The Stars at Noon Read online

  The truth is, I’d suddenly, in a panic of avarice, turned all my dollars into an airline bag full of black-market cordobas at one-twentieth the official rate in La Cruz, Costa Rica, the last town before the Nicaraguan border; and had crossed over with tens of thousands of them in my underwear—hidden and smuggled like that because the Sandinistas know those Contra families are out there selling their exiled worthless cash at whatever price they can get: there’s a limit on the number of cordobas you can bring in. A limit that I ignored, as I say, and so I came over rich—but even the Nicaraguans themselves don’t want their internationally laughed-at currency coming across the counters at them when they suspect there’s a U.S. dollar to be had. Therefore the rule is that if you carry Caesar’s passport, you pay with Caesar’s coin: the greenback. I didn’t have any.

  Up in the northern provinces, they hadn’t cared so much that I had only cordobas, but down here in the capital they wanted what they said they wanted—U.S., U.S.—and I didn't have it. I was black market.

  What’s why I was cornered in a room at the Whatsis Motel, with the breakfast-hour floor show of naked children starving . . .

  That's why no photographer would take me north where the stories were, not even the French photographers who didn’t care about anything but bang-bang, a phrase that does not refer to sex but the noises of war: they didn’t want me continually impeding their hustle with my bagful of jive money . . .

  That’s why Sub-tenente Whoever had me in a hammer-lock, so that he or any bureaucrat of his acquaintance could lift my press card, or my skirts, pretty much whenever the mood clouted him, and chinga me . . .

  Instead of the descent of sleep I now felt a familiar panic . . . A visitation of tropical claustrophobia . . . Sailing rudderless into the day just made everything so much worse, but it wasn’t rare for me to run as if on fire into the streets in the morning, it was getting, in fact, to be a cyclical thing, like a searing comet—best combatted by a little squeeze, a few drops of rum.

  Two fingers of the stuff, all I had, didn’t work. I let the bottle roll away and jumped up and dressed, raving out loud at everybody keeping me down, and headed through the lobby convinced I had to get out of this toilet today . . . Knowing I was fated never to get out—not in this life, not in this death . . .

  WITH ITS loud diesel engines and unmuffled motorcycles, its choking fumes and loud cries, Managua is like New York City in summer—Manhattan, in a sense, is a Third World nation—although the only Managuan building fat as a New York one is TELCOR.

  TELCOR is where I was going. TELCOR meant words with the world above.

  Here and there in this country there were telephones, but if one wanted to call Planet Earth, one put the call through at TELCOR, the small, timeless, dead center of Hell, where souls were being branded with the shapes of their hope . . . As soon as you enter you go deaf—there can be no voice to these cries . . . If you bring a camera, the film exposes itself on entering . . . The minutes stop, but the ticking gets louder . . . People blow their noses and cough . . . The green fire of boredom streaks the air . . . The children on their mothers’ laps seem to drip with pain . . . Nothing happens, you never get out, and it all just gets worse and worse forever . . . Imagine a bus station presided over by demons, some of them hateful and some of them helpful, where the buses never come . . . A doctor’s anteroom but the doctor is dead . . . Eventually they call a name that sounds like yours and shout the number of the booth they expect you to enter, and either you get one without a door, so that everybody waiting to make whatever calls the burning circumstances are forcing them to make can now memorize the names of your contacts and trace the character of your desires, or you close yourself up behind the Plexiglas while the chamber fills with your used breath until you really can just no longer speak.

  First you have to fight your way to the front of the crowd, and pay. I estimated the length of my call: “Five minutes.”

  “You will pay in dollars,” the little man behind the counter said.

  For a moment I simply floated on my oceanic resentment of that one. “It’s customary that I pay in cordobas,” I said, pronouncing the Spanish phrases the best I could. “It’s customary.”

  Beside me and on top of me and underneath me before this counter, as if we’d all been bulldozed up against it, were dozens of other people trying to get their messages across.

  “Your passport,” the little man said.

