Genius Page 4

  No day passes that Guadalupe doesn’t drag my wife off to the Minimax or the local tienda with endless marketing lists: jugs of Casa oil—a particularly nasty sesame-seed oil used for cooking—rice and beans and frijoles and tortillas, Barras de Coco, gallons of pulque, Gloria butter by the ton, Pan Bimbo for toast, and mountains of Nescafé (which my wife insists Guadalupe uses for face powder). And who eats all these groceries? Guadalupe’s family. There is her daughter with three children and another on the way (and still no husband). There is Guadalupe’s sister, who works for Dr. and Mrs. Priddy across the courtyard. There is the vigilante, or night watchman, who just happens to be Guadalupe’s uncle. There is a cousin who sells lottery tickets during what rare moments he’s not in our kitchen eating. There is a drunken son who helps put away Guadalupe’s pulque as well as our Scotch, bourbon, gin, rum, and tequila. For two people with light appetites, more food is consumed in our kitchen in the course of a day than in the entire Hilton Hotel chain. There are just about as many people checked in, too. My wife swears that all of them are poor relatives of Señorita Ximinez and that she just keeps them on as servants. (To her horror, my wife found out yesterday that Guadalupe’s salary is one dollar a day.) But I don’t see how any family can be all that big.

  The whole of Casa Ximinez throbs with life. In addition to Guadalupe, her daughter, her three grandchildren, her son, her sister, her cousin, her uncle, all feeding their faces in our place, there are her birds—a great reed cage filled with little tzinzontles that bicker and fight even worse than the humans. There is Perro, Madame X’s abominable little French poodle, who barks for exactly twenty-three and a half hours every day. There is Loro, her ugly green and yellow parrot (Miss Ximinez is very direct with animals, calling them simply the Spanish equivalents of dog, cat, parrot, and so on—but then Miss Ximinez is very direct about everything), who gives an awfully good impersonation of Perro barking and an even better one of Madame X demanding her rent. When he has run through this somewhat limited repertoire, he flies up into the jacaranda tree just above my head and screams until Abelardo, the gardener, comes with a ladder to fetch him down. Less than an hour later, the whole performance is repeated. It seems to keep Abelardo a good deal more occupied than the garden does. Guacamayo, the macaw, lives on a perch across the patio—but not far enough. By day he is as still as death, blinking his obscene naked eyelids in the sunlight and searching his wingpits—if that is the term I want—for lice. Punctually at midnight he goes stark, staring mad, shrieking and emitting jungle cries that would freeze your marrow. After dark, cats prowl and yowl on the roof above, rats scratch and scurry through the cellars below. Madame X and her mother get into a screaming fishwifely brawl every night on the subject of whether or not Mamacita’s favorite television program is disturbing the tenants. Perro joins in. Yellow mongrels out on the street bark back their replies. About four in the morning a rooster living somewhere—I wish I knew—nearby commences to crow, and every half hour the vigilante rides past on his bicycle and blows a shrill blast into our bedroom window to tell us that all is serene. (For this service he charges four pesos a week—thirty-two cents—although he never has change for a five-peso note.)

  All in all, it’s a silly, pleasant way of life with as many amusements as irritants. The climate is lovely and a lot better than a sleety, slushy winter in New York. We can also piously tell one another that things are so cheap down here we’re actually saving money, which is quite true if we overlook—as we resolutely do—the plane fares, the long-distance calls to our children and agents and publishers, and the fact that our expenses continue in New York just as though we were still there.

  This year we have been installed in the Casa Ximinez since Epiphany, when the children were sent back to school growling and grousing about the ghastly injustices of being young and having three thousand dollars apiece annually spent on their educations. This makes us the oldest tenants of all, save for Dr. and Mrs. Priddy, who occupy very small quarters on—thank God—the far side of the patio. The P.’s are not to be believed. He is an old poop from Maine who has passed the last sixty-five of his seventy years preparing himself for life. He holds degrees of varying luster from Harvard, Columbia, Heidelberg, Yale, Alabama, Trinity, Clare College, the Sorbonne, U.C.L.A., and God knows how many totally unheard of institutions spread across the face of the globe. The list of initials strung out after his name—and he has them all religiously engraved on his visiting cards, which he deals out as though he were playing six-pack bezique—looks like ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM spelled backwards. He is also one of those really tatty Ph.D.’s who insist on being called Doctor instead of Mister, and his wife refers to him solely as The Doctor. Having just enough private income to pay for room and board, books, and tuition, he is forever looking one year ahead for the one more degree that will prepare him for a career. Except for homework, he’s never done an honest day’s toil in his life. He is currently enrolled with the bobby-socks set at the University of Mexico, studying I-forget-what, although he’s told me at least a hundred times.

