Idle Talk Ch 1

1.

1964

            The night’s hundred fires burn thin and cold this September dawn and under them stands Gael Cienfuegos, sweating out the synthesis of all evils. He counts his fellow voyagers with one hand, i.e., curving his fingers to match his thumb. Closes his eyes, presses against eyelid. Finds a center and tells himself this will persist until his ship comes in.   

            “Dime.”

            “Goya, La Lechera de Burdeos.”

            Gael hangs up the payphone, puts on Wayfarers just as the hangover dusk pulls back under the barnacles. Winds through freighter crews on leave from their white whales, silent to his own ears he whispers it’s not me and shakes in pace more frantic.

An hour’s walk is ahead of him, legs ache something fierce fresh from their 14-hour stasis and he counts out his steps, cutting and dodging cobblestone cracks. Runs new numbers through his head to scramble them up but nothing’s doing. The dawn, solitude intertwine with somnambulist détente; every phenomenon here like falling bird shit, circuitry of vampires. Checks four times if he’s on the right road and as if it’s a sign mongrel dogs bark through their preamble for scraps. They look at Gael and cease to howl, staring at one of their own. Salutations creep out laconic every couple blocks. In response Gael nods half a measure too soon, strives for sine qua non breaths, full radiant circumference— forward, without surprises. Haaaaaaaooooooh, let it all out. Filled up like a landfill, the bruises on his arms falling away. Ready now.

            Falling leaves, wafts from frying tortillas, origami crinkles breaking themselves out into forms flat and pure. Gael after so many hours awake is hallucinatory but as he does not realize this aims to become less of a particle, to move beyond the zero and the one. A numbness, effusion outside himself. No taxis that he can see, the light’s fading down in full. Smoked too much over the night, now his coughs are clear and with purpose. His skull aches and he hopes to find a bakery,or at least some potable water-- no dice. 

His destination is the estate of Laureano Pinilla, colonel of 30 years, now succumbed to his long marches across Pemex land. The dissonance Pinilla hit banging on company town doors demanding paperwork and scouring peasant homes for guns settled into his architecture and Gael, surprised that this was the man who offered him refuge, says nothing to it. This is no longer land to fight for— whitewashed houses on cobblestone streets forever smelling of an ocean wind, plebiscite refracting in broken air.

            A century ago some soldiers of the American Confederation, fleeing their scorched earth, settled here. They are blacksmiths and field workers and they build their lands up around the city. They refer to those already living here as the “natives” and find pale nostalgias wherever is most convenient. A couple weeks prior Gael meets with one of them, now integrated into the world around him. He runs the teamster union and Gael slips a hand under the table, we never met, no nos conocemos. 

            “Which side were you on?” The man still winces a bit at the pilsner with its unmistakable cannabis taste and Gael who is four or five pints in conceals his smile.

            “Which side are you on…” Gael loves Pete Seeger and the güero misses this completely. Shot in the dark.

            “Heard you all had a Civil War. Guess it happens everywhere…”

            “Ah. Yeah. I was too young to fight, my brother died with the Republicans.”

            “Voted for Nixon?”

            “What?”

             “Bad joke.”

            “I guess so.”

            The compound runs from the shore up a fifty-foot cliff face with guards every twenty meters. They check unknown qualities at least three times through, stone-faced against jokes implying association with the Gulf Cartel. Tense under the iron gates today, Pinilla’s found a new plot against his life. Hoxhaists down in Chiapas calling perennial for blood. He busted through one of their campesino crawls to Tuxtla Gutierrez back at the peak of his nationalist fervor; the farmers’ AK-47, most likely from Afghanistan, no match for the Mexican army and the CIA pincer. Not enough bunkers in the world for it. Been twenty years and the vato who got pinched of course has no tangency, collections his claim. Just so happens he forgot the snub-nose in his belt and three days in the second guest house broke him to confess to just about anything. Anyone with this sort of compound expects little hornets buzzing by but with Gael dropping in like an anvil every guard with hands crossed over belt buckle kicks it up into high gear. 

The interrogaters take far too long in determining he’s simply a scared kid and give him a few thousand pesos for his troubles but perhaps more valuable the parting words of don’t fuck around. Pinilla’s vengeance is only a fraction of his hypnagogic world. With the sea’s heresies his only salve he’s taken to drifters, sheltering them in his empty mansion all while asking few questions and hoping to become one of them.

            “Tonight?” Pinilla passes over a bottle of mezcal. Gael takes two shots like they’re water and it corrodes the cinders back up through his throat, no coughs this time but he feels himself turning to a creature of ash.

