Aleksandar Hemon: Love and Obstacles

I went back upstairs a couple of days later, and then again the following day. Mama and Tata seemed fine with that, for if I took my boredom away, we could all avoid long stretches of crabby silence. They must have thought also that engaging with the real world and its inhabitants without actually going out was good for me, and I got to practice my English too. As for me, I smoked at Spinelli’s as much as I wanted; the music was much louder than my parents would ever permit; he poured whiskey in my glass before it was half empty. He even showed me how to play drums a bit—I loved smashing the cymbals. But most of all I enjoyed his narratives: he delivered them slouching back in the sofa, blowing cigarette smoke toward the fast-spinning ceiling fan, sipping his J&B, interrupting his delivery for a solo in a Led Zeppelin song. There might be a taint of death, a flavor of mortality, in lies, but Spinelli’s were fun to listen to.

He had run a cigarette-selling business in high school, and had regularly had sex with his geography teacher. He had hitchhiked across America: in Oklahoma, he drank with Indians who fed him mushrooms that took him to where their spirits lived—the spirits had big asses with two holes, which smelled equally of shit; in Idaho, he lived in a cave with a guy who watched the sky all day long, waiting for a fleet of black helicopters to descend upon them; he smuggled cattle from Mexico into Texas, cars from Texas to Mexico. Then he was in the Army: avoiding rough deployment by applying onion to his dick so as to fake an infection; whoring around in Germany, cutting up a Montenegrin pimp in a disco. Then Africa: sneaking into Angola to help out Savimbi’s freedom fighters; training the Ugandan special forces with the Israelis; setting up a honey trap in Durban. He told his tales laterally, moving across his life without regard for chronology.

Afterward, I would lie in my bed, trying to organize his stream of consciousness in my giddy head so that I could write it down for Azra. But I failed, for now I could see the loopholes in the texture of his tales, the inconsistencies and contradictions and the plain bullshit. The stories were unimpeachable when he was telling them, but would have been obvious lies if written down. Once I was out of his proximity, he made little sense; he had to be physically present in his own narratives to make them plausible. Therefore I sought his presence; I kept going upstairs.

One night I went up, but Spinelli was all dressed and ready to go, wearing an unbuttoned black shirt, reeking of shower and cologne, a gold chain dangling below his Adam’s apple. He lit a cigarette at the doorstep, inhaled, and said, “Let’s go!” and I followed without a question. It did not even cross my mind to let my parents know where I was going. They never came to check on me when I was upstairs, and the boredom I had endured certainly entitled me to some adventure. It turned out we were going to a casino around the corner.

“The guy who owns the casino is Croatian,” Spinelli said. “Used to be in the Foreign Legion, fought in Katanga, then in Biafra. I don’t wanna know the things he did. We do business sometimes, and his daughter likes me pretty well too.”

I could not see his lips moving as we walked, his voice was disembodied. I was vibrating with curiosity, but could not think of anything to ask him: the reality he implied was so solid as to be impassable. We turned the corner, and there was a splendid neon sign reading PLAYBOY CASINO, the S and O flickering uncertainly. A few white cars and military jeeps were parked on the gravel lot. On the stairs stood a few hookers in ridiculously high heels, neither climbing nor descending, as though afraid they might fall if they moved. But move they did as we passed them; one of them grabbed my forearm—I felt her long nails bending against my sweaty skin—and turned me toward her. She wore a helmetlike purple wig and earrings as elaborate as Christmas ornaments, her breasts pushed up by her tiny bra so I could see half of her left nipple. I stood petrified until Spinelli released me from her grip. “You don’t fuck much, Blunderpuss, do you?” he said.

Three men were sitting at the roulette table, all plain drunk, their heads falling on their chests between the revolutions of the wheel. The heavy fog of masculine recklessness hung over the table, the green of the felt fractured by the piles of colorful chips. One of the men won, snapped out of his torpor to take the chips with both of his arms, as if embracing a child. “Watch the croupier steal from them,” Spinelli said with delight. “They’re going to lose it all before they get another drink, then they’ll lose some more.” I did watch the croupier, but could not see how the stealing happened: when they won, he pushed the chips toward them; when they lost, he raked the pile toward himself. It all seemed simple and honest, but I believed Spinelli, fascinated with abomination. I started composing a description of this place for Azra. The hallway of hell: the cone of smoke rising to the light above the blackjack table; the hysterical flashing of the two slot machines in the corner; the man standing at the bar in the attire of a plantation owner, light linen suit and straw hat, his right hand hanging down from the bar like a sleeping dog’s head, a ribbon of cigarette smoke slowly passing his knuckles.

“Let me introduce you to Jacques,” Spinelli said. “He’s the boss.”

Jacques put the cigarette in his mouth, shook Spinelli’s hand, then looked me over without saying a word.

“This is Blunderpuss, he’s Bogdan’s kid,” Spinelli said. Jacques’s face was perfectly square, the nose perfectly triangular; his neck was less like a tree stump than a stovepipe of flesh. He bespoke the chummy ruthlessness of someone whose life was organized around his profit and survival; as far as he was concerned, I did not exist in the world of straightforward facts. He put out his cigarette and, in English marred with clunky Croatian consonants, said to Spinelli: “What I am going to do with those bananas? They are rotting.”

Spinelli looked at me, shook his head in bemused disbelief, and said: “Put them in a fruit salad.”

Jacques grinned back at him and said: “Let me tell you joke. Mother has very ugly child, horrible, she goes on train, sits in coupe. People come in her coupe, they see child, is very ugly, they cannot look, they leave, go away, disgusting child. Nobody sits with them. Then comes man, smiles at mother, smiles at child, sits down, reads newspapers. Mother thinks, Good man, likes my child, is real good man. Then man takes one banana and asks mother: ‘Does your monkey want banana?’ ”

Spinelli didn’t laugh, not even when Jacques repeated the punch line: “Does your monkey want banana?” Instead, he asked Jacques: “Is Natalie here?”

I followed Spinelli through a bead curtain into a room with a blackjack table and four men sitting at it; they all wore uniforms, one of them sand-khaki, the other three olive-green. Natalie was the dealer, her fingers long and limber as she dealt the cards; her pallor was luminous in the dark room; her arms were skinny, no muscles whatsoever; she had bruises on her forearms, scratches on her biceps. On her shoulder she had a vaccine mark, like a small-coin imprint. Spinelli sat at the table and nodded at her, slamming a cigarette pack against his palm. Her cheeks rose, quotation marks forming around her smile. Having dealt the cards, she raised her hand, gently, as though lifting a veil, and scratched her forehead with her pinkie; her hair, pulled tightly into a ponytail, shimmered on her temples. She blinked slowly, calmly; it appeared that pulling her long eyelashes apart required effort. I stood in the dark enthralled, smoking, my heart beating fast, but calmly. Natalie was from out of this world, a displaced angel.