Three by Cain: Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, the Butterfly (5 page)

“… Señorita, what do I get out of this?”

“Oh—you live, have nice cloth, maybe big hat with silver, yes? Some pecos. Is enough, yes?”

“—And entertain the señoritas?”

I don’t know why I said that. It was the second mean slice I had taken since we started out. Maybe I was hoping she’d flash jealous, and that would give me the cue I wanted. She didn’t. She smiled, and studied me for a minute, and I felt myself getting cold when I saw there was the least bit of pity in it. “If you like to entertain señoritas, yes. Maybe not. Maybe that’s why I ask you. No have any trouble.”

C H A P T E R

3

Early next morning I shaved, washed, and packed. My earthly possessions seemed to be a razor, brush, and cake of soap, two extra shirts, a pair of extra drawers I had washed out the night before, a pile of old magazines, and the black-snake whip I had used when I sang Alfio. They give you a whip, but it never cracks, and I got this mule-skinner’s number with about two pounds of lead in the butt. One night on the double bill a stagehand laid it out for Pagliacci, and the Nedda hit me in the face with it. I still carry the scar. I had sold off all the costumes and scores, but couldn’t get rid of the whip. I dropped it in the suitcase. The magazines and my new soapdish I put on top of it, and stood the suitcase in the corner. Some day, maybe, I would come back for it. The two extra shirts I put on, and tied the necktie over the top one. The extra drawers I folded and put in one pocket, the shaving stuff in another. I didn’t mention I was leaving, to the clerk, on my way out. I just waved at him, like I was on my way up to the postoffice to see if the money had come, but I had to slap my hand against my leg, quick. She had dropped a handful of pesos in my pocket, and I was afraid he’d hear them clink.

The Ford was an open roadster, and I lost a half hour getting
the boot off and the top up. It was an all-day run to Acapulco, and I didn’t mean to have that sun beating down on me. Then I rolled it out and pulled down to 44b. She was on the doorstep, waiting for me, her stuff piled up around her. The other girls weren’t up yet. She was all dressed up in the black dress with purple flowers that she had had on when I first saw her, though I thought the white would have been better. The main baggage seemed to be a round hatbox, of the kind women traveled with fifteen years ago, only made of straw and stuffed full of clothes. I peeled off the extra shirts and put them and the hatbox in the rumble seat. Then there was the grass mat that she slept on, rolled up and tied. I stuck that in, but it meant I couldn’t close the rumble. Those mats, they sell for sixty centavos, or maybe twenty cents, and it didn’t hardly look like it was worth the space, but it was a personal matter, and I didn’t want to argue. Then there was a pile of
rebozos
, about every color there was, but mainly black. I put them in, but she ran out and took one, a dark purple, and threw it over her head. Then there was the cape, the
espada
, and the ear. It was the first time I ever saw a bullfighter’s cape, the dress cape, I mean, not the fighting cape, up close so I could really look at it. I hated it because I knew where she had got it, but you couldn’t laugh off the beauty of it. I think it’s the only decently made thing you’ll ever see in Mexico, and maybe it’s not even made there. It’s heavy silk, each side a different color, and embroidered so thick it feels crusty in your hands. This one was yellow outside, crimson in, and against that yellow the needlework just glittered. It was all flowers and leaves, but not in the dumb patterns you see on most of their stuff. They were oil-painting flowers, not postcard flowers, and the colors had a real tone to them. I folded it, put a
rebozo
around it, to protect it from dust, and laid it beside the hatbox. The
espada
, to me, was just one more grand-opera prop. It’s what they use to stick the bull with, and I didn’t even take it out of the scabbard to look at it. I threw it down in the bottom.

While I was loading the stuff in, she was standing there stroking the ear. I wouldn’t have handled it with tongs. Sometimes,
when a bullfighter puts on a good show, they give him an ear. The crowd begins to yell about it, and then one of the assistants goes over and cuts an ear off the bull, where he’s lying in the dirt with the mules hooking on to his horns. The bullfighter takes it, holds it up so you can see all the blood and slime, and goes around with it, bowing every ten steps. Then he saves it, like a coloratura saves her decoration from the King of Belgium. After about three months it’s good and rank. This one she had, there were pieces of gristle hanging out of it, and it stunk so you could smell it five feet away. I told her if it went on the front seat with us the deal was off, and she could throw it back there with the
espada
. She did, but she was plenty puzzled.

The window popped open then, and the fat one showed, with some kind of a nightgown on, and her hair all frazzled and ropy, and then the other ones beside her, and there was a lot of whispering and kissing, and then we got in and got started. We lost about ten minutes, out on the edge of town, when we stopped to gas up, and another five when we came to a church and she had to go in and bless herself, but finally, around eight o’clock we leveled off. We passed some wooden crosses, another little feature they’ve got. Under Socialism, it seems that there’s only one guy that really knows how it works, and if some other guy thinks he does, it’s a counter-revolutionary act, or, in un-socialist lingo, treason. So back in 1927, a guy named Serrano thought he did, and they arrested him and his friends down in Cuernavaca, and started up to Mexico with them in a truck. But then up in Mexico somebody decided it would be a good idea if they never got there at all, and some of the boys started out in a fast car to meet them. They fastened their hands with baling wire, lined them up beside the road, and mowed them down with a machine gun. Then they said the revolution was over, and the American papers handed it to them that they had a stable government at last, and that a strong man could turn the trick, just give him the chance. So wooden crosses mark the spot, an inspiring sight to see.

