Cabiling / Il Migliore Del Mondo /
IL MIGLIORE DEL MONDO
By Alaric Cabiling
Trapped in a deluge of nights, you lie awake in the darkness. Staring at the large ceiling fan, you watch it for any sign of movement.
You expect the fan to fall at any instant, decapitating you, blood spattering on your sheets, walls, your soft, white down covers perfect for lovemaking.
For five more nights, you arise sleep-deprived. You walk the streets like a nomad robbed of your dreams. You gaze through pitch-black windows, seemingly window-peeping. You tread cobblestone walkways, echoing the sound of your own footsteps.
The next day, you lie asleep in the mid-day heat. Naked and innocent in the sheets, you turn in your sleep restlessly, tossing and turning as you feel Death’s cold breath graze the hairs on the back of your neck.
In a minute, you awaken with a scream. Sweat trickling down your midsection, the mid-day sun perforating the gaps in the shades, you realize you’ve slept but little. Black patches under your eyes resemble deep bruises. Black coffee trickles from a spout in the coffee machine. The sound does little to rouse you. The coffee does not rouse you, despite drinking enough.
You shower and dress up for another night of listless wandering. The streets are alive at midnight. People dancing, seafood cooking on the grill, street artists painting portraits in pitch-black darkness, you carouse the metropolis like a man howling in the depths of his emptiness.
Only you know what that feels like. Everywhere, locals here in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic smile and nod amid a fiesta. Happy, despite poverty, locals dance in the height of Mal di Luna—the term the natives use for moon sickness. You call it insomnia, but only you are miserable in the wake of sleeplessness.
At the height of your powers, you are an artist. You do more than draw portraits. You do more than paint beaches. You paint Death in the manner of Poe’s Oval Portrait tale: Death in rigor mortis—the hardening of facial muscles, frozen in time to speak eternal loneliness. With faces etched on canvas consisting of an antinomy of colors and dark shades, the robbed heads of patriarchs taken from various family crypts would fetch a ransom few living patriarchs ever could. Your paintings sell well, though, and you’ve become famous.
But now, midnight passes, and you are only too glad to spend late nights amongst primitive locals and savants without painting them. You speak to them in their native tongue—a trick you learned from a woman. The locals are friendly with tourists, and you are no exception.
It is midnight, and the beaches are empty, save for skinny-dipping locals. Midnight cloaks your rugged features: the gaunt cheeks and blemished, puckered skin, the long face and stark chin, the hardened eyes and black patches underneath, the scraggly hair tucked messily behind the small ears.
You were married once but are now alone. You are widowed, and your heart bleeds for its other half. You remember her beauty, her kindness, the tenderness of her touch. Everywhere, in crime-ridden Santo Domingo, where streets at night can be lawless and especially dangerous to tourists, the shadows remind you of her absence, her brutal murder at the hands of a demented, perverted local.
You are the unhappy American tourist whom locals know by the name Il Migliore del Mondo—the best in the world—about your work as an artist.
You paint the portraits of putrescent heads.
* * *
You see, locals fear your presence, but they are driven mad by the chilling realism, the purgatorial afterglow of your portraits. Art this alive is alive only in Death, and only in that Death—that beauty—will locals respect Death as much as life.
Death is no longer a paradigm in the flesh, etched in skin, muscle, and bone. It makes manifest in your oil paint and charcoal. It makes itself evident in your blood, sweat, and tears. It is a thing of gold.
It is a living harness. It is Death in duress. It is the suspension of decay, the transition between life and disintegration.
You will always be known to them this way.
When you attend social functions, you are dressed for a day with the dead—black—like Death Incumbent. Santa Muerte, herself, your inspiration, would be proud. The socialites fear you, renounce you only in secret. You are like the Red Death coming to the masque to reap the souls of the affluent.
The poor are not immune to your charms. Like a dentist who extracts teeth from the mob’s victims, they show indifference while you pass them on broken side streets, fearing you like you are God himself.
