But it wasn’t just the queer, naive provincialism of the natives that kept most of the Latin Americans away from those Good Neighbor Policy, International Evening, and Hands Across the Panama Canal galas. Much of the nasty secret lay in the naïveté itself. They were — the Latinos — not only a proud people but a stylish, almost gaudy one. The high heels of the women, the wide, double-breasted, custom suits of the men, lent them a sexy, perky, tango air; sent unmixed signals of something like risk and danger that sailed right over the Jews’ heads.
So not very many South Americans ever actually saw the “Hispanic” motifs set up in the game rooms by the Committee on Decorations on these poorly attended, floating occasions that traveled from Building One to Building Six, completing on a maybe semiannual or triquarterly basis a circuit of the six buildings every two or three years, depending. The transmuted, phantasmagorical visions, themes, and dreamscapes of a South America that never was mounted on the tarted-up walls of the game rooms in brightly colored crepe- and construction-paper cutouts of bullfights, sombreros, mariachi street bands, and, here and there, rough approximations of piñatas suspended from the ceiling like a kind of straw fruit. All this brought back and made known to the vast majority that had declined to see these wonders for themselves.
“I tell you,” Hector Camerando told Jaime Guttierez, “these people get their idea of what anything south of Texas looks like out of bad movies. It’s all cantinas and old Mexico to them, sleeping peasants sprawled out under the shade of their hats.”
“Ay, ¡caramba!” Jaime said flatly.
“There’s no stopping them,” Hector reported to Guttierez the following year. “You should have seen it, Jaime. The door prize was a lamp that grew out of the back of a burro. Come with me next time.”
“I don’ need no stinkin’ door prize.”
But one time, when the gala was hosted by Building Two, Camerando’s building, several of the resident Latinos in the Towers complex — Carlos and Rita Olvero, Enrique Frache, Oliver Gutterman, Ricardo Llossas, Elaine Munez, along with Carmen and Tommy Auveristas, Vittorio Cervantes, and Jaime Guttierez himself — their curiosity having been piqued by Hector Camerando’s almost Marco Polo-like accounts of these evenings, joined Hector to see for themselves what these galas were all about.
When Guttierez arrived in the game room a handful of his compatriots were already there. He picked up his paper plate, napkin, plastic utensils, and buffet supper and struck out to find where Hector Camerando was sitting. Hector, a veteran of these affairs, spotted him and rose in place at his table to signal his location, but just as Jaime saw him he was stopped by a woman who put her hand on his arm, jiggling the plates he carried and almost causing him to spill them to the floor. She invited him to join her party.
“I see my friend,” Jaime Guttierez said.
“So,” she said, “if you see your friend he’s your friend and you already know him so you don’t have to sit with him. Here. Sit by us.”
She was actually taking the plates and setup out of his hands and arranging them on the table.
“You look familiar to me. Are you from Building One? They’ll come and pour, you don’t have to get coffee. Dorothy, you know this man, don’t you? I think he’s from Building One.”
“Three,” Guttierez said.
“A very nice building. Three is a very nice building.”
“Aren’t they all the same?”
“Yes, but Three is as nice as any of them. You get a nice view from Three.”
“I’m just looking around,” Guttierez said. “The decorations. Who makes them?”
“Oh, thank you,” said the woman, “thank you very much. I’ll tell my friends on the Decorations Committee. They’ll be so pleased. This is just another example of your maintenance dollars at work.”
The woman’s name was Rose Blitzer. She was originally from Baltimore and had moved south in 1974 with her husband, Max. Rose and Max had a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, full kitchen, living/dining-room area with a screened-in California room. Max had been the manager of Baltimore’s largest hardware store and had a guaranteed three-quarters point participation in net profits before his stroke in 1971 from which, thank God, he was now fully recovered except for a wide grin that was permanently fixed into his face like a brand.
“People don’t take me seriously,” Max said. “Even when I shout and call them names.”
Giving brief, lightning summaries of their situations and accomplishments, she introduced Guttierez to the others at the table. It was astonishing to Jaime how much information the woman managed to convey about the people and even the various political factions in the Towers. Within minutes, for example, he learned about the rift between Building One (not, despite its name, the first to go up but only the first where ground had been broken) and Building Five (which enjoyed certain easements in One’s parking garage). He was given to understand, though he didn’t, that Building Number Two was “a sleeping giant.” She sketched an overview of the general health of some of the people at their own and nearby tables.
Jaime clucked his tongue sympathetically. “No, you don’t understand,” Mrs. Blitzer said. “Those people are survivors. What do they say these days? ‘They paid their dues.’ They came through their procedures and chemotherapies; they spit in their doctors’ eyes who gave them only months to live. They laughed up their sleeves.”
And she even filled him in on who had the big money. “The little guy over there? He could buy and sell all of us, can’t he, Max?”
“I don’t dare go to funerals, they think I’m laughing,” Max said.
A woman in an apron came by. She held out two pots of coffee — decaf and regular.
“You forgot sugar,” one of the women at the table said.
“Ida, she’s got her hands full. Don’t bother her, take Sweet ’n Low. Look, there’s Equal.”
“I can’t digest sugar substitutes without a nondairy creamer.”
“Really?” another woman said. “I never heard such a thing. Have you, Burt?”
“Nothing surprises me anymore. It’s all equally fantastic.”
“How about you, Mr. Guttierez? She wants to know if you want some coffee.”
“I better get back to my friend,” Jaime said. “He expected me to sit with him.”
“Oh, he’s very good looking,” Rose Blitzer said.
“He has a nice smile,” said Max.
“She thinks you’re good looking,” Guttierez told Hector Camerando.
“Olé.”
They were gentlemen. They were from South America. They lived according to a strict code of honor. It would never have occurred to the one to question the word of the other.
So despite the commanding two- or three-gala advantage Hector Camerando held over Jaime Guttierez, the gentleman from Building Three, armed with the bits of information Rose Blitzer had provided him, ate the gentleman of the host building alive that evening in a fast game of human poker.
Hector drew first. He picked Max Blitzer.
“Stroke,” Jaime said.
“Stroke? Really? He seems so animated.”
“The Gioconda smile is a residual.”
Jaime picked the woman pouring coffee.
“I check,” Guttierez said, and picked Ida.
“Something with her stomach,” Jaime said. “She can’t digest Equal unless she has Coffee-Mate.”
Guttierez picked Burt.
Jaime checked and picked the guy who was supposed to have the big money.
“Check,” Hector said.
Though he had to check when Camerando picked Dorothy, Jaime took the next few hands easily (a brain tumor, liver transplant, two radicals, and a lumpectomy) and was up five hundred dollars when Hector, laughing, said that Guttierez was murdering him and threw in the towel. Jaime declined to take his friend’s money but Hector insisted. Then he offered to return it but Camerando congratulated him on his game and said he hoped he was at least as much a man of honor as Guttierez. There was nothing to do but pocket the five hundred dollars as graciously as he could. “You really had me on that, Dorothy. I thought the tide was about to turn,” Jaime Guttierez said.