Genius

by Patrick Dennis

  “Good Lord, man, do you intend to loll about all day? Your wife’s been up and about for hours. Now do hurry. We can’t keep an important figure in the Mexican cinema such as Aristido González waiting.”

  “Sit down,” I mumbled, “while I get some fresh coffee and take a shower.”

  “We haven’t time. Besides, you look clean.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Perhaps no one will notice. Now do put on something with a bit of dash.” He opened the closet door and began pawing through my suits. “I say, haven’t you anything with any style to it at all?”

  “Not down here. Your kind of drag isn’t worn much—off-stage, that is.”

  “Tattiest wardrobe I’ve ever seen.”

  “Well, at least it’s paid for.”

  “Here, this will do.” He tossed me a Glen Urquhardt plaid suit, originally woven with Siberia in mind. “And wear the waistcoat, too. If there’s anything I can’t endure it’s American men with their bosoms hanging out of their suits—shirt bosoms, that is.”

  “Are you crazy, Starr? It’ll be up in the eighties today.”

  “We must all make some sacrifices for art, dear boy, and with González a certain air of formality is sine qua non.”

  “That and sitting on your wallet, from all I’ve heard,” I growled. I threw off my robe and burrowed through a drawer for a clean shirt.

  “Good heavens, man,” Starr said. “Are you gray all over?”

  “Yes. Are you dyed all over?”

  “Don’t be cheeky with your elders and do hurry. We can’t keep González waiting.” After Starr had gone through all of my neckties, criticizing each as he let it drop to the floor; after he had recommended a splendid little place on the rue Castiglione specializing in foundation garments for gentlemen; after he had called me ten kinds of a slob for not having brought a bowler, an umbrella, and chamois gloves to a land of sunstroke and palm trees, he pronounced me passable—“But do try to keep to dim corners, dear boy, and by all means keep your mouth shut. I’ll do the talking.”

  “That’ll be a nice change for all of us,” I said. He steered me down the stairs and permitted me to give my wife a chaste kiss.

  “Will you be home for lunch?” she asked.

  “I . . . uh . . .”

  “Certainly not. My dear old friend González will undoubtedly lay on a superb spread. À bientôt, chérie.”

  We got out into the street, and I said, “Is it within walking distance or should we take a taxi?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, my dear fellow. God, how can one be as naïve as you after forty years in this vale of tears?” He pulled a tiny gold whistle from his pocket and let fly with a piercing blast. From around the corner Mrs. Worthington Pomeroy’s hideous lavender Cadillac appeared, complete with chauffeur, footman, fuchsia-satin upholstery, and the air conditioning going full tilt.

  Starr settled into the car and gave the address. “Would you like to have that chinchilla lap robe tucked around you, Gramps?” I asked.

  “Don’t be facetious. You know, this car wouldn’t be bad—in a different color. Although in the long run a Rolls is cheaper.”

  “Doesn’t Mrs. Pomeroy want her car today?”

  “Not today. She has a new toy. That enormous house. So she graciously consented to lend it to me.”

  “In exchange for a pound of flesh?”

  “Just about. Now remember, don’t be all apple-cheeked American boy when you meet González. Latins don’t understand that sort of thing. Dignity and decorum. Follow my lead.” He drew a very grand cigarette case from his breast pocket and snapped it open under my nose. It was empty. “Drat! Do you happen to have a decent cigarette on you, good fellow? My valet grows more careless with every passing day. Thank you!” He settled back into the tufting, smoking with elaborate nonchalance, but I could see that he was nervous.

  Mrs. Pomeroy’s vast equipage rolled sedately out to the Pedregal section—all very posh—and came to a halt at a severely modern, although somewhat scaly, wall, pierced with a “moderne” wrought-iron gate that made me think a bit wistfully of the scenic designs of the late Joseph Urban. There was a short, pretty ballet involving Starr and the footman, who opened the door, bowed low, and all but tugged his forelock as he helped us down—or rather up—from the great underslung car.