We had some coffee in Cuernavaca, then pushed on to Taxco
for lunch. That was the end of the good road. From there on it was just dust, curves, and hills. She began to get sleepy. A Mexican is going to sleep at one o’clock, no matter where he is, and she was no exception. She leaned her head against the side, and her eyes drooped. She wriggled, trying to get set. She slipped off her shoes. She wiggled some more. She took off a string of beads around her neck, and unfastened two buttons. She was open to her brassiere. Her dress slipped up, above her knees. I tried not to look. It was getting hotter by the minute. I didn’t look, but I could smell her.

I gassed in Chilpancingo, around four o’clock, and bathed the tires with water. That was what I was afraid of, mostly, that in that heat and sliding all over that rough road, we would have a blow-out. I peeled down to my undershirt, knotted a handkerchief around my head to catch sweat, and we went on. She was awake now. She didn’t have much to say. She slipped off her stockings, held her bare legs in the air stream from the hood vent, and unbuttoned another button.

We were down in what they call the
tierra caliente
, now, and it turned cloudy and so muggy the sweat stood out on my arms in drops. After Chilpancingo I had been looking for some relief, but this was the worst yet. We had been running maybe an hour when she began to lean forward and look out, and then she told me to stop. “Yes. This way.”

I rubbed the sweat out of my eyes and looked, and saw something that maybe was intended to be a road. It was three inches deep in dust, and cactuses were growing in the middle of it, but if you concentrated we could see two tracks. “That way, hell. Acapulco is the way we’re going. I looked it up.”

“We go for Mamma.”

“… What was that you said?”

“Yes. Mamma will cook. She cook for us. For the house in Acapulco.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Mamma cook very nice.”

“Listen. I haven’t had the honor of meeting Mamma, but
I’ve just got a hunch she’s not the type. Not for the high-class joint we’re going to run. I tell you what. Let’s get down there. If worse comes to worst,
I’ll
cook. I cook very nice, too. I studied in Paris, where all the good cooks go when they die.”

“But Mamma, she have the
viveres.”

“The what?”

“The food, what we need. I send Mamma the money, I sent last week. She buy much things, we take. We take Mamma, Papa. All the
viveres.”

“Oh, Papa too.”

“Yes, Papa help Mamma cook.”

“Well, will you tell me where you, me, Mamma, Papa, and the
viveres
are going to ride? By the way, do we take the goat?”

“Yes, this way, please.”

It was her car, and I turned into the road. I had gone about a hundred yards when the wheel jerked out of my hands and I had to stamp on the brake to keep from going down a gully that must have been two hundred feet deep. I mean, it was that rough, and it didn’t get any better. It was uphill and down, around rocks the size of a truck, through gullies that would have bent the axles of anything but a Ford, over cactuses so high I was afraid they would foul the transmission when we went over them. I don’t know how far we went. We drove about an hour, and the rate we were moving, it might have been five miles or twenty, but it seemed more like fifty. We passed a church and then a long while after that, we began to pass Mexicans with burros, hurrying along with them. That’s a little point about driving in Mexico they don’t tell you about. You meet these herds of burros, going along loaded up with wood, fodder, Mexicans, or whatever it is. The burro alone doesn’t give you much trouble. He knows the rules of the road as well as you do, and gets out of the way in time, even if he’s a little grouchy about it. But if he’s got a Mexican herding him along, you can bet on it that that Mexican will shove him right in line with your fender and you do nothing but stand on your brake and curse and sweat and cake up with their dust.

It was the way they were hurrying along, though, that woke
me up to what it looked like outside. The heat and dust were enough to strangle you, but the clouds were hanging lower all the time, and over the tops of the ridges smoky scuds were slipping past, and it didn’t look good. After a long time we passed some huts, by twos and threes, huddled together. We kept on, and then we came to a couple more huts, but only one of them seemed to have anybody in it. She reached over and banged on the horn and jumped out, and ran up to the door, and all of a sudden there was Mamma, and right behind her, Papa. Mamma was about the color of a copper pot, all dressed up in a pink cotton dress and no shoes, to go to Acapulco. Papa was a little darker. He was a nice, rich mahogany after it’s had about fifteen coats of dark polish. He came out in his white pajama suit, with the pants rolled up to his bare knees, and took off his big straw hat and shook hands. I shook hands. I wondered if there had been a white iceman in the family. Then I pulled up the brake and got out.

Well, I said she ran up to the door, but that wasn’t quite right. There wasn’t any door. Maybe you never saw an Indian hut, so I better tell you what it looks like. You can start with the colored shanties down near the railroad track in New Orleans, and then, when you’ve got them clearly in mind, you can imagine they’re the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and that the Mexican hut is a shanty standing beside it. There’s no walls, or roofs, or anything like you’re used to seeing. There’s four sides made of sticks, stuck down in the ground and wattled together with twigs, about as high as a man’s head. In the middle of the front side is a break, and that’s the door. The chinks between the twigs are filled up a little bit with mud. Just plain mud, smeared on there and most of it falling off. And on top is a thatch of grass, or palmetto, or whatever grows up on the hill, and that’s all. There’s no windows, no floor, no furniture, no pictures of the Grand Canyon hanging on the walls, no hay-grain-and-feed calendars back of the clock, with a portrait of a cowgirl on top of a horse. They’ve got no need for calendars, because in the first place they couldn’t figure out what the writing was for, and in the second place they don’t care what day it is. And
they’ve got no need for a clock, because they don’t care what time it is. All I’m trying to say is, there’s nothing in there but a dirt floor, and the mats they sleep on, and down near the door, the fire where they do their cooking.