BLUE HORSE by Mark Jacobs
THE SIGNS OF DECLINE were there. The trick he taught himself was to see them as single events, unconnected. November, a cool evening. In the central plaza the church of San Lino was solidly black and silent. The municipal building, whose classic façade attracted the camera phones of tourists by day, was shuttered. A donkey clattered past on stiff legs, tossing its head. An east wind scraped across the valley up to the pretty town on the hill where it lifted the fringe of his poncho. A Honduran moment of definition, like so many he had celebrated through the years. Boot heels on the cobblestones, face in shadow beneath the brim of his black hat, he was Guillermo de la Playa. Yeah, the guy who wrote Man on a Blue Horse. Then two girls giggled going past him in a blaze of self-sufficiency. It was not teenage twittering, it was the slash of knives. They drew blood.
Any man so attacked would look for consolation. He headed for Amparo’s. His lover was forty and had a maverick streak, which her business facilitated. Half of Palanquín purchased their day’s necessities, including lottery tickets and alcohol, from her at Tu Tienda Amigable. In her independence Amparo spurned convention. Marriage did not appeal. A back door man, now that was something else. Everybody needed love.
They had an understanding, he had a key. He climbed the stairs to the apartment over the store quick as a tomcat. Lying in bed under a striped blanket she was watching television, picking at a plate of beans. On a chair by the bed in easy reach, a glass of beer, a bottle of hot sauce, a stack of tortillas. At her angle of recline, her haunch looked huge. A mountain of welcome.
He leaned down to kiss her, putting a hand on her breast, discovering she wore no bra. Comfort and pleasure, a package deal, though sex was the smaller part of it. With sudden force he longed to crawl under her blanket, sip her beer, wrap his legs around hers, take some warmth and give some back. In Amparo’s bed was a kind of home he had not expected to yearn for.
She turned away. Picked up the remote and changed the channel.
“Not now, Guillermo.”
“Why not?”
She looked at him in blank appraisal. “You need a haircut.”
He did not. He was careful about his appearance, he had to be. His image was a selling point for the product he hawked, which was himself. He understood that what Amparo was saying had to do with the color of his hair, not its length. Gray or getting there. Her disinclination to love him bore no relation to the casual contempt of the girls in the plaza. None.
He went home. Back when it was cheap and possible he had bought a fine old colonial home, small but dignified, on the crest of a street in Chaflán, the neighborhood of choice in Palanquín. He made money giving English lessons. So what? When anybody asked—some nosy fool always did—his answer suggested the lessons were his contribution to the civic life of the town he had adopted. The real money, he implied, was in the books he wrote, the paintings he painted. He was Guillermo de la Playa and had done his own illustrations for Man on a Blue Horse.
Maria Estela, who cleaned for him, had left beans on the stove. Thinking about Amparo in bed, her wide haunch, her warm breasts, her unique smell of flowers and flour, he ate beans from the pot with a wooden spoon and willed an erection. It came, it went. He went upstairs.
The spare room on the second floor was his studio. On the easel, the brute beginnings of a picture he called Apocalipsis resisted his imagination. He always gave his paintings Spanish names. Why the hell not? They came out of thirty years in a picturesque pueblo on the side of what was almost a mountain with a knockout view of a vast green valley below. How much longer did he have to go on paying dues before people saw him as the real thing? He had earned the right to Spanish names, Spanish style.
Tourists loved Palanquín, especially the Americans. It confirmed the image of Latin America they came south in search of. Quaint times ten, and an easy drive from the capital. He had chosen his refuge blindly and well.
He trained a light on the canvas. He squeezed a tube of apocalyptic red onto the palette. He picked up a brush. But did not touch the brush to the paint, the paint to the canvas. There was something about the end times he kept getting wrong, close as they might be. He went to bed. His room faced east, across the valley. The eaves of his roof caught the wind blowing across the town, curled it, made it howl like a son of a bitch.
Palanquín was a walkable town, and Guillermo did not own a car. In the morning he made his way strolling to a private lesson with the wife of the mayor. Norma Paredes liked to shop in Miami. Sure, you could get by with Spanish in the city of the Heat, but she wanted to be able to walk into a Nordstrom and ask in natural English for the items she desired. Not all that many years ago, the lesson would have been a pretext to flirt with the teacher, who was irresistible. Now, it had to do with vocabulary. Norma was hungry for words.
