Serenade - James M. Cain [6]
She was like a child while I was tuning, leaning over and watching everything I did, but when I started to play, she sat up and began to study me. She knew she had never heard anything like that, and I thought I saw the least bit of suspicion of me, as to who I was and what the hell I was doing there. So when I went down on the low E string, on the phrase the bassoon has in the orchestra, I looked at her and smiled. "The voice of the bull."
"Yes, yes!"
"Am I a good mariachi?"
"Oh, fine mariachi What is the música?"
"Carmen."
"Oh. Oh yes, of course. The voice of the bull."
She laughed, and clapped her hands, and that seemed to do it. I went into the bullring music of the last act and kept stepping the key up, so I could make kind of a number out of it without slowing down for the vocal stuff. There came a knock on the door. She opened, and the mariachi was out there, and most of the ladies of the street. "They ask door open. So they hear too."
"All right, so they don't sing."
So we left the door open, and I got a hand after the bullring selection, and played the intermezzo, then the prelude to the opera. My fingers were a little sore, as I had no calluses, but I went into the introduction to the Habanera, and started to sing. I don't know how far I got. What stopped me was the look on her face. Everything I had seen there was gone, it was the face at the window of every whorehouse in the world, and it was looking right through me.
"...What's the matter?"
I tried to make it sound comical, but she didn't laugh. She kept looking at me, and she came over, took the guitar from me, went out and handed it to the mariachi player. The crowd began to jabber and drift off. She came back, and the other three girls were with her. "Well, Seńorita--you don't seem to like my singing."
"Muchas gracias, Seńor. Thanks."
"Well--I'm sorry. Good evening, Seńorita."
"Buenos noches, Seńor."
Next thing I knew I was stumbling down the Bolivar, trying to wash her out of my mind, trying to wash everything out of my mind. A block away, somebody was coming toward me. I saw it was Triesca. She must have gone out and phoned him when I left. I ducked around a corner, so I wouldn't have to pass him. I kept on, crossed a plaza, and found myself looking at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, their opera house. I hadn't been near it since I flopped there three months before. I stood staring at it, and thought how far I had slid. Flopping in Rigoletto, in probably the lousiest opera company in the world, before an audience that didn't know Rigoletto from Yankee Doodle, with a chorus of Indians behind me trying to look like lords and ladies, a Mexican tenor- on one side of me that couldn't even get a hand on Questa o Quella, and a coffee cake on the other side that scratched fleas while she was singing the Caro Nome--that seemed about as low as I could get. But I had wiped those footprints out, with my can. I had tried to serenade a lady that was easy serenaded, and I couldn't even get away with that.
I walked back to my one-peso hotel, where I was paid up to the end of the week, went to my room, and undressed without turning on the light, so I wouldn't see the concrete floor, the wash basin with rings in it, and the lizard that would come out from behind the bureau. I got in bed, pulled the lousy cotton blanket up over me, and lay there watching the fog creep in. When I closed my eyes I'd see her looking at me, seeing something in me, I didn't know what, and then