The Delusionist (12 page)

“What?” asked Gilbert, sensing Cyril's gaze.

“Is that a quote?”

“What's-her-nuts used to say it.”

Cyril lay back in the dark and contemplated Gilbert's grandmother buried with that pistol. “Was she deeply herself?”

For a long time Gilbert said nothing and Cyril assumed he'd fallen asleep until his voice came out of the black. “After grandpa offed himself she was.”

“How do you know?”

“She said so.”

Cyril tried to imagine such a conversation with his own mother. “Did she ever say why he did it?”

“Battle fatigue. Shell shock.”

“But it was so long ago.”

“What the fuck, Cyril I don't know. Anyway, why do you want to change?” He yawned and scratched his chest luxuriously with both hands.

“Don't you want to make money?” asked Cyril.

“I don't have to change to do that.”

“You're broke.”

“Wheels are turning,” he said contentedly.

Cyril wondered if Gilbert was profound or an idiot. Where did such easy confidence come from? Was it like hair colour or height, something you were simply born with? There seemed no logic to who had it and who didn't.

Gilbert took a boat trip up the river—financed by Cyril—and returned with a parrot in a cage made of saplings. The bird's eyes were red and wrinkled as if it had been weeping. Soon there were two more parrots, then a toucan with a beak as long and sharp as shears, and Gilbert had to hire a carpenter—with money borrowed from Cyril—to build a bigger cage.

“It's cruel,” said Cyril.

“It's commerce,” said Gilbert, as if Cyril was committing the all too common error of confusing categories and getting moral where morality had no business.

Cyril drew the birds. He also drew the fishing boats, the row boats, the wharf, the canoes and the palm trees and the crab shells and the huts and the sleeping dogs and the church as well as the red '53 Buick of Don Antonio Martin Smolenski, whose grandfather came from Krakow. He drew Don Antonio's antique Spanish rifle with the trumpet-shaped barrel, and drew the dusty iguanas that sat as still as baked clay. He sharpened his pencils with a knife and soon he was working with nothing but a nub on butcher paper. They bussed up the coast to Puerta Vallarta where Gilbert looked into shipping rates for sending the birds north and Cyril bought paper, pencils, and a box of charcoal sticks from a charcoal burner who lived amid sacks of briquets and whose face and knuckles were seamed with soot. They spent the night in a hotel five blocks from the beach and in the morning, before catching their bus, strolled through the town feeling superior to the tourists.

Five months they stayed in San Vicente del Mar, Gilbert acquiring more birds and Cyril drawing more than he had in years. He experimented at using no lines at all, only shades of grey. He went through his own cubist phase, rendering everything in blocks and cylinders. For a while he gave up on representation altogether, devoting all his attention to the character of the line, wide and bold, light and tenuous, thin and sinister, tightly coiled, gently looping.

The local kids came every day to see the birds and to watch Cyril work. Sometimes he drew them and off they'd go, holding their portrait in both hands as if reading a scroll. Don Antonio Martin Smolenski commissioned a portrait, and Cyril devoted two weeks to improving the proud old man's looks by straightening his nose and ignoring the smallpox scars that dented his complexion. He earned twenty us dollars, a slab of tuna, and a bottle of locally distilled mescal plugged with a twist of rag. His first sale.

Don Antonio held Cyril by the shoulders. “To have talent like yours,” he said wistfully. The richest man in the village, Don Antonio's bookshelf held works by Albert Camus, José Marti, and Cervantes. He was sixty and had pale blue eyes in a sun-leathered face, and while he'd been to Mexico City and to Vera Cruz he preferred San Vicente.

The village enchanted Cyril. He liked the river's cool scent, the jungle's sweet rot, the booming surf, liked sleeping in the afternoon and waking to the spectacle of sunset, but best of all he loved the dawn when the air was almost chill, the sky cinematic, and the world was cleansed not so much of its sins as the muddled chaos of the previous day.