            “If I can get any sleep. If not, tomorrow at sunrise.”

            “You must be quite tired.”

            “Yes. Suppose so.”

            Pinilla breaks out a cigar from a cracked slated box. Straight from Havana he says, Gael’s taciturn and Pinilla’s on the brink of disappointment. What a shame… Gael staggers a bit getting up to look over the balustrade and as soon as he gets there he turns to the white French doors leading to the vacant foyer. The schooners are out to sea now, ready to deluge the Saturday markets with any fish they find. Two nets will break. They think of the capital loss before the obvious. 

            Gael takes the time to decompress, four days of shellfish and exhales. His room is empty past the armoire and bed larger than any he’s ever slept in. In the silk sheets he counts backwards from ten and he doesn’t make it past seven.

            “There’s not much you can do about it. Growing bananas is a volatile enterprise and he thought he could do it on the rooftops of London, of all places.” Carlos meanders through his words, distracted by scrubbing down the same bit of floatsam-free floor as others tend to more pressing tasks.

            “All of this on your doorstep.” Gael’s been told not to do anything and he tinkers with his hands, resists pulling away fingernails.

            “Weirdos find a way…”

            Back at the docks, one last confirmation. Carlos is one of the four in his crew, from Bogotá, romantically involved with Marta, a Catalan who’s a decade his senior. Gael met them both in France where they worked on the docks and moved counterfeit Ming dynasty porcelain on the side. If there’s anything Gael knows, it’s how to know people who know how to forget. Let his little demon open all the doors. 

Gael strolls out to the payphone again. When it rings he doesn’t wait for a second.

            “Sí?”

            “Ya. Paul Revere, comerse el mundo.”

            They’ll speed past tiny islands now, the blockade is within, anhedonia of regressing wholes— never before these months has Gael looked to the sky and hoped to see something different. They disembark and his stomach does not shift with his feet, the fleeting Cézanne shore, exit to a deeper blue. Gael reads over a note from Pinilla, a sturdy hand fighting against the shakes that take more and more of his strength to subsume.

            I hope you arrive where you are going safely-- not Cuba, I know that is fine. I know you will be fine. But where you end up in the end.

            When I was your age, perhaps a few years older I was sent to lead a squadron of men into Chiapas. There was a labor dispute with some of the farmers we went to investigate. I will not bore you with the details but there I met a man who reminded me so much of you. It was a distinct ache in his eyes; he looked at me and saw right through me as you did. Even as you were so tired, almost fainting, you saw right through me. I thought of confession and this letter is one form of it.

            Crew moves in silence and Gael reads out on the bow seeing how Celtic blood takes to the fresh sun. They will take a week, and outside of what Carlos thinks for the better part of an hour is an American cruiser, blunt iron with a Manhattan skyline of radios and sonar atop it, it’ll be excruciatingly boring. One heave by land, infinite if by sea….

            Only connection to Cuba is Gael’s uncle Saúl who declared himself a Rough Rider midway through the war and last Gael heard, owns a sailor bar in Manila. His crew will wait for him as he transports the payload to La Habana under the escort of Dominica Sánchez, civil engineer and contract soothsayer. 

“Such a long journey,” she says to break the ice, Gael still swaying a bit in the back of her Buick, how it must be to not oscillate between yourself and the world so violently.

As they reach the edge of La Habana there’s a house whose architect in his twilight years was transfixed by intersection of Japanese Art Deco and Colonial charm, Gael knows it is his destination the second they pull into town. The owner is Claudio Alarcón, remnant of Spain’s colonial daze and committed to the Party for as long as it suits him. He’s delighted when Gael’s ceceo slips out.

            “¿Gallego?”

            “Asturiano.”

            “Ah. Pues genial, tío.”

            With his fortune made from consolidating Caribbean-West African shipping routes Claudio travels the world looking for nothing in particular, landing in Cuba. Franco began to litigate seizure and with a few signatures Claudio incorporated in Delaware and now spends most of his time painting watercolors, signing them as “Olivier Jaula” and in the 1990s will gain some notoriety suburban coffee tables the American Midwest intelligentsia over, particularly the University of Minnesota.

            “It never feels right in your dreams and you are not sad when you wake up from it,” Claudio is one to acknowledge his lack of brevity and push on through, “but this, this feels right.” He prepares some sort of nettle tea which Gael declines.

            “More of a nightmare on my end.”

            “You’ll be paid extra, much extra. Absolutely. You must be some kind of…”

“Prophet.”

