Three by Cain Read online

  We turned left.

  We turned left, but she walked so nice and talked so sweet I started hoping again. Nothing about an Indian makes any sense. He can live in a hut made of sticks and mud, and sticks and mud are sticks and mud, aren’t they? You can’t make anything else out of them. But he’ll take you in there with the nicest manners in the world, more dignity than you’d ever get from a dozen dentists in the U.S., with stucco bungalows that cost ten thousand dollars apiece, kids in a private school, and stock in the building and loan. She went along, her hand on my arm, and if she had been a duchess she couldn’t have stepped cleaner. She made a little gag out of falling in step, looked up once or twice and smiled, and then asked me if I had been long in Mexico.

  “Only three or four months.”

  “Oh. You like?”

  “Very much.” I didn’t, but I wanted anyway to be as polite as she was. “It’s very pretty.”

  “Yes.” She had a funny way of saying yes, like the rest of them have. She drew it out, so it was “yayse.” “Many flowers.”

  “And birds.”

  “And señoritas.”

  “I wouldn’t know about them.”

  “No? Just a little bit?”

  “No.”

  An American girl would have mauled it to death, but when she saw I didn’t want to go on with it, she smiled and began talking about Xochimilco, where the best flowers grew. She asked me if I had been there. I said no, but maybe some day she would take me. She looked away at that, and I wondered why. I figured I had been a little previous. Tonight was tonight, and after that it would be time to talk about Xochimilco. We got to the Guauhtemolzin. I was hoping she would cross. She turned, and we hadn’t gone twenty yards before she stopped at a crib.

  I don’t know if you know how it works in Mexico. There’s no houses, with a madame, a parlor, and an electric piano, anyway not in that part of town. There’s a row of adobe huts, one story high, and washed blue, or pink, or green, or whatever it happens to be. Each hut is one room deep, and jammed up against each other in the way they are, they look like a barracks. In each hut is a door, with a half window in it, like a hat-check booth. Under the law they’ve got to keep that door shut, and drum up trade by leaning out the window, but if they know the cop they can get away with an open door. This door was wide open, with three girls in there, two of them around fourteen, and looking like children, the other big and fat, maybe twenty-five. She brought me right in, but then I was alone, because she and the other three went out in the street to have a palaver, and I could partly catch what it was. They all four rented the room together, so three of them had to wait outside when one of them had a customer, but I seemed to be a special case, and if I was going to spend the night, her friends had to flop somewhere else. Most of the street got in it before long, the cop, the café woman on the corner, and a flock of girls from the other cribs. Nobody sounded sore, or surprised, or made dirty cracks. A street like that is supposed to be tough, but from the way they talked, you would have thought it was the junior section of the Ladies’ Aid figuring out where to bunk the minister’s brother-in-law that had blown in town kind of sudden. They acted like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  After a while they got it straightened out to suit them, who was to go where, and she came back and closed the door and closed the window. There was a bed in there, and a chest of drawers in the early Grand Rapids style, and a washstand with a mirror over it, and some grass mats rolled up in a corner, for sleeping purposes. Then there were a couple of chairs. I was tilted back on one, and as soon as she had given me a cigarette, she took the other. There we were. There was no use kidding myself any longer why Triesca hadn’t taken off his hat. My lady love was a three-peso whore.

  She lit my cigarette for me, and then her own, and inhaled, and let the smoke blow out the match. We smoked, and it was about as electric as a stalled car. Across the street in front of the café, a mariachi was playing, and she nodded her head once or twice, in time with the music. “Flowers, and birds—and mariachis.”

  “Yes, plenty of them.”

  “You like mariachi? We have them. We have them here.”

  “Señorita.”

  “Yes?”

  “… I haven’t got the fifty centavos. To pay the mariachi. I’m— ”

  I pulled my pockets inside out, to show her. I thought I might as well get it over with. No use having her think she’d hooked a nice American sugar papa, and then letting her be disappointed. “Oh. How sweet.”

