Serenade (2 page)

"You sure you know this
dirección?"

"A
paraquito
have told me--just now."

"In that case, yes."

I laid a peso on the check. Her little black eyes crinkled up into a nice friendly smile, but she didn't move. I put the other peso on top of it. She took out her pencil, pulled the menu over, and started to write. She hadn't got three letters on paper before the pencil was jerked out of her hand, and he was standing there, purple with fury. He had tumbled, and all the things he had wanted to say to me, and never got the chance, he spit at her, and she spit back. I couldn't get all of it, but you couldn't miss the main points. He said she was delivering a message to me, she said she was only writing the address of a hotel I had asked for, a hotel for
Americanos.
They must like to see a guy framed in Mexico. About six of them chimed in and swore they had heard me ask her the address of a hotel, and that that was all she was giving me. They didn't fool him for a second. He was up his own alley now, and speaking his own language. He told them all where to get off, and in the middle of it, here she came, out of the
damas.
He let her have the last of it, and then he crumpled the menu card up and threw it in her face, and walked out. She hardly bothered to watch him go. She smiled at me, as though it was a pretty good joke, and I got up, "Seńorita. Permit me to see you home."

That got a buzz, a laugh, and an
Olé.

I don't think there's ever been a man so moony that a little bit of chill didn't come over him as soon as a woman said yes, and plenty of things were going through my head when she took my arm and we headed for the door of that café. One thing that was going through was that my last peso was gone at last, that I was flat broke in Mexico City with no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to do it. Another thing was that I didn't thank them for their
Olé,
that I hated Mexicans and their tricks, and hated them all the more because the tricks were all so bad you could always see through them. A Frenchman's tricks cost you three francs, but a Mexican is just dumb. But the main thing was a queer echo in that
Olé,
like they were laughing at me all the time, and I wondered, all of a sudden, which way we were going to turn when we got out that door. A girl on the make for a bullfighter, you don't exactly expect that she came out of a convent. Just the same, it hadn't occurred to me up to that second that she could be a downright piece of trade goods. I was hoping, when we reached the main street, that we would turn right. To the right lay the main part of town, and if we headed that way, she could be taking me almost anywhere. But to our left lay the Guauhtemolzin, and that's nothing but trade. 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 seńoritas."

"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."

"Seńorita."

"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.

"Seńorita."

"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, Seńorita--you don't seem to like my singing."

"Muchas gracias,
Seńor. Thanks."

"Well--I'm sorry. Good evening, Seńorita."

"Buenos noches,
Seńor."

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.