Gone Tomorrow, page 8
Paul’s obsession with Michael Simard had begun to determine the alterations of the script, which Paul took with him at night in a canvas shoulder bag, along with a Polaroid camera and other paraphernalia to be used during dinner to record a promising location or a comely potential extra. He would amend the next day’s shooting pages over strong rum drinks in the Arsenal Disco (where a number of local transvestites battled for his attention, hoping to secure parts in the film), scribble more dialogue in the taxis shuttling us between the old city and the resort peninsula of Boca Grande, and improvise scenes as we sat in the basement casino of the Don Blas Hotel, feverishly losing thousands of Alex’s pesos at roulette. Paul believed that Irma and Michael were “coming together” in some occult way, and kept adding scenes between the two of them to urge things along.
That morning, for example, a love scene between Irma and Alex had been postponed on Paul’s insistence, and something entirely different was arranged, a scene at the market just below San Diego. The cameraman was permitted to shoot inside the block-long tent, using a crucifix of battery-powered floodlamps and a hand camera. He followed Michael and Irma through the loamy fragrances of the bazaar, into crowds thronging around vast piles of vegetables, sweating Mayan pyramids of cheese, and butcher stalls where the fetor of dried blood swaddled impaled goats and rabbits. An endless profusion of straw baskets and balsa crates overflowed with tomatoes, carrots, peppers, guavas, and mangoes. Filtered cathedral light sprinkled down on makeshift shrines to the Virgin, cardboard altars festooned with garlic necklaces and clumps of squash. The sound technician contentedly trailed the camera, headphones clamped to his ears, his omnidirectional mike recording an unbelievable cacophony of voices, breathy flutes, cackling hens, butchers’ saws and cleavers chopping dead flesh, the cries of ragged children, the shrill electronic gurgle of hand-held video games.
Outside the tent, among sellers of pistachios and Brazil nuts, Paul filmed Irma and Michael strolling away from the market into a field where the grass was chewed up by truck tires and utility trailers. In a secluded spot near the edge of a woods, she was directed to stand looking up at the uneasy sky with an expectant expression, to point her arm up at the clouds, to hold this pose for several seconds until Michael, likewise, reached toward the sky, his hand angling until it brushed against hers; at the moment they touched, they threw themselves on the ground side by side. Paul rehearsed the actors several times, giving elaborate instructions about the configuration he wanted them in. Next, he had them each remove one shoe, and told Michael to take his sock off and roll up his pant leg. Lying on their backs, the couple stared into space. Her knees pulled up, Irma crossed her bare left foot over her right knee, while Michael’s naked right foot came up and crossed his left knee, until their feet touched in midair . . . then they dropped their feet to the dirt.
“What’s he doing?” Ray wanted to know. We were standing behind some parked cars several yards away from the filming, watching the cryptic choreography of arms and legs. We could hear the sibilant nattering of Paul’s breathless directions, unintelligible from that distance but audibly rapt and exacting.
“It looks like some sort of ritual,” I said, wondering how Irma would choose to interpret Paul’s fetishism. Ray acted puzzled and dismayed.
“Alex is just livid,” he commented drily. “Paul’s been cutting his scenes down. What’s worse, he’s making Michael’s longer. Those shots back and forth the other day. What for? Look at this! It’s unnecessary! And I mean, what are they doing? What is that? It’s . . . it’s obscene.”
It was true. The stilted, artificial movements of Michael’s hand and Irma’s hand, Michael’s foot and Irma’s foot, the unnatural way these parts of their bodies met and flew away from each other, exhibited a powerful, bewildering eroticism, a studied carnality—it was indecent, in a way that an actual sexual act wouldn’t have been. From a distance, the actors might have been signaling a passing aircraft, such was the initial impression of innocence, yet the longer you looked, the more perplexing and naked these symmetrical movements became, charged with a pornographic bluntness . . .