After the lesson he headed for Rufo’s on the plaza. Rufo served the best coffee in town. More importantly, you sat at a table outside on the walk enjoying an unimpeded view of arriving tourists. They did not come every day. When they did, however, as often as not they were delighted to find an English speaker. And Guillermo was happy to guide them on a walking tour of his adoptive hometown. His version included a stop at his place on Chaflán, where visitors admired the view out over the valley and sometimes purchased a painting by Guillermo de la Playa, or one of his books. Yes, he assured them, all his stories took place in Honduras, most of them in and around these same inscrutable streets.
He was concentrating on a minivan’s worth of demonstrative Argentines, wondering whether to approach them or wait for a carful of English-speakers who might or might not show up. So he missed the woman coming at him in hiking shoes along a purposeful diagonal.
“Oh my God. Bill? Is that you?”
He looked up. She was his age. She was buxom in a matronly way, and her skin lacked luster. She was smiling and seemed unsure of herself. He shook his head.
“You’re Bill Beach, aren’t you? You don’t remember me. That’s okay. We went to high school together. I’m Phoebe Winter… or I used to be.”
He frowned. It had been a long time since anyone addressed him as Bill Beach. It shouldn’t bother him. It did. She was implacable and sat down across from him. She ordered coffee.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m sitting with Bill Beach in this amazingly beautiful little town in Latin America. What are you doing here?”
Answering her question was a tactical defeat. But he could not very well sit there like a stone. “I live here.”
“How cool is that!”
She did not require much in the way of response. With ferocious energy she stirred sugar into her coffee and told him more of her story than he wanted to hear. She was traveling in Central America, she was divorced, she had two grown sons. Her husband Bradley had made a lot of money, she would not speak ill of him, she had gone through hell and come out the other side. Surprise: the other side was green and pleasant.
“I remember you,” he told her. “You’re the archer.”
Her smile, this time, was easy. Bad Axe, Michigan. A fundraiser for their senior trip. An archery contest. The prize was one of the guys from the tennis team mowing your lawn. Phoebe took aim at a distant target. Three arrows in a row found the bullseye. In the winners circle she pointed at Bill Beach, choosing him to cut her parents’ grass.
“I cheated,” she told him now. “My dad was a bow-hunter. He taught me to shoot. I used to go with him up to the U.P. in deer season.”
He finished his coffee, paid for both of theirs, stood up. “It was nice to see you again, Phoebe.”
“There must be a restaurant in this town.”
“There’s a couple of places you can generally avoid ptomaine poisoning.”
“Let me buy you dinner. Tonight.”
He thought for a moment, but it was a reconstruction of the decision he had already come to. He told her, “I’d like to show you something.”
What he showed her was the agreeable small house where Guillermo de la Playa lived. The view out over the valley. The shelves with copies of the five books he had written and published, thanks to a small press in Tegucigalpa. The studio with the painting that resisted him on an easel, a dozen completed canvases stacked against a wall. She inspected the pictures slowly and deliberately.
“You paint a lot of blue horses.”
“It’s kind of my signature.”
“What does it mean?”
The question offended him. You did not ask an artist to explain his work; he was not a study guide to himself. And he could be prickly in two languages. A handful of people around town, Amparo among them, knew how to get under his skin. But he chose not to snap at Archery Woman. That did not mean he would tell her the truth.
“I had a dream. A long time ago. There was a blue horse in it.”
She nodded, ready to take him at his word.
He told her, “The dream had a powerful feeling tone. It had to do with the horse. There were a hundred strong emotions in it. It woke me up. I got out of bed and wrote a story. It’s called Man on a Blue Horse.”
“You’re an interesting person, Bill.”
“In Honduras they call me Guillermo. It’s the Spanish way to say William. Sometimes they say Llemo.”
“I’m going to call you Llemo.”
He shrugged as though it didn’t matter one way or the other. She smiled as though she knew it did.
At dinner that night she told him she had no schedule. They met at La Carreta, which had decent food and a mariachi band that played all the Mexican standards. Talk about cultural imperialism. She had done her best to look good. She must carry a change of clothes and some makeup in her daypack. It made him wonder what he looked like to her. He was trim, not an ounce of fat. But he was staring sixty in the face. There were mornings at the mirror when he resembled a caricature of himself.
She told him, “I go where I want, when I want to go. I stay as long as I want. That’s the deal I made with myself back in Nasty Hatchet when I planned this trip.”
