Bad Nature or With Elvis in Mexico Read online

  Before answering Presley I thought it was a good idea for me to say something to Ricardo: “El no es quien usted cree. Es su doble, sabe, su sosias, para hacer las escenas de peligro en el cine, estamos rodando una pelí­cula allí en Acapulco. Se llama Mike.”

  “El parecido es tan logrado,” Julio interrupted sarcastically, “que le habrán hecho la cirugía estética a Mike, como a las presumidas.” He wiped the by now utterly revolting handkerchief across his forehead.

  “What did they say?” Presley insisted. “What did they say?”

  I turned toward him.

  “They’re the owners. We’d better go.”

  “And what else? What were you saying about Mike? Who’s Mike?”

  “Mike is you, I told them that was your name, that you’re your double, not yourself, but I don’t think they believe me.”

  “And what did they say about George? You said they insulted him. Tell me what those guys said about George, they can’t get away with just saying whatever they want.”

  This last comment was a genuine piece of North American naiveté. And that was where my share of the blame came in, though Presley and I were to blame only in the second place; the guilty party was primarily McGraw, and maybe I was only to blame in the third place. How could I explain to Mr. Presley, at that moment, that the tough guys were using nouns in the feminine gender to refer to McGraw, la nena vieja, pesada, bailona, English nouns have no gender and I wasn’t about to give him a Spanish lesson right there on that dance floor. I glanced over at la nena vieja, la bailona—I’m the same age now that he was then—he was smiling weakly, walking away, the coward, he was starting to feel as if he were out of danger, he was tugging at Hank, Hank was tugging a little at Presley (“Let’s go, Elvis, it doesn’t matter”), no one was tugging at me. I gestured my head towards César Gilbert.

  “O.K. He called Mr. McGraw a fat faggot,” I said. I couldn’t avoid putting it like that, and I couldn’t help saying it, I wanted the owner of the Herald to hear it and not be able to make any display of despotism or punish anyone or do anything except swallow the insult. And I wanted the others to hear it, pure childishness.

  But I hadn’t been thinking about what a stickler Presley was and for an instant I’d forgotten the ghost. We’d all been drinking tequila. Mr. Presley raised one finger, pointed it at me dramatically and said, “You’re going to repeat this word for word, Roy, to the guy with the moustache, don’t you leave out one syllable. Tell him this: you are a goon and a pig, and the only fat faggot here is your little girlfriend there with the handkerchief.” That was what he said, with that way of twisting his mouth he sometimes had that inspired distrust in the mothers of his youngest fans. His insults were a little on the schoolboy side, nothing about sons of bitches or motherfuckers, words that had more weight in the sixties. He paused for a second, and then, with his finger still pointing, added, “Say that to him.”

  And I did say that to Ricardo César, I said it in Spanish (stammering a little): “Usted es un matón y un cerdo, y la única maricona gorda es su amiguita del pañuelo.” As soon as I said “maricona gorda,” translating my own words, “fat faggot,” into Spanish, I realized it was the first time those exact words had been spoken there, really, though they weren’t much more offensive than “bailona” or “nena vieja.”

  Presley went on: “Tell him this, too: We’re leaving now because we want to and because this place stinks, and I hope someone sets fire to it soon, with all of you inside. Say that, Roy.”

  And I repeated in Spanish (but in a less wounding tone and a softer voice): “Ahora nos vamos porque quere­mos y porque este lugar apesta, y espero que se lo quemen pronto con todos ustedes dentro.”

  I saw how Gilbert Ricardo’s biceps were quivering like jelly and a corner of his moustache twitched, I saw fat Julio open his mouth like a fish in feigned horror and run his fingers across his rings as if they were weapons, I saw that one of the two thugs at the table openly pulled back the front of his jacket to exhibit the butt of a pistol in its holster, like an old print of one of Pancho Villa’s men. But Ricardo Romero stretched out his hand to the horizon again, as if he were indicating “five,” which was not at all comforting because there were five of us. Then, with the same hand, he briefly signaled to me with the index finger pointing upward, as if he were holding a pistol and his thumb were the raised safety. Sherry was at the door by then, along with McGraw whose hand was clutching his damaged loin, Hank was pulling at Presley with one hand and kept the other in his pocket, as if he were gripping something. I already said that no one was pulling at me.