Once a week he shaved in a mirror the size of a playing card propped on two nails driven into a post. If he stepped back his entire face fit in the mirror; up close only his nose, eye, or mouth. It was this fragmented self-scrutiny that started him on a series of self-portraits. He went to Don Antonio Martin Smolenski's general store to buy a bigger mirror but there wasn't one, so he bought two more small ones and arranged them on a shelf. From a distance he saw three Cyril's; up close he saw himself in pieces.

Then there was the moth, tan and grey, the size of a quarter, attracted to the light on the mirrors. Each day the moth lit upon one of Cyril's reflections. He drew the moth over and over, in pen, pencil, line, shade. The moth was an obedient model, its powdery wings suited to charcoal. He named the moth Gustavo, in honour of Carl Gustav Jung, whose book on dreams he'd once tried to read. It seemed to Cyril that the moth was the unconscious while the butterfly, crass, tacky, superficial in its loud beauty, was the conscious.

Yet in spite of all his efforts, the fear lingered that he was nothing more than a draughtsman, that the fat bastard at the interview had been right. No matter that Don Antonio Martin Smolenski praised him and that the villagers called him el artiste and there were regular requests for his services, the kids wanting caricatures, the fishermen usually wanting him to draw their boats, and the girls wishing to look like movie stars.

One of Don Antonio's daughters looked better than a movie star. She had two different coloured eyes and a voluptuous figure. Gilbert lusted after her. “I'd like to bite her ass,” he said. “If I could unhinge my jaw, like a snake, I'd bite her whole ass.” As if to demonstrate, he opened his mouth as wide as he could.

Cyril looked away. He didn't want to see down Gilbert's throat. They were in their hammocks. Chickens worried the dirt while the parrots in their cages worked the kinks from their necks. Cyril informed him that her name was Remedios, and he agreed that biting her ass would be very satisfying. They grew wistful at the thought of Remedios' ass.

“You realize that Don Antonio'll cut your nuts off if you even look at her ass much less bite it.”

“Not when he sees how much dinero the birds get me.”

“You think that's all it would take?”

“That's all anything takes.”

Cyril hoped he was wrong because in his view Remedios was too good for Gilbert.

One afternoon during a downpour, Gilbert mused on the possibility of collecting and selling rain. “Pure rain water. Not from the ground, but the sky  . . . from God! These cat-lickers'll buy anything if it's from God.” Gilbert was Scotch Presbyterian and had inherited the view that Roman Catholics were medieval. He stood in the deluge with his arms wide and face upturned as if embracing the rain of wealth. “Then senior Smellyinski'll pony up what's her name.”

“Remedios,” said Cyril, irritated. “You're going to hell.”

“Maybe. But I'll get there in a Mercedes.”

Remedios and two of her sisters came to gaze at Gilbert's birds. While Gilbert deployed the full arsenal of his charm, Cyril watched from the hammock, his drawing pad in his lap. The ladies looked queenly and statuesque even though none stood taller than five foot two. They turned as one to Gilbert with the serene if giddy hauteur of adolescent royalty. Even from thirty yards away Cyril could read the dance-like rite of male-female interaction that was unfolding.

“You like my parrots?”

They smiled.

Cyril judged that all three were in their late teens. He wasn't sure, but the eldest might be married, for he'd seen her with a baby. He dreaded the thought of Gilbert scoring with Remedios. It would make him unbearable, cock-walking around, that maddening self-confidence bolstered yet again. Cyril tried ignoring it all by focusing on his drawing, a man in a straw hat with two long strings of garlic bulbs slung over his shoulders. His face was in shadow, his straw hat frayed, his hands long and sinewy. Hunched over his work detailing the fibres of the hat, Cyril couldn't ignore the three shadows that suddenly darkened the pale sandy dirt. He looked up. The girls stood at a respectful distance, intrigued by what he was drawing but too polite to intrude. He held it up. They murmured.

