Tristessa (8 page)

I turn and I see both their coats, the back of their coats, have majestically Mexicanly womanly turned, with immense dignity, streaks of dust and all street plaster and all, together, the two ladies go down the sidewalk slowly, the way Mexican women aye French Canadian women go to church in the morning—There is something unalterable in the way both their coats have turned on the women in the kitchen, on Bull's worried face, on me—I run after them—Tristessa looks at me seriously “I go down to Indio for to get a shot” and in that way that normal way she always says that, as if (I guess, I'm a liar, watch out!) as if she means it and really wants to go get that shot—

And I had said to her “I wanta sleep where you sleep tonight” but fat chance of me getting into Indio's or even herself, his wife hates her—They walk majestically, I hesitate majestically, with majestic cowardice, fearing the women in the kitchen who have barred Tristessa from the house (for breaking everything in her goofball fits) and barred her above all from passing through that kitchen (the only way to my room) up narrow ivorytower winding iron steps that shiver and shake—

“They'd never let you through!” yells Bull from the door. “Let em go!”

One of the landladies is on the sidewalk, I'm too ashamed and drunk to look her in the eye—

“But I'll tell them she's dying!”

“Come in here! Come in here!” yells Bull. I turn, they've got their bus at the corner, she's gone—

Either she'll die in my arms or I'll hear about it—

What shroud was the reason why darkness and heaven commingled to come and lay the mantle of sorrow on the hearts of Bull, El Indio and me, who all three love her and weep in our thoughts and know she will die—Three men, from three different nations, in the yellow morning of black shawls, what was the angelic demonic power that devised this?—What's going to happen?

At night little Mexican cop whistles blow that all is well, and all is all wrong, all is tragic,—I dont know what to say.

I'm only waiting to see her again—

And only last year she'd stood in my room and said “A friend is better than pesos, a friend that geev it to you in the bed” when still she believed anyway we'd get our tortured bellies together and get rid of some of the pain—Now too late, too late—

In my room at night, the door open, I watch to see her come in, as if she could get through that kitchen of women—And for me to go looking for her in Mexico Thieves' Market, that's I suppose what I'll have to do—

Liar! Liar! I'm a liar!

And supposing I go find her and she wants to hit me over the head again, I know it's not her it's the goofballs—but where could I take her, and what would it solve to sleep with her?—a softest kiss from pale-rosest lips I did get, in the street, another one of those and I'm gone—

My poems stolen, my money stolen, my Tristessa dying, Mexican buses trying to run me down, grit in the sky, agh, I never dreamed it could be this bad—

And she hates me—Why does she hate me?

Because I'm so smart

“AS SURE AS you're sittin there,” Bull keeps saying since that morning, “Tristessa'll be back tapping on that window on the thirteenth for money for her connection”—

He wants her to come back—

El Indio comes over, in black hat, sad, manly, Mayan stern, preoccupied, “Where is Tristessa?” I ask, he says, hands out, “I dont know.”

Her blood is on my pants like my conscience—

But she comes back sooner than we expect, on the night of the 9th—Right while we're sitting there talking about her—She taps on the window but not only that reaches in a crazy brown hand through the old hole (where El Indio's a month ago put his fist through in a rage over junkless), she grabs the great rosy curtains that Bull junkey-wise hangs from ceiling to sill, she shivers and shakes them and sweeps them aside and looks in and as if to see we're not sneaking morphine shots on her—The first thing she sees is my smiling turned face—It must of disgusted the hell out of her—“Bool—Bool—”

Bool hastily dresses to go out and talk to her in the bar across the street, she's not allowed in the house.

“Aw let her in”

“
I cant
”

We both go out, I first while he locks, and there confronted by my “great love” on the sidewalk in the dim evening lights all I can do is shuffle awhile and wait in the line of time—“How you?” I do say—

“Okay”

Her left side of face is one big dirty bandage with black caked blood, she has it hidden under her head-shawl, holds it draped there—

“Where that happen, with me?”