An hour later, Paul observed, “Between the two of them is developing the possibility of murder,” as he scanned the baleful Boca Chica sky, its ragged clouds raking low over the palms, pointing his Coke bottle at the long avenue of mud ribboning into the rain forest. We were sitting on the tailgate of the white truck, as Maria resumed her negotiations with the locals. We might have been in Central Africa, Cameroons, Mozambique: the poverty of the surroundings verged on the conditions associated with life in the wild.
“Between their characters,” I said, encouraging clarification.
“Well . . . yes, naturally. The possibility exists that they’ll conspire to murder Alex.”
Paul craned his head around and smiled at Michael, who stood with his back against the bulkhead of the truck, technicians at his feet unpacking reflectors and magazines of film stock. Michael grinned back disarmingly. I realize that I have described him as Russian-looking, Italiante, Greek, a French schoolboy, etc., etc.: the fact is that Michael’s beauty was, like all extreme beauty, indescribable. Certainly he was “dark” rather than Nordic, Mediterranean rather than Celt, let’s say, closer to Slav or Arabic than to WASP; he was probably an inch or so short of six feet, his body type somewhere between a “swimmer’s build” and “bodybuilder.” His face had smooth, regular features, thick black eyebrows, piercing gray eyes with green-brown aureoles, a fleshy, longish nose, wide lips, a wide, squared chin . . . but it’s futile to itemize his attractions. Michael Simard was the shepherd you hope will stumble over you in the forest. As far as what he was actually like is concerned, this was still, improbably, mysterious. For one thing, the boy was so laconic that we had learned almost nothing about him. His résumé was simple: a friend of Paul’s had discovered Michael modeling nude at the Art Students League in New York. (“That doesn’t mean he’s a prostitute,” Paul assured me. “It just means he’s comfortable without his clothes on.”) He also worked as a chauffeur for a limousine company.
He had a ready smile and an apparent willingness to do anything Paul asked of him. But he seemed utterly incurious about the film—except when he became interested in things the technical crew was doing—and he spent a great deal of time staring off into the clouds. Michael drifted in and out of our thoughts, an object of intense preoccupation and at the same time a complete irrelevance, like some childhood fetish bedeviling your responsible, adult self . . .
Meanwhile, Alex Gavro, alarmed at Paul’s script changes, afraid not merely of being upstaged by Michael but also of losing money (since every departure from the established shooting schedule risked prolonging our stay), had driven into Boca Chica to supervise, with the line producer (a dour woman named Hannah) and Valentina Vogel, who sat in the front seat of the Cadillac preening her long auburn hair with a plastic brush. For several days, Valentina had stayed in the villa on the pretext of some obscure indisposition; Irma reported that the haughty editor (like Ray, a longtime veteran of Rudolph Bauer’s celebrated films) emitted a subtly disparaging view of Paul’s project. She had only agreed to edit the movie out of friendship, and to have a paid vacation in South America. Today she had condescended to “take a look” at the shooting, to groan good-naturedly over Paul’s amateurishness, maybe to interject a wise if obvious suggestion.
I was supposed to walk beside Michael along the mud road, past a corral full of pigs and a large pink building on stilts, the local schoolhouse. We carried suitcases, the premise being that a transportation strike obliged us to walk into the city from the airport, through the fetid marshland between the forest and the harbor. We had agreed to play the scene for comedy, my impish character struggling in the heat with a luggage that was loaded down with bricks while regaling Michael aka Max with risqué gossip about Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. Michael remained silent, impassive, preoccupied with his own thoughts. The first shots took us past the pig corral and into the deserted outskirts of the village. From there the camera, mounted on the truck, would track us front-on.
We had already shot a few takes, none of them to Paul’s liking, when a cloudburst supervened. My sneakers were caked with mud; Michael was cleaning grime from his shoes with a rag. Paul had just reiterated his desire to use this timeless, primitive colony in his “historical flashback.” Alex had once again proclaimed his aversion to this proposed sequence, claiming the movie would grind to a halt as soon as it came on. The first sheets of rain fell without preamble. Alex stopped haranguing Paul to hop back into the Cadillac and put the roof up, while Ray and the crew men spread greasy tarps over the equipment in the pickup.