  Presley turned around when he saw I had translated everything, and in two shakes he was there with the others at the door, and the meaning of the way Hank had his hand in his jacket was unmistakable, to the Mexicans, too. I followed them, the door was already open—I was the straggler, all of them were walking outside, quickening their step, they were already out—I was about to go after them, but the rubber man shoved in between Presley and me, his back in front of my face, he was taller and blocked the others from sight for a second, then the rubber man went out with them, and the bouncer who’d been standing at the door keeping an eye on the street came in and closed it before I could get through. He stood in my way and kept me from passing.

  “Tú, gachupín, te quedas.”

  I had never believed it was really true that we Spaniards are known as gachupines in Mexico, just as I never believed the other thing they told us when we were kids, that if you were ever in Mexico and ordered “una copita de ojén”—an anisette—to the rhythm of seven thumps on the bar of a cantina—or even if you thumped rhythmically seven times and didn’t say a thing—they’d open fire on you without further ado because it was an insult. It didn’t occur to me to try and verify this just then, I didn’t much feel like having an anisette, or anything else.

  This time it wasn’t Gilbert Montalbán who called me gachupín but Julio, and he was looking more irate and uncontrolled to me, I’d watched him knotting up.

  “Pero mis amigos ya se marchan,” I said, turning around, “I have to go with them. No hablan español, you saw.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Pacheco will go with them back to the hotel, they’ll arrive safe and sound. But they’ll never come back here, eso es seguro.”

  “They’ll come back for me if you don’t let me leave,” I answered, trying to glance furtively back at the door, which did not open.

  “No, they won’t be back, they won’t know the way,” it was César Roland speaking now. “You wouldn’t know how to come back here either, if you left. I’m sure you weren’t paying attention to the street we’re on, you guys wandered away from the center a little bit without realizing it, it happens to a lot of people. But you’re not leaving; you must spend a little more time with us tonight, it’s early still, you can tell us about the Madre Patria and maybe even insult us some more, so we can listen to your European accent.”

  Now I really wasn’t happy.

  “Look,” I said, “I didn’t insult you. It was Mike, he told me what to say to you and all I did was translate.”

  “Ah, you didn’t do anything but translate,” the fat one interrupted. “Too bad we don’t know if that’s true, we don’t speak English. Whatever Elvis said we didn’t understand, but you we understood, you speak very clearly, in a little bit of a rush like everyone else back in Spain, but we hear you loud and clear, and you can rest assured that we’re listening. Him, no, your boss we couldn’t understand, he was speaking English, right? We never learned it, we didn’t get much of an education. Did you understand what the gringo said, Ricardo?” he asked Gilbert or César, who was, in fact, named Ricardo.

  “No, I didn’t understand either, Julito. But the gachu­pín yes; we all understood him very well, isn’t that right, muchachos?”

  Neither muchachos nor muchachas ever answered when he said things like this, they appeared to know that on such occasions their involvement was merely rhetorical.


  I turned my head toward the door, the big bouncer was still there, almost as big as Hank; with a jerk of the chin he let me know he wanted me further back inside the dive. “Oh Elvis, this time you really have robbed me of my youth,” I thought. They must have tried to come back inside when they saw I wasn’t coming out but Pacheco wouldn’t let them, maybe he even pulled his gun on them. But Hank had a gun, too, and in the street it was three against one, not counting Sherry, so why didn’t they come back for me? I still hadn’t lost all hope but I lost it a second later when I saw that the Villista with the butt of his pistol on display had left the table and was coming toward me, but only to go by and continue on out to the street, the bouncer let him pass, then closed the door again. He put a hand on my shoulder as he was opening it, a hand the weight of a steak, immobilizing me. Maybe the thug was going to help the rubberized Pacheco, maybe they weren’t going to escort my group back to any hotel—there was no hotel, just the plane—but settle the score with the others just as they were going to with me, only outside the joint that belonged to them, dar el paseo that’s called: going for a ride.

