Javier Marias - Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

We happened to wander into an inhospitable and not very well-policed joint, or else the thugs inside were there to protect the owners rather than any patron, even if he happened to be a famous gringo. We would generally stop in wherever we felt like it, going on how the dive looked from the outside and what its posters promised, pictures of singers or dancers, almost always Mexican, a few unconvincingly Brazilian women. There were quite a lot of people inside, in an atmosphere that had a listless, thuggish savor to it, but it was the third stop of the evening and we hadn’t been stinting on tequila, so we went over to the bar and stood there all in a row, making room for ourselves in a way that wasn’t exactly the height of good manners, but anything else would have been out of place.

Across the dance floor was an eye-catching table of seven or eight people, who looked as if they had a lot of money if not a lot of class, five men with three women who may have been rented for the night or hired on a daily basis, and both the men and the women were staring at us fixedly despite the fact that we had our backs to the dance floor and to their table. Maybe they were just guys who liked to watch other people dancing from up close; the women danced, but among the men only one did, the youngest, a limber individual with high cheekbones and the look of a bodyguard, a look he shared with two others who stood by and never left their bosses alone for a second. They didn’t appear to have any connection to the place, but it turned out they did, and so did one of their bosses; he was a common enough type in Mexico, around thirty-five with a moustache and curly hair, but in Hollywood they would immediately have put him under contract as a new Ricardo Montalbán or Gilbert Roland or César Romero, he was tall and handsome and had neatly rolled up his shirtsleeves very high, displaying his biceps which he constantly flexed. His partner, or whatever he was, was fat with a very fair complexion, more European blood there, his hair combed straight back in a dandified way and too long at the nape of the neck, but he didn’t dye it to take out the gray. Nowadays we’d call them mafiosos lavados, “whitewashed gangsters,” but that expression wasn’t in use then: they were intimidating but for the time being irreproachable, owners of restaurants or stores or bars or even ranches, businessmen with employees who accompanied them wherever they went and protected them when necessary from their peons or even from some angered capataz. In his hand the fat man had a vast green handkerchief that he used, by turns, to mop his brow or to fan the atmosphere as if he were shooing flies away or performing magic tricks, sending it floating out over the dance floor for a second.

Our arrival hadn’t created much of a stir because we had our backs to the room and because Hank, who was enormous, stood, looking very dissuasive, between Mr. Presley and the three or four women who first came up to us. After a few minutes, Presley spun around on his bar stool and looked out at the dance floor; there was a murmur, he drank as if nothing were going on, and the buzz diminished. He had a certain glassy look that could sometimes appease a crowd, it was as if he didn’t see them and canceled them out, or he would shift his expression slightly in a way that seemed to promise something good for later on. He himself was calm just then, drinking from his glass and, watching the hermanos Mexicanos dancing, sometimes a kind of a melancholy came over him. It didn’t last.

But there was no stopping the exasperating George McGraw, who of course was relentless when it came to making demonstrations of his own prowess; if he saw Presley in a moment of calm, far from adapting to the mood or following his lead, he would seize on it to try to outshine and eclipse him — fat chance. He wanted Sherry to dance, practically threatened her, but she didn’t go with him to the dance floor and made a crude gesture, plugging her nose as if to say that something stank, and I saw that this did not pass unnoticed by the fat guy with the oiled-back locks, who wrinkled his brow, or by the new César Montalbán or Ricardo Roland, who flexed his right bicep even higher than usual.

So McGraw got out on the floor, swaying his hips and taking very short little steps all by himself, his button eyes ablaze with the trumpeting rumba that was playing, and he couldn’t keep from displaying his repertory of dreadful movements or from emitting sharp, ill-timed cries that were a mockery of the way Mexicans shout to urge someone on. Hank and Presley were watching him in amusement; they burst out laughing and young Sherry started laughing too, out of contagion and flirtation. The owner of the George Herald was dancing so obscenely that his crazed thrusts of the hip were getting in the way of some of the women on the dance floor; the bodyguard with high cheekbones who moved as if he were made of rubber shot him dead with a glance from his Indian eyes, but nothing stopped him. The other dancers did stop and stood aside, whether out of disgust or in order to get a better view of McGraw I don’t know: he was giving his trapper’s or bellhop’s cap such a vigorous shaking that I was afraid it would go sailing off and come to a bad end, forgetting that he wore it securely glued to his scalp. The problem was that he didn’t travel with his towel, and he must have considered it an indispensable element in his dance routine; consequently, as the pale-skinned fat man, in a moment of carelessness, flung his handkerchief up to aerate the atmosphere, McGraw filched it from him without so much as a glance and immediately flung it over his shoulders, holding it by the two ends, and rubbing it against himself, up and down, with the customary celerity that by then we had seen all too often. The fat man kept his limp hand extended during the moment following the loss, he didn’t pull it back right away as if he hadn’t given up on recovering his beloved green handkerchief — some kind of a fetish maybe. In fact, he tried to reach it from his seat when McGraw came his way in his increasingly indecorous dance. What finally made the fat man lose patience was a moment in McGraw’s sashayings when he both withheld the handkerchief and started voluptuously toweling it across his buttocks. The fat man stood up for a second — he was a very tall fat man, I saw — and angrily grabbed the handkerchief away from the dancing fool. But the dancer gave an agile spin and, before the fat man had resumed his seat, snatched the handkerchief back again with an imperious gesture, he was used to having his way and having his orders followed back in Tupelo or Tuscaloosa. It was a comical moment, but I wasn’t happy to see that Gilbert Romero and his crowd were not at all amused, because it really was funny, the fat man and the semi-fat man quarreling over the green silk at the edge of the dance floor. I was even less happy to see what happened next: the impatient expression on the stiff-haired fat man’s face changed to brutal cold rage, and he seized the handkerchief back from McGraw with a swipe of his big hand just at the moment the elastic bodyguard delivered a blow to the magnate’s kidneys which made him fall to his knees, his dance stopped dead. As if he were well-rehearsed at this sort of gesture — but how could he be? — the fat man’s next swift move was to twist the handkerchief around the kneeling McGraw’s neck and start pulling on the ends to strangle him right then and there. In a second the cloth lost all its glide and stretched thin and unbelievably taut, like a slender cord, and its green color disappeared, a cord that was tightening. The fat man pulled hard on the two ends, his complexion red as a steak and his expression heartless, like a man tying up a clumsy package hurriedly and mechanically. I thought he was killing McGraw on the spot, like a flash of lightning and without saying a word, in front of a hundred witnesses on the dance floor, which in an instant emptied out completely. I admit I didn’t know how to react, or maybe I felt fleetingly that at last we would be free of the small-town tycoon, and I did no more than think (or else the thought came later, but I attribute it to that moment): “He’s killing him, killing him, he is killing him, no one could have seen it coming, death can be as stupid and unexpected as they say, you walk into some dive without ever imagining that everything can end there in the most ridiculous way and in a second, one, two and three and four, and every second that passes without anyone intervening makes this irreversible death more certain, the death that is happening as we watch, a rich man from Chattanooga being killed by a fat man with a bad nature in Mexico City right before our eyes.”