"Club Mentiros" (1958)

But the lie had to be a good one, because if your lie is badly done it makes everyone feel wretched, liar and lied-to alike plunged into the deepest lackadaisy, and everyone just feels like going into the other room and drinking a glass of water, or whatever is available there, whereas if you can lie really well then get dynamite results, 35 percent report increased intellectual understanding, awareness, insight, 40 percent report more tolerance, acceptance of others, liking for self, 29 percent report they receive more personal and more confidential information from people and that others become more warm and supportive toward them--all in consequence of a finely orchestrated, carefully developed untruth. ― Donald Barthelme, Flying to America: 45 More Stories

Lord Dunsany’s barefaced liar Jorkens is one of my favorite literary characters, and I have a soft spot for the club story. The genre is usually traced in its modern form to R. L. Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club,” though it has more than a little in common with the framed storytelling of the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales, and the Arabian Nights. Lafferty uses the genre in several places. The best known, without doubt, is the Improbable Club, also called the High Liars Club, in Space Chantey. That extraordinarily exclusive establishment stands more than a hundred stories up in the leaning, ramshackle buildings of Guimbarde Town on the planet Yellow Dog. Inside one finds a sanctuary for the universe’s greatest liars, with asylum granted to anyone who can tell a topper, the truly galloping and unparalleled lie. Anyone who tells the truth is punished. Throat-slit and trapdoor-dropped punished.

The prototype of the Improbable Club in Lafferty is Club Mentiros, or the Liars’ Club. The compositional history of the odd place is a little complicated. The earliest version of it seems to have originated in 1958. Lafferty then, and this is conjectural, appears to have rewritten a version of it as a science-fiction story, in his usual way of adding an SF flavor. As Andrew Ferguson has noted, the front cover MS page bears the note “FRAME USED IN ESTEBAN.” On the other side appears the line “Change to Space Ace Liars’ Club.” Read Esteban, however, and you learn that Lafferty does not use Club Mentiros as its frame. Instead, Lafferty uses Club Mentiros as a setting. What happened? It looks to me as though there were three phases: an original Spanish Club Mentiros from 1958, about which Ferguson has written in reference to the Space Ace genre-graft version; and then the 1963 Esteban version of the club, which returns to the Spanish one, with it being planted in Mexico City.

I’ll begin with the Space Ace Liars’ Club version of the club and then say a little about what Lafferty does with the location in Esteban. Ferguson has pointed out that Lafferty gave the original version its SF chrome.

Space Ace Club Mentiros is a secluded corner of a tavern called the Snake Bar on the asteroid Ilhota Dos Gatos. Lafferty quickly establishes the location's scale and management:

The Club Mentiros was small, possibly the smallest really famous club in the universe. It wasn't a room; it was only the corner of a room. It had a broken table, and four chairs made out of split rails and old rope or czisco nets. It was near-deserted so much of the time that a great cobweb, the grandfather of all cobwebs, covered it like a shroud; the most frequent lodger of the Club was a spider as big as a house cat. He, incidentally, was president of the Club.

The club officially has nine members, but there is a wrinkle. One member is always completely unknown to the rest. In addition to the giant spider, the furnishings include an unlocked armoire stocked with exotic liquors and a young sea serpent resting on a maze of wall pegs. One evening, three members—a pauper named Endive English, a fisherman named Sylvester Sachen, and a millionaire named Goldfuchs Gudge—gather to drink from an ancient jar of mountain dew and tell stories.

Endive English recounts a trip to the mainland where, after briefly playing drums at a tavern, he is arrested and jailed. He claims he escaped by drinking a strange black liquor that gave him superhuman strength. Breaking the walls, he throws away his money and bottle, swims to a ship, and sails it onto rocks. Sylvester Sachen claims he caught the discarded bottle while fishing and fed its liquor to bait, which hooks a sixty-foot sea monster. After months of struggle, his small fish, driven by the liquor’s appetite, consumes the giant from the inside out.