  Starr pulled at the bell chain, and we waited. He pulled again, and still we waited. Then he yanked at it furiously, and the chain came off in his hand. “Damn!” he roared. A moment later a pale boy of about twenty, with thick lips and thick glasses, appeared on the other side of the gate. He looked sleepy and stupid and unbelievably suspicious.

  “Qué desean Ustedes?” he asked guardedly.

  “Is Señor González in?” Starr asked.

  “I don’t know,” the boy said in perfect English, with a slight Oxford accent, which seemed comical considering the rest of his appearance. “Who wishes to see Señor González?”

  “Mr. Starr. Le-an-der Starr. I have an appointment.”

  The youth cast a questioning glance at me, his eyes looking as big as prunes through the thick lenses of his spectacles.

  “Mr. Dennis,” Starr said. “My associate.” This was the first I had heard of my new position. I had volunteered to help Starr with his script (“patchy” had hardly begun to describe it), but I had never realized that I was to be so closely involved in Valley of the Vultures.

  “My father is expecting you, then?”

  “Nat-u-rally,” Starr declared.

  “Come in, please.” He undid several bolts and locks and, with a terrible screech of rusty hinges, opened the gate just wide enough for us to enter crabwise. It seemed a far cry from that highly touted “Mi casa es su casa” Latin hospitality. We walked up a longish, rutted gravel driveway through what must once have been a beautiful garden of the naturalistic school. However, nature had taken over with a vengeance, and the place was choked with weeds and wild vines. A large reflecting pool scooped out of lava rock was clogged with leaves and scum, a swarm of insects humming over its few inches of opaque, stagnant water. Before us loomed a severely modern (some years back) flat-roofed house that reminded me of Frank Lloyd Wright’s more daring experiments of thirty years ago. The boy stood aside sullenly at the front door, which looked a bit like the entrance to an old Trans-Lux Theatre, and allowed us to go in first.

  The salón de entrada was a large, stark, whitewashed cube with a lava-paved floor and great slabs of roughhewn lava sticking out of the wall to form a staircase leading to the upper quarters. A similar cantilevered lava-slab arrangement led downward. In fact, no two rooms seemed to be on the same level. On the walls were enormous, postery-looking figure studies—mostly female—painted by artists such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros during their rare nonsocially significant moods. Like the house, they served to remind one of how drastically fashions had changed.

  Here and there one could see a large white rectangle where, mercifully, one of these masterpieces of the thirties had been removed. An enormous old dog of no known species came growling at us from out of the gloom. The boy cursed at him in Spanish (second person familiar). The dog disappeared into the darkness with a yelp.

  “Down this way,” the boy said glumly.

  We followed him down the lava slabs into an immense high-ceilinged living room. Again, it was pure Frank Lloyd Wright with, now and again, a hint of Luis Barragán, Carlos Mérida, and Juan O’Gorman of many years ago. The room was very sparsely furnished with overstuffed chairs that looked as though they had been dredged up from the smoking saloon of the old Normandie. The predominating colors were mustard and chartreuse in furry, textured weaves. There were grayish smudges on the arms and backs of all of them. Stumps of candles were everywhere. “Be seated, please,” the boy said. “I will tell my father you are here.”

  I sat gingerly in one of the chairs; there was the twang of a broken harp string, and I was poked viciously by a spring.

  I
got right up again and strolled to the fireplace. It was filled with old newspapers, letters, candy wrappers, and cigarette butts. Over the mantel was a portrait as big as a blanket. It was, again, by Rivera and depicted a sloe-eyed beauty in native costume. It reminded me of nothing quite so much as an old poster urging one to visit the Southwest via Union Pacific.

  “Know who that is, dear boy?”

  “She looks fairly familiar.”

  “That’s Concha Malagár—González’s wife. That boy’s mother. Famous actress in her time. Toast of Latin America.”

  “Too bad the son doesn’t favor her,” I said. “What’s become of her?”

  “Dead. Suicide.”

  There was a shout from outside. “Ay! Starr! Leandro! Aquí. Estoy en la piscina.”

  “What’s that?” Starr asked.

  “He says he’s in a pool. What is he, a piranha fish?”