            He would have said it twice but Claudio does not speak English and wouldn’t get the entendre. Outside there’s paella cooking in a caldero alongside a garden Claudio attends where the orange tree will soon yield mandarinas as sweet as anything Valencia had to offer. 

            They go to a bar full of farmers turned accountants, legislators. Most have retired and now tend to small fields with their friends.

            “We’ve got ourselves another Sancho here, gentlemen,” Claudio slaps Gael’s back who’s hoping this jerez didn’t make its way here via galleon. 

            “So,” Claudio will be this place’s prominent voice, it seems, “my friend Gael here, he has seen the world. I want to know what he thinks of our little island.”

            “Your…” crowd still treats Claudio with the appropriate reticence.

            “I’ve been here two days, Claudio. I’ve barely slept.”

            “It’s a dream to him! Lovely.”

            “Bueno…”

            Viva Durruti, from the corner. His name’s Alexis, the only one to pull the trigger during the revolution. The rest treat him with a reverence, he sits with a careful stillness, a hard man who learned just in time that he must become soft to live again. He almost died in Jamie Vega’s ambush outside Santa Clara, the scar on his chest faded that twinges every sunrise. He gives this out in piecemeal over the night to Gael as they drift away to drink a bottle of wine darker than any Gael’s seen and Gael will take those bits of Alexis and meet with synchesis. 

            “Ay, cabrón, qué fuerte,” Gael’s reeling at first sip. Directing his thoughts to his lungs, exhaling in a slow distortion of vowels in which no discernible id can be found. He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a blank piece of stationery, folded crisply in eighths. Unfolding and asking why there are no words. 

            “People must want you to see them as something else.”

            “Huh.”

            “Gael, do you let the world in?”

            Even now his print is clean and crisp. He only folds it in two, returns it to Alexis. He does not read it now, only the outside fold where Gael has addressed him by name. Alexis smiles, the first time Gael has seen him do so. They wander off after the bar closes, Gael sleeps in the only spare bedroom of Claudio’s with a bed and there’s fresh squeezed orange juice waiting for him on the kitchen table.

July in Madrid, Puerta del Sol opens all the way to the sun and even the toreros are sweating. To the right of Antoine Totti sits a bear searching out apples in bronze. He pays little mind to the Hapsburg halls around him and winds the same five or six streets, localizing himself, the cheapest markets, beer, how late the city stays awake. The only sense of texture is in constraining this spider-web to spaces where cars can barely drive, absconding away with a third axis. People stand on their balconies and smoke, perhaps have a cup of coffee and when they emerge Antoine notices it immediately, these acts of the dead in for a Kabbalist revival. The shirtless 80-year old man, some breed of daemon hunting Antoine down, child feet-patters the march of angels with their thousand eyes watching him reach for change in his pocket.  

The city feels part of the hill. A conch-shell of sandstone. The Community of Madrid is shaped after Spain as a whole which must be why everyone is so quiet. Antoine’s seen the photos of the old fascist headquarters, the si reneging every other option. Mussolini’s head in terraform, a new android leading the nation. He lowers his eyeline just a bit and does not increase his pace, whispers a hurried “buenas” to passersby in a more thickly-accented Castilian than he would have liked. 

            Everything shuts down in the daytime. Antoine’s staying in a flat out in Recoletos, he knows how to make rich friends. 

No marks on his skin, verisimilitude. New dark pallets under his eyes. Prescient. Down to the Puerta de Alcalá, the Tío Pepe sign, glass awning over the metro stop, it’s unbearably bright as you depart it midday, epicenter more phatic. The city center’s exhausting and Antoine’s whittled his dossier down to che cosa? 

            “Antoine! Antoine!” Gael’s tripping over his feet. Antoine takes his arm and leads him past falange guards with guerilla arms, Antoine turned 20 a month ago and matches up well against Godard’s immortal death; entropy of youth and all that (Guardia Civil should probably consider his deviancy distinctly un-Poisson-like). They stop at a market to buy baguettes and sheep’s cheese. A woman stands smoking in front of a ceramics shop, Antoine’s age; in his desuetude of the heart they move to where they’re going.

            “How is everything?” 

            “It’s fine, I’ve talked with Werner, he’s good to…” Gael shocks himself into cogence.

            “You look awful.”

            “I can never sleep before things like this.”

            “Hah!”

            “Do you want to talk the rest of this over at the hotel, I need to lie down…”

            Just before mediodía, Salamanca district where every old wooden door never opens. The rest of the continent fades in here, lost American airmen looking to buy something “exotic” for their wives back at the base. As much as a city or people can manifest sinister, Madrid’s face is static, parsonical. 