  Passport was always the final word in this argument. I paid in dollars—day rates; fifteen bucks!—and stood waiting beneath the high clock in the room of tears.

  This is a small chamber in a big building—out the door is a monstrous ground-floor, marbly, resonant, like Grand Central Station. Towering murals depicting the red-scarved heroes of the revolution prove that this administration’s been around long enough, at least, to affect the decor. Soldiers with their Chinese AK-47’s slung barrel-down march back and forth—they were just little boys when first handed those weapons, but they’ve grown with the revolution, now they're older and steadier, sometime soon they’ll start shaving . . .

  Was I calling somebody for money, or what? By the time I was actually summoned to my booth, I’d forgotten what it was all about. . . But, of course, I was a journalist, I was calling my editor . . . There was a crepitation in the earpiece, his voice, supposedly . . .

  Soon we were quarrelling.

  “Louder,” I told him, “slower, I can’t quite—”

  “Why would a collegiate fashion magazine be interested in anything, any person, any event, in the fucking continent of Nicaragua?”

  “Your geography is a little loose, there. I’m saying I can get you a wonderful piece on San José, Costa Rica . . .”

  “Is this the same routine as last time? Is this Telex me X amount of cash and never hear from me ever in your life again?”

  “You’re hearing from me now. Just get me to San José and I’ll get organized. Things aren’t as simple as you want to think.”

  “Does this sound simple, fuck you? Does fuck you sound simple enough?”

  “Please bear in mind that I am employed by you.”

  “Are you on drugs, honey? You are not, and never have been, employed by me. Never never.”

  “Just what are you trying to say?”

  “Something along the lines of what I just said, darling.”

  “I have a press card right here in my—in my stupid, sweaty purse—wait a minute—”

  “You sound great, Managua, let’s get together soonest, and have lunch—”

  “Wait a minute—it says Roundup Magazine—”

  “Bye-bye, Señorita.” Click. Clackety—whack buzz hum—nothing’s uncomplicated this morning in Centroamerica, not the phone calls, not the phones, not the mechanical expletives of the phones . . . Half a dozen terrorists were gesturing helpfully that I should now replace the receiver on its hook. “Señorita . . . Señorita . . .”

  For a long time I had felt the matter of me shrinking to where I was known only as the last place: they’d say, “Hello, New York,” and start glancing through the bad checks, “Hello, Spokane,” and go for the buzzer . . . These days I was down to nowhere, to nothing, now I was down to Señorita . . .

  Home! New York! Goddamn it! The smug Judases! The lying hypocrites, et cetera—around me were people whose lies were at least desperate and unabashed. Of course, I’d been the one lying the most over the phone . . . But the other party had been evasive! shady! unwholesome! . . .

  And now, cretinously mumbling, a young sentry blocked my way out the door.

  “Por favor, motherfucker, hable más despacio,” I said. Not that even abject pleading ever got them to talk any slower.

  “You have to use the other door,” he said.

  And them too! Don’t forget them! Pay in dollars! Use the other door! As if this one didn’t work, wasn’t wide open! Goddamn them also! . . . I longed for the sight of U.S. tanks further chewing up the streets of this slovenly capital where it
was possible only to get nothing done and nobody seemed to think nothing not enough . . .

  Down here, the sight of a lady weeping crazily in front of a big public building warms everybody’s heart. They smile at me as they pass . . . “Taxi!”—I scream it like an oath, and the whole capital screeches to a halt: in the Inferno, 1984, anything that moves is for hire . . .

  I SPEND the rest of the morning battening down at a patio restaurant across the main road from the InterContinental: Los Paraquitos, I suppose it’s called . . . Incarcerated birds are their trademark . . . The sound system plays Spanish-language versions of “Under the Boardwalk” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” I’m out of the sun; the breeze across the flagstones is not hot enough to ignite my clothing. This little corner of the game opens for business at ten, but I’m the only living thing on the patio at this hour, aside from four parrots in a big cage.

