Three by Cain: Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, the Butterfly (2 page)

“Sure. Why not?”

Well, what was he going to do? He could challenge me to a duel, but they never heard of a duel in Mexico. He could take a poke at me, but I outweighed him by about fifty pounds. He could shoot me, but he didn’t have any gun. I had broken all the rules. You’re not supposed to talk like that in Mexico, and once you hand a Mexican something he never heard of, it takes him about a year to figure out the answer. He sat there blinking at me, and the red kept creeping over his ears and cheeks, and I gave him plenty of time to think of something, if he could, before I went on. “I tell you what, Señor. I have examined this lady with care, and I find her very lovely. I admire your taste. I envy your fortune. So let us put her in a lottery, and the lucky man wins. We’ll each buy her a ticket, and the one holding the highest number buys her next drink. Yes?”

Another buzz went around, a long one this time. Not over half of them in there could speak any English, and it had to be translated around before they could get it. He took about four beats to think it through, and then he began to feel better.
“Why I do this, please? The lady, she is with me, no? I put lady in
lotería
, what you put in, Señor? You tell me that?”

“I hope you’re not afraid, Señor?”

He didn’t like that so well. The red began to creep up again, but then I felt something behind me, and I didn’t like that so well either. In the U.S., you feel something behind you, it’s probably a waiter with a plate of soup, but in Mexico it could be anything, and the last thing you want is exactly the best bet. About half the population of the country go around with pearl-handled automatics on their hips, and the bad part about those guns is that they shoot, and after they shoot nothing is ever done about it. This guy had a lot of friends. He was a popular idol, but I didn’t know of anybody that would miss me. I sat looking straight at him, afraid even to turn around.

He felt it too, and a funny look came over his face. I leaned over to brush cigarette ashes off my coat, and out of the tail of my eye I peeped. There had been a couple of lottery peddlers in there, and when he came over they must have stopped in their tracks like everybody else. They were back there now, wigwagging him to say yes, that it was in the bag. I didn’t let on. I acted impatient, and sharpened up a bit when I jogged him. “Well, Señor? Yes?”

“Sí, sí
. We make
lotería!”

They broke pan then, and crowded around us, forty or fifty of them. So long as we meant business, it had to be hands off, but now that it was a kind of a game, anybody could get in it, and most of them did. But even before the crowd, the two lottery peddlers were in, one shoving pink tickets at me, the other green tickets at him. You understand; there’s hundreds of lotteries in Mexico, some pink, some green, some yellow, and some blue, and not many of them pay anything. Both of them went through a hocus-pocus of holding napkins over the sheets of tickets, so we couldn’t see the numbers, but my man kept whispering to me, and winking, meaning that his numbers were awful high. He was an Indian, with gray hair and a face like a chocolate saint, and you would have thought he couldn’t possibly
tell a lie. I thought of Cortés, and how easy he had seen through their tricks, and how lousy the tricks probably were.

But I was different from Cortés, because I wanted to be taken. Through the crowd I could see the girl, sitting there as though she had no idea what was going on, and it was still her I was after, not getting the best of a dumb bullfighter. And something told me the last thing I ought to do was to win her in a lottery. So I made up my mind I was going to lose, and see what happened then.

I waved at him, meaning pick whatever one he wanted, and there wasn’t much he could do but wave back. I picked the pink, and it was a peso, and I laid it down. When they tore off the ticket, they went through some more hocus-pocus of laying it down on the table, and covering it with my hat. He took the green, and it was half a peso. That was a big laugh, for some reason. They put his hat over it, and then we lifted the hats. I had No. 7. He had No. 100,000 and something. That was an
Olé
. I still don’t get the chemistry of a Mexican. Out in the ring, when the bull comes in, they know that in exactly fifteen minutes that bull is going to be dead. Yet when the sword goes in, they yell like hell. And mind you, there’s nothing as much like one dead bull as another dead bull. In that café that night there wasn’t one man there that didn’t know I was framed, and yet when the hats were lifted they gave him a hand, and clapped him on the shoulder, and laughed, just like Lady Luck had handed him a big victory.

“So. And now. You still look, ha?”

“Absolutely not. You’ve won, and I congratulate you,
de todo corazón
. Please give the lady her ticket, with my compliments, and tell her I hope she wins the Bank of Mexico.”

“Sí, sí, sí
. And so, Señor,
adiós.”

He went back with the tickets, and I put a little more hot
leche
into my coffee, and waited. I didn’t look. But there was a mirror back of the bar, so I could see if I wanted to, and just once, after he had handed her the tickets, and they had a long jibber-jabber, she looked.

It was quite a while before they started out. I was between them and the door, but I never turned my head. Then I felt them stop, and she whispered to him, and he whispered back, and laughed. What the hell? He had licked me, hadn’t he? He could afford to be generous. A whiff of her smell hit me in the face, and I knew she was standing right beside me, but I didn’t move till she spoke.

“Señor.”

I got up and bowed. I was looking down at her, almost touching her. She was smaller than I had thought. The voluptuous lines, or maybe it was the way she held her head, fooled you.

“Señorita.”

“Gracias
, thanks, for the
billete.”

“It was nothing, Señorita. I hope it wins for you as much as it lost for me. You’ll be rich—
muy rico.”

She liked that one. She laughed a little, and looked down, and looked up. “So.
Muchas gracias.”

“De nada.”

But she laughed again before she turned away, and when I sat down my head was pounding, because that laugh, it sounded as though she had started to say something and then didn’t, and I had this feeling there would be more. When I could trust myself to look around, he was still standing there near the door, looking a little sore. From the way he kept looking at the
damas
, I knew she must have gone in there, and he wasn’t any too pleased about it.

In a minute, my waitress came and laid down my check. It was for sixty centavos. She had waited on me before, and she was a pretty little
mestiza
, about forty, with a wedding ring she kept flashing every time she got the chance. A wedding ring is big news in Mexico, but it still doesn’t mean there’s been a wedding. She pressed her belly against the table, and then I heard her voice, though her lips didn’t move and she was looking off to one side: “The lady, you like her
dirección
, yes? Where she live?”

“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, “Señorita. 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 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.