Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

Pilar, or whatever her name was — the washer-woman and Five-Star General of Maids — was resting on the couch.

“Coffee?” I asked her. “With milk?”

“Black coffee,” she corrected me, and went to get it.

I STAYED at La Whatsis cheaply, that is, at the recommended official rate as opposed to the actual, usual one, thanks to an impotent (our little secret) Vice-minister at Interturismo.

This man at Interturismo had told me many times he had a contact, a cousin, an uncle, who knows what, but someone willing, anyway, to turn cordobas into dollars.

I’d never tried him out, because I’d never been so desperate as to want to believe this obvious lie, never so greedy as to traffic with Contras right here in the capital of their extermination, never wanted to owe favors to the future dead — until now. And what for? Did I think I’d be “rolled up” in some kind of currency investigation? Over the course of weeks I’d gone back to Interpren time after time after time, just to get a couple of documents . . If it took years to fill the blanks in a press card, think what centuries must drip past before the machinery of prosecution for some picayune commercial misdemeanor started up. Certainly it wasn’t a consideration to run me out of here any faster than anything else.

Hung over and fueled by a general irritation, I was at last moving, that’s all. .

Oh once again trying to make clear what can’t be understood or forgiven. .

I CALLED the Vice-minister from one. of the shell-shaped pay phones on the corner near the motel where the taxis waited empty on the dirt shoulder and the houses were silent. He was an old man, one of the few grown-ups still functioning in an official capacity, I liked him, he treated me like an errant daughter, et cetera, and this morning he seemed to convey assurances from a far planet as his voice drifted, competing with a giant hum, down the wires. I gathered he was glad to hear from me.

“Please speak very loudly and slowly,” I said.

“Yes, okay.”

I said, “Do you remember that you said you had a friend?”

“Yes, I remember,” he said.

“A friend to help me with my cordobas.”

“Yes. I remember our conversation.”

“I’d like to contact him.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Can you tell me how to contact him?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Can you tell me now, on the telephone?”

“No, I can’t.”

“When can you give me the information?”

“Come to my office,” he said.

“Soon?”

“Before noon.”

“I’ll come right now.”

“Certainly, but don’t hurry . .”

I’d never been able, actually I’d never tried, to find out what the taxis thought they were doing parked here, driver-less, on this dirt shoulder, and it never failed to rankle me that I had to walk a block and a half to the nearest substantial intersection and stand, still within sight of them and usually for quite a while, until I got a live one and was carried off — in this case across the city to the corner where the Interturismo offices were.

From before this bureau’s gates I could see one of the town’s better restaurants, and a corner of the parking lot of the patio café I called Los Paraquitos, and beyond that the Inter-Continental Hotel looming like a mountain, tall enough to have afforded the journalists a view of Nicaragua’s government changing hands, one hand dropping bombs on the other, five years earlier.

My Vice-minister friend was busy and sent me over to the restaurant. There was nothing to do there. I looked at La Barricada. It was a day of wreckage in the papers: Something had crashed just after take-off from Timbuktu. . And on Monday a C-47 piloted out of Honduras had been shot down in the north.

The waiter brought me a menu.

“Do you have a Coke?”

“No Coke.”

I got some livid violet fruit juice in which floated a shard of ice.

I liked the Vice-minister not only because he liked me, but because he found me beautiful.

I’ve never been beautiful. Currently I was too thin, but whenever I gain weight it goes on in uncoordinated bulges.

My face is appealing although I have bad teeth . . I’m not beautiful but I keep my back straight and my hands still.

“I’m leaving Managua,” I told the Vice-minister as soon as he got there.

He beheld me with weariness and amusement. “When?”

“Very soon. In a few days, I think.”

“Going back to the United States?”

“I want to go to San José. Maybe after that, I’ll visit Playas del Coco.”

“It’s not the season for Playas. If you want to go back to Costa Rica, Limón would be more interesting.”

“Too crowded there,” I said in English. “Crowded?”

“No crowded. But a person can be losted there.”

“I like Playas. It’s quiet.”

“Then go to Playas,” he said, getting back to Spanish. “And I suppose you need some Costa Rican money?”

“I need U.S. in order to buy a plane ticket.”

“Very bad.”

“Can’t your friend get U.S.?”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

Bright promises turning vague. . Such was the plot of every transaction, human or financial, in this bed of dung!

“Are you still living at the motel whose management I spoke to?”

“Yes.”

“It’s okay for you there, I believe?”

“Yes. I’m used to it.”

“Maybe you should stay there a little longer.”

“Can you buy a ticket for me with cordobas? A ticket to San José?”

He smiled. “I don’t believe I’ll be permitted to buy a plane ticket to Costa Rica.”

I SEEMED to be getting into the very Latin habit of going over and going over my options without committing myself to, or even coming up with, an actual plan. .

In the taxi to Plaza España where this money marketeer kept his offices, I tried to lock my attention onto the problems ahead of me and mislaid all sense of the goal. The fumes and smells and roaring temperature of Managua’s roadways savaged all mental effort, in my brain was only a kind of tape-hiss. As I got out of the cab before the white, two-tiered Plaza, the kind of moneyed-Texas architecture Nicaragua had once esteemed, I found I’d lost my mind and could only wonder, What errand has driven me here? Young boys who would soon be killers approached me, demanding money. “Right.” It was money I’d come for. “Thank you,” I said, making headway through them toward the offices, “fuck you,” I added, “you’re wasting your time.”

And then I wasted a good deal of my own time trying to find the place, a travel agency, ironically.

But of course much more time would be wasted before anything was accomplished — that is the style. Whatever happened, nothing would happen today, I’d have to go back again — you have to appear at least twice, anywhere, in order to prove your existence.

I found him at the appointed place, behind the desk of his travel agency, which, by the look of it, hadn’t been open for business in quite a while.

Like his friend the Vice-minister, who’d begged off accompanying me here because it was risky for a person in his position, this one was an older man.

The Venetian blinds were drawn. The fixture for the overhead fluorescent was empty. And a study-lamp bending low over his desk gave the only light. “Good day. Good day,” he said. He only needed sunglasses on his face to make it all just too nauseatingly sinister to bear.

I said, “Your office is closed permanently?”

“Why? You wish to go somewhere today?” This was said by another man who now leaned into the light, wearing sunglasses. A boy, really, with smooth skin and the frailest beginnings of a moustache.

The older man smiled and offered me a seat. “We can probably arrange travel for you. But I don't think you want it.”