The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [92]
Bax and Larry thought we’d gone crazy. I don’t know what the Quadrille thought, except it was clear that anything old Wheero wanted to do was O.K. with them. They were all twice his age, but if he’d been the King of the Underworld, they couldn’t have been more under his thumb. Unwritten law of the bullring.
We drove off to Béhobie in the lavender Cadillac with the hood down, Wheero and I sitting on top, our feet on the back seat, waving to the cars that passed and nearly falling off at every corner.
We found the little bar we’d been to the other night and started playing some more games. We took the labels off beer-bottles and put them on everybody’s wallets, sticky side up, and threw them at the ceiling so that the labels stuck there and the wallets came clattering down all over the drinks on the table.
El Wheero suddenly asked me if I liked ice and I said yes and he took a piece out of his whisky glass and dropped it down the front of my dress.
So I gave him a hot-foot.
Then I had to try to teach him how to do it on one of his Quadrille, a gnarled monkey-faced old man of infinite patience who held his foot politely in position while Wheero kept putting the match in his shoe the wrong way round.
Then we sang that song about the Sinking of the Ship Titanic (Wheero had learned it from students in Mexico) and after that we started dancing. Then I told him how I’d run away from school when I was thirteen to become a bullfighter and he said he’d loan me one of his bullfighter’s costumes so I could have a picture taken of me wearing it. We measured each other to see if we were near enough the same size for it to fit me and were laughing so hard we had to sit down.
Suddenly, from nowhere, Stefan and Les Anglais appeared.
They sailed over to our table in formation, so to speak, spearheaded by Angela, undulating like the prow of a ship, pouring in and out of her dress, which was showing a great deal of arms and breasts, Rubensquely pink from her few days in the sun. Her expression was prouder and angrier and more disconsolate than ever.
It was quite a sight, come to think of it, though nothing compared to the sight of the Spaniards reacting to it.
She started a chain of emotion, beginning with Wheero and going around the Quadrille in ever-increasing circles of intensity, that made the air positively ring with cries of Wappa! and Wappissima! (when I was able to hold the monkey man’s attention long enough I made him write it down for me and he spelled out ¡guapa! on the tablecloth). Anyway the air was ringing with cries of ¡guapa! and ¡guapissima! for quite some time.
Boy, they were really galvanized. Inflamed. Stirred to the roots.
And what’s even harder to believe—and hardest of all to admit —is that: from that second on, I became invisible.
Angela spoke Spanish, which was a help, but that had nothing to do with it. They just went for her, that’s all. Every inch of her. They couldn’t believe their luck. They poked and prodded and patted her; they filled her with champagne; they nudged each other, shaking their heads in wonder. The few words they addressed to anyone else were merely to thank us for their great good fortune.
Angela herself was less pleased than surprised. “I simply don’t understand it. Christ, what a racket they’re making,” she said to me in what could hardly be called an aside. And, sniffing contemptuously three times, she re-inclined her head toward El Wheero, pouring out his heart in rapid Spanish to her other ear.
“It’s too funny,” she said to me after a while, again in her normal tones, which are a lot louder than most. “He keeps breathing ‘que barbaridad’ passionately all over me. Don’t you just adore ‘que barbaridad’? Imagine hoping to flatter one by calling one an outrage!”
I maintained a dignified silence.
From then on she kept me well briefed with the progress of his infatuation.
“He’s invited me to dine with him every night this week.…”
“He’s invited me to the next bullfight. He says he’ll dedicate a bull