  “I’m trying to tell you I’m broke. Todo flat. I haven’t got a centavo. I think I’d better be going.”

  “No money, but buy me billete.”

  “And that was the last of it.”

  “I have money. Little bit. Fifty centavos for mariachi. Now—you look so.”

  She turned around, lifted the black skirt, and fished in her stocking. Listen, I didn’t want any mariachi outside the window, serenading us. Of all things I hated in Mexico, I think I hated the mariachis the worst, and they had come to make a kind of picture for me of the whole country and what was wrong with it. They’re a bunch of bums, generally five of them, that would be a lot better off if they went to work, but instead of that they don’t do a thing their whole life, from the time they’re kids to the time they’re old men, but go around plunking out music for anybody that’ll pay them. The rate is fifty centavos a selection, which breaks down to ten centavos, or about three cents a man. Three play the violin, one the guitar, and one a kind of bass guitar they’ve got down there. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they sing. Well, never mind how they sing. They gargle a bass falsetto that’s enough to set your teeth on edge, but all music gets sung the way it deserves, and it was what they sang that got me down. You hear Mexico is musical. It’s not. They do nothing but screech from morning till night, but their music is the dullest, feeblest stuff that ever went down on paper, and not one decent bar was ever written there. Yeah, I know all about Chavez. Their music is Spanish music that went through the head of an Indian and came out again, and if you think it sounds the same after that, you made a mistake. An Indian, he’s about eight thousand years behind the rest of us in the race towards whatever we’re headed for, and it turns out that primitive man is not any fine, noble brute at all. He’s just a poor fish. Modern man, in spite of all this talk about his being effete, can run faster, shoot straighter, eat more, live longer, and have a better time than all the primitive men that ever lived. And that difference, how it comes out in music. An Indian, even when he plays a regular tune, sounds like a seal playing My-Country-’Tis-of-Thee at a circus, but when he makes up a tune of his own, it just makes you sick.

  Well, maybe you think I’m getting all steamed up over something that didn’t amount to anything, but Mexico had done plenty to me, and all I’m trying to say is that if I had to listen to those five simple-looking mopes outside the window, there was going to be trouble. But I wanted to please her. I don’t know if it was the way she took the news of my being broke, or the way her eyes lit up at the idea of hearing some music, or the flash I got of that pretty leg, when I was supposed to be looking the other way, or what. Whatever it was, her trade didn’t seem to make much difference any more. I felt about her the way I had in the café, and wanted her to smile at me some more and lean toward me when I spoke.

  “Señorita.”

  “Yes?’

  “I don’t like the mariachi. They play very bad.”

  “Oh, yes. But they only poor boy. No estoddy, no take lessons. But play—very pretty.”

  “Well—never mind about that. You want some music that’s the main thing. Let me be your mariachi.”

  “Oh—you sing?”

  “Just a little bit.”

  “Yes, yes. I like—very much.”

  I went out, slipped across the street, and took the guitar from No. 4. He put up a squawk, but she was right after me, and he didn’t squawk long. Then we went back. There’s not many instruments I can’t play,
some kind of way, but I can really knock hell out of a guitar. He had it tuned cockeyed, but I brought it to E, A, D, G, B, and E without snapping any of his strings, and then I began to go to town on it. The first thing I played her was the prelude to the last act of Carmen. For my money, it’s one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, and I had once made an arrangement of it. You may think that’s impossible, but if you play that woodwind stuff up near the bridge, and the rest over the hole, the guitar will give you almost as much of what the music is trying to say as the whole orchestra will.

  She was like a child while I was tuning, leaning over and watching everything I did, but when I started to play, she sat up and began to study me. She knew she had never heard anything like that, and I thought I saw the least bit of suspicion of me, as to who I was and what the hell I was doing there. So when I went down on the low E string, on the phrase the bassoon has in the orchestra, I looked at her and smiled. “The voice of the bull.”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “Am I a good mariachi?”

