“But I ought not to have entered the raffle. Meddling in something that isn’t my business. They’re going to be mad at me. They’ll holler and yell at me. Better put the little rooster back and let someone else … Thank you, young señor. You’ve been kind.”
“They’re yelling for you already. Is it true that you listen to men’s confessions, Elenita?”
“Yes, when they’re drunk they like to talk and they know I never tell. But I have to go. They’ll fire me if I don’t hurry.”
“Sit still. I’ll pay them for the time you stay with me. What do you earn?”
“Just my tips, my meal. Now and then a drink.”
“Come here, Elenita.”
“No, señor. Not to the bed. They’ll get mad.”
“Come here, Elenita. Come and listen to my confession. Just listen, that’s all. Can you understand me?”
“No, I never understand. That’s why men talk to me. While they’re waiting, before or after, they all talk to me, like cloudbursts they talk. And I forget everything, every word. I can’t remember. They call me forgotten Elenita, the forgetter. Yes. That’s me.”
“Come here and forget some things that don’t mean anything.”
“No, señor. I’m not the one for you to do this with.”
“Lie down.”
Jey joneybonch. Loveydovey. Hazme un huequito, cherriblossom. Foqui-foqui …
“I’ll put the light out now.”
“Ay, señor, señor!”
“Good, Elenita? Deep enough?”
“Oh, my God. Everybody fuck everybody.”
“Do you smell my Negro friend, Elena? Who ever made up that lie that Negroes smell different from the rest of us, worse? Touch the blond señor’s whiskers. Rub the back of our girlfriend who has no eyebrows. Jakob, what the hell are you doing with your socks on in bed? Listen, Elena, while I ask Jakob a few silly questions. Are you trying to shape up by making love, Jake? Don’t you know that while we forget it the world goes its own way? Don’t you see that in your battle, which is exactly like mine, my first dream, that dream of far away, of rebellion, you have been defeated too?”
And I am among, beneath, between the tangle of bodies, half suffocated. The absence of laughter frightens me. The cadaverous solemnity in which none of us touches any of the others, in which we are all kept secure by the mask of the language we are speaking, English, English too in the mouths of these dark Mexican whores with their joneybonch and foqui-foqui, and when Rose Ass puts out the light, every hand is withdrawn from the skin it was touching, darkness snatches our pleasure away from us, our hands flee to refuge against their own bodies, and the lingua franca of young, beardless Rose Ass forces isolation upon all of us who understand his Germanic English … “The destroyers of idols have now become the idolizers of idols…” and Rose Ass lies like a thin sardine on the edge of the silent, creaking bed, pressed against Elena the towel girl … “… Triumphant rebellion becomes the new institution, the law of the new oppression imposes respectability upon all until we must flee to imagine an untouchable madness, to feel the new sickness that has come to infect us…” and the foreign tongue immobilizes the whores, restrains their mockery, protects us from them, and in their own way they are part of our game too, listening without understanding as he says in English:
“What is left of our dream?” and White Rabbit, sighing beside me, pushes away all the cold arms and replies:
“The tragedy of the little tragedies. Tragedy without a tragic mask. Loss of illusion. Understanding at last what is really possible and what is not.”
“The testimony of the witness is accepted,” whispers Judge Morgana. A pillow is over her face. I think to myself, Christ, what a bitch of a judge. She carries her ceremonial wig in her crotch, well soaked now. They stand her on her head in the courtroom of Old Bailey and she pronounces sentence with a wriggle of her umbilicus and no one understands her. And there she is, when Rose Ass turns on the light again and everyone cries out and covers his mouth and the whores leap from the bed and crouch on the floor and seize handfuls of toilet paper and wipe between their legs, take alcohol and begin to rub each other’s backs and thighs: the old show has ended now, this is the new show, and there is Morgana our judge with her legs high, propped against the mahogany head of the bed. Rose Ass says quietly: “I don’t know. I still don’t know.”
White Rabbit is standing and Rose Ass reaches into the enormous pocket of her trench coat and takes out a lipstick. He begins to draw something on Morgana’s belly.
“The witness is impertinent.”
“No. ‘Avez-vous déjà giflé un mort?’ ‘Avez-vous déjà tué un juif?’”
He draws on her belly the head of Cyclops Cyclon-B, the eyeball belly button of a clown with Tyrolean mustaches.
“That was what I wanted to say…”
The Capitana of the house, disappointed because for her nothing happened during the darkness, hands the attorney for the defense his charro pants and he puts them on, draws them up over his buttocks, stuffs in his balls, while he talks: “Love is good even when it’s sad. We love most those who hurt us most, for we know at least we matter to them.”
“Words, words, sophistry,” Jakob growls. He pulls up his socks while White Rabbit moves among the whores, who are departing, who open the door, ask for towels, receive our clothing, now dry and ironed, and Elena is pushed out of the bed, for her the party is over and she must return to her duties, but White Rabbit closes the door, steps in front of her, takes her by the sloping shoulders and holds her, facing us, holding her by the hair, and says to her: “Why can’t they accept it? Why must they live with ghosts?” She puts a finger under Elena’s chin and lifts it. “Why don’t they prefer a living woman, despite the responsibilities she imposes, to the women of their imaginations?” Elena tries to smile. To close her eyes, to participate in this new show. “Is a flesh-and-body woman a chain around a man?” “A chain of flowers,” smiles Elena. White Rabbit Ligeia goes on, “Why do they give their love to creatures that are as unreal as dreams, the harems of their masturbation, the seraglios of their eunuch impotency?” All of us look at Elenita, short, crooked, dark. Like a good fighting cock, she raises her arms high and closes her eyes and begins to strut before us. She tries to dance. “Why don’t they prefer to love a woman, damn it, a woman who walks, sleeps, eats, pisses, menstruates?” But Elena’s dancing is that of a wooden doll or puppet. One two three, onetwothree, two small steps forward, one back, an ancient Indian ritual dance of beginnings, of terror placated. She is embarrassed as she shuffles before us in her buttoned sweater and her cotton stockings.
White Rabbit has been holding Elena up. Now she gives her a push and the towel girl sprawls on the floor. “Goddamn it, won’t anyone love me? Must I always be the repetition of some adolescent nightmare or the preview of some senile dream in order to have a man make love to me?” Elena lies on the floor softly squealing like a hurt small pig. The whores have gathered around their madam like chicks around the hen and the madam stares at White Rabbit first suspiciously and then with hatred while the whores cry, “Shut her up! Get her out! Call Gladiolo! They’re all of them crazy! The police will come! She’s gone out of her head! See what happens when you let women in!” White Rabbit speaks as if she doesn’t hear them: “What have you given me? Where are my children?” And it is sure there will be an earthquake when there are so many omens and White Rabbit goes slowly to the great bed and we all watch her, our backs against the walls; sure it will rain in Sayula as she lies down and all of us see the bed become a stage: the four-poster throne-bed of this house of many beds, an ancient vast bed such as you never see these days, of heavy solid mahogany, its head high and varnished, and sure rain is falling in Yucatan as Rose Ass tries to leap into the bed after her and Brother Thomas and Jakob grab and hold him and he cries to her: “No, you promised!”