I jumped into the Cadillac with Paul and Valentina. The others huddled in the rear of the black van. Through the splattered windshield we saw them framed between the open doors, figures in parentheses, sitting with knees up along the van floor, passing joints around.
“I haven’t been up this way in years,” Alex said, lighting a joint of his own and extending it to Paul like a peace offering. Valentina and I politely ignored each other’s body in the backseat, like strangers on a subway car. The smell of rain mingled with a stale dusty scent of the upholstery, a smell redolent of old powder puffs and closets choking with mothballs, ruched gowns and faded taffeta in forgotten cedar chests. With the raindrops rattling on the soft vinyl roof, this smell transported me to some long-ago moment of childhood, exploring the attic of our family house. Some desultory talk among the three of them followed, starting in English but lapsing into German, effectively locking me out of the conversation. Every so often Valentina looked at me and smiled a bit helplessly, her severe face softening, as if in apology for the language barrier. “Would you like some more of this?” she asked in English, holding out the joint.
Since I only understood one in six or seven German words, I couldn’t really follow Alex’s ruminations. The most I caught was his reminiscent tone, as he waved the dwindling cigarette at the rain, recounting past escapades in wonder at his former daring. Alex had unsuspected narrative gifts—when he got going, he loved spinning out a tale, replete with strangely nuanced observations. The wooden self-importance he carried around on his face was only one, daunting side of an off-putting personality. You can turn a rock over with your foot and find a whole world crawling around.
Alex had every reason to turn on the charm: the rest of us didn’t trust him. His part was being whittled down, not in any systematic way that he could fight with his powers as producer, but in supple, deft, logical-sounding strokes. Alex seemed incapable of ordinary social pleasure, so I assumed that this plangent interlude had an ulterior motive—but perhaps it was simply what it was. Paul, with whom he’d been bickering only minutes before, sat spellbound, and soon was translating Alex’s spiel for my benefit.
In the less organized early days of drug smuggling, Alex had operated a small air service between the islands, one single-engine Dakota that flew between Boca Chica, the Caymans, and the Everglades, and numerous unmarked islands and sandspits along the way. It was in the sixties, before Alex’s stretch in prison, and the drugs were mainly marijuana and peyote plants instead of coke. “And of course,” he added wickedly, “heroin.” Valentina clucked and guffawed throughout the recitation, exactly like a goose, I thought, nervous and silly: what was the Edith Sitwell poem Paul was forever quoting? “Daisy and Lily, lazy and silly, walk by the shore of the wan grassy sea—”
Those had been days of manly adventure. And if anyone subscribed to Paul’s ponderous credo that fucking and killing were the only actual events in life, it was Alex. He spoke of dodging DEA agents and drug pirates, sinking competitors’ boats on the high seas, jettisoning a half a ton of weed in advance of a bust. He hinted, darkly, that in the kill-or-be-killed circles he had traveled in, murder was all in the day’s work, though he himself had never done a hit—but he had witnessed a few. Yes, the whole area was saturated in lore.
“He says that behind the mountain near Santa Marta there’s a tribe of Indians,” Paul said. “The men can only have sex with their wives once every three months, according to the lunar calendar or something . . . and if you go on the beach over there and spread out your towel, the men will come out of the forest and fuck you, one at a time, until the whole tribe has had you.”
“It’s true,” Alex asseverated, hunching around behind the steering wheel.
“Fuck you and then eat you, probably,” Valentina suggested. “I suppose this is only for boys?”
“Stupid,” Paul said savagely, “the whole point is not to have to enter that horrible vagina.”
The moment froze, since Paul’s anger almost never surfaced, and when it did its meaning was never clear. Alex coasted over the brittle patch in German while Paul told me in English, “Alex has a friend he thinks we should meet. He lives in the hills over there.”