  One would think that with so much mileage and tutelage behind him, he might be interesting to talk to. Far from it. He is incapable of speaking or writing a simple declarative sentence. If there is a short Anglo-Saxon word that can be expressed less well by a long foreign phrase, Dr. Priddy always chooses the foreign language. If asked whether he would prefer coffee or tea, Dr. Priddy comes up with a long preamble, a classical quotation, an “amusing little anecdote” attributed to Walpole concerning Boswell and Johnson, a brief analysis of recent findings on the stimulating qualities contained in caffeine, and finally says, “Tea, s’il vous plaît, ‘The cup that cheers but does not intoxicate,’ heh heh heh. Or, as Congreve so aptly put it in The Double Dealer, ‘They retired to their tea and scandal, according to their ancient custom,’ heh heh heh.” Oh, he’s got a great sense of humor, as he’ll tell you in five million words or more. Actually, he’s the second most boring person I’ve ever met.

  The first most boring person we know is Dr. Priddy’s wife, Modesta Lee Drain Priddy. She is a flirtatious Southern belle of sixty-odd who—and I quote—“jest lahves and adowahs innathing quaint.” And with Dr. Priddy’s lifetime safari through the Groves of Academe (“Actually, the sublime Milton spoke of ‘the olive grove of Academe’ in his Paradise Regained, but yours is a common blunder, Mr. Dennis, heh heh heh.”), she’s seen ivverything quaint from the Balkans to Borneo, which she will be only too happy to describe to you in minute detail. She is little and plump—in fact, the word small describes everything about both The Doctor and Miz Priddy—and prone to peasant blouses, amber beads, cameos, squash-blossom necklaces, beaten silver, turquoises, embroidered shawls, coolie hats, lava earrings, and all the other badges of quaintitude she has been able to barter for in native bazaars and peasant market places for the past half century.

  She fancies herself as a one-woman voice of democracy, who loves and understands peasants the world over. She is wrong. She merely patronizes them, and they know it and resent it—or at least they do down here. And just allow some servant or shopkeeper to treat her as an equal, and she will let everyone know that she is a Drain and Poetess Laureate of Corinth, Tennessee. Childless, she thinks she loves and understands children. But, again, her love and understanding are only patronage. She likes children on her own terms: in native costume performing long-abandoned traditional songs and dances, when they’d much rather be drinking Coca-Cola and watching television. Being poor and greedy, the local children naturally hoped that they might get a few pesos out of the rich Americana. They were sorely mistaken. When the maids at Casa Ximinez beg for shoes for their kids or for a little help in buying the compulsory red school uniforms, Miz Priddy suddenly becomes stone-deaf or delicately vague and forgetful, or, if the bite is really being put on her, the outraged spokesman for the huddled masses. As she recently said to my wife, who had just treated Guadalupe’s three grandchildren to new shoes, “Ah think it’s terrible to
deprive them of their pride.” She affects the simpering sweetness of Melanie Wilkes, but just let the proprietor of the Farmacia Corazón de Jesús charge one centavo too much for a bottle of leche de Phillips (milk of magnesia seems to be the staff of life in the Priddy household), and the famous Drain dimples disappear while Miz Priddy tells him in her Tennessee Spanish that she’s going to call the police.

  When speaking English, which she does incessantly and fluently, she has that irritating, coy mannerism affected by some Southern women of making every statement a question by means of vocal inflection at the end of each sentence. “Ah come from Corinth, Tinnesee? Mah family were all Drains?” Drains is right! I suspect the device is intended to inquire as to whether we comprehend and appreciate the importance of each dreary pronouncement. We do. She is also, if you can bear to listen closely, a little hotbed of prejudices. Jews displease her except in Israel (“Wheah they belong?”), dancing quaint traditional horahs. Save for such picturesque rites as saint’s day processions in full costume, Miz Priddy recognizes no current values in the Catholic Church. The merest mention of the American Negro is enough to erase her cast-iron dimples, although Negroes qualify for occasional roles of quaint folksiness in her tales of native Dixie.