            “Antoine…” Gael is so acutely in need of sleep he no longer believes it so.

            “What?”

            “When Italy and France play, who do you support?”

            “I don’t pay attention to football.”     

            “What? Vaya. How can you not?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “You know what Camus said about it, your countryman! Maybe he’s Algerian…”

            “He’s Algerian.”

            Antoine’s bought a bottle of mineral water and blows across its mouth as they make their way to the hotel. It’s a new building for this part of town, built after Alfonso VIII was driven from the royal palace in ’31. Truth in material, this is a country of duendes, arpeggios rising from flamenco throat. En passant follies under consorted stars. The hotel owner’s faint connection to Gael’s sister has convinced him no one will be listening. The other bed has been occupied by Saïd Mahrez who’s just returned from his uncle’s café. Antoine hasn’t spoken to Saïd much about the night’s architecture but amidst the caffeine surely he’s focused.

            “Do you know who the first country to support the United States’ independence was?” Saïd’s fought off his habitual pacing for hours and now fully leans into it, taking heel-toe discrepancies down to the half-centimeter.

            “I’m going to assume Morocco.” Antoine irons out his shirt, the cabal here has never seen him with a wrinkle.

            “How would they have known? That all this would have happened?”

            “How can a war be cold?”

            “He keeps saying that,” Gael mutters half-awake.

            “Russia’s quite cold, or so I hear.”

            “Look at this guy,” Saïd points at Antoine, makes sure Gael hasn’t drifted off, “he’s funny to disguise how smart he is. He’s always doing that, this one!”

            “You’re embarrassing me.”

Antoine’s constants exchange sinusoids, orbit around how strange it is to be this human and it turns hard to find quiet in liminal spaces. Reckons with all this prior to meeting with Gemela Johnson, Madrid native, she’s out in Vallecas. She’s slipped the key to her bookstore into the earth of a Judas tree.

            “And,” She asks before kissing both Antoine’s cheeks.        

            “Everything’s set up. We’ll play the exit by ear. Giacomo says that the routes vary night by night.”

            “Huh.”

            “We’ll be fine.”

            “How’s Gael doing?”

            Now that it’s out of their hands their gears rotate less from impatience than spontaneity. Under the rosaleda, where shadows still run in chiasmus, Francophile voyeurism, bourbon warmth. Gemela has elsewhere to be back to Vallecas to exhume the Republicans, the anarchists. She’s never entered the palace, but tonight may be the night-- when half the working class of Madrid is gathered, what is there to divine?

When Italy and France play, who do you support, Antoine settles outside of Milan. Italy was never anything he understood; a leopard in a far-off estate. Sits on his porch, ever uneasy with lingering fascists manning fruit vendor stands, mayoral desks, his own walls a de facto minotaur who only stands and stares. Tends to his gardens, provides for himself. Stops eating meat, visits the adjacent town every other day and becomes beloved in the most marginal sense of the word.

            He’s just outside the Atocha train station. More and more people smell of cheap Cruzcampos beer and he walks to the park. He’s meeting with Giacomo now. They met in Tuscany, Giacomo having abandoned Florence after an ill-advised attempt at cracking into the Uffizi at midnight. He says he only wanted to see Venus de Milo in the solace of the night and Antoine almost believes him.

            “Through that window to the west?”

            Antoine nods. He is the only of the group who hasn’t seen the Prado. Gael, Saïd and the rest will be let in by Werner, sequestered away in a hidden compartment by the northern entrance. He’s stared at the Goya Gate for roughly eight hours, regretting drinking so much water in the sun’s apex. They muck around while Werner relieves himself in a potted Judas tree in the corner of a room of Carvaggios, Raphaels, what they think is a Michelangelo or one of his apprentices. 

            “Couldn’t you wait?” Giacomo’s not one to wait around.

            “It’s either this or piss my pants.”

            “There are bathrooms in here, asshole.”

            “Of course, that’s why we’re here, a night class, I’m sure they’ll understand.”

            Around eleven, the sun still stands in the sky but it won’t be there long. The fiestas that promulgate the summer will come soon and for a week, honoring some saint, virgin variation-- the people stand out and drink. Killing the bulls comes later, galvanizing what it means to be Iberia, forgetting that sliver to the west, to stand flat on the plains. Blades spinning off in the wind, slow. They will not forget.  

            “Juanito, where are the posters?” Antoine’s getting operational.

            “I thought Werner had them?”

