Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  During those years there was a kind of storm. I had such a strong will, it was like a small plane flying through rain and thunder, but always managing to reach a lighted airfield. Things happened every day, every week and year. We shot dozens of movies and each time Kim went a bit further. One day he came to us with a new project. A horror movie. Horror and sex, he said, it’s brilliant, read this. He took out a script and I saw the title, Deflowering. It told the story of a young woman deflowered by the devil, who, like the God Zeus, uses different disguises to seduce her. Along the way, she witnesses other deflowerings and a couple of exorcisms, which were supposed, at least in theory, to make the audience’s hair stand on end. We read it, and for the first time there was a disagreement between Kay and Kim. Dimitros claimed that there was no feeling more diametrically opposed to sex than fear, because fear inhibited erection and without an erection there is no porn. Kim disagreed, saying that art was the true genital organ to which we ought to aspire and that, once it was achieved, then penises would rise like stalagmites and vaginas melt in their own juice.

  I didn’t want to give my opinion, but told Kay that, as Kim’s screenplays had given us prestige and success, we should show solidarity with his talent and support him, even if the movie turned out a failure. Not everything a genius does is perfect, or, as I read somewhere, “we cannot be sublime without interruption.” We did the movie, and again it came out well, perhaps because the scary parts weren’t all that scary, but simply gave the movie a sense of darkness and mystery that helped make the sex scenes stand out more.

  In those years, at the beginning of the Nineties, a very large number of artists went to Sarajevo, in Bosnia, to express their solidarity with the civilian population trapped in the siege of the city, victims of that stupid war that had its origin in the desire for independence of those republics that had previously been part of Yugoslavia. Theatrical groups from Germany, Austria, France, and Poland all went. The writer Susan Sontag and her son staged a version of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot there, which stirred international opinion and gave the Sarajevans, at least for a time, the feeling that they weren’t alone, and I say “the feeling” because in reality they were indeed alone, more alone than a stone thrown in a river, which was proved by everything that happened later. Faced with that horror, Kay said, we have to do something, we can’t just fold our arms while people are dying. We decided to do a stage show that could be taken and presented there. We started working on that and once again it was Kim who came up with the best idea, which was to do an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s novel Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue, the idea being to showcase a work that had survived intolerance. That was the message Kim wanted to give the Sarajevans. When it was ready, with six actors and a small technical team, we applied to the United Nations for entry papers and they gave us visas as artists within the humanitarian aid program. We traveled from Paris to Zagreb, spent the night there, and the following day flew to Split, on the Dalmatian coast, from where UN flights left for Sarajevo.

  My God, what an experience that was.

  We went in an old Hercules with wooden seats, which flew at a very high altitude and carried incendiary ammunition, in case anyone fired a missile at us. After an hour’s flight the plane went into a nosedive and our skin stuck to our bones. Then, just as it looked as if we were about to crash, the nose lifted, the plane returned to a horizontal position, and we landed. We could see the roofs of burned and demolished houses at the sides of the airfield.

  After taxiing along the runway, the Hercules opened at the back and a UN soldier yelled at us, run to that hill and take cover, they’re shooting from over there, pointing to the other side of the runway. We grabbed our bags and the boxes with the props and ran behind the hill. The airport’s control tower was leaning to the side, not directly out of the ground like the Tower of Pisa but on top of a horizontal building. The walls were full of holes, and there wasn’t a single window in good condition. In their place were sheets of steel intended to stop bullets from snipers.

  The French UN soldiers checked our baggage meticulously and after a while let us get into an armored car that was to take us to the city. The city. A euphemism for that vast mountain of rubble that Sarajevo had turned into. On the night of our arrival, we could feel it on our skin, because there was an air raid. Grenades and shells plowed across the sky, leaving green vapor trails. It was a macabre spectacle that, in spite of its dramatic quality, contained a certain beauty. I crouched on one of the upper floors of the hotel, looking out through a crack in the wall, because the hotel had been hit early in the fighting and now only the first six floors were in use. The atmosphere was bleak. The corridors were like caves, the rooms side grottoes covered in dust and rubble. In one of them I found a girl’s shoe. A little patent leather shoe with a low heel. I picked it up and dusted it off a bit. I lit my cigarette lighter and saw it had been pink. It was some consolation that at least there wasn’t a foot in it. Then I remembered the fantasies I had had in Paris, when I was taking drugs and Kay was in hospital. Images of women who saw destroyed cities, and a caravan of hooded men making their way through the rubble to a temple on top of a hill, before being massacred in a shower of black bullets, in the middle of an even blacker night. And I said to myself: it wasn’t a fantasy. It’s happening here.