It sounded like a brag but was probably not meant to be. She insisted on buying the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu, overtipping the musicians, paying for everything. She called him Llemo and told him, “I’m staying at the InterContinental in Tegucigalpa.”
“Téguz, we call it.”
“See? I’m learning a lot.”
It was her way of saying she was coming back to Palanquín, which she did the next day. When he answered her knock at the house on Chaflán she asked him a question.
“Do you dream in Spanish?”
It gratified him, being able to answer honestly. “Sometimes.”
“I have a favor to ask.”
That put him on his guard. “What is it?”
“I know you have things to do, I don’t want to get in your way. But I’d like to sit somewhere and read Man on a Blue Horse.”
He put her in the little interior patio, in a wicker rocker on the red tiles. Nearby his cat, Felicidad, licked its calico fur in the shade of a decorative palm. Maria Estela brought her lemonade and cookies. And he left the house suggesting vaguely that he had business to attend to.
He wanted someone to read Blue Horse carefully, lovingly, with an inquiring mind. He did not want it to be Archery Woman. The conflict put him in a terrible mood. He went to see Amparo looking for an excuse to get angry. She gave it to him. She was busy with customers and made him wait his turn. When they finally spoke she informed him that she was taking a vacation.
“Where to?”
“Roatán.”
Roatán was in the Bay Islands in the Honduran Caribbean. For the last couple of years they had been talking about a trip there. Together.
He asked her, “When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Too bad,” he said.
“What’s too bad?”
“You didn’t have to go to all that trouble just to tell me get lost.”
A customer walked in. Amparo put on her professional smile. Guillermo left without saying goodbye, understanding that the more he said, the worse he was going to come off looking. He wasted the day.
Man on a Blue Horse was a short book. Eleven stories, the longest just eighteen pages. Phoebe finished it by the middle of the afternoon and wanted to talk.
“This is awkward,” she admitted. “People ask artists such dumb questions, don’t they?”
He nodded, and she drew a resolute breath.
“So, no questions. Just let me tell you what I think.”
Why did it feel as though he were on trial?
Without any Spanish, somehow she had communicated to Maria Estela that she required a bottle of wine. Now she hunted around the kitchen for a corkscrew, opened the bottle, poured Concho y Toro Cabernet into two glasses, carried a tray to him in the living room. Bright cloth napkins he did not recognize, a flower in a vase he did. Her words came at him in a rush.
“The man on a blue horse is not you, it’s not that simple. He’s someone you know from your own inner experience. Maybe you intuit him, or you imagine him. Anyway he’s someone you respect and admire. He is the one man who combines feeling and knowing into a way of being in the world, an important way. All his senses are alive. He knows how cruel love is, how vicious, and how unspeakably sweet.”
She went on. Every word was a torment. It was the pain of recognition. This was not the mouth out of which he had longed so deeply, so long, for acknowledgement to come.
“I don’t know what to say, Phoebe.”
“You say it in the stories. Those are the words that count.”
She cooked for him. All the time she cooked and all the time they ate she told him who he was. A seeker, a quester after truth. It took courage to do what he had done, spend his life in the middle of Honduran nowhere enacting his vision in words, his vision in pictures. He tried, for form’s sake, to change the subject, but she only shook her head.
“I need to say this. You need to hear it.”
He closed his eyes. His confusion was complete. Later, they decided she would sleep in his guest room. She had rented a car in Téguz, but it was probably not safe to drive back in the dark over roads she did not know. In the hall, before she closed the door to her room, she kissed his lips with her fingers.
In the middle of the night, internal turbulence woke him. He got up and went to the studio and worked on Apocalipsis for a good hour, succeeding in making the painting still worse. As he painted he wondered what sex with Phoebe would be like. He was not sure whether or how or how much she appealed to him, only that she was not a woman he could picture himself drawn to.
She sensed that, she had to. In the morning her manner was brisk and artificially bright. She allowed him to make her breakfast and then left for Tegucigalpa. He was relieved, he was disappointed. He stationed himself with an orange juice at Rufo’s on the plaza and snagged two American couples in their fifties with open minds and precious little in them. Frustration brought out the worst in him, and most of the stories about Palanquín he told, escorting them through the scenic streets, were lies. It was the day’s sole satisfaction. In the afternoon, having sold each couple a blue horse canvas, he went back to his end days painting and accomplished nothing.