  They are great droppers-in. They dropped in on us the first day we moved into Casa Ximinez, scattering their visiting cards, and they haven’t stopped since. Our common bond seems to be that we all write. Dr. Priddy in the course of garnering his many, many degrees is the author of countless abstruse monographs and Ph.D. theses, each published by an obscure university press, each averaging an inch of text to a yard of footnotes, and each more stultifying than the last. Miz Priddy, if less prolific, is even less talented. Her literary output amounts to a five-foot shelf of personal memoirs privately published, over the years, by a printer in Nashville, and includes such can’t-put-it-down works as Montenegro—My First Impressions; Going Native—My Two Years as a Portuguese Housewife; My Friends the Fisherfolk of Calabria. Well, you get the picture.

  Miz Priddy is incessantly sticking her nose into other people’s business and giving a full report on her findings. It was Miz Priddy who was able to tell us that the couple named Horowitz in Apartamiento 3 were Jewish—or at least she suspected as much. It was Miz Priddy who came up with the scoop that the Catalina Ximinez who owned Casa Ximinez was “none othah than the Catalina Ximinez who appeared in that dowlin’ movie Yew-catayun Gull?” When the alcoholic who briefly occupied Apartamiento 6 was carried away in a Cruz Roja ambulance during an attack of delirium tremens, it was that old sleuth Miz Priddy who said that she believed he drank. I mean she’s alert. And so it was Modesta Lee Drain Priddy who informed my wife that the mysterious new tenant in Apartamiento 2 was none other than Leander Starr, “die-rectah of that dowlin’ movie Yew-catayun Gull and othahs?”

  My wife came home from some minor shopping foray at the Nueva Mil Preguntas looking wide-eyed and harassed.

  “Don’t you feel like a drink?” she asked.

  “No, not especially,” I said.

  “Well, make two anyhow. I’ll drink yours.”

  “You look as though you’d seen a ghost.”

  “I feel as though I had. I was in the Nueva Mil Preguntas when along came old Miz Priddy and said . . .”

  “Oh, Miz Priddy? In that case I’ll make you three drinks. I know exactly how . . .”

  “And do you know what she told me?”

  “Plenty, I feel sure.”

  “She told me that the person who moved into Casa Ximinez last night was . . . Well, you won’t guess in a thousand years.”

  “Hernando Cortés?”

  “No. I’m serious.”

  “Pancho Villa?”

  “Oh, much worse. It’s none other than Leander Starr!”

  I got up quietly and made four drinks.

  But if the great man was indeed living right next door to my wife and me, he was being anything but neighborly. As the weather in Mexico City all this winter has been especially warm, we usually work out of doors in the patio. Immediately after my wife and I had downed our restorative drinks we set up office directly beneath Starr’s heavily curtained windows. For the rest of the afternoon we played noisy duets on our typewriters. (My output was principally a letter to our son and “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy sleeping dog,” while my wife ran up a scorcher to the Vassar Alumnae Association and several versions of “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.”) Every now and then when, from sheer exhaustion, we stopped banging away at our typewriters, we launched into loquacious and totally fictitious dialogue about the brilliant things we were supposedly working on—oh, I tell you, the Lunts couldn’t have put on a better show of the madly successful little couple. We had wild bits like:

  ME: Would you mind stopping whatever you’re doing and casting an eye over this?

  SHE: Hahahahaha! Funniest thing I’ve ever read. They’ll love it at Warner Brothers.

  ME: Well, they’re not going to get it unless I have approval of the director. That’s absolutely definite in my contract.

  SHE: I don’t blame you one bit. That’s what I told them at M-G-M. I said, “I want a decent director—somebody young and reliable.”

  My wife swears that she heard a low moan from inside Starr’s apartment, and maybe she did, but her ears aren’t half as keen as her imagination. We poured out more drinks and went back to our clattering until we got bored with doing typing exercises. Then my wife led off with another body blow:

  SHE: Funny as this piece is, do you think it’s quite fair to stop working on that play you promised the Theatre Guild?

