Collected Prose

its last legs), and I filled my days with aimless walks around the dusty town, stepping over mangy dogs, batting flies out of my face, and accepting invitations to drink beers with the local drunks. My room was in a stucco outbuilding on the brother’s property, and I slept under muslin netting to guard against the tarantulas and mosquitoes. The crazy girl kept showing up with one of her friends, a Central American Hare Krishna with a shaved head and orange robes, and boredom ate away at me like some tropical disease. I wrote one or two short poems, but otherwise I languished, unable to think, bogged down by a persistent, nameless anxiety. Even the news from the outside world was bad. An earthquake killed thousands of people in Nicaragua, and my favorite baseball player, Roberto Clemente, the most elegant and electrifying performer of his generation, went down in a small plane that was trying to deliver emergency relief to the victims. If anything pleasant stands out from the miasma and stupor of that month, it would be the hours I spent in Cuernavaca, the radiant little city that Malcolm Lowry wrote about in Under the Volcano . There, quite by chance, I was introduced to a man who was described to me as the last living descendant of Montezuma. A tall, stately gent of around sixty, he had impeccable manners and wore a silk ascot around his neck.
    When I finally returned to Paris, Monsieur X arranged to meet me in the lobby of a hotel on the Champs-Elysées. Not the Hôtel Georges V, but another one directly across the street. I can’t remember why he chose that place, but I think it had something to do with an appointment he’d scheduled there before mine, strictly a matter of convenience. In any case, we didn’t talk in the hotel. The instant I showed up, he led me outside again and pointed to his car, which was waiting for us just in front of the entrance. It was a tan Jaguar with leather upholstery, and the man behind the wheel was dressed in a white shirt. “We’ll talk in there,” Monsieur X said. “It’s more private.” We climbed into the back seat, the driver started up the engine, and the car pulled away from the curb. “Just drive around,” Monsieur X said to the chauffeur. I suddenly felt as if I had landed in a gangster movie.
    Most of the story was known by then, but he wanted me to give him a full report, an autopsy of the failure. I did my best to describe what had happened, expressing more than once how sorry I was that things hadn’t worked out, but with Madame X’s heart no longer in the book, I said, there wasn’t much I could do to motivate her. Monsieur X seemed to accept all this with great calm. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t angry, not even especially disappointed. Just when I thought the interview was about to end, however, he brought up the subject of my payment. Since nothing had been accomplished, he said, it seemed only right that I should give him back the money, didn’t it? No, I said, it didn’t seem right at all. A deal is a deal, and I had gone to Mexico in good faith and had kept up my end of the bargain. No one had ever suggested that I write the book for Madame X. I was supposed to write it with her, and if she didn’t want to do the work, it wasn’t my job to force her to do it. That was precisely why I’d asked for the money in advance. I was afraid that something like this would happen, and I needed to know that I would be paid for my time—no matter how things turned out.
    He saw the logic of my argument, but that didn’t mean he was willing to back down. All right, he said, keep the money, but if you want to go on working for me, you’ll have to do some more jobs to square the account. In other words, instead of asking me to return the money in cash, he wanted me to give it back in labor. I told him that was unacceptable. Our account was square, I said, I wasn’t in debt to him, and if he wanted to hire me for other jobs, he would have to pay me what those jobs were worth. Needless to say, that was unacceptable to him. I thought you wanted a part in the movie, he said. I never said that, I answered. Because if you do, he continued, we’ll have to clear up this business first. Once again, I told him there was nothing to clear up. All right, he said, if that’s how you feel about it, then we have nothing to say to each other anymore. And with that remark he turned away from me and told the driver to stop the car.
    We had been riding around for