Thanksgiving was next week. In his first years in the pueblo he had invited local people for a dinner that was a rough replica of what his parents used to serve in Bad Axe. Now, he could not recall exactly when or why he had stopped doing that. This was the coldest November he remembered in Honduras. He was unable to convert the sensation to art. No story, no picture, no saving grace. One day at Rufo’s, he barked at the waiter for spilling his coffee in the saucer. Leaving him a generous tip did not make up.
Guillermo was a man of definite opinions. It was unlike him not to know how he felt, two days later, watching a red Ford come to a stop in the plaza and Phoebe get out. She drew a bead on him, approaching like a woman with an idea.
“I thought you were headed for Guat City,” he told her.
“I changed my mind.”
“How come?”
She shook her head, took a seat.
“Bradley,” she said.
“Your husband.”
“Ex. He looked down on certain categories of people. Lots of them, actually. Do-gooders, romantics, politicians. He did respect scientists, and people who made money. Most of all he looked down on artists. ‘It’s a scam,’ he always said.”
“Is that why you read Blue Horse, you were getting back at him?”
She frowned. “I believe you are real.”
“What do you want, Phoebe?”
“I want to see a blue horse.”
He drove the Ford out in the country, showing her something of the real, unromantic Honduras. Under a thin sky they saw deforested hills, shacks with satellite dishes, men in hammocks and women shaping tortillas, boys kicking soccer balls in fields of red dirt. She said little, he said less.
That afternoon, they made love in his bed. Her instinct was to apologize: for her sagging breasts, her accumulated years, her performance. His instinct was to be critical. She fought hers. He tried to fight his. They met at the intersection of touch. Afterward, when she said, “Now what?” he had no answer.
They made a decision by refusing to make any decisions. Phoebe brought her bags from the InterContinental and stayed in the house on Chaflán. The days were windy, with grit in the air and a shifting wreath-work of insubstantial clouds. She read all his books, spending mornings in the patio rocker while he waited for tourists in the plaza at Rufo’s. She talked to him unceasingly about what she read, finding in the stories everything he wished were there. She cooked. They drank better wine than he was accustomed to. She admired his valor, living analog in a world dazzled by digital. He learned to be a more generous lover, doing his damnedest to quit holding back; to give. A hunch came to him, that beauty consisted in what was there. To see it, he had to blot out what was not. That was the hard part.
They might have gone on as they were. But something she said about his work set him off. It was the Monday before Thanksgiving. They made love after dinner. Afterward she wrapped a sheet around herself, went to the studio, studied Apocalipsis on the easel.
“Some day,” she said.
He had followed her in. Under the sheet her breasts drooped, and an underflash of desire took him by surprise. He said, “Some day what?”
“People will know… who you are, what you’ve done.”
He shook his head.
She told him, “I bought a Spanish dictionary. I looked up the word.”
“What word?”
“Genio.”
For one deadly instant he thought she was making fun of him. But she seemed serious. It was excruciating. When she asked him what was wrong he shook his head, not trusting himself to speak.
The next day he told her he had business in Téguz. She lent him her rental car, and he drove in, gut clenched, to see Rigo. Rigoberto was a poet of some note around Central America. He ran a small publishing house and a café called El Chifle. They sold books and coffee and greeting cards in an atmosphere redolent of tropical flowers and quiet civility.
Rigo was at a table correcting the proofs for a book of poems. He was a bear of a man, bearded and warm, generous as ten poets. He stood to embrace Guillermo, clapping him on the back like a long-lost brother.
“¡Hombre, tanto tiempo! It’s good to see you.”
But the conversation did not go well. Guillermo proposed another print run for Blue Horse and one of the other collections. Rigo shook his head. His regret was sincere. No one was buying the American’s books. Since Guillermo’s last visit, El Chifle had not sold a single copy.
“You’ve had a good run with your stories, my friend. It’s just… I can’t afford to carry the books anymore. It’s the internet. That, and the overhead.”
Panic made Guillermo stupid. The end days. He saw them now. The blood running in the cobbled streets was his own. He said the dumbest thing he could have said.
“You’ll regret this, Rigo.”
The poet’s eyebrows, his most expressive feature, registered surprise. He shook his head. “Did you think…”
“Did I think what?”
The Honduran decided he would say the thing that had come to him to say. “Did you imagine, William, that you were writing about Honduras all these years?”