“No, after I leave you,
tree times
I fall”—She holds up three fingers—She's had three further convulsions—The cotton batting hangs down and there are long strip tails down to almost her chin—She would look awful if she wasnt holy Tristessa—

Bull comes out and slowly we go across the street to the bar, I run to her other side to gentleman her, O what an old sister I am—It's like Hong Kong, the poorest sampan maids and mothers of the river in Chinee slacks propelling with the Venetian steer-pole and no rice in the bowl, even they, in fact they especially have their pride and would put down an old sister like me and O their beautiful little cans in sleek shiney silk, O—their sad faces, high cheekbones, brown color, eyes, they look at me in the night, at all Johns in the night, it's their last resort—O I wish I could write!—Only a beautiful poem could do it!

How frail, beat, final, is Tristessa as we load her into the quiet hostile bar where Madame X sits counting her pesos in the back room, facing all, and lil mustachio'd anxious bartender darts furtively to serve us, and I offer Tristessa a chair that will hide her sad mutilated face from Madame X but she refuses and sits any old way—What a threesome in a bar usually reserved for Army officers and Mex businessmen foaming their mustaches at mugs of afternoon!—Tall bony frightening humpbacked Bull (what do the Mexicans think of him?) with his owlish glasses and his slow shaky but firm-going walk and me the baggy-trousered gringo jerk with combed hair and blood and paint on his jeans, and she, Tristessa, wrapt in a purple shawl, skinny,—poor,—like a vendor of loteria tickets in the street, like doom in Mexico—I order a glass of beer to make it look good, Bull condescends to coffee, the waiter is nervous—

O headache, but there she is sitting next to me, I drink her in—Occasionally she turns those purple eyes at me—She is sick and wants a shot, Bull no got—But she will now go get three gramos on the black market—I show her the pictures I've been painting, of Bull in his chair in purple celestial opium pajamas, of me and my first wife (“Mi primera esposa,” she makes no comment, her eyes look briefly at each picture)—Finally when I show her my painting “candle burning at night” she doesnt even look—They're talking about junk—All the time I feel like taking her in my arms and squeezing her, squeezing that little frail unobtainable not-there body—

The shawls falls a little and her bandage shows in the bar—miserable—I dont know what to do—I begin to get mad—

Finally she's talking about her friend's husband who's put her out of the house that day by calling the cops (he a cop himself), “He call cops because I no give im my
body
” she says nastily—

Ah, so she thinks of her body as some prize she shant give away, to hell with her—I pivot in my feelings and brood—I look at her feelingless eyes—

Meanwhile Bull is warning her about goofballs and I remind her that her old ex-lover (now dead junkey) had told me too never to touch them—Suddenly I look at the wall and there are the pictures of the beautiful broads of the calendar (that Al Damlette had in his room in Frisco, one for each month, over tokay wine we used to revere them), I bring Tristessa's attention to them, she looks away, the bartender notices, I feel like a beast—

AND ALL THE previous ensalchichas and papas fritas of the year before, Ah Above, what you doin with your children?—You with your sad compassionate and nay-would-I-ever-say unbeautiful face, what you doin with your stolen children you stole from your mind to think a thought because you were bored or you were Mind—shouldna done it, Lord, Awakenerhood, shouldna played the suffering-and-dying game with the children in your own mind, shouldna slept, shoulda whistled for the music and danced, alone, on a cloud, yelling to the stars you made, God, but never shoulda thought up and topped up tippy top Toonerville tweaky little sorrowers like us, the children—Poor crying Bull—child, when's sick, and I cry too, and Tristessa who wont even let herself cry . . .

OH WHAT WAS the racket that backeted and smashed in raging might, to make this oil-puddle world?—

Because Tristessa needs my help but wont take it and I wont give—yet, supposing everybody in the world devoted himself to helping others all day long, because of a dream or a vision of the freedom of eternity, then wouldnt the world be a garden? A Garden of Arden, full of lovers and louts in clouds, young drinkers dreaming and boasting on clouds, gods—Still the god's'd'a fought? Devote themselves to gods-dont-fight and bang! Miss Goofball would ope her rosy lips and kiss in the World all day, and men would sleep—And there wouldnt be men or women, but just one sex, the original sex of the mind—But that day's so close I could snap my finger and it would show, what does
it
care? . . . About this recent little event called the world.