  ME: Of course I’ve stopped. I finished it over the weekend and sent it right off to Lawrence and Armina by airmail.

  SHE: And you didn’t let me read the last act?

  ME: How could I? You were at that meeting with Dolores del Río about adapting that novel for her.

  SHE: Oh, so I was. Well, I do hope Lawrence liked it.

  ME: Like it? They were mad for it. They’ve already signed Margaret Leighton and Rex Harrison for the leads.

  SHE: Perfect!

  ME: Now the only problem is finding a director.

  SHE: Isn’t it always. As I was saying to Josh Logan . . .

  ME: Wouldn’t you like another drink? I would.

  SHE: Adore one.

  This time, there was the distinct sound of a door being slammed furiously in Starr’s apartment and of a voice that could have belonged to no one but Alistair St. Regis saying, “Oh, goodness!”

  Between the hot sunlight beating down on us, the many, many, many drinks, the hectic typing, and our bravura performances, we could hardly stagger back into our own quarters at dusk. As I closed the door unsteadily behind me, I saw Alistair St. Regis, wearing very dark glasses and a mass of chestnut ringlets, dart out of Starr’s apartment, dash across the patio and into the street.

  It was quite late when we glided rather unsteadily into El Paseo for dinner, and at the piano our genial host, William Shelburne, was going out of his Bart Howard set (“Fly me to the moooooon and let me play among the stars, etc.”) and into his Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh phase (“I have a feeling that beneath the little halo on your noble head, etc.”). Although naps, hot coffee, and cold plunges had done something to quell the effects of sun and rum, we were still far from being ourselves, sliding helplessly from great hauteur into fits of inane laughter. El Paseo was thronged, and there was no hope of getting a table right away so we ordered two drinks—which we needed like a case of crabs—and took them to the piano where one could get a splendid view of the Shelburne. But what attracted my attention instead was Alistair St. Regis standing next to me and contemplating his daiquiri with a great sweeping of crimped eyelashes.

  “Mis-ter St. Regis,” I said in a small, jovial roar. “This is a pleasure and after all these years and all those Christmas cards!” I thought poor St. Regis was going right up through the skylight, but I clutched his frail a
rm in order to hold him down and then grandly introduced him to my wife. “My dear,” I said grandly, “I want you to meet none other than the great Leander Starr’s right-hand man, the distinguished Alistair St. Regis.”

  “A g-great pleasure indeed, Mrs. Dennis,” he stammered. “Goodness, it is late. I must be going.”

  “Not a-tall,” I bellowed. “And do let me buy you another of those.”

  The piano stopped. “If you would rather sing this song, Patrick,” Bill Shelburne said icily, “I’ll be happy to accompany you.”

  “Ever so sorry,” I said. “Not my key.”

  “Pipe down,” my wife said out of the corner of her mouth. “You’re making a scene.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And I really must be going,” St. Regis whispered.

  “I won’t hear of it,” I said in a more normal tone of voice. “Why, it’s been years since I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you and dear Leander, and I want to hear about every golden moment of it.”

  “Your table is ready, Mr. Dennis,” Ricardo said.

  “I insist that you join us for dinner,” I said to St. Regis, who was positively quivering beneath my grasp.

  “His table?” someone at the piano said. “We’ve been waiting here since . . .”

  Our genial host stopped in the middle of a song. “He has a reservation.” (I hadn’t.) Then he added darkly, “Sort of a last supper.” Some performers are just plain touchy.

  With St. Regis protesting every inch of the way, we were ushered to a table far, far away from the music, where I ordered a whole lot more to drink and, eventually, even dinner. St. Regis was most unco-operative at first, protesting that he had another engagement, that it was terribly late, that he had promised Mr. Starr to be home by midnight, that he had some letters he must write, that he had a nagging headache, and so on. But he hasn’t much head for liquor—or perhaps it was the altitude—and so after being lulled by a few more drinks and a Steak Diane, he eventually relaxed and, albeit guardedly, told me in his affected, prissy manner of the decline and fall of Leander Starr during the past decade.