            “How was I going to fit them in that hole.” Werner speaks just past anyone’s shoulder.

            “Uhh, German engineering?”

            “The Panzers were actually shit, why would you trust us.”

            “Oh they were not.”

            “Under nature’s undying eye, everything is shit…”

            “What the fuck?” Saïd’s had enough.

             “I would like to get another look at that painting. May, 1808, was it?”

            “Werner, stay focused.” Antoine’s nearly doting.

            “I had to put up with the fucking Nazis, the least I can do is see some art that makes me feel as if there is something worth preserving in this world.”

            “You were five when the war was over! You grew up in New York because your parents fled after the Kristallnacht!”

            “My point stands.”

            “Boys,” Gael is all here now, “can we at least say that the posters are somewhere close?”

            They are, of course, leaning by the tree. Werner sniffs them to make sure his aim was true and takes them under arm.

            “Well, let’s get to it…”

They work their way through the halls of the museum. Gael is unnerved, stepping as if he is not there at all. Werner worked for some years painting the manor homes of Munich’s post-war rich looks between frames. Their task signifies and no one speaks. Juanito came here once every month starting in March to align himself with the vast insides and he leads the way. They reach the depths, windows small and they have to squint which lends them some confidence in what they are doing. 

            “Juanito, I hate to doubt your memory, but when I was here last--” Juanito stares down Werner, first time tonight someone isn’t looking past him. Shuts up for the time being.

            Saïd who knows more about the galleries than he lets on, accedes to the thick amber light and moves his lips in the names of each painter. Dives deep for Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco in Greece. 

            The Garden of Earthly Delights. Gael is on lookout and in the couple minutes before he returns to give them the go-ahead they all focus on different sections of the triptych oak. Saïd stares down the grisaille orb floating in the pond in the upper center. Lifting him off his feet…

            “Well, slap it on, we’ll be on our way,” it’s not quite a smile on Gael’s face as he pulls along on an advertisement for the bullfighter El Cordobés and they are quick in leaving as they were in entry.

            The police know what is happening, even in a Francoist summer they can twist up the obreros into something their own. A family with the protest has broken away for a second to let the daughter, maybe seven or eight, lean over the fencing across the lake to peer over at swans lazily courting the water. The old gas lamps breach out, the smell of it strong, another age.

            Gemela has distributed signs, pithy slogans that hopefully get some good cantos going. Lucas has not told her exactly what the rest of them are doing and he is not a man to intentionally lie, she could inquire and only end up running in circles. Ostensibly they’re demanding benefits for people who can no longer enter the workforce. In this crowd that’s something difficult to argue against, some will try, they all will fail. Men and women missing fingers, limping, exogenous to the apathy of the factory it is a constant grind against everything not themselves. To be here is at least something, the ubiquitous sign is that of unidos. Together.

            An hour passes and the group has triples. They proceed to the Atocha station, symbolic in how they move and how the nation stops without them. The train conductors, bus drivers, taxis are with them now and in concentrating a pie in peace the civil bodies in front soften. No one will be rich but it’s nice to forecast otherwise. 

            Those who Gemela would prefer not to hear take her words, make them their own. Francisco, Santi, and Bruno Gómez through what most would call a thuggish resolve have ascended alongside the falange and it is their time to shine. They didn’t even have to buy clothes to fit in. Do the police know who they are? No, but they know the lines they cannot cross. They drift away to the right side, yelling “a la mierda con los nationalistas” as if their father didn’t butcher anarchists down in Sevilla for a couple months, the rocks start flying. They miss so badly the police see immediately who they are and in the crescendo of batons and fists they pass it all by. 

            Basque separatists have bombed the train station. Fourteen people lay dead, dozens with wounds and lacerations of all sorts. The crowd dispersed upon the explosions. A furor against the government reaching the abstract, meant to kill. The police hone their attention to a few and they arrest Gemela. Long and hard interrogations she does not break. Lives expecting this. The bombers join the ETA in time and misalign The Order for a few years until they become the skull in their crest. La causa, kausa. Euskadi Ta Askatasuna. Aguirre lead the Basques against this government. The fleeting sun, where do they go now? Against the judgement of a hundred thousand angels, will the skull and snake adorning them absolve? Antoine hears it in the distance, their group disbanding and planning a quick escape the next day, wonders if it is jubilant childhood firecrackers or a backfiring car. He does not sleep yet, has a smoke on the safehouse balcony, sees the sun and thinks to where he would be seeing it back home. Coffee’s on the pot, no reason to stop now, long voyage to the sea….