Patrick deWitt - Ablutions

He is a world-class inventor of facts and you enjoy watching him improvise scenarios from a distant, fabricated past. To hear him tell it he has bedded numberless insatiable beauties in Europe, Asia, and North America, and physically humiliated any man who dared show him less than the utmost respect. He claims to have been a bullfighter in his youth and once showed you an old blurry snapshot of himself in full matador garb and cape, standing beside a just-killed bull in the center of a large arena, the ecstatic crowd at his back. You were momentarily impressed with the picture but he would not let you hold it and was suspiciously eager to put it away and later you wondered, was it your imagination or did his cape look more like a baby's blanket? And why were those men in the background rushing toward him? And was he wearing tennis shoes? He will never let you see the photo again, though you ask him every time you see him.

There are certain patrons of the bar whose stories leave you feeling lonely, even bitter, but Ignacio's tales have a luminosity about them and you lean in to catch each word. You know he is a liar but there is something about the stories that seems plausible. He is, or was, open to greatness — there is potential greatness in his eyes — only he was never actually visited by the greatness and so he speaks of what his life would have been like if he had been. He is compulsive about the telling of the stories in that he understands no one believes him and yet he continues to invent and deliver them. Also it seems there is a part of him that listens to his own stories and anticipates their endings, some piece of his being disconnected from its rational core so that he becomes his own rapt audience.

He paints in his spare time, finishing a canvas or two a year, a meager output for even the most relaxed weekend artist, but in his defense the paintings are exceedingly ambitious, if not in their subject matter then in their size, some of them measuring up to ten feet in length and six feet in height. They are pleasant to look at, if a little redundant — circles within circles within circles — but you get the feeling Ignacio is not interested in the finished product so much as the process of seeing a project through to its end. He brings in photos of the completed paintings (he is always posing at their side) and is careful not to let anyone touch them in case they should smudge the images. He moves down the line of regulars, holding the photos at eye level until the viewer sufficiently praises his efforts, and when there is no one else to show he returns the picture envelope to his coat's breast pocket and levels a stubby finger in your direction. Now, despite his doctor's explicit warnings, he will drink one glass of red house wine, and it will take him near an hour to finish and afterward he will not give up the glass but sniff it and lick at its rim.

It is after one of these rare picture-sharing evenings that you ask Ignacio if he has ever worked on a smaller scale and he nods in the affirmative but is slow in elaborating and you see that he is inventing something. It takes some time to work it all out but in a moment he calls you back, and this is the story he tells you:

Early one morning, ten summers past, he was prepping a large canvas in the backyard of his aunt's house. From his work area he could see the happenings on the sidewalk and he noticed a young girl peering through the gates to watch him. She was a beautiful little Hispanic girl, eight or nine years old, and he turned and smiled at her and called for her to come closer, but she was shy and afraid of his deep voice and she ran off. The next morning Ignacio saw she had returned, only this time she passed through the gates and across the property line, and again he greeted her, and again she fled, a routine that continued for a week or more, with the girl getting closer every day until finally she gathered her courage and approached Ignacio to tell him how curious his painting made her, and how much she looked forward to seeing its completion, and she wondered, did he have many other paintings? And did they sell for a million dollars? And why did he paint only shapes and not "things"? And was he a very famous artist? The girl was full of questions, and Ignacio, touched by her innocence, answered them all and asked in turn about her family and life and religion, and her answers were always forthright and charming, and he was glad to be speaking with her, and she with him, and they became friends.

Now she came by every day, pulling up a bucket (it came to be called her bucket) to watch the painting's progress and to talk with him about her days. Ignacio learned of a neighborhood boy whom she loved named Eddie, a rough boy with a cowlick who teased her and called her Ladybones because she was underweight. One day Eddie kissed her cheek, and she shrieked with wild joy and slipped from her bucket as she recounted the episode for Ignacio, but later Eddie kicked her in the stomach and she was heartsick and swore off love for a life devoted to art and the church. She became intent and serious about the painting and her eyes were unblinking and her chatter tapered off and months later when the painting was finished she cried because she didn't want her time with Ignacio to end or for the painting to be moved from its blocks. She wanted the painting for her own, and was inconsolable when she discovered Ignacio had a buyer lined up and that it would be shipped to New York City the very next day.

What the girl did not know was that Ignacio had been spending his nights working on a smaller painting just for her, a special little painting with hearts in the corners and an admiring dedication at the bottom, and when he presented it to her she wiped the tears from her face and placed a hand on the canvas and after a pause began to cry all over again, and she swore before God and Jesus Christ she would someday repay him and she ran off with the canvas under her arm, ashamed of her emotion, and Ignacio laughed as he watched her go and was warm in his body from the good deed he had done.

Now Ignacio bows his head for a sip of soda water and you breathe a great sigh of relief, because for a moment you were afraid this would be a dirty and immoral pedophile love story, and you thank him for the tale and stand to return to your work but he clears his throat and says there is a ways to go yet and to hold your horses because the story soon gets good, and he winks, and you are revisited by your worry. Ignacio strokes his mustache and continues.

"I looked for her every day, but she didn't come by anymore after that. After a while I forgot about her. Years passed, my work continued, when one morning just this last summer I was kneeling in the driveway washing the wheels of my van when I felt a presence at my back, and I could see in the reflection of the hubcaps that there was a woman standing over me, and I turned, and there was a pair of beautiful brown ankles blooming like flowers out of red leather high-heeled shoes. I looked up and saw the calves, and the kneecaps, and the thighs — bare, brown thighs — and I looked up, farther still, and could see from my angle that this presence, this woman… was not wearing any underwear!"

Ignacio's eyes are insane and he leans back and now you are required to say something in response but your mind is a blank and there is a sound in your ears like the sucking of a vacuum, and so you say simply this: "Wow."

"That is nothing," he says. "Now I will really tell you something." He fans the air between you. "I was stunned by the sight of this woman's genitals. I was helpless, frozen, a blinded animal on the highway. And then there was the faintest shift in the breeze, and from where I was kneeling, I swear to you I could smell it… her fresh… vaginal "

With the utterance of these last two words you find yourself categorically lost and alone in the world, and if an earthquake suddenly ripped the bar in two you would raise your arms and invite a piece of the building to visit your skull and crush it to dust. Ignacio finishes his story (this presence was of course the little girl, now grown, returning to pay for the painting by offering her virginity, which he accepts, and he is a passionate and superhuman sexual machine and she is a voracious whore, and then she is gone and he smokes a cigar in his bedroom alone) and you stand before him as long as you can but your chin begins trembling and you feel you have finally reached your limit, that your ears and heart cannot absorb any more of the regulars' filthy, detestable disinformation, and your eyes well up and Ignacio, concerned, asks you what's the matter and you push past him apologizing and rush out the door and into the alley, surprised to find that you are openly crying. Once this starts you believe you will not be able to stop, or will soon reach a point from which you will not return without damaging your mind, and so to put an end to this falling feeling you draw back your hand and punch the brick wall as hard as you can. Now your hand is like a frozen claw, and you reenter the bar to show Simon the blood and shredded skin and are sent home and in the morning your hand is twice its normal size and you realize through the fog of pain that your wife is gone, the closets and bathroom cupboards bare. On the pillow a note.