Guillermo’s legs went weak. For a moment, he couldn’t see. Like a kicked dog. Later, that was how he knew he looked to Rigoberto, limping out of El Chifle. He did not remember driving back to Palanquín, parking the car, opening the door to his home. On a stool in the kitchen paging through a Spanish cookbook, Phoebe was the perfect target and knew something was up.
“What’s wrong, Llemo?”
He shook his head, tried to hold himself back. Failed. His charges were monstrous. She lied to him, she trapped him, she laughed at him. She was running away, she was living off her husband’s money, she was playing house. She was needy, she was manipulative, she wanted a toy. More. Way too much more, even after she broke and cried.
But she took it. In his fever of vindictive rage he had to admire how she took it. When the fire in him burned out, she closed the cookbook. She stood up. She pulled her sweater close as though to shield herself from his hostility.
“Before I go, I have a confession to make.”
“Make it.”
“Me coming here, finding you here, it didn’t just happen.”
“What do you mean?”
“Beth told me where you were. She told me what you were doing, everything about you.”
Beth was his sister. She still lived in Bad Axe. They weren’t close, but she knew enough about his life in Honduras to construct a story that Phoebe fell in love with.
She left behind a fine bottle of Bordeaux. He drank the whole thing. He wobbled. He pitched and yawed, walking to Amparo’s, he slipped on the blood he imagined running down the cobbles. Après moi, the fucking deluge. The wind in his ears was an insult. He could have stood the sublime indifference of the man in the moon, up there in the night sky, it was his curled lip of disdain that got to him.
Amparo wasn’t home. Not until he unlocked the door to her apartment above the store did he recall that she was in Roatán, enjoying the Caribbean without him. He collapsed in her bed and fell asleep. When he woke he was still drunk but had begun to ache, mostly in the head. He smelled the scent of his former lover and cried. He wrote a message on her bathroom mirror with lipstick. It had to do with the end days but was so dense with metaphor it was unintelligible. He went back to sleep in Amparo’s bed.
The next couple of days were composed of pain and oblivion. He scarcely left the house. He took Apocalipsis off the easel and burned the canvas in a barrel in the backyard. He came very close to burning all the copies of all his books in the same fire, but the gesture seemed cheap. It lacked imagination. Maria Estela moved around the house on noiseless feet, expecting an explosion. She knew better than to speak. He was unable to sleep in his bed so dozed sporadically on the couch. He was constantly parched.
On Thursday morning he felt less terrible. He shaved and showered, changed into clean clothes. He could not face the prospect of lurking to persuade tourists to take his tour, buy his art, consume his stories. That part of his life was over. But the plaza was the heart of Palanquín, and he could not really avoid it. Midafternoon he walked there just to get out of the house. And found Phoebe at Rufo’s drinking Diet Coke and staring at a Honduran newspaper.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” she said. “Learning a language.”
“It’s hard.”
“I did not come back to be abused by you again, if that’s what you’re thinking. Once was enough, thank you.”
He couldn’t speak.
“I came back because I wanted you to know the truth.”
“What is the truth?”
She gestured to the waiter. “Café,” she said. She pointed at Guillermo and said carefully, “Un café para él.”
He sat down. “What is the truth?”
“I never thought you were a genius. I was selling myself. Trying to, anyway. That’s the one thing I regret. I tried too hard. Makes me feel like a whore.”
He opened his mouth to say he was sorry. She didn’t want to hear it. For the first time, he was able to imagine the hurt he had caused her, the damage he had done. It was not in her face, or in her manner. She was stronger than he had first thought.
“What are you going to do?”
The waiter was there with his coffee. He delivered it without a spill.
Phoebe said, “I want to learn Spanish.”
He nodded. They drank, a little too quickly. She paid the bill.
When they left Rufo’s he stopped at a hole-in-the-wall store down a side street, a place he seldom bothered to shop. Phoebe followed him in. There wasn’t much in the way of food available. On a dusty shelf in the back aisle he picked up a tin of corned beef.
“What’s that?” she said.
“Thanksgiving.”
There was a bin of potatoes. She picked up two, deftly plucking out their sprouted eyes with a thumb. He paid for the corned beef and the potatoes. They walked, not too closely to one another, back to the house on Chaflán.
MARK JACOBS has published more than 150 stories in magazines including the Atlantic, Playboy, The Baffler, The Iowa Review, and The Hudson Review. His five books include A Handful of Kings, published by Simon and Shuster, and Stone Cowboy, by Soho Press. His website can be found at markjacobsauthor.com.