Javier Marias - Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

I spent that whole eternal night with them, the entire group, women and men, we went to a string of bars, we would all sit down around a table and watch some dances or a song or a striptease and then move on to the next place. I didn’t know where I was, every time we went somewhere new we traveled in several cars, I barely knew the city, I watched the street signs go by, a few names stayed with me, and I haven’t ever gone back to Mexico City, I never will go back, I know, though Ricardo must be nearing seventy by now and fat Julio has been dead for centuries. (The thugs won’t have lasted, that type has a brief, sporadic life.) Doctor Lucio, Plaza Morelia, Doctor Lavista, those few names stuck in my head. They assigned me — or maybe it was his choice — to the company of the fat man for the duration of the evening’s festivities, he was the one who chatted with me the most often, asking me where I was from and about Madrid, and I told him what my name was and what I was doing in America, about my life and my brief history which perhaps began then; maybe he needed to know who he was going to be killing later that night.

I remember he asked me, “Why the name Roy? That was what your boss called you, right? That’s not one of our Spanish names.”

“It’s just a nickname they use, my name is Rogelio,” I lied. I wasn’t about to tell him my real name.

“Rogelio qué más.”

“Rogelio Torres.” But you almost never lie entirely, my full surname is Ruibérriz de Torres.

“I was in Madrid once, years ago, I stayed at the Hotel Castellana Hilton, it was pretty. At night it’s fun, lots of people, lots of bullfighters. In the daytime I didn’t like it, everything dirty and too many policemen in the streets, as if they were afraid of the citizens.”

“It’s the citizens that are afraid of them,” I said. “That’s why I left.”

“Ah muchachos, es un rebelde.”

I tried to be sparing in my information yet courteous in my conduct, he wasn’t giving me much of a chance to show how nice I could be. I told an anecdote to see if they would think it was charming or funny, but they weren’t inclined to enjoy my sense of humor. When someone has it in for you, there’s nothing you can do, they’ll never acknowledge any merit in you and would rather bite their cheeks and lips until they bleed than laugh at what you’re saying (unless it’s a woman, women laugh no matter what). And from time to time one or another of them would remember the reason for my presence there, recollecting it out loud to keep everyone simmering:

“Ay, why doesn’t the muchacho like us,” Ricardo would say suddenly, fixing his eyes on me. “I hope his wishes haven’t come true during our absence and we don’t find El Tato reduced to ashes when we go back. That would be most distressing.”

Or Julio would say, “It’s just that you had to go and choose such an ugly word, Rogelito revoltoso, why did you have to call me a maricona, you could have said I was a fairy. That would have hurt me less, now, you see how things are. Feelings are a great mystery.”

I tried to argue each time they came at me with this: it wasn’t me, I was only transmitting; and they were right, McGraw had asked for it and Mike hadn’t been fair at all. But it was no use, they clung to the extravagant idea that I was the only one they had heard and understood, and what did they know about what the singer had said in English.

The women sometimes spoke to me, too, but they only wanted to know about Elvis. I stayed firm on that point and never wavered, that was his double and I’d hardly seen the real Elvis during the shoot, he was very inaccessible. In the third place we dropped into Pacheco reappeared, and seeing him really shook me up. He went over to Ricardo and whispered in his ear, his Indian eyes on me. Fat Julio pulled his chair over and lifted a hand to his ear in order to hear the report. Then Pacheco went off to dance, the man loved a dance floor. Ricardo and Julio said nothing, though I was looking at them with a questioning and undoubtedly anxious expression, or maybe that’s why they didn’t say anything, to worry me. Finally I worked up the nerve to ask: “Perdone, señor, do you know if my friends got back all right? The other gentleman was accompanying them, no?”

Ricardo blew cigarette smoke in my face and picked a shred of tobacco off his tongue. He took advantage of the occasion to smooth his moustache and answered, flexing his biceps (it was almost a tic), “We have no way of knowing. It looks like there’s a storm brewing tonight, so God willing they’ll crash.”

He looked away deliberately and I didn’t think it was advisable to insist; I’d understood him well enough. He could only be referring to the plane, so Pacheco must have taken them back to the airport on the outskirts of the city where we had landed, and now he had told Ricardo about it: no hotel, a small plane, otherwise there was no way Ricardo could have known, no one ever mentioned the airplane in El Tato and I hadn’t mentioned it since. Now I really did feel lost, if Presley and the others had taken off for Acapulco I could say my last farewell. I had a feeling of being cut off, of abyss and abandonment and enormous distance or of a dropped curtain, my friends were no longer in the same territory. And what never occurred to me, neither then nor over the course of the five days that followed, was that the abyss would become or had already, immediately, become much larger and the territory much more remote, that they decamped immediately in light of what had happened, alarmed by McGraw and Sherry and Hank and convinced of the manifest unsafety of that country for Presley; nor that in Acapulco I would find, when I arrived bruised and battered at the end of those five days — five — only the second unit that even today the liner notes speak of, left there partly to shoot more stills and partly as a detachment in case I appeared; nor that after that night Presley never again set foot in Mexico but gave his entire performance as the trapeze artist Mike Windgren in a movie studio, my idea about the double was put to use; nor that I would not manage to be present for the climactic scene in which “Guadalajara” was sung, and which would, for that reason, become the most ludicrous display of the Spanish language ever heard on a record or seen on a screen, Presley sings all the lyrics of the entire song and you can’t understand a thing he says, an inarticulate language: when they finished filming the scene everyone crowded around and slapped his back with insincere congratulations (“Mucho, Elvis”), they told me later; he thought his unintelligible pronunciation was perfect and no one ever informed him that he was mistaken, who would dare, Elvis was Elvis. I never investigated the question very thoroughly, but apparently it did happen the way I thought it had: they forced Mr. Presley to leave me stranded, first Pacheco with his threats and his pistol, then McGraw and Colonel Tom Parker and Wallis with their terrible panic. You don’t like to think that your idol has let you down.

I was feeling hopelessly lost, I had to find some way to get out of there, I asked for permission to go to the men’s room and they let me but the other bodyguard came along, the one with the pistol in his armpit, a slow-moving, heavyset guy who was always at my side, in the bars and also in the cars during the trips from one bar to the next. They had dragged me with them that whole night like a package they were guarding, without paying much attention to me, just part of the entourage, amusing themselves from time to time by scaring me, though they hadn’t even made me their primary source of entertainment, they were a somewhat sluggish and not very imaginative group, the same guys must have been getting together almost every night for a long while and they were sick of it. I was a novelty, but the routine did not fail to swallow me up, as it must have swallowed up everything.