Goldfuchs Gudge wraps up the lie. He says he caught both English’s thrown money and Sachen’s discarded bottle while sitting on a hotel windowsill, where he was going to kill himself after losing his twelfth fortune. In a darkly comic nod to the "Suicide Club" trope, Gudge explains how his usual plea for sympathy backfired:

I have a favorite trick which I use at such times. We were high in a hotel tower and I went to the window, threw one leg over the sill, and made a great fuss about jumping out. Always before this had caused consternation, and friendly hands had pulled me back from self-destruction. That night, however, they were all on to me. ‘Let the sevenletter so-and-so jump,’ said one of them. ‘Help the five-letter expletive on his way,’ said another. ‘Somebody give that four-letter a push,’ said a third. This made it almost a point of honor that I kill myself. There was no graceful way I could decline.

Fortunately, just as he was bound by honor to jump, the flying bottle and money arrived. The last drops of the black liquor revitalized him, and Gudge used the funds to re-enter a high-stakes casino game where he won his thirteenth fortune.

The narrative returns to present events inside the club, Gudge has something special, a fresh bottle of the dark liquor. He just happens to have recently purchased the distillery, so the men will never run out. The three keep drinking until sunrise, at which point the sea serpent on the wall—who seemed like a decoration—stretches and blinks its eye at the morning light. So ends the Space Ace version.

In Esteban, Club Mentiros is one of the world's oldest establishments. It is the exclusive gathering place reserved for "high liars," or, as Lafferty calls them, "royal liars." It might seem to be located in the corner of a ship's chandler's warehouse in Mexico City, but it has a mystical, otherworldly character:

And the Club was small, possibly the smallest really famous club in the world. It hadn’t a room of its own; it had only the corner of a room. But there was the sound of the fog lapping under it.

The inside is a variation on the other versions: a broken table, chairs made of curious sticks and fish netting, and shipboard kegs for seats. Its custodian is, again, a cat-sized cob-spider that sits in a huge, shroud-like web. Again, the living sea-serpent is on the wall among a maze of fish-net pegs. The centerpiece of the club is just what a drinker might hope:

The heart of the club was an old armario, a rickety wall cabinet full of bottles. Though many had hoped and pegged, the cabinet was never truly locked to the members. The cabinet contained licor verde in Venetian crystal, Palermian in goatskin suits, sugar-rum in little barriletes, genuine mountain dew in clay jars, and cactus-lightning in snake-skin bottles.

When readers enter The Club Mentiros in Chapter 11, a session is in progress. And, again, a lying session needs at least three members to be present. Finally, membership in the club spans time and space. So those Space Ace versions? They belong to the same club in Esteban. It’s a wonderful example of Lafferty doing some metafictional bridgework by keeping the guest list completely unbound by the timeline:

There were traveling men of all sorts in the Club that evening, some from the distant past, and some from the far future. But among the high spielers, Dorantes and Esteban were not mean members.

Not surprisingly, the club is a stage for storytelling, a venue for crazy and competitive tall tales. Members share yarns. A young Limey claims to have sailed his ship onto a mountain peak in dense fog, and another man claims a scar on his body is a "gill" that allowed him to live underwater for seven years with the Queen of the Deep. Another member, an old Aztec, flips history on its head:

Then the old Aztec told about the earliest overseas discovery. Not of America, by the Europeans, but of Europe by the Americans. It was an Aztec and it was five hundred years to the day before this present time. They had sailed up the River of Spain and found only pig-keepers and blackamores . . . The grandfather of the old Aztec himself had then married the Queen of France, and from these two are descended all Frenchmen to this very day.

Instead of just being a set piece, the club plays an important role in the novel. After surviving the hellish nine-year journey across the continent, Esteban and Dorantes return to the club to reclaim their former status, as new liars have popped up in their absence and they are all but forgotten. Over the course of the night, tales are swapped, including towering stories about surviving in the wilderness by developing "extensible jaws" and eating a buck deer whole. It is good stuff. The two men successfully re-establish themselves:

But by dawn our two friends were the Princes of the Place. They received an ovation from the members, and once more they were proclaimed to be the finest liars of the Indies. The sea-serpent in his nest of pegs on the wall glowed at them with real pleasure and rewarded them with his most comprehending wink. When you are in with the serpent, you are in.

Finally, the club is a major turning point. Just as they leave the club at dawn, really proud of their storytelling triumph, and with so much history between them, the novel delivers a gut-punch:

As they left the Liars’ Club at dawn, Dorantes casually told Esteban that he had sold him.

This is a towering betrayal, as powerful as the deepest moments of Okla Hannali. It shatters the celebration and forces Esteban to return to the perilous North. That is where Esteban has its apocalyptic final act.