William Boyd - The New Confessions

Three times a week, then once a week to economize on gasoline, I drove into Tijuana. I visited the consulate, where I inquired about the progress of my reapplication, and changed the books I was generously allowed to borrow from the small eclectic library they had there. Lexter was a thoughtful decent man, but even he admitted that this delay was more than bureaucratic ineptitude. But he couldn’t clarify matters any further. After that I went to the post office to post letters and collect mail, bought whatever English-language newspaper was available and drove back to Rincón and my drear accommodation at the Vera Cruz.

On Christmas Day 1939 I motored up to Tecate, parked the car in some scrub and walked several miles across the border to Potrero, where sanity returned and I retraced my steps. So many official inquiries had been instigated on my behalf, my particulars had been forwarded to so many government agencies, that I realized I must be the best documented would-be immigrant the U.S.A. had ever seen. I would be lucky to last a week before being deposited back in Tijuana with all hopes gone. And Lexter would never forgive me. He was my only hope. I simply had to be patient.

My begging letters kept me alive, hovering above the poverty line. Lori, the Coopers, Monika, the Hitzigs, the Gasts and the Anti-Nazi League subsidized me in my exile. All my Californian gloss disappeared. I grew thin again, my hair was cut rarely and my clothes were grubby. My friends corresponded regularly, sent me food, newspapers and magazines. Even my father wrote. I had cabled him for fifty pounds. He replied, saying he would see what he could do — then, silence. My letters to Eddie Simmonette were marked “return to sender.” To my eyes it looked suspiciously like Eddie’s handwriting on the envelope, but I couldn’t swear to it.

I felt as if I were in quarantine, a dog suspected of rabies. I was free, but I was not free. Free in Mexico to do what I pleased as long as it was not the one thing I desired — leave. I caught something very nasty from a charming whore in Tijuana that cost me a precious twenty Yankee dollars to have put right. I didn’t visit Lexter for two weeks out of pure shame. Those pale Baptist eyes of his saw everything, I knew.

My diary:

Rincón. February 1, 1940. The fiesta of El Rescate, in honor of our Lord of the Rescue. I lit a candle in the church of Our Lady of Los Dolores. It is all too horribly apt. The battery on my car has gone flat and I can’t afford a new one. Assets: one immobile 1935 Mercury. Two suitcases of worn clothes. One camera. $27.55. The frightening thought strikes me that I could keep going like this indefinitely. Years may pass. Enough money to hang on in Rincón, but not enough to escape. If only Thompson would help. I hate that fat sanctimonious bastard! I think I understand the poverty trap. You have to have a little money, a little self-esteem, a little respect for authority. That way you don’t starve, beg or steal. And that way you never do anything .

That evening I went down to the Americana to sell my camera, an expensive Leica I had bought in Berlin in ’32 (I still took photographs from time to time, mainly portrait shots of people I worked with). Juan, the patrón of the Americana, had offered me two hundred pesos for it.

The fiesta was more or less over. It was a bluey warm dusk. A band was playing and some people were dancing in the Plaza Zargoza at the end of the main street. Mercifully, all the fireworks seemed to have stopped. For once the Avenida Emilio Carraza was empty of cars. Beneath the nutant trees — strung with bunting — two exhausted policemen collected the NO SE ESTACIONAR signs. It was hard to imagine that all Europe was at war. For the first time I realized how easy it was to be neutral.

The Americana terrace was crowded with families. I made my way through the tables into the dark bar and asked for Juan.

“Mr. Todd, at last!”

I turned round. It was Dusenberry, smiling in a friendly way. I hadn’t seen him for weeks. Ramón Dusenberry was half-Mexican, half-American. He lived in San Diego, California, but kept a large house outside Rincón where his mother stayed. He was a slim, fine-boned man with a neat goatee. He was in the newspaper business. He owned a chain of local papers on both sides of the border. He was brown-skinned and dark-haired, but spoke English like an American.

“Hello,” I said without enthusiasm. The fiesta had depressed me.

“Still here?”

“For my sins.”

“You owe me a hundred dollars. The U.S. remains stubbornly neutral.”

I laughed and then felt sick. Briefly, with passionate terseness, I outlined my position to him. One of his slim hands lightly tapped the marble surface of the bar. It looked like an elegant woman’s hand — light brown, hairless, shiny-nailed, very clean.

“Well, what are we going to do with you, Mr. Todd?”

I sighed. “Don’t tell me this is an affair of honor.… Look, I’m broke. Flat, stony. Skinned. No tener un centavo , mate.”

He ignored my aggression. I apologized.

“I am, really. I’m even trying to flog this camera to Juan.”

“You a photographer?”

“Yes, of course. I’m a motion picture director, for heaven’s sake.”

“Ever worked for newspapers?”

“I was a newsreel cameraman in the Great War.” I suddenly felt old. I muttered, “You know—’14–’18.”

“Got a car?”

“What is this? Yes.”

He smiled. He was handsome in a faintly sinister, overrefined way. “You’re just the man I’m looking for.”

That was how I became a newspaper photographer for the Tijuana, Tecate, Rumovosa and Mexicali Diarios . During the weeks I was employed I presided at a dozen weddings, four fiestas, two mayoral inaugurations, several livestock shows, a warehouse fire at Mexicali, the arrest of a rapist in the village of Agua Hechicera, the Miss Baja California 1940 beauty pageant and, my scoop, the collision of a freight train with a lorry full of oranges on the railway between Mexicali and Nuevo León. My shot of the body of the lorry driver lying on a bed of spilled oranges was syndicated throughout Mexico and even, so I was told, made the pages of some American magazines.

Ramón Dusenberry paid me twenty-five dollars a week plus bonuses. I stayed on at the Vera Cruz, partly out of affection for the place (seediness has its own allure for the seedy) and partly to save money. I abandoned my plan of returning to Los Angeles; someone or something was blocking that route far too effectively. I decided instead, when I had some money saved, to make for Tampico and try to book a passage on a merchant ship heading for Britain. If that proved unsuccessful I would head down to British Honduras or cross over to the West Indies and make my way home from there.

It was curious, however, how a job relieved a lot of my anxiety. I had the Mercury repaired and drove up and down the border to whatever assignment one of my four editors deemed worthy of photographing. I took a strange pleasure in these trips, motoring through the dusty arid landscape along the badly paved highway parallel to the border. I had some coarse linen suits run up for me in Mexicali; I acquired a taste for mescal. I became a well-known figure in Rincón and opened a bank account in the Tijuana branch of the Banco Nacional de México, where my savings steadily accumulated. I was told that it was something of a social cachet in the border towns to have the gringo photographer turn up to cover your wedding. In short, I began to settle in.

Then, one evening in the middle of April, I turned down the Avenida Emilio Carraza and parked my car in front of the Vera Cruz. I had just returned from photographing the winner of the five-thousand-peso prize in the federal district lottery. The hotel owner’s daughter, Elisa, who acted as receptionist, handed me a message.