Il Migliore del Mondo, guns may come, but your shadow bleeds into the night. Always the police hear about you, but they never come. They never come asking questions, for they already know the answers. They never want the same plight to fall upon their loved ones, their relations—for your charcoal and paints to transpose their souls from harsh realms to even harsher ones—nebulas of ash, bone niter, and darkness. They leave you to rot in society’s fringes. Yet, in their midst, you are easily predator amongst prey, a hunter...but never hunted.
When that well-spring of opportunities suits them, even men in the mob—criminals who prey on women and children on the streets—send you charms to entice you, but you refute them. You want nothing of their wares, their methods of eking a living from victims.
When they send a woman to your doorstep, they have her go alone. She is confident like any seductress and killer. Like a lioness that leads her pack, she is certain of her skill. You find insult in her attempt at subjugation—she and the lot of them—attempting to usurp your place in the food chain. Else, bend you to their will.
In the background, a trio of musicians plays percussion music. The sounds made from steel drums, steel pans, and bongo drums are festive. The woman walks into your promenade, intent on conquering you the way a huntress prematurely kisses her trophy.
You let her in, then taste her. You are not impressed. You smell her perfume. You lavish her set of pearls, her diamond necklace. You raise a tender hand to her cheek. She smiles, underestimates you, reaches for the dagger in her shoal, closes her eyes as if to warmly kiss you, takes your finger inside her, teases you...
Only to grasp control of her dagger. She is ready to kill you. She kisses you...
But dies as you taste her lips.
* * *
Blood on your hands, blood on your lips, you stare at the burning moon like a wolf fresh from a kill.
The woman’s body at your feet, red dress soaked in crimson, you hold her decapitated head in your hand. Tubular fibers of meat hang from the primitive cut along her neck.
You plan to paint her. You take her head inside. The members of the string quartet hurry out of your promenade after seeing the blood, the headless body. Their job is done. Yours is just beginning.
Inside your home, you climb the winding staircase to your studio. The chandelier lights your path; a glint in the eye of the bounty hunter’s head in your hand catches the large antique mirror in your dayroom.
Inside your studio, you toss the head to the foot of the trunk. It rolls down the floor and stops there, thudding against the trunk’s wooden facade. An eyeball drops out, and blood streams out of an ear canal. You don’t mind the trail of blood on the floor as you cross the room barefoot.
You take your easel from the closet and take your paintbrushes from the trunk. Then, you place the head on a mantle above a pillar. Like an obscene bust made of real flesh and gore, it stares at you: mouth open, fear bleeding from eyesockets, defeated. You have won once again. Il Migliore del Mondo, again, your latest hunter becomes prey for your latest portrait.
* * *
Your latest portrait is ready. Violet, crimson, obsidian paints blur with charcoal lines. The head is alive in color, contrasting the actual subject, eye sockets staring out the window into the distance, inanimate like puckered, bruised fruit used as still life. You stare at the masterpiece, cloaked in the early morning darkness, the candles across the room casting light upon your features—you smile like a man fulfilled with destiny, like a man who has created beauty out of nothingness, like God.
Il Migliore del Mondo, would you paint God’s portrait if you could stare into His face? Would His radiance prove inviting when Santa Muerte, in contrast, desires only those like her—like the killer whose head sits on the mantle before you, slain like the prize of a deity and not a painter? Il Migliore del Mondo, would you roam mass graveyards and warzones to inspire enough paintings to fulfill the hunger of legions?
You cover the painting. You take the head off of the mantle. You take it to an adjacent room—your shrine, your charnel house. There, beside another desiccated head, you place your latest subject on a velvet-lined enclave. You light a candle in the room, and you behold a roomful of heads, trophies—subjects. The smell of rot clotted blood, and gore nearly drives you into a frenzy.
* * *
What madness fancies the face of Death for a portrait? In the cold wash of sublime darkness, you light candles in your studio, enacting ritualistic craft. The paintbrushes dipped in black blood graze the canvas, leaving streaks of muck, grime, and humus; broad brushstrokes create the consistency of black ash and niter. The portrait comes alive in Death’s specter. Suddenly, you remember. The spade plumbs dark earth. Earthworms ooze out of the ground. The hoe splinters the casket. You open it. You take a machete and decapitate the corpse, taking your trophy.
