James Cain - Serenade

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.

After a while they got it straightened out to suit them, who was to go where, and she came back and closed the door and closed the window. There was a bed in there, and a chest of drawers in the early Grand Rapids style, and a washstand with a mirror over it, and some grass mats rolled up in a corner, for sleeping purposes. Then there were a couple of chairs. I was tilted back on one, and as soon as she had given me a cigarette, she took the other. There we were. There was no use kidding myself any longer why Triesca hadn’t taken off his hat. My lady love was a three-peso whore.

She lit my cigarette for me, and then her own, and inhaled, and let the smoke blow out the match. We smoked, and it was about as electric as a stalled car. Across the street in front of the café, a mariachi was playing, and she nodded her head once or twice, in time with the music. “Flowers, and birds — and mariachis.”

“Yes, plenty of them.”

“You like mariachi? We have them. We have them here.”

“Señorita.”

“Yes?”

“... I haven’t got the fifty centavos. To pay the mariachi . I’m— ”

I pulled my pockets inside out, to show her. I thought I might as well get it over with. No use having her think she’d hooked a nice American sugar papa, and then letting her be disappointed. “Oh. How sweet.”

“I’m trying to tell you I’m broke. Todo flat. I haven’t got a centavo. I think I’d better be going.”

“No money, but buy me billete.”

“And that was the last of it.”

“ I have money. Little bit. Fifty centavos for mariachi . Now — you look so.”

She turned around, lifted the black skirt, and fished in her stocking. Listen, I didn’t want any mariachi outside the window, serenading us. Of all things I hated in Mexico, I think I hated the mariachis the worst, and they had come to make a kind of picture for me of the whole country and what was wrong with it. They’re a bunch of bums, generally five of them, that would be a lot better off if they went to work, but instead of that they don’t do a thing their whole life, from the time they’re kids to the time they’re old men, but go around plunking out music for anybody that’ll pay them. The rate is fifty centavos a selection, which breaks down to ten centavos, or about three cents a man. Three play the violin, one the guitar, and one a kind of bass guitar they’ve got down there. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they sing. Well, never mind how they sing. They gargle a bass falsetto that’s enough to set your teeth on edge, but all music gets sung the way it deserves, and it was what they sang that got me down. You hear Mexico is musical. It’s not. They do nothing but screech from morning till night, but their music is the dullest, feeblest stuff that ever went down on paper, and not one decent bar was ever written there. Yeah, I know all about Chavez. Their music is Spanish music that went through the head of an Indian and came out again, and if you think it sounds the same after that, you made a mistake. An Indian, he’s about eight thousand years behind the rest of us in the race towards whatever we’re headed for, and it turns out that primitive man is not any fine, noble brute at all. He’s just a poor fish. Modern man, in spite of all this talk about his being effete, can run faster, shoot straighter, eat more, live longer, and have a better time than all the primitive men that ever lived. And that difference, how it comes out in music. An Indian, even when he plays a regular tune, sounds like a seal playing My-Country-’Tis-of-Thee at a circus, but when he makes up a tune of his own, it just makes you sick.

Well, maybe you think I’m getting all steamed up over something that didn’t amount to anything, but Mexico had done plenty to me, and all I’m trying to say is that if I had to listen to those five simple-looking mopes outside the window, there was going to be trouble. But I wanted to please her. I don’t know if it was the way she took the news of my being broke, or the way her eyes lit up at the idea of hearing some music, or the flash I got of that pretty leg, when I was supposed to be looking the other way, or what. Whatever it was, her trade didn’t seem to make much difference any more. I felt about her the way I had in the café, and wanted her to smile at me some more and lean toward me when I spoke.

“Señorita.”