  I didn’t know which was better: if the others were being prevented from rescuing me or if they had left me in the lurch. Rescuing me. The only one who might have felt any obligation to do that was Mr. Presley, and even then: we’d only spent a few days together, I was an employee or peon, no more, and after all I spoke the local language and would know how to take care of myself; Hank didn’t seem like a bad guy or a man to abandon anyone, but he was a capataz and his primary duty was to look out for Mr. Presley and bring him back safe and sound from that bad encounter, anything else was secondary, they could look for me later, when the King was far away and out of danger, what a disaster for so many people if anything should happen to him. But I wouldn’t be disastrous for anyone. As for McGraw and the girl, no one could criticize McGraw for leaving me there until hell froze over if he wanted to, I hadn’t lifted a finger for him when he was being strangled on a dance floor to the beat of a rumba. The music started up again, it had been interrupted by the altercation, though not by death which seemed to have arrived among us. I felt a shove on my back—that steak, so raw—and walked to Ricardo’s table, he urged me to sit down, motioning with his hand toward the seat left empty by the Villista thug. It was a friendly gesture, he was wearing a deep red handkerchief around his neck, very neatly arranged, I only had to try to get them to forgive me for words that were not mine—though they’d been on my lips, or had become real only through my lips, I was the one who had divulged them or deciphered them—but that was incredible, how could they hold me guilty for something that didn’t proceed from my head or my will or my spirit. But it had come from my tongue, my tongue had made it possible, from my tongue they had grasped what was happening, and if I hadn’t translated, those men would have had no more than Presley’s tone of voice to go on, and tones of voice have no meaning, even if they are imitated or represented or suggested. No one kills over a tone of voice. I was the messenger, the intermediary, the translator, the true deliverer of the news, I was the one they had understood, and maybe they didn’t want to have serious problems with someone as important and famous as Mr. Presley, the FBI itself would have crossed the border to hunt them down if they had so much as scratched him, petty gangsters know above all whom they can tangle with and whom they can’t, who can be taught a lesson and who can be left to bleed, just as capatazes and businessmen know, but not peons.

  I spent that whole eternal night with them, the entire group, women and men, we went to a string of bars, we would all sit down around a table and watch some dances or a song or a striptease and then move on to the next place. I didn’t know where I was, every time we went somewhere new we traveled in several cars, I barely knew the city, I watched the street signs go by, a few names stayed with me, and I haven’t ever gone back to Mexico City, I never will go back, I know, though Ricardo must be nearing seventy by now and fat Julio has been dead for centuries. (The thugs won’t have lasted, that type has a brief, sporadic life.) Doctor Lucio, Plaza Morelia, Doctor Lavista, those few names stuck in my head. They assigned me—or maybe it was his choice—to the company of the fat man for the duration of the evening’s festivities, he was the one who chatted with me the most often, asking me where I was from and about Madrid, and I told him what my name was and what I was doing in America, about my life and my brief history which perhaps began then; maybe he needed to know who he was going to be killing later that night.

  I remember he asked me, “Why the name Roy? That was what your boss called you, right? That’s not one of our Spanish names.”

  “It’s just a nickname they use, my name is Rogelio,” I lied. I wasn’t about to tell him my real name.

  “Rogelio qué más.”

  “Rogelio Torres.” But you almost never lie entirely, my full surname is Ruibérriz de Torres.

  “I was in Madrid once, years ago, I stayed at the Hotel Castellana Hilton, it was pretty. At night it’s fun, lots of people, lots of bullfighters. In the daytime I didn’t like it, everything dirty and too many policemen in the streets, as if they were afraid of the citizens.”

  “It’s the citizens that are afraid of them,” I said. “That’s why I left.”

  “Ah muchachos, es un rebelde.”