  The next day, the sun was radiant. We went with our props team to the Opera House and put up the lights and the set. One of our colleagues, Yarco, was Yugoslav, so there was no problem in making ourselves understood. The only sticky moment was when the director of the theater, a man of seventy who had agreed to our participation as a gesture of solidarity, was disturbed by some of the imagery and asked for a summary of the play. Yarco explained that it was a modern adaptation of the Marquis de Sade; the man was enthusiastic, but said, I don’t want any explicit sex scenes, my audience would find that quite sad, so we did as he said, limiting ourselves to simulating the couplings, and it all went very well. It was a wonderful day.

  But days that are too wonderful scare me, because after them there comes a little voice announcing that a tragedy is on its way. I can hear that voice. It’s a metallic tone beneath the wind or behind the light, which suddenly manifests itself, and when it does you have to hide or flee. We didn’t flee in time, and two days later our Volkswagen was attacked by snipers. The driver was shot three times in the head and died instantaneously. A cameraman had a lung perforated by a bullet and had to stay in hospital for nearly six months. Kay’s right shoulder and shoulder blade and the bones of his arm were shattered in the gunfire. Fortunately for me, I had stayed behind in the hotel. The bullets went in one side and out the other of the car and its occupants. That night we flew back to Zagreb, where everyone was hospitalized.

  After three weeks, and six operations, I brought Kay back to Paris, where they did more tests. There was nothing to be done: he had lost his arm, by which I mean, not that it was amputated, but that it had lost all mobility. A dead appendage. He had to reeducate himself and his whole body changed, like a boat with a broken mast. Now he walked bent over, which he tried to hide out of vanity. We spent hundreds of thousands of euros on miracle operations and mechanical arms, but it was impossible. The nerves and tendons had been destroyed. The arm was dead.

  One day we were introduced to an expert in occult cures, related to old legends of the blacksmith’s trade in central Europe. It was the one card we hadn’t yet played, so Kay said to me, I’m going to try. The man, whose name was Ebenezer Selle Trimegisto, had an office in the elegant Parisian district of École Militaire. According to Doctor Ebenezer, Kay could recover his strength by invoking the old medieval blacksmiths, and putting his arm in a splint with various qualities of metal. As he explained it, the earth was the great midwife and every metal was in transition between carbon and gold. Then he said that the bones were the carbonic and solid structure of the body and that the proximity of certain metals could revive the shattered pieces of the inert appendage. We believed h
im because we wanted to believe him and a few days later Dr. Ebenezer Trimegisto presented Kay with a long leather glove that went from the fist to the armpit and had to be filled with iron and other metals. A Brazilian storekeeper adjusted it for us and that was why Kay started walking around with that strange prosthesis. He looked like a medieval falconer with his arm covered to receive a falcon or a goshawk. Of course, it wasn’t long before Kim–who hadn’t come with us to Sarajevo, which might have been why he was still alive, because given his size he wouldn’t have escaped the bullets–used the idea in one of his screenplays, which he entitled The Flight of the Vagina Falcon, and which reaches its climax when, in a tower at the top of a castle, as I’m on my knees giving a blowjob to one man while two others are penetrating my available orifices, a goshawk descends from the sky and comes to rest on his gloved hand at the very same moment when the man’s penis shoots its load over my cheeks. It was a very vivid scene that greatly impressed the critics, and again there were hundreds of thousands of euros and a brace of excellent articles.

  One day I was walking through the Marais, looking in fashion shops and making unnecessary purchases, when I saw a hideous-looking woman, filthy and haggard. Her eyes looked familiar and her name emerged from my mouth in a cry: Giorgetta! Her skin was all cut and raw, as if she had been sleeping for many years under the sun of the Sahara. I looked at her and it took her a while to focus, but finally she opened her horrible, almost toothless mouth, said, Sabina, and fainted at my feet. A thousand images hit me like a storm of meteorites: playing in the swimming pool at the Circeo, near Rome, when we were very young, or going to parties thrown by our uncles, when she would swig all the dregs left in the glasses to get drunk. She was always precocious, the poor thing. I felt responsible, so I called my driver, a black Dominican named Jenofonte, who had been waiting for me in a nearby square, drinking beer and watching the girls swinging their hips as they passed. Seeing me with Giorgetta, he jumped out and said, Madame Sabina, is anything wrong? Help her into the car, I said, she’s my cousin.

