Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

Aside from pastry and coffee there were propagandistic tee-shirts for sale at 1,500—at the official rate, that was over fifty bucks — and soft-cover books printed on weightless paper: tracts, rationalizations, biographies, whitewashes, smears, like La Muerte de Sandino, the sad testimonial account of Somoza’s murder of the rebel.

We found a table by the window, looking out at the beautiful taxicab we’d arrived in and, two car-lengths down the curb, our cop’s hulking jeep.

The proprietress of the Yerbabuena, draped all over with jewelry, sat near the cake selection going over the ledger, it appeared — a hard-case capitalist ritzily coping through a whole deck of regimes. I hated her fat, red lips. . When I complained about her in a low voice, the Watts Corporation’s Senior and soon to be ex-Analyst said, “And what do you believe in?”

“I’m just keeping my head above the flood. At least I’m not in it entirely for profit.”

“You believe in survival.”

“Are you going to help me sort out my beliefs now? I just wanted you to see this place.”

“It’s pleasant.”

“It’s a little piece of Palo Alto. A little piece of Cambridge.”

“England?”

“Boston.”

“And Palo Alto?”

“California. If we wanted Disneyland, they’d serve up some of that. They’re just patiently taking our cash and trying to keep the Marines away.”

He made no comment. The waiter came, and we ordered coffee. “Why are you looking at us like that?” I asked the waiter. That put a stop to his act. “Snotty,” I told him in English.

“And what about you?” I asked the Londoner. “Are you a believer? Is there a reason for everything that happens?”

Exhausted and despairing, he didn't answer.

But in such dry, cool air you can't help but feel, before long, the hope returning. We had coffee. The rain stopped, and the last drops blew out of the air. The sun came back, mist rose from the pavements. We didn’t wonder how we'd started for the Mercado and ended here. It made sense to sit in the air-conditioned Harvard-style bookstore and watch the rain dry first off the concrete lampposts and then, starting from the tops, off the hides of the streetside palm trees. Each tree and post had got wet along one side only.

The waiter was, unfortunately, a debilitated gelding. He wouldn’t come around when I wanted more coffee. I struggled in Spanish with some of the more insulting idioms. This brought over the proprietress. I must have been soggy with rum and taxi rides, because although there was only one of her, she appeared to triangulate and converge.

“It’s bad the way you talk to my waiter,” she said, then more, but I couldn’t follow her Spanish.

“He’s rude. He’s the son of his daddy,” I said, meaning he was spoiled.

“You've done it two times,” she went on. "Once before, and now today.”

“I’ve never visited your shop before.” I wished it were true.

She said no more but went over to the waiter and said softly, “Lying.” The waiter was released from his delicacies. He delivered the check at once and, preliminary to screwing me for dollars, asked what country I was from: “Tu pais?” The fop, the choirboy.

I pointed at the Englishman. “Maybe he wears a toupee. I don't.”

This broke the Englishman up. His mirthful outburst was a shock, a regular string of firecrackers. It continued in fits. In his eyes there was nothing funny, but he couldn’t stop. He looked around, confused and nearly purple in the face, trying to stifle himself.

I yanked out a few dozen cordobas for the waiter . . The patrons around us looked on blankly. . Bad money, the police, rancid motel, stupid taxi. . Now this moment. . It was all too much. . We left in defeat, the Englishman belatedly disguising his hysteria as a bad coughing episode. On the post-revolutionary street, on a street that had seen gun battles, the sight of one person helping another bent-over raised a peculiar alertness in some boys leaning against a stack of tires in a garage. . Our cabbie looked away. . The OIJ man, behind the wheel of his Daihatsu, was suddenly sitting straight up and peering at us . .

“Now the Mercado,” I told our driver. The old man made a blind, macho-hombre U-turn. Meanwhile, having wiped his nose and eyes, the Englishman looked for a virgin corner of his hankie with which to clean his glasses.

We passed the Ministry of Culture, and the museum: the speechless poets — blind painters — a tingling in the sculptor’s amputated hands. .

“AND NOW we’re going to lose this person,” the Britisher said, “pretty much as they do in a film. Do I gather as much?”

“It isn’t stupid,” I insisted. “It’s a workable idea.”

We both got out of the cab at one of the entrances to the Mercado Central. “Anyway I’m out of shampoo.”

In this post-cataclysmic vastness, where once there’d been some kind of downtown, the Mercado lay like a small island. “If he leaves his car here, and we lose him on the other side, he’ll have a hard time getting transportation.”

“Right, I see it now,” the Brit said. “Certainly give it a try if you like.”

“I don't speak Spanish very well,” I told the cabbie. “If you don't understand, please tell me that you don't understand.”

“I understand,” he said. “We’ll meet on the other side of the Mercado.”

“And I’ll give you the second part of this.” I tore a hundred-cordoba note in two and gave him half.

He looked at his half, and then at me, in utter horror. “I understand,” he said.

We left him. “Do you think he’ll be there?”

“Oh, there must be cabs on the other side,” I said. “I just don’t remember for sure.”

“Are you certain you can walk all right?”

“You insist I’m plastered. I’m doing fine. I have the use of my legs.”

“Very good.”

The Englishman kept looking back, embarrassed and self-conscious and pretending otherwise. “Are we still. .”

“We’re still being monitored.”

The OIJ man was walking about twenty feet behind. He wasn’t looking at merchandise. He was looking at us.

“It occurs to me — what do you suppose he’ll — what action,” the Brit finally managed to say, “is he going to take when he sees we’re trying to lose him?”

“Oh I guess he’ll shoot you in the back once or twice.”

He was taken with a shudder.

“Just kidding,” I assured him.

“Indeed.”

"I need some shampoo.”

“Shampoo. Oh, well, as long as we’re here then,” he said, “surrounded by shampoo.”

We were a long time travelling down the weird thoroughfares at the Mercado, a maze of shops on the order of a Stateside shopping mall, but laid out more haphazardly and quite a bit more various in its pretensions, the decor of sad fifties bowling alleys and modest living rooms, country sheds, Alabama shoeshine parlors, phone booths, and so on pressed out in a series of shops devoted to the sale of any item, absolutely any item, but mostly, as elsewhere, the most useless items: U.S. junk, cheap digital watches, imitation designer jeans, tee-shirts stamped with the spectral-sexual symbols of Heavy Metal rock groups, cuddly posters and records and jogging shoes, something like home but slightly, horribly askew because so much of it was secondhand, dented, bent, stained, or just inexplicable. . We passed a closed government office whose interior was dominated by an old round-shouldered Coke machine. .

“I got to have some rum,” I said.

“Must be some of that in the vicinity too, I should think.”

Next to a store that sold both used furniture and costume jewelry we found a store that sold both rum and shampoo.

The OIJ man waited outside like an angry friend. Leaving the shop, we were walking right toward him.