  We went outside through some dirty sliding glass doors and down another long, curving flight of lava slabs. Like the grounds in front, the garden must, at one time, have been sensational. Now it was hopelessly overgrown with bits of rubbish scattered here and there. At the bottom was a large swimming pool, more or less kidney-shaped. It seemed empty. The sides of the pool were slick with scum, and the murky water, clotted with algae, looked as though it hadn’t been changed or filtered in years. Suddenly, with a great snorting and splashing, the fattest man I’ve ever seen bobbed to the surface. I could think of nothing but a hippopotamus wallowing in ooze. “Ah, Starr! Querido Leandro! I come out.” With a thrashing and churning of the filthy water, Señor González wallowed over to a slimy ladder and struggled up to dry land. He was as naked as the day he was born and about a thousand times as repulsive. He carried at least three hundred pounds on the narrow frame of what should have been a slender man. Great, pendulous breasts swayed to left and right with every movement, huge folds of blubber cascaded over his hip bones, his belly was a great flap of fat that hung halfway to his knees. He was covered with short, black hair through which the water coursed in a million little rivulets. He waddled around the edge of the pool toward us, shedding water, his flat wet feet going “splat, splat, splat” on the lava pavement. “Leandro! Querido Leandro!” In traditional Mexican fashion he threw both arms around Starr, hammocks of hairy flesh swinging from his biceps. Starr, his splendid London suit drenched, freed himself agilely and introduced me. I was fortunate in receiving only a suetty, wet handshake and a “Con mucho gusto.” He stepped back and shook a bit more water off himself, setting his mountains of blubber to dancing obscenely. Then he grabbed his little pig’s snout between thumb and index finger and blew his nose. “Le gusta nadar?” he said, gesturing invitingly toward the filthy pool.

  “No, thank you,” I said, fighting to keep my stomach down, “I don’t believe I’ll go in swimming today.” Starr gagged.

  “Pliz be sitted,” González said with a gesture toward two rump-sprung canvas chairs. Water had collected in the seat of one. Starr chose the other, and I was delighted when the rotten canvas seat split, leaving Starr’s chin between his knees and his rear on the warm lava pavement. González had a good laugh over that, his sagging dugs and prolapsed stomach bobbing hideously.

  “For God’s sake, Dennis,” Starr snarled, “get me out of this flytrap.” I was grateful for the opportunity to avert my eyes from our host. By the time I’d extricated Starr from the ruined chair, González had put on what had once been, I suppose, a white turkish towelling robe. It was now a grimy mass of pulled threads, gray as an old floor mop.

  “Come, Starr, señor,” González said, “we all sitt over here.” He sank into the mildewed cushion of a rusty old glider that screamed with agony at his weight. Then he put his spindly little legs, interlaced like a road map with varicose veins, up on the tile table in front of him and surveyed his distorted feet complacently. He suffered under the delusion that toenails took care of themselves.

  “Thees mai son, Heff.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “Thees mai son, Heff. I name him for famous American actor and dear friend, Heff Chandler. Now dead.” He crossed himself piously.

  “Oh, I see. Jeff Chandler.”

  “Sí. Exactamente. Poor Heff. My friend. My brother.” Then he rattled something in rapid-fire Spanish to Heff. As far as I could gather, it had to do with going out and buying some tequila. Heff’s fat lip curled, and he snarled, again in Spanish, “With what?” There was an embarrassed pause. “Ai weel need Heff for interpretation. Mai Eengleesh ees . . .” a gesture.

  Heff began to translate in his stilted English. “My father says that he will need me as an interpreter as his command of . . .”

  “Yes, yes, child. Both Mr. Dennis and I were able to follow. Now, Aristido, about Valley of the Vultures . . .”

  “Ah, sí, sí, but first permit pequeña memoria of last night. I have weeth me the most beautiful blonde. Like the Marileen Moron she was.” (A sinuous gesture down his obese body to indicate her figure.) “She come to my house, she plead me for to take her to my bed. I say no. She beg. She cry. I say perhaps. She take off the dress. . . .” Overcome, he lapsed into Spanish with Heff translating in cold, clipped, precise English.