  I tried to be sparing in my information yet courteous in my conduct, he wasn’t giving me much of a chance to show how nice I could be. I told an anecdote to see if they would think it was charming or funny, but they weren’t inclined to enjoy my sense of humor. When someone has it in for you, there’s nothing you can do, they’ll never acknowledge any merit in you and would rather bite their cheeks and lips until they bleed than laugh at what you’re saying (unless it’s a woman, women laugh no matter what). And from time to time one or another of them would remember the reason for my presence there, recollecting it out loud to keep everyone simmering:

  “Ay, why doesn’t the muchacho like us,” Ricardo would say suddenly, fixing his eyes on me. “I hope his wishes haven’t come true during our absence and we don’t find El Tato reduced to ashes when we go back. That would be most distressing.”

  Or Julio would say, “It’s just that you had to go and choose such an ugly word, Rogelito revoltoso, why did you have to call me a maricona, you could have said I was a fairy. That would have hurt me less, now, you see how things are. Feelings are a great mystery.”

  I tried to argue each time they came at me with this: it wasn’t me, I was only transmitting; and they were right, McGraw had asked for it and Mike hadn’t been fair at all. But it was no use, they clung to the extravagant idea that I was the only one they had heard and understood, and what did they know about what the singer had said in English.

  The women sometimes spoke to me, too, but they only wanted to know about Elvis. I stayed firm on that point and never wavered, that was his double and I’d hardly seen the real Elvis during the shoot, he was very inaccessible. In the third place we dropped into Pacheco reappeared, and seeing him really shook me up. He went over to Ricardo and whispered in his ear, his Indian eyes on me. Fat Julio pulled his chair over and lifted a hand to his ear in order to hear the report. Then Pacheco went off to dance, the man loved a dance floor. Ricardo and Julio said nothing, though I was looking at them with a questioning and undoubtedly anxious expression, or maybe that’s why they didn’t say anything, to worry me. Finally I worked up the nerve to ask: “Perdone, señor, do you know if my friends got back all right? The other gentleman was accompanying them, no?”

  Ricardo blew cigarette smoke in my face and picked a shred of tobacco off his tongue. He took advantage of the occasion to smooth his moustache and answered, flexing his biceps (it was almost a tic), “We have no way of knowing. It looks like there’s a storm brewing tonight, so God willing they’ll crash.”

  He looked away deliberately and I didn’t think it was advisable to insist; I’d understood him well enough. He could only be referring to the plane, so Pacheco must h
ave taken them back to the airport on the outskirts of the city where we had landed, and now he had told Ricardo about it: no hotel, a small plane, otherwise there was no way Ricardo could have known, no one ever mentioned the airplane in El Tato and I hadn’t mentioned it since. Now I really did feel lost, if Presley and the others had taken off for Acapulco I could say my last farewell. I had a feeling of being cut off, of abyss and abandonment and enormous distance or of a dropped curtain, my friends were no longer in the same territory. And what never occurred to me, neither then nor over the course of the five days that followed, was that the abyss would become or had already, immediately, become much larger and the territory much more remote, that they decamped immediately in light of what had happened, alarmed by McGraw and Sherry and Hank and convinced of the manifest unsafety of that country for Presley; nor that in Acapulco I would find, when I arrived bruised and battered at the end of those five days—five—only the second unit that even today the liner notes speak of, left there partly to shoot more stills and partly as a detachment in case I appeared; nor that after that night Presley never again set foot in Mexico but gave his entire performance as the trapeze artist Mike Windgren in a movie studio, my idea about the double was put to use; nor that I would not manage to be present for the climactic scene in which “Guadalajara” was sung, and which would, for that reason, become the most ludicrous display of the Spanish language ever heard on a record or seen on a screen, Presley sings all the lyrics of the entire song and you can’t understand a thing he says, an inarticulate language: when they finished filming the scene everyone crowded around and slapped his back with insincere congratulations (“Mucho, Elvis”), they told me later; he thought his unintelligible pronunciation was perfect and no one ever informed him that he was mistaken, who would dare, Elvis was Elvis. I never investigated the question very thoroughly, but apparently it did happen the way I thought it had: they forced Mr. Presley to leave me stranded, first Pacheco with his threats and his pistol, then McGraw and Colonel Tom Parker and Wallis with their terrible panic. You don’t like to think that your idol has let you down.