Serenade (3 page)

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.

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 Dominguez,

Calle Violetta, 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 dormi inquieta con motivo de tus palabras me son vida y no pudiendo permanecer sin con-tacto contigo te digo que hoy por la noche te espero a las ocho de la noche para que platiquemos, por lo que asi 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.

"Yes. I ask you to come. Yes."

"I caught that. But what's all this other stuff about? I didn't have any date with you--that I know of."

She kept studying me, and studying the letter, and hungry as I was, and bad as she had walloped me that night, and dumb as it had been up to now, I couldn't help having this same feeling about her I had had before, that was mainly what any man feels toward a woman, but partly what he feels toward a child. There was something about the way she talked, the way she held her head, the way she did everything, that got me in the throat, so I couldn't breathe right. It wasn't child, of course. It was Indian. But it did things to me just the same, maybe worse on account of it being Indian, because that meant she was always going to be like that. The trouble was, you see, that she didn't know what the letter said. She couldn't read.

She called the fat one out, and had her read it, and then there was the most indignant jabbering you ever heard. The other two came out and got in it, and then she grabbed me by the arm. "The auto. You make go, yes?"

"Well I could once."

"Come, then. Come quick."

We went down the street, and she turned in at a shack that seemed to be a kind of a garage. It was full of wrecks with stickers pasted on the windshield, that seemed to be held for the sheriff or something, but halfway down the line was the newest, reddest Ford in the world. It shone like a boil on a sailor's neck. She went up to it, and began waving the letter in one hand and the key in the other. "So. Now we go. Calle Venezuela."

I got in, and she got in, and it was a little stiff, but it started, and I rolled it through the murk to the street. I didn't know where the Calle Venezuela was, and she tried to show me, but she didn't have the hang of the one-way streets, so we got tangled up so bad it took us a half hour to get there. As soon as I backed up to park she jumped out and ran Over to a colonnade, where about fifty guys were camped out on the sidewalk, back of tables with typewriters on them. They all wore black suits. In Mexico, the black suit means you got plenty of education, and the black fingernails mean you got plenty of work. When I got there, she was having an argument with one guy, and after a while he sat down to his machine, stuck a piece of paper in it, wrote something, and handed it to her. She came over to me waving it, and I took it. It was just two lines, that started off "Querido Sr. Sharp" instead of "Querido Jonny," and said she wanted to see me on a matter of business.

"This letter, big mistake."

She tore it up.

Well, never mind the fine points. The result of the big Socialist educational program is that half the population of the city have to come to these mugs to get their letters written, and that was what she had done. But the guy had been a little busy, and didn't get it quite straight what she had said, and fixed her up with a love letter. So of course, she had to go down there and get what she had paid for. I didn't blame her, but I still didn't know what she wanted, and I was still hungry.

"The auto--you like, yes?"

"It's a knockout." We were coming up the Bolivar again, and I had to keep tooting the horn, according to law. The main thing they put on cars for Mexican export is the biggest, loudest horn they can find in Detroit, and this one had a double note to it that sounded like a couple of ferryboats passing in an East River fog. "Your business must be good."

I didn't mean to make any crack, but it slipped out on me. If it meant anything to her at all, she passed it up. "Oh no. I win."

"How?"

"The
billete.
You remember?"

"Oh. My
billette?"

"Yes. I win, in
lotería.
The auto, and five honnerd pesos. The auto, is very pretty. I can no make go."

"Well, I can make it go, if that's all that's bothering you. About those five hundred pesos. You got some of them with you?"

"Oh yes. Of course."

"That's great. What you're going to do is buy me a breakfast. For my belly--
muy
empty. You get it?"

"Oh, why you no say? Yes, of course, now we eat."

I pulled in at the Tupinamba. The restaurants don't open until one o'clock, but the cafés will take care of you. We took a table up near the corner, where it was dark and cool. Hardly anybody was in there. My same old waitress came around grinning, and I didn't waste any time. "Orange juice, the biggest you got. Fried eggs, three of them, and fried ham. Tortillas. Glass of milk,
frió,
and
café con crema."

"Bueno."

She took iced coffee, a nifty down there, and gave me a cigarette. It was the first I had had in three days, and I inhaled and leaned back, and smiled at her. "So."

"So."

But she didn't smile back, and looked away as soon as she said it. It was the first time we had really looked at each other all morning, and it brought us back to that night. She smoked, and looked up once or twice to say something, and didn't, and I saw there was something on her mind besides the
billete.
"So--you still have no pesos?"

"That's more or less correct."

"You work, no?"

"I did work, but I got kicked out. Just at present, I'm not doing anything at all."

"You like to work, yes? For me?"

"...Doing what?"

"Play a guitar, little bit, maybe. Write a letter, count money, speak
Inglés,
help me, no work very hard. In Mexico, nobody work very hard. Yes? You like?"

"Wait a minute. I don't get this."

"Now I have money, I open house."

"Here?"

"No, no, no. In Acapulco. In Acapulco, I have very nice friend, big
político.
Open nice house, with nice music, nice food, nice drink, nice girls--for American."

"Oh, for Americans."

"Yes. Many Americans come now to Acapulco. Big steamboat stop there. Nice man, much money."

"And me, I'm to be a combination professor, bartender, bouncer, glad-hander, secretary, and general bookkeeper for the joint, is that it?"

"Yes, yes."

"Well."

The food came along, and I stayed with it a while, but the more I thought about her proposition the funnier it got to me. "This place, it's supposed to have class, is that the idea?"

"Oh yes, very much. My
político
friend, he say American pay as much as five pesos, gladly."

"Pay five--what?"

"Pesos."

"Listen, tell your
político
friend to shut his trap and let an expert talk. If an American paid less than five dollars, he'd think there was something wrong with it."

"I think you little bit crazy."

"I said five bucks--eighteen pesos."

"No, no. You kid me."

"All right, go broke your own way. Hire your
político
for manager."

"You really mean?"

"I raise my right hand and swear by the holy mother of God. But--you got to get some system in it. You got to give him something for his money."

"Yes, yes. Of course."

"Listen, I'm not talking about this world's goods. I'm talking about things of the spirit, romance, adventure, beauty. Say, I'm beginning to see possibilities in this. All right, you want that American dough, and I'll tell you what you've got to do to get it. In the first place, the dump has got to be in a nice location, in among the hotels, not back of the coconut palms, up on the hill. That's up to your
político.
In the second place, you don't do anything but run a little dance hall, and rent rooms. The girls came in, just for a drink. Not mescal, not tequila. Chocolate ice-cream soda, because they're nice girls, that just dropped in to take a load off their feet. They wear hats. They come in two at a time, because they're so well brought up they wouldn't dream of going in any place alone. They work in the steamboat office, up the street, or maybe they go to school and just came home for vacation. And they've never met any Americans, see, and they're giggling about it, in their simple girlish way, and of course, we fix it up, you and I, so there's a little introducing around. And they dance. And one thing leads to another. And next thing you know, the American has a room from you, to take the girl up. You don't really run that kind of place, but just because it's him, you'll make an exception--for five dollars. The girl doesn't take anything. She does it for love, see?"