So McGraw got out on the floor, swaying his hips and taking very short little steps all by himself, his button eyes ablaze with the trumpeting rumba that was playing, and he couldn’t keep from displaying his repertory of dreadful movements or from emitting sharp, ill-timed cries that were a mockery of the way Mexicans shout to urge someone on. Hank and Presley were watching him in amusement; they burst out laughing and young Sherry started laughing too, out of contagion and flirtation. The owner of the George Herald was dancing so obscenely that his crazed thrusts of the hip were getting in the way of some of the women on the dance floor; the bodyguard with high cheekbones who moved as if he were made of rubber shot him dead with a glance from his Indian eyes, but nothing stopped him. The other dancers did stop and stood aside, whether out of disgust or in order to get a better view of McGraw I don’t know: he was giving his trapper’s or bellhop’s cap such a vigorous shaking that I was afraid it would go sailing off and come to a bad end, forgetting that he wore it securely glued to his scalp. The problem was that he didn’t travel with his towel, and he must have considered it an indispensable element in his dance routine; consequently, as the pale-skinned fat man, in a moment of carelessness, flung his handkerchief up to aerate the atmosphere, McGraw filched it from him without so much as a glance and immediately flung it over his shoulders, holding it by the two ends, and rubbing it against himself, up and down, with the customary celerity that by then we had seen all too often. The fat man kept his limp hand extended during the moment following the loss, he didn’t pull it back right away as if he hadn’t given up on recovering his beloved green handkerchief — some kind of a fetish maybe. In fact, he tried to reach it from his seat when McGraw came his way in his increasingly indecorous dance. What finally made the fat man lose patience was a moment in McGraw’s sashayings when he both withheld the handkerchief and started voluptuously toweling it across his buttocks. The fat man stood up for a second — he was a very tall fat man, I saw — and angrily grabbed the handkerchief away from the dancing fool. But the dancer gave an agile spin and, before the fat man had resumed his seat, snatched the handkerchief back again with an imperious gesture, he was used to having his way and having his orders followed back in Tupelo or Tuscaloosa. It was a comical moment, but I wasn’t happy to see that Gilbert Romero and his crowd were not at all amused, because it really was funny, the fat man and the semi-fat man quarreling over the green silk at the edge of the dance floor. I was even less happy to see what happened next: the impatient expression on the stiff-haired fat man’s face changed to brutal cold rage, and he seized the handkerchief back from McGraw with a swipe of his big hand just at the moment the elastic bodyguard delivered a blow to the magnate’s kidneys which made him fall to his knees, his dance stopped dead. As if he were well-rehearsed at this sort of gesture — but how could he be? — the fat man’s next swift move was to twist the handkerchief around the kneeling McGraw’s neck and start pulling on the ends to strangle him right then and there. In a second the cloth lost all its glide and stretched thin and unbelievably taut, like a slender cord, and its green color disappeared, a cord that was tightening. The fat man pulled hard on the two ends, his complexion red as a steak and his expression heartless, like a man tying up a clumsy package hurriedly and mechanically. I thought he was killing McGraw on the spot, like a flash of lightning and without saying a word, in front of a hundred witnesses on the dance floor, which in an instant emptied out completely. I admit I didn’t know how to react, or maybe I felt fleetingly that at last we would be free of the small-town tycoon, and I did no more than think (or else the thought came later, but I attribute it to that moment): “He’s killing him, killing him, he is killing him, no one could have seen it coming, death can be as stupid and unexpected as they say, you walk into some dive without ever imagining that everything can end there in the most ridiculous way and in a second, one, two and three and four, and every second that passes without anyone intervening makes this irreversible death more certain, the death that is happening as we watch, a rich man from Chattanooga being killed by a fat man with a bad nature in Mexico City right before our eyes.”
Then I saw myself shouting something in Spanish out on the dance floor, all of us were there, Presley grabbing the lapels of the rubber man who twisted out of reach with a hard slap, Hank with the handkerchief in his hand, he had given the fat man a shove that sent him flying back to his seat and sent all the glasses on Roland’s table crashing. This crew wasn’t carrying knives, or not just knives, they were full-grown men, not peons but capatazes and landowners, and they carried pistols, I could see it in the way the other two thugs moved, one at the chest and the other on the hip, though Montalbán restrained them, opening out a horizontal hand as if to say, “Five.” Hank was the most excited, he always carried a pistol, too, though fortunately he hadn’t put his hand on it, a man with a gun gets more excited when he sees he may be using it. He wadded the handkerchief into a ball and threw it at the hotheaded fat man, saying in English, “Are you crazy or what? You could have killed him.” The silk floated in its journey.
“¿Qué ha dicho ese?” Romero asked me immediately, he had already realized I was the only member of the group who spoke the language.
“Que si está loco, ha podido matarlo,” I answered automatically. “No es para tanto,” I added on my own account. What was the big deal?
It was all coming to nothing, every second that went by now, every panting breath we all drew made the tension diminish, an altercation of no importance whatsoever, the music, the heat, the tequila, a foreigner who behaved like a spoiled brat, he was standing up now with Sherry’s help, coughing violently, he looked scared, unable to comprehend that anyone could possibly have harmed him. He was all right, either there hadn’t been time for much harm to be done or the fat man wasn’t as strong as he looked.
“La nena vieja se puso pesada con el amigo Julio y Julio se cansa pronto,” said Romero Ricardo. “Será mejor que se la lleven rápido. Váyanse todos, las copas están pagadas.”
“What did he say?” Presley asked me immediately. He had his own urgent need to understand, to know what was happening and what was being said, I saw him slipping into belligerence, the ghost of James Dean descended upon him and sent a shiver down my spine. His own movies were too bland to satisfy that ghost. Hank jerked his head toward the door.
“That we should get out of here fast. The drinks are on them.”
“And what else? He said something else.”
“He insulted Mr. McGraw, that’s all.”
Elvis Presley was a good friend to his friends, at least to his old friends, he had a sense of loyalty and a lot of pride and it had been many years since he had taken orders from anyone. It’s only a short step from melancholy to brawling. And there was his nostalgia for boxing.
“Insulted him. That guy insulted him. First they try to kill him, then they insult him. What did he say? Come on, what did he say? And who is he to tell us to get out of here anyway?”
“¿Qué ha dicho?” now it was Roland César’s turn to ask me. Their inability to understand each other was enraging them, a thing like that can really grate on your nerves in an argument.