  To the extent that I wear skirts and cheap nylon slips, I’ve gone native. But it doesn’t take long to find me out. Already the waiter realizes I don’t have much Spanish. Out of respect for my homeland, the waiter’s bringing me ketchup and mustard . . . He gives me a vast, four-page menu of which, he explains, one meat item is actually available; one vegetarian; several fish.

  “Rum,” I say. Never any shortage of that.

  Several soldiers passed along the low hedge beside me and crossed the street, all of them, in the macho manner, without looking right or left. Didn’t they ever get knocked down?

  Would such people really come banging at my door to count my cordobas and arrest me? Was there honestly an investigation?

  Oh, what was I panicking for?—as reason returned with a drop of Tres Rios rum and a minute in the shade . . . I had thirty-five U.S. dollars, in most circles a phenomenal stash. If I spent only cordobas today, and found a customer to pay in dollars tonight, I’d have enough money for the five p.m. Aeronica out of here tomorrow.

  If I hesitated, if I spent my dollars, I'd have to ride a bus to Liberia in Costa Rica, and that would take ten hours on post-revolutionary Nicaragua’s decimated section of the Panamerican Highway . . . Diesel and dust—sweat, rain, and wet straw. The children along there are streaked with dried mud. Their hair is in knots. They don't seem to have any parents. Or so much as a prayer—the small Catholic church this side of the southern border crossing is closed, padlocked, all boarded up, I know that much . . . I went out back of it, the day I came across, to squat down daintily over the crawling flowers and relieve myself.

  I crossed the frontier from Costa Rica in the south, down from the cool hills, through the soggy checkpoints, and right into the factory of bugs in the towering grass this side of the border, bugs raining down through the air, a perpetual cloud of them overshadowing the Lago de Nicaragua so that they cake, absolutely putty—I'm talking about bugs—all these leprous diesel-spewing vehicles trying to crawl through the choking deluge . . . I don’t know at what point, maybe it’s as you pass the second or third miserable sugar refinery looking just like a prison, that you realize you’ve been ejected from Paradise. And whatever these stunned, drenched people did to get themselves banished here is an absolute mystery. Like your own mortal error . . . Because, after all, the damned don’t arrive carrying the memories of their fat black sins in their heads, you don’t think of yourself as taking up your citizenship in Hell, nobody expects to cross the border and immediately start licking dirt like a snake—I myself would have perpetrated suicide at Checkpoint One if I’d imagined I’d come here as anything but an observer. But to observe is my designated agony, the sharpest punishment is just to watch . . . While being treated always and everywhere, incidentally, like a sucker—ripped-off—laughed at—exposed and hated—forced to show the midnight-blue passport like a stain on my hands. . .

  All the authorities are dead . . . Or in any case they no longer, and no longer do even their ghosts, inhabit the embassies . . . The community swims in the water of earthquake craters . . .

  And I am getting out of here.

  And as I enjoy the peristaltic quiver each icy sip of rum produces, I believe I witness my salvation . . .

  It’s the bespectacled Londoner of last night, looking over the parrots as if this were a zoo. But he isn’t interested so much in these enormous flashy birds as in the parking lot beyond their cage and on the other side of the patio’s hedge of oleander, through which he’s peering.

  THERE WAS something princely about him . . . In his cool, cerulean blue suit, his skin so clean and pink in the scorching daylight . . . What if my heart moved? What if I went for him at that moment? So what?

  I felt stung that he didn’t notice me. After all, I was the only other human this side of the kitchen—no, the big oil executive was now joined by the gentleman he'd been peeking at, who came onto the patio from the parking lot and greeted him quietly, one of the Nicaraguans that Watts Petroleum had business with, I supposed—one of the endless train of Nicaraguans in green sunglasses and white shirts, if Watts represented possible profit—here to mooch lunch or receive a bribe.

  I SAW the man from England in his blue suit again at supper, sitting with the same official, or another official just like that one, in the restaurant at the Inter-Continental.

  As I came in, I nodded to the Englishman. But he ignored me.

  I was very embarrassed and pretended to look over the buffet while thinking of a reason to leave.

