5

Jan. 3, 1957

Lovely mother,

I can’t keep from studying the snapshots you enclose. Christopher’s cherubic sense of himself pushes right through the silver iodide. I must say he looks a good deal like Winston Churchill, and that delights me. Not every day does one become surrogate godfather to Old Winnie!

I also thank you for my Christmas present. It’s summer here now, but the gloves will be most useful come July. I’m glad the roses got to Walter Reed. Did the brooch arrive, however, at the Stable? Don’t tell me I was extravagant. Perhaps I was, but so soon as I looked into the antique shop window, I had to buy it for you. The ornament spoke to me of heavy old Uruguayan gentility, and yet, I don’t know why, it reminded me of some inaccessible part of you. Can you possibly comprehend what I mean? In any event, don’t count me extravagant. In truth, I wasn’t. My mother, to my amazement, had just sent me a voluptuous check—it even felt plump and lustful in my bone-dry wallet. (Since I sympathize with your passion-to-know, I will not torture you needlessly.) Five hundred smackers! Sent along with a one-line note—“It’s Christmas, so do it up properly, darling.” She didn’t even bother to sign. Her stationery is her signature. I must say I feel uncharacteristically full of love for her. Just as one grows to resign oneself one more time to her basic stinginess of sentiment, lo, she knows what you are thinking, and comes across with a flashing stroke. Someday I will write a Charles Lamb–like essay on The Multitudinous Vagaries of the Bitch.

Well, I certainly must be full of gelignite and lyddite, peter and soup, to speak of my mother in such fashion. (Actually, I can’t resist listing these explosives. I hear them all the time.) We Station hands certainly don’t use the stuff very often (once a decade?), but we do know how to throw the cordite and nitro jargon around. Bang juice is the latest favorite. Obscene enough to do the job. We naturally passed through a host of Christmas parties these last two weeks, each of the married couples (which involves Mayhew, Sonderstrom, Porringer, Gatsby, Kearns) plus Nancy Waterston and myself as singles, giving an evening at their homes. I, still ensconced in my all-but-fleabag hotel, reciprocated by inviting four couples and Nancy Waterston (Mayhew doesn’t show up at any party but his own) to dine, all ten of us, in the grand and overpriced dining room of the Victoria Plaza. In the course of after-dinner drinks, we all got off for some silly reason on bang juice. Kept passing the term around, looking for new connotations—which came down, predictably, to the old connotation. But we had a merry time formulating such bang juice toasts as: “Blessings and bang juice to Augustus Sonderstrom, our own Gus, banging his big woods and juiced-up irons, and may all the bang juice be wiped off his hard-hitting putter,” yes, it got as elaborate and stupid as that. From Porringer, of course.

Anyway, I had one insight into Sally and Sherman late that evening. At the end of dinner, about the time we were all thickening up—you can’t call it sobering up—they happened to be alone for a moment at one end of the table, and she was looking sour, and he was full of bilious, much-compacted anger. (I know he had to be upset that his elaborate golf-and-bang-juice toast did not go over.) So the Porringers sat there like a warning to all who might contemplate marriage, old before their time. It’s awfully sad, because she has a perky little face. Maybe she was a cheerleader in high school, for certainly she has a nice body.

At any rate, I began to notice what the Porringers were doing with their napkins. It told the tale. Sherman had squeezed his piece of linen and released it, squeezed it and released it (with his thighs, I assume) until now, laid on the table, it looked like a piled-up thundercloud. Hers, to the contrary, appeared to have undergone a regimen of successive flattenings from the palm of her hand. Still, the cloth kept rising. Her poor trapped heart?

I think the Porringers are both from the Southwest, college sweethearts perhaps, I seem to recollect that he went to Oklahoma State. The point to this, I expect, is that each of them touches me in the oddest way. Ever since I voted with him against Sonderstrom, his relations toward me have been a study. Stop-and-go. Brusque; friendly. Highly critical of my work, followed by a clap on the back. Superciliously superior, then helpful. I, in turn, don’t know if I like him any better. I mention this because he did pass on a plum of a job to me. Right in front of Sonderstrom, he said, “Rick can field this one better than Gatsby, and you and I just don’t have the time.”