  When we got to our apartment, which by now was a penthouse on Rue Bonaparte, near Place Saint-Sulpice and the Jardin du Luxembourg, Giorgetta was incapable of stringing a sentence together. The only thing I understood was when she said: I went to a party with you years ago and I never saw you leave, when did you leave? I didn’t remember anything, but I didn’t think it was necessary to tell her that. The circuits in her brain had snapped and she couldn’t catch my words. I gave her something to eat, and during the night, when she asked me for money to buy heroin, I didn’t know what to do. Kay was in Los Angeles and wasn’t answering his cell phone, so I decided to give Jenofonte a two-hundred-euro bill to go out and buy some and come back as soon as possible. My cousin gave herself two fixes one after the other, sticking the syringe first in her foot and then in her neck, because she had no veins left. When she fell into the abyss, I told Jenofonte to pick her up and help me take her to a private hospital just outside Paris, and there I left her, with a check for twenty-five thousand euros to pay for the best possible treatment.

  Two days later, I went to visit her and was told they had been doing tests. Not surprisingly, she had tested HIV positive, and also had the beginnings of hepatitis B and a heart murmur. I contacted my aunt Gerarda, her mother, in Rome and persuaded her to come to Paris. She was a nice, gentle old lady, who burst into tears when she saw me. On the way to the hospital she whispered in my ear, have you seen Beatrice? It hit me like a bombshell, because as I’m sure you remember, Beatrice was my mother. I told my aunt I’d lost touch with her years ago, because we led very different lives. But she said, call her, she’s been wanting to see you for years, and she slipped a folded piece of paper into my pocket. I felt a knot in my throat and didn’t reply, only looked through the window at the French countryside and gripped my cell phone, longing to call Kay. If Aunt Gerarda had said that, it was because she had talked to Mamma, and Mamma was somehow waiting for me.

  We spent the afternoon with Giorgetta, who didn’t look as corpse-like as she had on the first day but still left her mother speechless and crying for a good couple of hours. She spent three months in the hospital, and I paid for it all, even for Aunt Gerarda to stay a few times. When the program was over she came out in a fairly decent state, so I went with them to Charles de Gaulle airport and we hugged and agreed to meet again soon. All three of us cried.

  That night, while I was sleeping beside Kay, I heard him say: how odd, I feel a strange tingling in my arm. I woke up and said, wait, I’ll scratch you, but he said, no, not that one, the other one. We were both stunned. Can you feel your arm? I asked, rubbing my hand against him. Yes, he said, I feel your hand, the pressure of three of your fingers. He tried to move it and couldn’t, but it was an omen. Something was telling me that the loose or badly sewed threads of my life could be put back together again.

  The next day I looked for the piece of paper my aunt had given me and dialed the number. It was a Miami number. When the phone started ringing at the other end I found I couldn’t breathe, so I hung up and waited a little. I poured myself two glasses of gin and the alcohol cleared my head. Then I gave the number to Jenofonte and told him to call from the next room, ask for Beatrice, then tell me. I had quickly downed another gin when Jenofonte said, Madame Beatrice on the telephone. I was unable to speak, but she heard my breathing and started speaking, daughter, I knew you were going to call so I’m ready, Gerarda told me you’re living in Paris and you’re rich, I know the kind of work you do and you mustn’t feel ashamed, what matters is that you had the courage to call, so speak now, tell me something . . . I said hello in a thin voice and we both cried for a while then we started chatting and didn’t stop for three hours. At one point I said, Mamma, wait a second. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told Jenofonte to call the travel agency and book a ticket on the next flight to Miami, and I said, Mamma, tell me your address, I’m coming straight away.