This latest subject belongs to an old, wealthy aristocrat. He died in his home after suffering a heart attack. He was a reputed pedophile. He was famous once.
The portrait features dark hues mixing with swathes of black paint. Deep blue hues accurately depict the early stages of decomposition. Empty eyesockets gleam with the obsidian.
After the skull bears the weight of steel striking bone, the resulting cavity reveals the dead, pulpy flesh of a brain. Then, the shriveled lips divulge a slew of transgressions—a lifetime’s worth of secrets.
The oral cavity, the mouth leading into forever, might have tasted a boy’s innocence, stolen it like it were candy. In its throat area, there was stillborn breath. In its purple tongue, there was a prison, where faces, genitalia, hands, arms, legs, colored the taste buds, trapped the memories of the rich pedophile’s many victims.
The most distinct aspect of your painting lies in the man’s amulet, consisting of bones, carved serpents, beaks, and a small red chamber used to house his victims’ blood. The pedophile would cut the boys’ palms and place the blood in his amulet after the abuse. He wore their blood as protection from police, enemies. The amulet was sold to the pedophile by a voodoo priest.
Il Migliore del Mondo, you behold this painting with admiration and not revulsion, freeing this pervert’s victims with an unlikely act of revelation. Are you a hero for the less fortunate, for the same townsmen and villagers who fear you? Do you choose to slay only the wicked? Do you judge as though Santa Muerte, herself, had hand-picked you? Are you a savior or a sinner? Liar or prophet?
By painting this rich pedophile’s portrait wearing his amulet, you trap his soul in canvas and paint. Santa Muerte would be proud, Il Migliore del Mondo. You are her instrument, her handmaid, her harvester of damned souls.
In the charnel house, you set the prize of the night’s hunt on an enclave beside a trophy from yet another midnight odyssey. The both of which you painted in the light of a waning moon.
* * *
Continuing your trend of ridding the city of illicit entities, your next victim is the pedophile’s voodoo priest. In a poor village by a swampland, you approach like funeral mist. The priest senses your arrival, defies Santa Muerte’s decree of death. He mutters an unintelligible malediction and clutches at his bone necklace. When you appear before him from the mist, cloaked in black, armed with your stiletto, he runs into his primitive dwelling and searches frantically for his doll. You know better. You move with the speed of darkness and spear his belly with your hungry dagger. You’ve only hurt him, but not fatally. You take him with you to the woods to enact an ancient rite.
Deep in the foreboding woods, with swamp fetor entering your nostrils, you savor the night’s sacrifice with great fervor. You’ve bound the voodoo priest along the wrists and ankles and tied each limb to a tree, stretching his arms and legs taut like a medieval torture rack. Il Migliore del Mondo, you pull at the contraption consisting of knotted ropes, and all the man’s extremities are pulled beyond their limits, dislocating joints, rupturing flesh and ligaments, tearing at the skin, and exposing the muscle and bone.
The voodoo priest screams in agony and asks what he has done wrong. The wrong question, you think, obviously. Santa Muerte has designated a form of suffering worse than any excruciating torment on earth.
Then, you take your ceremonial dagger and drive it into his heart: the priest’s heart ruptures, blood, voodoo potion, fear, emptiness, despair. With that voodoo potion spilled from his aorta, he turns mortal and slowly starts to die. He screams in agony; blood spatters violently from his veins. His shrieks resound on the higher register, echoing throughout the swamplands and cursed villages. The villagers are scared, not happy, despite being liberated. Once the priest is dead, you take your easel, which you’ve stashed away until you’ve completed the ritual torture. You take your tubes of paint and your paintbrushes, and you capture the voodoo priest’s violent death on canvas. Santa Muerte would be more than proud. She would applaud, and the angels in hell would rejoice!