Do you know, I realize that all of this letter has been a preamble to a serious decision. Everything I’ve disclosed up to now can be seen as venial, but if I fill you in on the new job, and am discovered, I’m in the soup. As are you. So, let us wait a couple of days. I’ll write again before the week is out. It’s 3:00 A.M. once more. Apologies for this abrupt ending. I have to think this out for myself. It’s of too much consequence to rush into.

Love,
Harry

I was not telling the truth about Sally Porringer. We had begun an affair, and it was already into its second week on the night I invited my good Agency associates to dinner. So, the sadness I felt on watching Mrs. Porringer flatten her napkin was more complex than simple sorrow, and not without a tinge of fear. I lived among trained observers, after all, and the affair, if ever discovered, would look dreadful. Having helped me to get an important assignment, Sherman Porringer had been given a set of horns for Christmas.

Nonetheless, I fell asleep with no difficulty. Encountering the cold center of myself was not unreassuring. It suggested that I might be well equipped for the more difficult tasks I would face. I certainly felt cold enough to recognize that a very small part of me, which was nonetheless quintessential, would never forgive Kittredge for having another man’s child.

Jan. 5, 1957

Dearest Number One,

I’ve weighed out the contingencies. As you may have supposed, I am going to tell all. Our operation is called AV/OCADO, and if it works as well as we hope, there’s a good deal of entrée. I suppose you could say it’s in fulfillment of one of our two major objectives. Ideally, according to the Missions Directive, the Priority is to effect a penetration into the Soviet Embassy, and next Priority is to get into the higher ranks of the PCU. (That last, if you recall, is the Uruguayan Communist Party.)

Well, this second objective is well along. Thanks to Porringer, it’s become my baby. I’m inheriting a Priority Task, and I am going to take you into it, for I may need advice farther down the line. I can tell you—I don’t want any repetition of that embarrassing Berlin period when I was on the secure phone every other day with our mutual friend. This time I am going to bring the job off on my own.

Let me provide the filler. Did I mention that we have two contract agents? Besides Gordy Morewood, there is Roger Clarkson. He’s also done good work for us, and his cover is excellent. He not only works for the most prestigious public relations firm in Montevideo (which handles the accounts for most of the U.S. corporations here), but has put in a lot of time with the local Anglo-American drama group. You would think that is not a particularly fertile place to pick up our kind of information, but it certainly is where the winds of gossip blow. Many upper-class Uruguayans gravitate to the Montevideo Players on the pretext that they wish to improve their English, whereas, actually, the Players has become a classy arena for the great South American upper-middle-class sport—infidelity. Roger Clarkson has served as our facsimile of a KGB joy-boy. He’s tall, good-looking, straight nose, blond hair, Princeton—a splendid example of what we’re advertising to the rest of the world. In the course of his activities, he’s picked up a lot of what is going on at the Legislative Palace. No great haul, but indispensable bits to corroborate or refute the information we receive from our heavier sources—the usual Uruguayan legislators, journalists, businessmen, etc.

Some months ago, Roger came in with a big one. Eusebio “Chevi” Fuertes popped up at the drama group. Chevi is almost as good looking as Valentino, Roger assured us, at least if you are ready to discount a somewhat chewed-up Latin street face. Fuertes, who comes out of Uruguayan working-class stock, went to the University of the Republic here, then married up into a middle-class family of local lawyers and doctors, part of the Montevideo radical establishment.

At present, Fuertes is a member in good standing of the PCU, ditto his wife. He is, however, no stable hardworking Communist, but, on the contrary, is somewhat taken with himself, and is pulled in many directions. For example, he quit his university studies some years ago, and with no money went off to New York. (Only agreed to marry his wife after he came back a year later.) She is apparently a wholehearted party-liner who has already risen high in the local ranks. Everyone, including her husband, expects her to become one of the PCU’s national leaders in ten years. She’s a lawyer, polemicist, functionary, and her family has, as I say, an old radical tradition.

Chevi, by contrast, pretends to be a loyal member but secretly can’t bear whole aspects of the Party, the discipline, the self-sacrifice, and the patience required to obtain power. The year he spent in New York seems to have affected him eccentrically. He returned to Uruguay admiring America and hating it, but cocky from the experience. It seems among other stints as dishwasher and short-order cook and waiter, he was also some kind of unwilling consort—“never a pimp,” he assures Roger—to a Harlem whore.

