display in alcoves lit from below. Otis was already waiting there, a glass or so into a bottle of wine.

  "So, Mr. Madrid, at last we meet," he said in some niock- espionage voice.

  He poured me a glass of wine as I settled myself facing him. He'd taken his dark glasses off for a change-he might well have missed the glasses otherwise. He looked fit and healthy, despite the awesome amounts of alcohol he seemed to have been putting away.

  He raised his glass and looked me in the eye.

  "To my ex-wife Catherine," he said in a gentle voice. "Who I hear you're having carnal knowledge of."

  I put my glass down. He saw the look on my face. I didn't of course but I hoped it was suitably steely and square jawed.

  "Petulance doesn't suit you, pal," he said. "Personally I don't care who you fuck but you've got some big shoes to fill theremy shoes-and looking at you I don't see how you can."

  "Are you really so obnoxious?" I said without thinking. "Or is it just some front you feel you need to present to people?"

  He grinned and took a
swig of his wine, his eyes never leaving mine. Maybe it was the coca leaf tea but despite the couple of KOs he'd given me I wasn't afraid of him.

  "That's for you to decide-if you've a mind to"

  I wanted to look round for the nearest heavy object to bash him with, pacifist as I am. But behind the cockiness it was plain to see that self-loathing ran deep. I hadn't been in therapy for nothing.

  "On a scale of one to ten how much do you hate yourself?" I said. He drained his glass.

  "Which is top of the scale-one or ten?"

  He kept his eyes on me, then reached over and squeezed my bicep.

  "Sorry, pal. I've never loved anyone like I loved Catherine. Find it difficult to deal with her having other men."

  "Time you grew up then," I said, wanting desperately to rub my bicep. He had a strong grip.

  There was something entirely vulnerable about him under the bluster and the aggression. I wasn't intending to forgive him for his treatment of other people, particularly women, but I was unexpectedly moved that he seemed so lost.

  I was reminded of my earlier feelings about his death wish. And looking at the way he drained his glass and poured another almost in the same moment I saw not a man who was an alcoholic but a man who didn't really give a fuck, although maybe that came to the same thing.

  He looked at me.

  "There's something about you, Madrid, kind of gets under the skin. Makes a person want to tell you things."

  "So tell me," I said.

  "Do you know Confessions of A Justified Sinner?" he said, gripping my arm again.

  "Sure, doesn't everybody" I said, wincing.

  "I don't mean the album I mean the book"

  "I mean the book, too."

  The James Hogg book was one of my dark favorites, a Gothic story not of good and evil but of evil and evil-or more precisely how banality can be turned to evil uses. The plot, in case you don't know it, charts the descent into hell of a Calvinist young man whose belief in justification by faith is twisted by the Devil into a belief that any action he takes is justified. His actions include murdering his parents and his stepbrother.

  The Devil goads him on in various guises but often the guise is that of the Calvinist himself. The Devil as doppelganger commits horrific crimes that the Calvinist has no memory of.

  Aside from the fact the Devil must be pretty bored to spend so much time winning the soul of this oik, the book is very atmospheric, especially in its description of late eighteenth century Edinburgh. I wasn't surprised when it was made into a movie, but I had been surprised to discover Otis's interest in it.

  "I've been betrayed by friends who led me into bad ways. You know I've been in hospitals, the psychiatric unit? The drink and the drugs. Lots of blank spaces.

  "I've done things I don't remember doing. Even wondered if I had a doppelganger, like the Sinner, doing some of this stuff. But the psychiatrist explained it was just me refusing to take responsibility for the bad parts of me or the bad things I've done. That's where the Devil comes from, you know-people externalizing their own bad actions."

  In my new post-therapy persona I was hip to the `real meaning of things,' even if my therapist had been a con-person. Doppelganger-the double or shadow who gets the blame for your own bad actions-is classic delusionary stuff.

  "You saying that when you get drunk you have memory lapses?"

  "That would be a cop-out, wouldn't it? Something convenient for fiction writers. But with the drugs as well ..." He shrugged his big shoulders. "My memory is like Swiss cheese. It has all these big holes in it."

  "You mean like the sixties-if you can remember them you weren't there?"

  "Just blank spaces."

  He drank his wine. After a few moments I said: "I was sorry to hear about your son."

  His eyes filled with tears.

  "Didn't think I could have kids, you see. One of the reasons Catherine and I didn't last-took it out on her"

  "I think you're a real shit with this violence-to-women thing."

  "You think I don't?" he said, his voice thickening. He balled his fists, held them in front of him. The swelling on the right one had gone down but the knuckles were still raw. I looked at the scars on the left one. He unclenched his fists and turned his hands palm up.

  "I look at these fists that I've used to bludgeon and these fingers that I play my music with and I can't seem to put the two together." He chewed his moustached. "I don't know what to say to you. I loathe myself for how I abuse people. My music comes out of that loathing."

