Stolen Pleasures (29 page)

Over the phone the
doctora
had recognized his name; although she had read none of his novels, she subscribed, she had told him, to several periodicals from the States and had heard of him. But she did not, now, reveal anything about Kruper. Her answers were elusive of Klipspringer's questions. He saw that she regarded him as she would a patient, both respectful of his person and ruthless with his ailment, and under her influence he was convinced that an ailment had brought him here.

“Kruper visits you?” he asked.

“Never.”

“So he is not here now?”

“Never,” she repeated. “Even his agent in Mexico City he never sees. That gentleman deposits the royalties in the Banco de México and forwards the mail to a box in the main post office. Neither he nor I are ever visited by Kruper. The one and only time I have ever seen Kruper was in the jungle near the Guatemalan border. It was the first trip that my husband and I made into the jungle, years ago. Kruper was, then, a peddler, with burros, from one mahogany camp to another. He asked me if I would consent to be his translator, and a short while after we returned home, there arrived his manuscript of that novel of the Indians in the camps. I am the one who translated it into English. I did it in the evenings, as I do now. The evenings I devote to Kruper.”

“He writes in Spanish?”

“Sometimes in English. Does it matter, when eventually it is translated into twenty-seven languages?”

“Isn't there a courier who brings his manuscripts?” he demanded, pacing the courtyard that a few minutes before had seemed
so exemplary, so giving in its lush beauty; now he felt unbearably deprived. “Isn't there a courier? A man whom you could follow, whom you could send someone to follow?”

The
doctora
crossed the courtyard, disappearing through a door under the arcade, leaving Klipspringer to speculate elatedly that his desperation had persuaded her to plead with Kruper to reveal himself. She reappeared with a large envelope of heavy, brown paper. “You will see,” she said, “that he mails his manuscripts and that he lives in a village so small and so remote that the postmaster, if he can be called that, does not even own a rubber stamp with the name of the village. He dips his thumb in ink and smears it across the stamp.”

Klipspringer held the envelope that Kruper had held, on which Kruper had written in a scrawling hand, with a thick-nibbed pen, the name of the
doctora,
the number of her post office box, the town and the state, and up in the left corner his name and nothing more, and which he had sealed and bound—there were the marks of it—with twine. It was not, he noted, the handwriting of the man in the café.

In despair he sought out his hotel on foot, climbing the hill where his hotel was situated somewhere along the endless walls of villas and of ancient churches. When at last he stood in the bluetiled shower cubicle, his head bowed under the onslaught of tepid water, he expressed his despair with a long howl. Toward the end of his howl he was interrupted by a rapping at the door to the hall. He twisted the shower handles and in the silence, punctuated by the water dripping from his body to the floor, shouted through the wall, “You got a
problema
?”

“Señor Klipspringer, I come to solve your
problema.
” It was a man's voice, low, urgent, authoritative, uneasy but not unpleasantly so, a voice familiar or perhaps not familiar. Kruper? Was it possible that Kruper, hearing that Klipspringer was searching for him so guilelessly, so earnestly, so hopefully, had decided to spare him further torment and appear in person at his door? With his towel grasped around his waist he flung open the door and saw that his visitor was the
doctora
's servant, pressing his hat to his chest and solemnizing his face.

“The
manuscritos
come by mail, that is true,” the servant said as he stood in Klipspringer's room. “But it is not true, also. Do you yourself believe that
manuscritos
so valuable he would give to the
custodia
of the mailman? No. I will tell you what happens. Kruper gives the
manuscritos
to a man who brings them in his hands to the post office in this town. The man gives them, with a few pesos, to the clerk who puts the
manuscritos
into the box of the
doctora.
Kruper has much
confidencia
for the
doctora
but he is afraid, also, that the
doctora,
who, you understand, is in love with him, will ask a few questions of the man. She will tell him to sit down and bring him coffee and
pan dulce
and ask him if something hurts, his foot or his heart, and soon she will know everything and arrive at the house of Kruper with her black medicine bag and her nightgown.”