All this has been learned by Clarkson and passed on to us. It seems he and Fuertes get along famously. They have even double-dated a couple of the ladies in the Montevideo Players. To use a phrase I’ve recently learned—they run together. Roger, who remains agreeably modest concerning his cachet with the local actresses, explained that studs (speaking of new words!) often run in parallel. So, Clarkson and Fuertes are fascinated with each other.

I confess to equal fascination. I’m learning how much you can pick up about a man by studying reports. Clarkson, who keeps a tidy ship, has been feeding detailed memos to the Station after each evening spent with Fuertes, and I, having been assigned to take over when he leaves for America (which is just a couple of weeks away), read everything Roger turns in as if it were “Gerontion” or Remembrance of Things Past. Clarkson’s no stylist—he’s not, dear God, supposed to be!—but the material, considering my oncoming relation to it, certainly proves stimulating. Fuertes, very clever and very suspicious, is always on the alert against manipulation. He has startling insights into Clarkson, then spasms of rage against American imperialism which alternate with gouts of vitriol against Uruguayan Communists. He most respectfully declares his love for his powerful wife, but soon allows that he resents and detests her. He loves Clarkson yet hints he’ll leave a knife in him someday should Clarkson ever betray him, that is, prove to be a CIA agent. This is Fuertes’ declared suspicion of our Roger. In a bar, on their last meeting after rehearsal (the Montevideo Players are now doing Paul Osborn’s The Vinegar Tree), Chevi not only accused Clarkson of working for the Agency but stated that he must be in the CIA since it was well known that 50 percent of the Agency’s contract people were employed by American public relations firms.

All this while, Chevi, despite such outbursts, has been drawing closer to Roger. Chevi’s real desire, he now announces, is to talk over his problems—as between men. Those problems, he declares, are acute in the region of emotion. (Don’t you enjoy the formal turn Latins bring to English?) His hatred of the Communist Party in Uruguay is una enormidad, he confesses. Of course, on other days, it is the Soviet Union that gets berated. They have betrayed the world revolution. Next night, he goes back to blaming the lust for power of the Uruguayan leaders, and the stupidity of the rank and file. They are not revolutionary, but bourgeois, he declares. Communism in South America has degenerated into a hobby of the intelligentsia, a virulent fever of the decaying middle classes. The villains of every revolution, from Robespierre to the present, have revealed their attachment to the middle-class umbilicus. There are times, Roger allows, when he can’t keep up with Fuertes.

Should Clarkson try, however, to put in a good word for the U.S., Chevi bombards him with polemical abuse. Capitalism feeds on the excrement of progress. The people of the United States are dispossessed of their souls. Capitalists are pigs. Pigs in limousines. He says at the end of one of these sessions, “Since I know you work for the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, and are aware that my wife and I are members of the Partido Comunista de Uruguay, and that I am unhappy in such a role, why do you offer no proposition?”

“Because I’m goddamned if I can trust you!”

Roger is not only bold enough to make that reply, but is forthcoming enough—or is it scrupulously responsible enough?—to include it in his Summary of Jan. 2 Meeting with AV/OCADO. (Needless to say, Sonderstrom does not leave that little speech uncensored on its way to Argentina-Uruguay Desk, God, they would have thrown the book at Clarkson.)

Roger was accoutered with a sneaky that night. Of course, his recording was garbled a bit, but Clarkson, like a good soldier, filled in some of the blanks. He claims to have respectable ability at recalling conversation, and calls the result “fortified transcription.” For certain, he has produced a document that I think enough of to reproduce for you.

AV/OCADO: You do not comprehend me. You are too insulated. That is how Americans fulfill their soul-destroying functions.

AV/UNCULAR: Why don’t you just cut the crap?

AV/OCADO: Sí, Señor, I am full of crap. But how may I cut it? You desire to make an offer to me, yet you dare not.

AV/UNCULAR: Have a heart, friend. How am I to begin? You don’t trust yourself.

AV/OCADO: That is no less than the truth. I am a man who lives in an anguish that is self-perpetuated. I am lacking in pundonor. Do you comprehend pundonor?

AV/UNCULAR: You are never lacking in pundonor. You, amigo, have death-guts.

