Boston Boy seats himself on the floor next to the manikin. He throws several coppers down beside it. He sucks on his joint of marijuana and exhales a thick mouthful of smoke above the holy little infant. I stare at him with surprise. Son of a bitch, you can never be sure of anything with these Monks. Now he wraps the doll in toilet paper and hands it to Elena, who has been watching, waiting, crouching and hoping with an old desire that she has never forgotten. She accepts the small bundle. She holds it to her breasts and begins to croon to it. She looks at us with pride, with hauteur. And you, Dragoness, standing now and feeling only curiosity, ask: “So you saved it, Elena?”
Elena the towel girl does not understand but smiles and goes on crooning.
“Protect it. Hide it. Don’t let them chop off its head. Don’t let them throw it out with the trash. Don’t let them put it into their death ovens. Hold tight to your lost child.”
“The statistics on those ovens are grossly exaggerated,” says Boston Boy Franz.
“If there had been only one child alone, that would have been too many.” Your voice is cold, Dragoness. You spread your arms.
Now both Judge Morgana and Elena the towel girl know what they must do. Elena covers the doll and holds it between her breasts as she hurries to fetch White Rabbit’s clothing. Morgana goes to the trench coat and searches through its voluminous pockets for tubes and bottles of beauty creams and lotions. You stand rigid, White Rabbit Ligeia, like a statue, white-skinned Ligeia who, thanks to the debility of your will, still belongs neither to the angels nor to the damned; you wait, pale Mother Mary of the temple and the brothels, and allow Elena the forgotten forgetful one to put your stockings on you, to stroke her hands of burned stone the long smooth length of your legs.
“Don’t let them force you into a taxi in the middle of the night, Elena. Don’t let them take you to the factories where angels are made, don’t let them abandon you in the black palace of Herod. Watch over what you yourself carry hidden. Watch over it, little Elena with your body of a grape, don’t let them scratch it out of you, don’t let them make it disappear, don’t let them make it become invisible. Your child may be the last child ever to be born in all the world, Elena.”
Morgana, fraud as a judge, as a maid not much better, with both hands dabs an astringent fluid pat pat pat on White Rabbit’s face. Yes, you must use your beauty, enjoy and display it, my Pepsicoatl. And you, our patient looker-on, our observer who has followed us on our twisted journey through this long night and will, I trust, continue with us until dawn breaks, you, my kind, my generous, my all-necessary reader, are you aware that the women of the great United States of America spend more each year on cosmetics than the entire national income of the Estados Unidos de … México? Elena snaps the yellow garters around your thighs, Dragoness White Rabbit, and Morgana anoints your slender neck with lotion. And your eyes are accusing, damning fingers as you look from Boston Boy to Rose Ass and say bitterly:
“Where are my children, damn you? And do you think that you’ve won now, simply because my children are dead? Do you think I’m all alone now, that my life ended with the lives of my babies? Shit! You’re fools. You think it’s so easy to destroy a woman’s life. But the life of a woman doesn’t let itself be destroyed except by the woman herself, and she must act from her marrow, her core. You outside her can’t touch it. Haven’t you seen them, imbeciles? Haven’t you seen them this very night, selling pop in that little store, playing hopscotch in the dirt? Won’t you see them again tomorrow, silent, half naked, rolling around in the dust beside the highways and the rice fields, on the land where battles are fought? They’re the life of a woman, you idiots. Of all women.”
Morgana’s fingers work upon the blank white lime-washed skin and form a new face. Elena is fastening the garter belt with two copper hooks. Morgana offers lipsticks: flamenco pink, icy coral, skeletal smoke, lunatic livid. White Rabbit chooses a subdued red.
“You’ve been able to exhaust and destroy my sensations, to tire my touch, to offend my smell. But that was all. No more. Not my life. And today my senses hate and condemn you and my hatred is a long patient waiting that is far from its end. And just as long-lived as my hatred will be the love that sustains my hatred.”
She caresses your cheeks, Dragoness. She prepares your lips. Elena offers you your panties with their copper-colored lace and you lift one leg and then the other, crying, “Becky, Becky, wait for me! I’m coming back now! I’ll believe everything you taught me, even if it costs me the sanity it cost you. I’m coming back, Becky, Mamma. We’ll settle our accounts with these damn men once and for all.”
Morgana is finishing. The last touches: eyebrows, eyelids, the lips again. And now we know this woman who formerly was faceless. She raises her naked arms and fastens her hair at the back of her neck with a copper-rusted ribbon. Her naked arms, bronzed from the sun, then the tossing movement with both hands. That is how we always see her, her arms raised while she ties up her hair with a ribbon. Sometimes in profile, sometimes from behind, sometimes in front as if she were a turning statue with a windblown blue curtain for her grape-leaf garment. From in front, in profile, from behind, as Morgana slowly turns her, makes her drop her hands. We inspect Morgana’s work. Kneeling, Elena looks on. “Yes, Becky,” the woman with the new face says quietly, “the God of Israel exists and lives, though far from us. He is not merely one more fantasy created by these mock men who love women as if they were dreams and dreams as if they were women, who murder innocent childen with abortions before birth and gas chambers after birth. No, Becky. God is real.” She is a beautiful Jewess. A beautiful dark-skinned Jewess whose beaded sweat we can see on her temples, in her armpits, on her upper lip, at the division of her breasts. A dark-haired Jewess of black prolonged orgasms. The discovery of America. Land-ho. Bullshit. “I’ll come home, Becky. I’ll make one more voyage and come home.” Elena covers her with the damp trench coat and her arms drop.
“Elenita,” says the Capitana, “peel me a grape.”
“When are you going to tell me the story of that monster of a bed, Capitana?”
“Get them out of here, caifán. With a little order and dignity, please. Who’s paying, you? Gladiolo, make out his check and wait downstairs. When you go out, caifán, try not to attract the attention of every cop in the colonia. We have a little protection, but not very much. And God knows what would happen if anyone was to find out about this witches’ Sabbath you and your … The dough, caifán, let’s have the dough. That old bed? Bah, it came in handy, didn’t it? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“But you’ve been here for years, Capitana. I know you know about it.”
“Years, caifán, you said it. Long years and a few happy days.”
“I believe you were here when the house first opened.”
“Yeah. And I remember you, too. You were just a squirt kid who used to come in to have his horn sharpened every now and then. I remember, all right.”
“Be careful with the step, Capitana.”
“Always the gentleman, caifán. Thank you, I appreciate it. Look, please don’t bring these werewolves of yours back again. It’s indecent to have that many in one bed at the same time. The prestige of the house suffers.”