  "That's your justification-other people's suffering allows you to create art?"

  He wanted to get angry but his heart wasn't in it.

  "I'm not trying to justify. I'm trying to explain something that torments me.The fact I push away those I most care about." He picked up his glass, held it loosely in front of him. "Except for my son and his mother. They were taken from me"

  He looked at me. Forced a smile.

  "But you had something you wanted to tell me"

  "Not about the death threats-at least I don't think so.Those are a thing of the past now, I expect."

  "You reckon?" he said, giving me an odd look. He topped up both our glasses then waited for me to speak. I took a breath then told him all I'd found out about Horace.

  He didn't interrupt once and it was clear he believed me. When I'd finished, instead of the rage I'd expected there was only sorrow. He had slumped in his seat. His eyes were fixed on the table between us. When he looked up his eyes were full of tears again. He seemed such a little boy lost I wanted to hug him.

  "Ah well," he said, his voice thick. "Ah well."

  "I'm sorry," I said. "And to be the one to tell you."

  "I think I knew. Just didn't want to face it. We met at a bad time for me. He helped me out of a hole. Got me back on my feet"

  "You'd been pretty wild before then"

  "As I said-some things I'm supposed to have done I can't believe I did. But yeah there are enough outrageous events for me to own up to."

  "Is it true that in the early days you once turned a promoter upside down and shook your money out of him because he tried to run off without paying you?"

  He smiled.

  "They were always trying to rip you off in those days. If you were supposed to get a percentage of the bar they'd lie about the takings. If it was on the door they'd lie about how many people had come in, as if you couldn't count them for yourself on stage. First song I did I was always a bit distracted because I'd be counting heads."

  He took a gulp of his wine.

  "So this promoter?" I said helpfully.

  "I'm sitting on stage in this church hall singing a song and suddenly see this promoter creep off down the center aisle. `Stop him,' I shout, `he's got my bleeding money.' Then I jump down off the stage and chase him. I catch him and I turn him upside down-he's only a little runt-and this roll of fives and ones and, Christ, ten bob notes in those days falls out of his jacket pocket.

  "I'm tempted to take the lot for the aggro but I peel off what I'm owed and leave it at that. I don't want him to have an excuse to come back at me with the law, you know?"

  He chuckled and shook his head.

  "I was doing a gig in Washington once and I didn't know anybody. After a show I'm always pumped up. I went to this bar and had a few rounds and started feeling feisty so I gave the other guys at the bar the usual bollocks about Britain versus the States-I wasn't insulting or anything-well, not very-and the next thing I know the barman's laid a baseball bat across the side of my head. Out cold."

  He sighed.

  "I was bad those days."

  "You're not bad now?"

  "Too frigging old for that malarkey, mate. Being a yob is a young person's game. I take it easy now" He saw my look. "You were different pal. I've always been jealous." I continued to look. "The guy outside the club." He shook his head. "That's a blank space"

  He'd finished the bottle. He looked at his watch.

  "Got to do the
soundcheck in half an hour"

  "What will you do about Horace?"

  "Sort him out after the concert. Do you think he could have been sending me death threats?"

  "Not really. I think you have to distinguish between the people who send out death threats and the people who want you dead."

  "Subtle distinction."

  "Maybe. Maybe Benny sent you a death threat but I even doubt that. But don't sweat it. Now you're in Peru I'd be very surprised if you got any more threats."

  "That right?" he said, getting to his feet. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. Dropped it on the table.

  "Found it in my jacket pocket last night before I went on stage in Lima."

  He stopped halfway to the door and looked back.

  "Despite all the security whoever the bastard is was backstage-in my dressing room."

  "Wait-have you told Ralph?"

  He carried on walking. Called back: "You tell him. Like I said-these bastards want me, they know where to find me. I don't give a shit any more."

  I unfolded the paper. It was to the point. Someone had written out another couplet from Otis's hit "Sinner Man:"

  Some people found the second line derivative of a Robert Johnson song title.Whatever. In this context the meaning seemed quite clear. Otis was still in danger.

  I went for a walk around town. Aside from our trip to the Amazon, I had never felt more of an intruder into someone else's culture. Everywhere I looked were Indians living in poverty.

  Essentially, I knew, they were Mongolian, as their flat cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes showed. Around 20,000 B. C. Asian tribes had crossed the Bering Straits and drifted down through the Americas. There were many other tribes before the Incas came along. As Perry had pointed out, the Incas were in power for only a hundred years.

  I reached the main square of the town, the Plaza de Armas, where tonight's concert would be held. A large stage jutted out from the steps below the cathedral. It was like a square in an old Spanish town, with enclosed wooden balconies hanging over it on three sides and arcades full of Indian market stalls.

  It was big-some 5,000 people were expected to fill it in the evening. Every train and bus delivered another load of musiclovers, who were spread around the town since until this evening there was no access to the square.