  Our reunion was a happy one, if a little tense. She was sixty, but still elegant and beautiful. It was obvious she looked after herself, went to the gym every day, had had a few facelifts, and made a lot of effort to slay slim. She lived alone in an apartment near Coral Gables. She had separated from her Mexican lover more than seven years earlier, and although he was a fairly nasty and cynical individual, he had left her that apartment and enough money to give her an above-average monthly income. I waited nervously for the right moment to talk to her about my work, but it came very naturally. Do you know why I separated from him? she said, and I said, no, tell me, what happened? Mamma poured herself another dash of V8 with vodka, which was what we were drinking on her terrace, and she started her story, which wasn’t very long and basically fairly predictable.

  I always knew he was cheating on me, she said, but I’d reached the age when a woman gives up and prefers to close her eyes. His meetings and business trips to Acapulco and Sinaloa and the Bahamas were getting longer and longer and seemed to be less and less justified, but I didn’t care because it all happened far away, in that great nothingness made up of all the places we haven’t lived and know only as dots on a map. Until one day he started to seem strange, nervous, exhausted. He would get home in the evening or at night and go straight in the shower claiming he was hot or tired. His mouth smelled of alcohol. One day he traveled to Chicago and I got into his office and gave it a complete once-over. That was a serious mistake, of course, because what you look for, you find. It’s something you should never do.

  Well, I found it. A key ring with an address and two keys. 1587 Tijuana Drive, Apartment 6D. I went straight there, and it turned out to be a respectable-looking building, not luxurious but quite clean and well-maintained. When I got to the door of 6D I took out the key, but just as I was about to put it in the lock I heard a voice inside saying, can’t you get back before tomorrow? will you be here by noon? She was talking on a cell phone near the door. Then she said, bring me something nice, darling, different than what you always bring m
e. I felt jealous. I dialed Tony’s cell phone and of course it was engaged. I waited until the conversation was over and dialed again. This time he replied immediately and said, did you just call me? I was talking to the office, I’m going to have to stay until Saturday, it’s freezing cold here, but there’s no way I can get out of it, the Abbotts want to meet with me on Friday and it’s too much bother to go and come back.

  The next day I found an observation post, a coffee shop on the corner of Tijuana Drive and Anchorage Street, just opposite the entrance to the building. Of course I saw him arrive at noon, right on time, with a bag of gifts. It made me angry, but then I cooled down and plotted my revenge. The first thing I did was make copies of the keys and leave them in their place so that he didn’t notice anything. Then I started keeping an eye on the bitch, who was a Colombian named Dorys. She was a stylist in a salon near Fito’s office, which was where he’d met her. One day I went in to get my hair done and studied her. She was an attractive woman just under forty, that idiot Fito had good taste. It was obvious she didn’t know who I was, because there was nothing nervous or uncomfortable about the way she behaved. On the contrary, she was very friendly and attentive. I started to make plans. My idea was to get her to dump him, or to make him believe that she had a lover. Something like that. One day, while Dorys was in the salon, I got into her apartment. It was quite nicely furnished, the home of someone who was neat and tidy but also romantic. A painting of a stormy dusk in the Caribbean, two heart-shaped red cushions, things like that. I looked through her underwear and was surprised not to find daring panties or garter belts, the kind of thing that appeals to older men going out with younger women. I wasn’t there for very long, I knew they’d be coming back together that night. Before I left, I put a pair of men’s socks beside the bed. That was part of my strategy. Leaving things that would incriminate her. Another day, I left a half-full bottle of eau de cologne, which I’d bought and half emptied, of course, like everything I left. And it worked, things started to go sour between them. One day I entered the apartment after they’d spent all weekend together, and saw that they had moved the TV into the bedroom. There was a bottle of rum, cigarette butts, and various DVDs strewn on the floor. I picked one up and saw you in the photograph on the cover. I recognized you in spite of the make-up and all the ways you’d changed, and in spite of the fact that you were naked. I sat down on the bed. My god, my husband has erotic parties with his lover and gets off on watching pornographic videos of my daughter. I felt really disgusted by the time I left, and when he got home I told him I knew everything and didn’t want to see him anymore. He gave me this apartment and a decent income. So I separated from him and found out what you did. Then I investigated a little and discovered that you were a great professional in that kind of thing and had even won prizes. I’m not going to tell you I was pleased, but I thought, if a person chooses to do something in life, however strange it may be, they should do it well, and that’s exactly what you’re doing, daughter.