John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

Ben and Barrow sat with their heads together at a table in the corner talking about the oil business. Barrow was saying that there was an investigator for certain oil interests coming down; he’d be at the Regis almost any day now and Ben was saying he wanted to meet him and Barrow put his arm around his shoulder and said he was sure Ben was just the man this investigator would want to meet to get an actual working knowledge of conditions. Meanwhile Mac and Salvador were dancing the Cuban danzon with the girls. Then Barrow got to his feet a little unsteadily and said he didn’t want to wait for the French girls but why not go to that place where they’d been and try some of the dark meat, but Salvador insisted on taking them to the house of Remedios near the American embassy. “Quelquecosa de chic,” he’d say in bad French. It was a big house with a marble stairway and crystal chandeliers and salmonbrocaded draperies and lace curtains and mirrors everywhere. “Personne que les henerales vieng aqui,” he said when he’d introduced them to the madam, who was a darkeyed grayhaired woman in black with a black shawl who looked rather like a nun. There was only one girl left unoccupied so they fixed up Barrow with her and arranged about the price and left him. “Whew, that’s a relief,” said Ben when they came out. The air was cold and the sky was all stars.

Salvador had made the three old men with their instruments get into the back of the car and said he felt romantic and wanted to serenade his novia and they went out towards Guadalupe speeding like mad along the broad causeway. Mac and the chauffeur and Ben and Salvador and the three old men singing La Adelita and the instruments chirping all off key. In Guadalupe they stopped under some buttonball trees against the wall of a house with big grated windows and sang Cielito lindo and La Adelita and Cuatro milpas , and Ben and Mac sang just to keep her from the foggy foggy dew and were just starting Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie when a girl came to the window and talked a long time in low Spanish to Salvador.

Salvador said, “Ella dit que nous make escandalo and must go away. Très chic."

By that time a patrol of soldiers had come up and were about to arrest them all when the officer arrived and recognized the car and Salvador and took them to have a drink with him at his billet. When they all got home to Mac’s place they were very drunk. Concha, whose face was drawn from waiting up, made up a mattress for Ben in the diningroom and as they were all going to turn in Ben said, “By heavens, Concha, you’re a swell girl. When I make my pile I’ll buy you the handsomest pair of diamond earrings in the Federal District.” The last they saw of Salvador he was standing up in the front seat of the car as it went round the corner on two wheels conducting the three old men in La Adelita with big gestures like an orchestra leader.

Before Christmas Ben Stowell came back from a trip to Tamaulipas feeling fine. Things were looking up for him. He’d made an arrangement with a local general near Tampico to run an oil well on a fifty-fifty basis. Through Salvador he’d made friends with some members of Carranza’s cabinet and was hoping to be able to turn over a deal with some of the big claimholders up in the States. He had plenty of cash and took a room at the Regis. One day he went round to the printing plant and asked Mac to step out in the alley with him for a minute.

“Look here, Mac,” he said, “I’ve got an offer for you… You know old Worthington’s bookstore? Well, I got drunk last night and bought him out for two thousand pesos… He’s pulling up stakes and going home to blighty, he says.”

“The hell you did!”

“Well, I’m just as glad to have him out of the way.”

“Why, you old whoremaster, you’re after Lisa.”

“Well, maybe she’s just as glad to have him out of the way too.”

“She’s certainly a goodlooker.”

“I got a lot a news I’ll tell you later… Ain’t goin’ to be so healthy round The Mexican Herald maybe… I’ve got a proposition for you, Mac… Christ knows I owe you a hellova lot… You know that load of office furniture you have out back Concha made you buy that time?” Mac nodded. “Well, I’ll take it off your hands and give you a half interest in that bookstore. I’m opening an office. You know the book business… you told me yourself you did… the profits for the first year are yours and after that we split two ways, see? You certainly ought to make it pay. That old fool Worthington did, and kept Lisa into the bargain… Are you on?”

“Jez, lemme think it over, Ben… but I got to go back to the daily bunksheet.”

So Mac found himself running a bookstore on the Calle Independencia with a line of stationery and a few typewriters. It felt good to be his own boss for the first time in his life. Concha, who was a storekeeper’s daughter, was delighted. She kept the books and talked to the customers so that Mac didn’t have much to do but sit in the back and read and talk to his friends. That Christmas Ben and Lisa, who was a tall Spanish girl said to have been a dancer in Malaga, with a white skin like a camellia and ebony hair, gave all sorts of parties in an apartment with Americanstyle bath and kitchen that Ben rented out in the new quarter towards Chapultepec. The day the Asociacion de Publicistas had its annual banquet, Ben stopped into the bookstore feeling fine and told Mac he wanted him and Concha to come up after supper and wouldn’t Concha bring a couple of friends, nice wellbehaved girls not too choosy, like she knew. He was giving a party for G. H. Barrow who was back from Vera Cruz and a big contact man from New York who was wangling something, Ben didn’t know just what. He’d seen Carranza yesterday and at the banquet everybody’d kowtowed to him.

“Jez, Mac, you oughta been at that banquet; they took one of the streetcars and had a table the whole length of it and an orchestra and rode us out to San Angel and back and then all round town.”

“I saw ’em starting out,” said Mac, “looked too much like a funeral to me.”

“Jez, it was swell though. Salvador an’ everybody was there and this guy Moorehouse, the big hombre from New York, jez, he looked like he didn’t know if he was comin’ or goin’. Looked like he expected a bomb to go off under the seat any minute… hellova good thing for Mexico if one had, when you come to think of it. All the worst crooks in town were there."

The party at Ben’s didn’t come off so well. J. Ward Moorehouse didn’t make up to the girls as Ben had hoped. He brought his secretary, a tired blond girl, and they both looked scared to death. They had a dinner Mexican style and champagne and a great deal of cognac and a victrola played records by Victor Herbert and Irving Berlin and a little itinerant band attracted by the crowd played Mexican airs on the street outside. After dinner things were getting a little noisy inside so Ben and Moorehouse took chairs out on the balcony and had a long talk about the oil situation over their cigars. J. Ward Moorehouse explained that he had come down in a purely unofficial capacity you understand to make contacts, to find out what the situation was and just what there was behind Carranza’s stubborn opposition to American investors and that the big businessmen he was in touch with in the States desired only fair play and that he felt that if their point of view could be thoroughly understood through some information bureau or the friendly coöperation of Mexican newspapermen.

Ben went back in the diningroom and brought out Enrique Salvador and Mac. They all talked over the situation and J. Ward Moorehouse said that speaking as an old newspaperman himself he thoroughly understood the situation of the press, probably not so different in Mexico City from that in Chicago or Pittsburgh and that all the newspaperman wanted was to give each fresh angle of the situation its proper significance in a spirit of fair play and friendly coöperation, but that he felt that the Mexican papers had been misinformed about the aims of American business in Mexico just as the American press was misinformed about the aims of Mexican politics. If Mr. Enrique would call by the Regis he’d be delighted to talk to him more fully, or to any one of you gentlemen and if he wasn’t in, due to the great press of appointments and the very few days he had to spend in the Mexican capital, his secretary, Miss Williams, would be only too willing to give them any information they wanted and a few specially prepared strictly confidential notes on the attitude of the big American corporations with which he was purely informally in touch.