“Go on,” Klipspringer urged as he dressed.

“Once I sat down to drink pulque with him,” the servant said. “He is
norteamericano,
like yourself. He was born in El Paso and has white hair and a scar on his face. But I waste time to tell you these things when you can meet him yourself. We can go now to the
man that brings his
manuscritos.
The sister of this man was the wife of Kruper. She died in childbirth and the child also.”

Since the servant had come on foot, Klipspringer and he went by taxi into the heart of town, to the edge of the labyrinth that was the marketplace. With the servant leading the way with rapid steps and a skilled serpentining through the throngs in the narrow streets, Klipspringer followed over ruts, some filled with black water, and under canopies of grayish cotton squares, ducking his head to avoid the low ones. The evening sky was still light above the canopies but everything under them was suffused with a blue dusk: the piles of fruit, the trays of yellow and purple and red beans, the pots and shoes and hanging blankets, and the peddlers, men and women, some of whom were packing their wares away. The turnings they took were innumerable but at last his guide came to a halt before a row of medicinal herbs in great variety, filling baskets and in mounds on the ground, each kind with its sign claiming its specific cure. The young man who emerged from among these herbs possessed, at least in the twilight, as innocent a face as Klipspringer had ever seen, as though a daily imbibing of brews from all his herbs barred from his system all diseases of the body and the spirit.

With his mouth to the ear of the herbalist, the servant explained the purpose of Klipspringer's presence. The herbalist smiled and nodded and, in turn, spoke a few words into the servant's ear. “He says,” the servant informed Klipspringer, beckoning him to come closer, “that he will do it for you because I ask him to do it. I have told him that you are the man that Kruper will be happy to see.” Again he spoke into the herbalist's ear and again the herbalist spoke into his. “Kruper,” said the servant, translating, “lives in a house
between the house of this man's mother and the house of his uncle in Iguala. If you will give him paper he will make a map so you do not become lost.”

On a slip of notepaper, the herbalist drew a map consisting of a line with one small square at the end of it and, across from the one square, three more small squares, with an X in the middle square. So now it was Iguala, Klipspringer mused; it sounded like a lizard in the middle of a desert. Only God—and, he hoped, some bus depot clerk—knew where it was. The herbalist gave over the map with a smile whose respect made it difficult for Klipspringer to dispute, to himself, the belief of these two that he was the man whom Kruper would welcome. For this respect and for their guidance Klipspringer laid several twenty-peso notes across the palm of the servant and as many across the palm of the herbalist, and was led out from the labyrinth and into the plaza, where he shook hands with the servant and was left to himself. The lamps were now lit and hundreds of black birds were streaking in from all over the sky to shriek and squabble in the trees of the plaza.

 

ON THE BUS to Iguala that he caught early the next morning, or barely caught, as he had permitted the crowd of people in the cavernous, fume-filled depot to rush up into the bus before him, he stood at the rear, forced there by latecomers filling the aisle, his face at a level with the shelf that was laden with baskets and ropebound suitcases and, close to his eyes, a sack that moved. When the bus, grinding and roaring down the street, was stopped short by traffic crossing its path and he was thrown onto the lap of an Indian woman in the last seat and, rising, was thrown again to her
lap, another seated passenger unfolded a spare seat into the aisle and Klipspringer sat down, facing front. When he gazed ahead his eyes were confounded by the close and far legs of the many men in the aisle. When he glanced to the right, his face was six inches away from the back of the head of the passenger in the aisle seat who was gazing out the window; it was the same to the left, and both obstructed his view of the countryside. Occasionally, a passenger got off at a village or along the highway; more often, someone else climbed aboard. Some passengers struggled with stuck windows and failed. The sun beating on the roof of the bus made the interior even more malodorous until, after a time, it seemed to Klipspringer that the bus was panting a mixed odor of poultry droppings, ripe squash, exhaust fumes, and odors he could not identify, and that this exhalation was inhaled by the passengers in lieu of air.