  I was sick of eating here . . . Well, but it was the only outfit in the region capable of putting on a buffet, and they allowed me to pay with my black-market cordobas. The lunch buffets, held in a much larger room, were extravagant, accompanied by live piano, buzzing with journalists and other international crooks and phonies. I wondered why none of them ever ate supper here . . . Probably because it was the most expensive place in the country.

  I stole a glance. My British friend looked much less the sovereign—suddenly he was hung over, pale, and shaken. He was all alone now, his meal pushed aside.

  “Hello,” I said to him like a fool, “has your dinner guest ducked out, or what, exactly?”

  I felt like changing his face with a fork when he stared at me as if I were a total stranger.

  “Well, excuse my ass all to hell,” I said to him.

  His mouth stayed shut. I retreated temporarily. Time to use the washroom downstairs here at the Inter-Continental, where yesterday, at any rate, they’d had toilet paper. And I had to steal some for my room at the Motel Whatsis.

  The Englishman's companion, I noticed, was now sitting in one of the wicker chairs on the promenade reading somebody’s discarded La Prensa. And you too, I thought. You too.

  At my motel, we got neatly defined squares of newsprint. The ladies' room at the Inter-Continental offered a pinkish brand of toilet paper this evening—the first color other than paper-bag brown I’d seen in Centroamerica. I unhooked a roll from its receptacle and put it in my purse.

  Tonight’s graffiti read:

  RED, white and blue

  I shit on you!

  Viva

  Reagan-muerto

  “If they

  move, kill ’eml”

  William Holden—The Wild Bunch

  Back in the restaurant, the rude British man from the Watts Oil Corporation found me as I looked over the dinner selection, which appeared, for some reason, to be more like breakfast.

  He said, “I had a reason for ignoring you, believe it or not.”

  “It’s okay. Whatever my true feelings.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s the man I was with, you see. He’s gone now. I was afraid he was coming back.”

  “Consorting with unescorted women is no disgrace down here,” I told the poor man. “Latins think it’s normal.”

  “No . . .”

  While I got myself some supper, moving from dish to dish, he moved beside me. “I was concerned for your—for your reputation, believe it or not. That is—oh, for goodness’ sake, what have I said—forgive me, will you?”

 
; He was upset. He mopped his face with a bare hand. His napkin was hanging out of his belt.

  “Who is that friend of yours? What did he do to you?”

  The Englishman waved his hand, as if trying to cancel our conversation with this gesture. I pulled him into a booth right next to the buffet.

  “He’s still here. He’s sitting out there on the promenade,” I said.

  “Oh God.”

  “He's reading the paper.”

  “I see.”

  “Who is he?” I said.

  “A Costa Rican. He claims to represent the OIJ.”

  I pronounced it for him: “The Oh-Ee-Hota.”

  “He called it the Oh, Eye, Jay.”

  “For you, huh? For your Anglo ears. Oh, Ee,—‘jota’ is our ‘j,’ see.”

  “Gotcha,” he said with some irritation.

  “Those are the Costa Rican cops,” I said.

  “Yes, the Costa Rican, that's the spy . . . Actually it’s quite a good—a large detective force,” he said.

  “What have you got to do with them? Or don’t I want to know?”

  “Oh . . . Well . . .” he said miserably.

  “I don’t want to know.”

  He shook his head.

  “You need a drink.”

  “No, no. Thanks. A cup of tea. I’ve got one . . .”

  He brought his tea over from his table; and we sat there silently at mine while he suffered right in my face and I tried to eat. Weren’t we all in some kind of a jam down here? The important thing was we weren’t wasting away, we weren’t combing the dirt for bits of old bone to chew . . .

  No, my coffee was being poured at this moment by a waiter in a chartreuse vest . . . Scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. Yards of white tablecloth, cups of flame beneath the steel warming-pans, mounds of crushed ice in which were bedded down sliced pineapple and three or four kinds of melon, and there was even some reconstituted milk—God alone knew what crimes lay back of its delivery—in a tall stainless-steel pitcher bathed in a cold sweat. . .