  “Oh, fine mariachi. What is the música?”

  “Carmen.”

  “Oh. Oh yes, of course. The voice of the bull.”

  She laughed, and clapped her hands, and that seemed to do it. I went into the bullring music of the last act and kept stepping the key up, so I could make kind of a number out of it without slowing down for the vocal stuff. There came a knock on the door. She opened, and the mariachi was out there, and most of the ladies of the Street. “They ask door open. So they hear too.”

  “All right, so they don’t sing.”

  So we left the door open, and I got a hand after the bullring selection, and played the intermezzo, then the prelude to the opera. My fingers were a little sore, as I had no calluses, but I went into the introduction to the Habanera, and started to sing. I don’t know how far I got. What stopped me was the look on her face. Everything I had seen there was gone, it was the face at the window of every whorehouse in the world, and it was looking right through me.

  “… What’s the matter?”

  I tried to make it sound comical, but she didn’t laugh. She kept looking at me, and she came over, took the guitar from me, went out and handed it to the mariachi player. The crowd began to jabber and drift off. She came back, and the other three girls were with her. “Well, Señorita—you don’t seem to like my singing.”

  “Muchas gracias, Señor. Thanks.”

  “Well—I’m sorry. Good evening, Señorita.”

  “Buenos noches, Señor.”

  Next thing I knew I was stumbling down the Bolivar, trying to wash her out of my mind, trying to wash everything out of my mind. A block away, somebody was coming toward me. I saw it was Triesca. She must have gone out and phoned him when I left. I ducked around a corner, so I wouldn’t have to pass him. I kept on, crossed a plaza, and found myself looking at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, their opera house. I hadn’t been near it since I flopped there three months before. I stood staring at it, and thought how far I had slid. Flopping in Rigoletto, in probably the lousiest opera company in the world, before an audience that didn’t know Rigoletto from Yankee Doodle, with a chorus of Indians behind me trying to look like lords and ladies, a Mexican tenor on one side of me that couldn’t even get a hand on Questa o Quella, and a coffee cake on the other side that scratched fleas while she was singing the Caro Nome—that seemed about as low as I could get. But I had wiped those footprints out, with my can. I had tried to serenade a lady that was easy serenaded, and I couldn’t even get away with that.

  I walked back to my one-peso hotel, where I was paid up to the end of the week, went to my room, and undressed without turning on the light, so I wouldn’t see the concrete floor, the wash basin with rings in it, and the lizard that would come out from behind the bureau. I got in bed, pulled the lousy cotton blanket up over me, and lay there watching the fog creep in. When I closed my eyes I’d see her looking at me, seeing something in me, I didn’t know what, and then I’d open them again and look at the fog. After a while it came to me that I was afraid of what she saw in me. There would be something horrible mixed up in it, and I didn’t want to know what it was.

  C H A P T E R

  2

  As well as I can remember, that was in June, and I didn’t see her for a couple of months. Never mind what I did in that time, to eat. Sometimes I didn’t eat. For a while I had a job in a Jazzband, playing a guitar. It was in a nightclub out on the Reforma, and they needed me bad. I mean, the place was for Americans, and the music they handed out was supposed to be the McCoy, but it wasn’t. I went to work, and got them so they could play the hot stuff hot and the blue stuff blue, anyway a little bit, and polished up a couple of them so they could take a solo strain now and then, just for variety. Understand, you couldn’t do much. A Mexican’s got a defective sense of rhythm. He sounds rhythmic on the cucaracha stuff, but when you slow him down to foxtrot time, he can’t feel it. He just plays it mechanically, so when people get out on the floor they can’t dance to it. Still, I did what I could, and figured a few combos that made them sound better than they really were, and business picked up. But then a guy with a pistol on his hip showed up one night and wanted to see my papers, and I got thrown out. They got Socialism down there now, and one of the rules is that Mexico belongs to the Mexicans. They’re out of luck, no matter how they play it. Under Diaz, they turned the country over to the foreigners, and they had prosperity, but the local boys didn’t get much of it. Then they had the Revolution, and fixed it up so that whatever was going on, the local boys had to run it. The only trouble is, the local boys don’t seem to be very good at it. They threw me out, and then they had Socialism, but they didn’t have any Jazzband. Business fell off, and later I heard the place closed.