He sat with his suit coat on his lap, his shirt wet across his back, unable either to lean back against the woman's knees or to stretch his legs forward, and growing more alarmed each mile with his gullibility. It was incredible, he thought, that he had allowed himself to be duped into the belief he could find Kruper and to be machinated onto this bus to Iguala with these strangers all oblivious of the task he had set for himself, four years ago, of baring his life, and oblivious of how he had accomplished the task, neglecting nothing and withholding nothing, baring all: verbatim revelations to his psychiatrist; the scenes with his wives, the spoken and the unspoken and the unspeakable parts, and with his father, mother, mistresses, friends, and enemies; the journals where the dregs were, the journals without deletions, without change. Not one of them knew that in his own country hundreds of thousands held in their
hands at that moment the chronicle of his life, eight hundred pages encased in a jacket bearing seven poses of the author, a large one on the front and six smaller ones on the back, and with his name three times larger than the title.

A sensation of suffocation set up before his eyes the item to appear on the front pages of his country's daily papers: died in Mexico on a second-class bus to Iguala. But only he, the expiring man, knew it was in the midst of fears and fumes and in search of J. Kruper, and that he searched for Kruper because he, Klipspringer, as his fame had grown, had found his own life more fascinating material than any other man's and now was confined way down at the very bottom of that life, and that he searched for Kruper because to find him was to find the means by which Kruper forgot the self that bore a name and became all others, became nobody and everybody. At that moment he was suddenly intolerant of his own name. If he threw his wallet under the seat of the man to the left or the right, he would, he reasoned slyly, die without a name, unidentified, a man in an expensive suit and shoes, whose body nobody would know what to do with. For dead and without papers he could be either a Canadian, a German, a
norteamericano,
or an affluent Mexican who had hopped aboard the wrong bus.

Iguala's dust rose in a cloud as the bus rattled into the depot lot, denying him further time to throw away his wallet and to die. His coat over his arm, his handkerchief to his eyes to wipe away the attacking dust, and gripping his suitcase, he staggered down, knocking over a pail of hot water in which several ears of corn were floating. Down on hands and knees, the Indian woman, whose produce it was, picked up the corn from under the passengers'
trampling feet. He paused to make amends, then went on, observing how, on the instant, a thick dust coated his wet shoes. Out in the street, which was like an adobe passageway, he turned to the right, as directed by the map. The sun was incredibly hot. He was hungry and thirsty and wished that he had bought a tangerine or two from a peddler in the depot lot, but a superstitious hope that some repast would be offered him by Kruper, a repast for a pilgrim who has at last arrived, had dissuaded him. The herbalist's map was simple: at the end of the street and across from a
tienda
stood three houses, the middle one the house of J. Kruper. Yes, far away was the
tienda,
its soft-drink sign and cigarette sign bright spots of color on the side wall facing the town. By its door two dogs lay on their sides, unmoving. An impatience even stronger than he had known before the other doors where Kruper was to be found, an impatience so strong it was an exultation, gave him the eccentric energy to run a few yards between every few yards of trudging. Yes, there was the row of adobe houses, small, yardless, undecorated, but not until he stood in the street with his back to the
tienda
and the dogs did he accept the fact that the house in the middle was not there.

He set his suitcase in the center of the empty lot, sat down on it, and for a long time gazed out on the endless earth, across tremendous, barren valleys to a far rim of craggy mountains and to the milky-blue sky, rippled with the heat, that swept back over all. The absence of the house and of Kruper was, he thought, all, all as it should be. A yellow dog with one ear slunk around him, its lip lifted, its eyes sidelong, touched its nose to his shoe and returned to the street.

 

AT THE AIRPORT in Mexico City, after he had wearily fumbled his papers before two of the battery of immigration clerks, he entered the waiting room and, since it was crowded, sat down on a bench near two women already sitting there. As he gazed out through the glass at the field and the plane with its attendant figures, he was aware that the women near him were now silent. Then, as he expected, he heard his name and felt his arm touched, and turned toward them an exhausted yet benign and grateful face.