Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

Our reunion was a happy one, if a little tense. She was sixty, but still elegant and beautiful. It was obvious she looked after herself, went to the gym every day, had had a few facelifts, and made a lot of effort to slay slim. She lived alone in an apartment near Coral Gables. She had separated from her Mexican lover more than seven years earlier, and although he was a fairly nasty and cynical individual, he had left her that apartment and enough money to give her an above-average monthly income. I waited nervously for the right moment to talk to her about my work, but it came very naturally. Do you know why I separated from him? she said, and I said, no, tell me, what happened? Mamma poured herself another dash of V8 with vodka, which was what we were drinking on her terrace, and she started her story, which wasn’t very long and basically fairly predictable.

I always knew he was cheating on me, she said, but I’d reached the age when a woman gives up and prefers to close her eyes. His meetings and business trips to Acapulco and Sinaloa and the Bahamas were getting longer and longer and seemed to be less and less justified, but I didn’t care because it all happened far away, in that great nothingness made up of all the places we haven’t lived and know only as dots on a map. Until one day he started to seem strange, nervous, exhausted. He would get home in the evening or at night and go straight in the shower claiming he was hot or tired. His mouth smelled of alcohol. One day he traveled to Chicago and I got into his office and gave it a complete once-over. That was a serious mistake, of course, because what you look for, you find. It’s something you should never do.

Well, I found it. A key ring with an address and two keys. 1587 Tijuana Drive, Apartment 6D. I went straight there, and it turned out to be a respectable-looking building, not luxurious but quite clean and well-maintained. When I got to the door of 6D I took out the key, but just as I was about to put it in the lock I heard a voice inside saying, can’t you get back before tomorrow? will you be here by noon? She was talking on a cell phone near the door. Then she said, bring me something nice, darling, different than what you always bring me. I felt jealous. I dialed Tony’s cell phone and of course it was engaged. I waited until the conversation was over and dialed again. This time he replied immediately and said, did you just call me? I was talking to the office, I’m going to have to stay until Saturday, it’s freezing cold here, but there’s no way I can get out of it, the Abbotts want to meet with me on Friday and it’s too much bother to go and come back.

The next day I found an observation post, a coffee shop on the corner of Tijuana Drive and Anchorage Street, just opposite the entrance to the building. Of course I saw him arrive at noon, right on time, with a bag of gifts. It made me angry, but then I cooled down and plotted my revenge. The first thing I did was make copies of the keys and leave them in their place so that he didn’t notice anything. Then I started keeping an eye on the bitch, who was a Colombian named Dorys. She was a stylist in a salon near Fito’s office, which was where he’d met her. One day I went in to get my hair done and studied her. She was an attractive woman just under forty, that idiot Fito had good taste. It was obvious she didn’t know who I was, because there was nothing nervous or uncomfortable about the way she behaved. On the contrary, she was very friendly and attentive. I started to make plans. My idea was to get her to dump him, or to make him believe that she had a lover. Something like that. One day, while Dorys was in the salon, I got into her apartment. It was quite nicely furnished, the home of someone who was neat and tidy but also romantic. A painting of a stormy dusk in the Caribbean, two heart-shaped red cushions, things like that. I looked through her underwear and was surprised not to find daring panties or garter belts, the kind of thing that appeals to older men going out with younger women. I wasn’t there for very long, I knew they’d be coming back together that night. Before I left, I put a pair of men’s socks beside the bed. That was part of my strategy. Leaving things that would incriminate her. Another day, I left a half-full bottle of eau de cologne, which I’d bought and half emptied, of course, like everything I left. And it worked, things started to go sour between them. One day I entered the apartment after they’d spent all weekend together, and saw that they had moved the TV into the bedroom. There was a bottle of rum, cigarette butts, and various DVDs strewn on the floor. I picked one up and saw you in the photograph on the cover. I recognized you in spite of the make-up and all the ways you’d changed, and in spite of the fact that you were naked. I sat down on the bed. My god, my husband has erotic parties with his lover and gets off on watching pornographic videos of my daughter. I felt really disgusted by the time I left, and when he got home I told him I knew everything and didn’t want to see him anymore. He gave me this apartment and a decent income. So I separated from him and found out what you did. Then I investigated a little and discovered that you were a great professional in that kind of thing and had even won prizes. I’m not going to tell you I was pleased, but I thought, if a person chooses to do something in life, however strange it may be, they should do it well, and that’s exactly what you’re doing, daughter.

I told her about my life, about Kay and Kim and Eve Studios, I talked about my experience with drugs, about Giorgetta and how hard things had been, but how that hardness had become my greatest treasure, an inexhaustible source of strength, and probably of talent. She felt guilty: if she had been closer I wouldn’t have suffered so much, but I insisted and said, Mamma, I repeat, those difficult years are my resource, I wouldn’t change them for anything.

I stayed for a week and found out about her life, which was quite simple. She had a group of women friends she played cards with every Friday in a restaurant called Sapori di Sicilia, and she was a member of an evangelical church led by a strange Latino, a handsome, muscular man with tattoos all over his body, who would certainly have had a great future in the porn industry. A few days later, Kay traveled to Los Angeles, and that was where we all met up. I think they got along well, because after four days Mamma invited him to Miami and later he bought her an airline ticket to Paris so that she could come and see us.

We are already coming to the end of this eventful life, full of highs and lows. Having now recounted how the only family I had was reunited, and how my professional success came about, it only remains for me to tell you about the last great idea of Kim, our brilliant screenwriter, something he wanted to call “left-wing porn.” His screenplays started to depict sexual situations in which selfishness was combated and the collective ownership of the means of production was advocated. The first one, Orgasmic Integration, was a founding document. It includes an amusing scene in which a Mediterranean fisherman, hard at work, catches his wife in the hold of his boat, being given a double penetration by two Senegalese immigrants with very large cocks, who had gotten on the boat the night before after drifting in on a clandestine raft. The fisherman takes off his rubber boots and his leather apron all smeared with scales, looks straight at the camera, and says, maybe having her with them will bring me new pleasures, through a combination of all the means of arousal I’ll be able to have better sex, because my pleasure is inseparable from everyone else’s. Having said this, he throws himself into the fray, displaying a fairly reasonable cock, although, as if to prove certain cultural myths, it’s smaller than those of the Africans, and everything ends in a double facial ejaculation accompanied by ejaculation over the buttocks, three cannons shooting their load at the same time, a sublime image intended, according to Kim, to recall the cannons in The Battleship Potemkin, which was the inspiration for the scene.