  “My father says that the young lady disrobed. He stroked her torso like a rare musical instrument—a violin or a cello. She moaned with pleasure, beseeching him to possess her bodily. Again he refused. When she was mad with desire, he ultimately relented. In due course she entreated my father to cease his violent passions. My father, being somewhat weary from having had his will, carnally, with two other beautiful women during the early part of the day, fell into a deep slumber. When he awoke this morning, the young lady had departed. But on his pillow she had left a superb diamond pin as a token of her extreme gratitude.” The son finished with a soft sigh of disgust. The father, waiting patiently for the end of the translation, beamed with pleasure. I was flabbergasted. The picture of Señor González in bed with anything more than a hot-water bottle was quite beyond the wildest flights of my imagination.

  “Good for you, Aristido,” Starr said with a stagey chuckle. “Still the same old devil with the ladies, aren’t you. Now about this film. I have the script and the cameraman.” Heff carried on his simultaneous translation rapidly and dispassionately. “However, I am working on a very small budget. I will have to avoid a great many unnecessary luxuries if the film is to be made at all. It is here where I will need your help—your connections in the Mexican film industry.”

  González held up his hand for silence and once again erupted into Spanish. “My father is saying that several years ago, when he was on his yacht anchored in the Nile at Cairo, an emissary from a certain royal house of Europe came aboard and commanded my father’s presence before his ruler—an internationally known princess of indescribable beauty. Heavily guarded, my father accompanied the—uh—the equerry to the villa of her royal highness. She received him quite disrobed but for high pay-tent leather boots with scarlet heels. In her right hand she carried a long whip. This royal personage explained to my father that she had attempted to achieve pleasure with all the greatest lovers in Europe, and all of them had failed her. She then gave him a love philter that was said to assure a state of complete tumescence for forty-eight hours. She led him into an adjoining chamber, which was hung entirely with black velvet. The floor was buried deep in fraises du bois. . . . Excuse me, sir, fraises du bois in English is . . .”

  “Strawberries,” I said, stifling a yawn.

  “Oh, yes. Thank you, sir. The princess then ordered my father to remove his clothing. . . .” Heff droned on and on with all the emotion of someone reading a bank statement aloud. I stopped listening. This time González’s chapter of personal history was taken almost word for word from a bit of pornography I had once picked up in Cairo for five piasters. It was entitled Such Nise a Prinsess (sic) and was noteworthy more for its typographical errors than its erogenous impact. The story finally ended, as I could have told González
in advance, with the beautiful princess throwing herself at his feet—I had to avert my eyes from his feet; those in crushed strawberries were more than I cared to picture—and offering him her kingdom if only he would sign on as royal stud. Having selflessly refused, he was rewarded instead with his weight in diamonds.

  “Whot cood Ai do, Leandro? Theese dame had me there seex days. Ai, whot a wooman!”

  “Heheheh, haven’t lost any of your old fire, Aristido,” Starr said. “Now about a studio, in case we should need one. There are the Churubusco Studios. They’re the biggest and the most expensive, or the San Angel studios. Now could you possibly intercede and . . .” Again the gesture for silence.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Starr. My father inquires as to whether or not you recall a certain Spanish actress named Estrellita who appeared in his last motion picture. . . .”

  “Forgive me, please, Heff,” I said, “but when did your father produce his last film?”

  González was champing at the bit to get on with his venereal reminiscences, but the son turned politely to me and said, “I do not know exactly, sir. It was before I was born.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “She was a dazzling brunette with breasts like melons. However, my father continues, one evening after the other actors had departed from the studio, she summoned my father to her dressing room. . . .”

  “Pardon me,” I said, “I’ll be right back.” González glared at me for cramping his act, but I felt sick. I relieved myself in the shrubbery and, perhaps ten minutes later, returned to the stinking pool. González, glistening with sweat, was winding up another romantic exploit. Starr looked hot and impatient, the son martyred and impassive.

  “. . . at the end of two weeks in that hotel suite in St. Petersburg, the grand duchess with tears in her eyes offered my father a check for a million rubles, but my father was too proud to accept it.”