* * *
You have a volunteer for your next painting.
He attempts to commission you for a portrait. He arrives at your manor and summons you from the gate. He rings the bells and waits, but you do not answer. His intentions are obvious; like malodorous fumes, they cannot escape your keen senses. He wants you to kill a rival businessman and paint his portrait in all its putrid, violent glory.
You dare not do as he pleases, for you only please Santa Muerte. You defy any mere mortal that seeks Santa Muerte’s favor without a blessing. Santa Muerte’s image sits before you in your shrine, gifted with trophies made of heads. Every day, you bring her flowers from pestilent, miasmal waters. She stares at you—a skull robed and crowned with a tiara of flowers. She smiles like she misses you—like your departed lover used to. She’s taken her place now. Santa Muerte is best served devotedly, else would her jealousy condemn you. Therefore, you travel with the speed of darkness to the businessman’s house on a hill—a mansion, a fortress protected by armed guards and dogs. You breach the perimeter via a sewage tunnel in the woods far from detection—a tunnel no man can stand for its putrid odor.
Once you climb out of a drainage port in his residence, you seek out the darkest rooms until the coast is clear. Armed guards walk by you in hallways where they cannot see, cannot smell the sewage in your black clothing because you enchant them.
Undetected, you breach the rich man’s room and find him sleeping. You place your hand above his face, then smother him while he resists. Unable to breathe, he chokes on the filth on your hands, suffocates while he savors the toxic odor. You take your hand away at the last minute and let him gasp for air before cutting out his tongue so he cannot scream.
You shove a tube under his skin, in his femoral artery, and you place a palette underneath it. Blood drains quickly, and he loses color fast. You take out a roll of yellow Manila paper from your tote bag, dip your fingers in his blood, and paint his face. The guards and guard dogs have no idea. You have Santa Muerte’s blessing, after all. He dies as his blood quickly drains. The hideous look on his face is captured in crimson swathes and smudges.
Another night, another painting. Another head goes into your trophy room. You have enough paintings to fill a showroom. You never attend the events. Your agent wires you the funds from New York City, where the paintings fetch for good prices.
You’ve had your fun. You dispose of the evidence from your person. Your gore-caked fingernails fresh from a night’s grave robbing are scrubbed free of clot and debris. You burn your stained garments. You burn incense in your studio to rid yourself of the scent. The locals know what you do, how you do it, but not why or how.
All they know is that you are the best artist to serve Santa Muerte the world has ever seen.
* * *
You roam the streets again, unburdened by the demands of your craft. The locals fear you, part like the red sea on a road where children play. Food sells in wheeled carts at odd hours, and men drink outside pubs and bars. You smile back at them.
You are Il Migliore del Mondo. The locals cater to your needs. Like offering sacrifices, they offer gifts to spare them of the same fate you bestow their dead relations.
You move like a shadow on water, like smoke on a gravel road. You walk with the grace of a schooled gentleman. Slowly, you tread the streets to your destination—the cemetery, where no prize awaits this time.
That cemetery—that grave surrounded by a dark tarn and lush gardens. Cherubims stand watch over lonely sepulchers. Nothing moves on the calm waters. The scent of Chrysanthemums fills the air.
In your mind, you recall Caccini’s, Ave Maria. You hear the splendor of a soprano’s soothing crescendo. As you draw closer, you also recall a woman’s laughter. She resides in that grave. She knows you come every night searching for her, seeing her face transposed against the faces of victims.
But, you never extricate the prize—the same one you take from the graves of locals. This grave belongs to your deceased wife. You can’t leave her for your native country. But how could you leave her now?
Instead, you imagine her beautiful face to remain as it was, never similar to the putrescent heads of corpses you’ve taken from graves and used as models for portraits. Never the listless expressions etched in the gore of dead flesh. Never feverish souls in living flesh free to join you for the moment you find irresistible to pressure—and pleasure. Never the moment you fantasize the portrait being alive—smiling, like your wife once used to, like she never will now.
THE END