“I love Tristessa,” nevertheless I have the gall to stay and say, to both of them—“I woulda told the landladies I love Tristessa—I can tell them she's sick—She needs help—She can come sleep in my room tonight”—

Bull is alarmed, his mouth opens—O the old cage, he loves her!—You should see her puttering around the room cleaning up while he sits and cuts up his junk with a razorblade, or just sits saying “M-m-m-m-m-m-m-m” in long low groans that arent groans but his message and song, now I begin to realize Tristessa wants Bull to be her husband—

“I wanted Tristessa to be my third wife,” I say later—“I didnt come to Mexico to be told what to do by old sisters? Right in front of the faculty, shooting?—Listen Bull and Tristessa, if Tristessa dont care then I dont care—” At this she looks at me, with surprised not-surprised round she-doesnt-care-eyes—“Give me a shot of morphine so I can think the way you do.”

They promptly give me that, in the room later on, meanwhile I've been drinking mescal again—” All or nothing at all,” says I to Bull, who repeats it—

“I'm not a whore,” I add—And I also want to say “Tristessa is not a whore” but I dont want to bring up the subject—Meanwhile she changes completely with her shot, feels better, combs her hair to a beautiful black sheen, washes her blood, washes her whole face and hands in a soapy washtub like Long Jim Beaver up on the Cascades by his campfire—Swoosh—And she rubs the soap thoroughly in her ears and twists fingertips in there and makes squishy sounds, wow, washing, Charley didnt have a beard last night—She cowls her head again with the now-brushed shawl and turns to present us, in the lightbulbed high-ceiling room, a charming Spanish beauty with a little scar on her brow—The color of her face is really tan (she calls herself dark, “As Negra as
me
?”) but in the lights that shine her face keeps changing, sometimes it is jet-brown almost black-blue (beautiful) with outlines of sheeny cheek and long sad mouth and the bump on her nose which is like Indian women in the morning in Nogales on a high dry hill, the women of the various guitar—The Castilian touch, though it may be only as Castilian as old Zacatecas it is fitting-She turns, neat, and I notice she
has
no body at all, it is utterly lost in a little skimpy dress, then I realize she never eats, “her body” (I think) “must be beautiful”—“beautiful little thing”—

But then Bull explains: “She dont want love—You put Grace Kelly in this chair, Muckymuck's morphine on that chair, Jack, I take the morphine, I no take the Grace Kelly.”

“Yes,” asserts Tristessa, “and me, I no awanta love.”

I dont say nothin about love, like I dont start singing “Love is a completely endless thing, it's the April row when feelers reach for everything” and I dont sing “Embraceable You” like Frank Sinatra nor that “Towering Feeling” Vic Damone says “the touch of your hand upon my brow, the look in your eyes I see,” wow, no, I dont disagree or agree with this pair of love-thieves, let em get married and get under—go under the sheets—go bateau'ing in Roma—Gallo—anywhere—me, I'm not going to marry Tristessa, Bull is—She putters around him endlessly, how strangely while I'm lying on the bed junk-high she comes over and cleans up the headboard with her thighs practically in my face and I study them and old Bull is watching out of the top of his glasses to the side—Min n Bill n Mamie n Ike n Maroney Maroney Izzy and Bizzy and Dizzy and Bessy Fall-me-my-closer Martarky and Bee, O god their names, their names, I want their names, Amie n Bill, not Amos n Andy, open the mayor (my father did love them) open the crocus the mokus in the closet (this Freudian sloop of the mind) (O slip slop) (slap) this old guy that's always—Molly!—Fibber M'Gee be jesus and Molly—Bull and Tristessa, sitting there in the house all night, moaning over their razor-blades and white junk and pieces of broken mirror to act as the pan (the diamond sharp junk that cuts into glass)—Quiet evenings at home—Clark Gable and Mona Lisa—

Yet—“Hey, Tristessa I live with you and Bull pay” I say finally—

“I dont care,” she says, turning to me on the stool—“It's awright with me.”

“Wont you at least pay half of her rent?” asks Bull, noting in his notebook figures he keeps all the time. “Will you say yes or no.”

“You can go see her when you want,” he adds.

“No, I wanted to live with her.”