AV/OCADO: I thank you for the sentiment. You speak like a friend. But I cannot trust the authority of your sentiments because in the cono del sur, a man must live for his pundonor. He must be prepared for mortal confrontation. Yes, every day of his life. Do you know? It is a comedy. Uruguayans live to be eighty. Whether or not we face our death-guts, we live to be eighty. We are cómico, my friend. (Long pause.) You do not comprehend me. What can be the value of a friend if he is not the generous spirit of comprehension? You, however, are a North American. You are looking for an edge. A grip on me. Go fuck yourself.

AV/UNCULAR: Hey, let’s have another drink. It’ll make you more mellow.

AV/OCADO: For people such as you, I must spell it out.

AV/UNCULAR: Have it your way.

AV/OCADO: Spell it out, or spit it out. These are the established modes of communication for Americans, verdad?

AV/UNCULAR: We’re no good.

AV/OCADO: Now I know it. You are CIA. It is in the logic of your responses. I utter scathing insults upon you and your country, and you, a proud and virile North American, do not challenge me to step outside this bar.

AV/UNCULAR: Would you challenge me if I insulted Uruguay?

AV/OCADO: There would be no alternative.

Kittredge, this is the clearest part of the conversation. Over the next ten minutes, it became too garbled for Clarkson to restore. Then, he must have shifted his seat, because their exchanges now came through again loud and strong. Here is more of the fortified transcription.

AV/OCADO: I have always stationed myself on the barricades of independent thought. I do not have a group mind, my friend, nor predesigned sentiments due to lack of inner subjectivity. So, at present, I am drenched in the poisons of humiliation.

AV/UNCULAR: Explain it to me. I want to listen.

AV/OCADO: I am a lawyer who serves clients who are too poor to pay their bills. I am a husband who attracts less respect in public than his wife. I may be more intelligent than my spouse, but my ideas veer too far to the right, then too far to the left. That is because I lack sufficient foundation to hold them in place.

AV/UNCULAR: What do you require, then?

AV/OCADO: A salary large enough to give ballast to the discord in myself. I need commercial focus. I am like all the other shits. I want money.

Sonderstrom, Porringer, and myself, after meeting with Roger, are obviously of two minds about whether to take on the two opposed spirits of Eusebio “Chevi” Fuertes. He hates his wife and the PCU enough to work for us—on that we all agree. But will he gear into the job? Will he begin to make something of himself in the Party and take on PCU tasks so diligently that he becomes a high Party functionary? I argue that to achieve equality with his wife would be a real and powerful motivation for him. In that case, what a probe we would have. The breadth of this possibility pushes us into taking him on, but, oh, the tremors. Sonderstrom, who has experience, after all, in these matters, says Chevi is selling himself so hard he could be a dangle. Roger, however, disbelieves that Fuertes is a gift of the KGB. “He’s not a good enough actor to orchestrate all that confusion,” says Roger. “Over at the Montevideo Players, we see him as a ham.”

What aggravates the problem, of course, is Roger’s pending return to the States. As of two months ago, his contract was already concluded. Given the potential importance of AV/OCADO, he has delayed his departure twice, but now Roger has given the Station final notice. He is getting married to his childhood sweetheart—one plain Jane by her photographs—and plans to work for her father. This does not make much sense, given the importance of what he’s doing for us here—why can’t the bride come down to Uruguay? Then we are treated to the subtext: The childhood sweetheart is going to inherit a fortune. She may be plain-looking, but has enough temper for an ugly duchess. Roger does not dare to keep her waiting. Her father, you see, is an advertising tycoon with a hell of a job for Roger. In a week, Clarkson is definitely departing.

It’s not the best of situations to insert me at this point, but where’s the choice? Roger is not going to kiss Miss Moneybags good-bye.

Sonderstrom, for all his faults, is, I’m beginning to recognize, not the worst den mother. He knows how to put a reasonable face on things. “Your situation could turn out satisfactorily,” Gus says to me at the end of the meeting. “With a new case officer in place, AV/ OCADO might shape up more quickly. A stranger can be effective in situations like this. AV/OCADO obviously likes to torture his friends.”

Succinct enough, but I’m the one in the passenger seat next week.

This time I won’t tell you how late it is. Will just sign off. My new cryptonym, specially crafted for the new job, is—I must say they save the tasty ones for me—AV/AILABLE.

Humbly yours,
Available Hubbard

P.S. Did you ever get the brooch?