Remedios nodded and said that the garlic seller's name was Angel.
Ang hell.

Cyril wrote the name at the bottom of the page.

Gilbert approached, grinning, proprietorial, as if to gather up his harem.

“You can draw me?” Remedios asked.

Cyril could see the pride and yet hesitation in her manner. Her long black hair framed her face as if she was peeking through dark curtains. She was risking rejection. But why would he draw Angel the garlic seller and not her? “Okay.”

“Bueno.”

The women turned to leave.

“When?” asked Cyril.

“Tomorrow.”

“Here?”

She waved her forefinger side-to-side and clucked her tongue once. “No. My house.”

Cyril and Gilbert watched the girls depart. Gilbert wasn't angry or jealous at Remedios' interest in Cyril. He was so genuinely surprised it was as if they'd witnessed a quirk of culture, on par with the Chinese regarding live monkey brains as a delicacy.

Cyril showed up at Don Antonio's the next morning at ten, shaved, showered, in a shirt still damp from having washed it at dawn. Don Antonio Smolenski's house was simultaneously elegant and haphazard. Some walls were wood, some breeze block, others palm thatch. Parts of the roof were baked ceramic tiles and others corrugated aluminum sheeting. The fence was cement with broken glass on top, though there were gaps big enough to step through. Dogs howled heralding Cyril's approach.

Remedios met him at the gate, which had a leather strap for a hinge and was flanked by two cement dolphins heavily pitted by the wind-blown sand. Just inside the gate were two enormous nopal cacti on which were snagged scraps of paper, shreds of cloth, and hen feathers. Two carved wooden chairs waited in the dirt courtyard where chickens pecked and laundry dripped. Remedios was wearing a lemon yellow dress that tucked tightly under her bosom and fell to just below her knees. The collar, cuffs, and hem were black ruffles and the buttons on the bodice were copper coins.

“Que linda,” he said.

She nodded and then sat in one of the chairs, crossing her legs and presenting him a three-quarter view.

“Don't make her too beautiful,” said Don Antonio, joining them. He was barefoot and bare-chested and smoking a cigar. “It will go to her head.”

“Papa,” she scolded.

The older man directed a look at Cyril that was an appeal for sympathy as well as a warning to him to behave himself, then he turned and departed, smoking his cigar.

Cyril got busy with his pad and pencils and then positioned the other chair. Then he stepped closer, studying her. It seemed strange that she kept so much of her face hidden within the curtains of her hair. He reached out—she flinched. He hesitated, looked at her, and slowly, with his forefinger, folded her hair back behind her ear: and that's when he discovered her scar. It ran like a thin, pale, upturned sickle from the corner of her right eye to the edge of her right nostril. It wasn't huge or even unsightly, rather it was dramatic and intriguing.

She turned to the left, giving him a full view. In a hard voice she asked, “Do you like my mark?”

“Muy bonita. How did you get it?”

“A duel. With my sister Magdalena. We were twelve. She insulted me.”

“You insulted me,” came a voice.

Magdalena's face appeared in the window of a blue cement wall nearby. Some rapid Spanish was exchanged, then Magdalena went away.

“She is a bitch.”

“You are a bitch,” came the retort, this time from another window.

“She is my best friend in the world,” called Remedios.

“You are my life!” cried Magdalena.

“You have family?” Remedios asked Cyril.

He described his family and she regarded him with what might have been a smile.

She called him Señor Picasso. “Mi ojas aqui,” she said, indicating her eyes in their proper places, “no ahi,” she added, indicating the side of her head.

“Su ojas muy bonita,” he said.

“Y usted muy guapo.”

“Gracias.”

“Are you famous?” she asked.

He barked a laugh. “No.”

She frowned. “Why not?”

He was about to say he was young, but he was ten years older than her.

“Are you rich?”

“Do I look rich?”

“Are you a hippie?”

“No.”

“Of course not,” she said with deep satisfaction, “hippies are godless drug addicts. You are an artist.”