Up ahead, the three-man crew, abetted by Michael, Ray, and Hannah, were pretending to dance inside the van, squatting in the doorway, pumping their arms up and down, and chanting something unintelligible. Maria climbed out of the front of the van and ran over to us. She climbed in next to Paul, black hair dripping:
“They want food,” she said. “Like always.”
Paul glanced at his watch. It meant going all the way into the city, and several lost hours, since each time the equipment was boxed up and moved it took forever to unpack it again.
“Alex, what do you think?”
Alex looked at his own watch. He answered Paul in German. Valentina had some objection. Alex nodded, considering it, then made an “it’s all the same” gesture with his hand. Paul twisted his face ambivalently. Maria and I looked at each other with goofy, clueless expressions. Something was decided, at any rate, since Valentina started gathering her things up.
“We’re going?” I said.
Paul thought about it.
“You can either go,” he said, “or . . . maybe come with us to meet this person.”
I shrugged. Valentina was nudging Paul’s half of the front seat forward, obliging Maria to scrunch against him. Valentina was obviously smarting from Paul’s insult, though when he spoke to her in an imploring tone, to smooth it over, she laughed and waved him away. “I need food,” she said flatly, stepping out of the car and skipping toward the pickup. Maria poised herself for a dash back to the van.
“I’ve taken enough speed that I’m not going to eat anything, anyway,” I said. “So who is this person?”
I noticed that Alex’s grim face wore a dreamy, idiotic smile. As soon as Maria had bolted for the van, Ray jumped out of it and came up to Paul’s window, knocking on it furiously. The keys to the pickup were clenched in his fingers. Through the steam and driblets on the plastic rear window, I got a weirdly distorted glimpse of Valentina climbing into the pickup, her large purse impeding her progress. Paul rolled down the window.
“How about meeting us at Paco’s?” Ray said. The rain dripped off his petite face, collecting at the fringe of his moustache. His eyes were sore and red in the corners. I wondered again if my influence on Paul, Paul’s influence on me, terrified this bland, excitable man.
“Well, of course, maybe—”
“You have other plans?”
“I have to discuss things with Alex,” Paul protested.
Ray cast a significant look at me in the backseat.
“Concerning the next scenes,” Paul added. “Look, you’re soaked, go on ahead and we’ll meet you there.”
“Paco’s,” Ray reminded him.
“Yes, yes, Paco’s,” Paul said with exasperation after Ray had walked off to the pickup. “Why on earth he wants a gingerbread cottage in the forest of Hansel and Gretel, after all this time . . .”
“He only wants you to love him,” I said, with feeling. As I said it I felt excluded from all love, but flooded with altruism.
“It isn’t so simple to love what you love,” Paul said.
Soon we were driving into the woods, under the dense forest canopy, the shrinking road developing an acne of sinkholes and boulders.
“It’s necessary to hate,” Paul shouted as the car dipped into a gully of spraying stones then lurched up through mud.
“Hate what?”
“All affectional ties are predicated on hate,” he said. “Hatred of the others. I’m sure it’s a perversion of Kant’s universal ethics. We want all to be as we would wish in order to be right, and if we think it’s right, then all should do as we do, and they don’t.”
The car bounced through a pothole.
“Therefore,” Paul concluded, “we must hate them.”
Alex adjusted his Tonton Macoute sunglasses as though he had long ago accepted the practical necessity of hatred.
Behind the flatlands of Boca Chica there were hills that rose into a vertiginous zone of emerald verdure. The road became straighter, less onerous, wending across meadows and groves of cultivated fruit trees before plunging back into the jungle. The rain stopped abruptly, as it always did, and Alex put the top down. Sunlight poured through the treetops.
The house was set back several yards from the road in the shade of monstrously tall trees: a plain, well-appointed little house whose main area was a terraced living room with no front wall, the open space overlooking hundreds of miles of forest spread out in the direction of Venezuela. A dog started barking as soon as the car pulled into the dirt drive, and then came galloping around the house, a skinny Airedale-looking mutt tethered to a clothesline wire by a retractable leash.