  After that, I even had to beg to stay on at the hotel until I got the money from New York, which wasn’t ever coming, as they knew as well as I did. They let me use the room, but wouldn’t give me any bedclothes or service. I had to sleep on the mattress, under my clothes, and haul my own water. Up to then, I had managed to keep some kind of press in my pants, so I could anyway bum a meal off some American in Butch’s café, but I couldn’t even do that any more, and I began to look like what I was, a beachcomber in a spig town. I wouldn’t even have eaten if it hadn’t been for shagging my own water. I started going after it in the morning, and because the tin pitcher wouldn’t fit under the tap in the washroom at the end of the hall, I had to go down to the kitchen. Nobody paid any attention to me, and then an idea hit me, and next time I went down at night. There was nobody there, and I ducked over to the icebox. They’ve got electric iceboxes all over Mexico, and some of them have combinations on them, like safes, but this one hadn’t. I opened it up, and a light went on, and sure enough, there was a lot of cold stuff in there. I scooped some frijoles into a glass ashtray I had brought down, and held them under the pitcher when I went up. When I got back to my room I dug into them with my knife. After that, for two weeks, that was what I lived on. I found ten centavos in the street one day and bought a tin spoon, a clay soapdish, and a cake of soap, The soapdish and the soap I put on the washstand, like they were some improvements of my own I was putting in, since they wouldn’t give me any. The spoon I kept in my pocket. Every night when I’d go down, I’d scoop beans, rice, or whatever they had, and sometimes a little meat into the soapdish, but only when there was enough that it wouldn’t be missed. I never touched anything that might have counted, and only took off the top of dishes where there was quite a lot of it, and then smoothed them up to look right. Once there was half a Mexican ham in there. I cut myself off a little piece, under the butt.

  And then one morning I got this letter, all neatly typewritten, even down to the signature, on a sheet of white business paper.

  Calle Guauhtemolzin 44b,

  Mexico, D. F.

  A 14 de agosto.

  Sr. John Howard Sharp,

  Hotel Domínguez,

  Calle Violeta,

&
nbsp; Ciudad.

  Mi Querido Jonny:

  En vista de que no fue posible verte ayer en el mercado al ir a las compras que ordinariamente hago para la casa en donde trabajo, me veo precidada para dirigirte la presente y manifestarte que dormí inquieta con motivo de tus palabras me son vida y no pudiendo permanecer sin contacto contigo te digo que hoy por la noche te espero a las ocho de la noche para que platiquemos, por lo que así espero estaras presente y formal.

  Se despide quien te ama de todo corazón y no te olivida,

  JUANA MONTES

  How she got my name and address didn’t bother me. The waitress at the Tupinamba would have been good for that. But the rest of it, the date I was supposed to have with her yesterday, and how she couldn’t sleep for thinking about me, didn’t make any sense at all. Still, she wanted to see me, that seemed to be the main point, and it was a long time before sundown. I was down past the point where I cared how she had looked at me, or what it meant, or anything like that. She could look at me like I was a rattlesnake, for all I cared, so she had a couple of buns under the bed. I went back upstairs, shaved, and started up there, hoping something about it might lead to a meal.

  When I rapped on the door the window opened, and the fat one poked her head out. The four of them were just getting up. The window closed, and Juana called something out to me. I waited, and pretty soon she came out. She had on a white dress this time, that must have cost all of two pesos, and white sock-lets, and shoes. She looked like some high school girl in a border town. I said hello and how had she been, she said very well, gracias, and how had I been? I said I couldn’t complain, and edged toward the door to see if I could smell coffee. There didn’t seem to be any. Then I took out the letter and asked her what it meant.