#rayeula

“Don’t be like that,” Gregorovius said humbly.  “All I wanted was to understand your life a little better, what you are, how you happen to have so many facets.”

“My life,” said La Maga.  “Even if I were drunk I wouldn’t tell you about it.  And you won’t understand me any better after hearing about my childhood.  Besides, I didn’t have any childhood.”

“I didn’t either.  In Herzegovina.”

“Mine in Montevideo.  I’ll tell you one thing.  Sometimes I dream about grammar school, it’s so horrible I wake up screaming.  And age fifteen, I don’t know if you were ever fifteen years old.”

“I think so,” Gregorovius said uncertainly.

“I was; in a house with a courtyard and flowerpots where my father used to drink mate and read dirty magazines.  Does your father ever come back to you?  His ghost I mean?”

“No, actually my mother is more apt to,” Gregorovius said.  “Especially the Glasgow one.  My Glasgow mother comes back sometimes, but she’s not a ghost, just a memory that’s a little too wet, that’s all.  She goes away with an Alka-Seltzer, it’s easy.  But you . . . ?”

“How should I know,” La Maga said impatiently.  “It’s that music, those green candles, Horacio over there in the corner, like an Indian.  Why must I tell how he comes back?  But a few nights ago I was at home waiting for Horacio, I was sitting near the bed and outside it was raining a little, the way it does on that record.  Yes, it was something like that, I was looking at the bed and waiting for Horacio, I don’t remember how the bed was made, and suddenly I saw my father lying with his back towards me and covering his face as he always did when he was drunk and beginning to fall asleep.  I saw his legs and could make out his hand on his chest.  I felt my hair stand on end, I wanted to scream, everything you feel at times like that, you must have been afraid sometime . . . I wanted to run away, the door was so far off, at the other end of the hallway and more hallways, the door was farther and farther away and I could see the pink bedspread going up and down, I could hear my father snoring, in a moment I would see a hand, then eyes, then his hooked nose, no, I shouldn’t be telling you all this, finally I screamed so loud that the woman upstairs came down and made me some tea, and later on Horacio said I was hysterical.”

Gregorovius stroked her hair and La Maga lowered her head.  “Here it comes,” Oliveira [Horacio] was thinking, and he stopped following Dizzy Gillespie’s tricks as he swung on the high trapeze without benefit of net, “here it comes, it was bound to.  He’s crazy about this girl and that’s his way of showing it, with his ten fingers.  The same game over and over.  We keep falling into worn-out molds, learning every trite role there is like idiots.  But just as if I were stroking her hair while she told me sagas of the Rio de la Plata, we feel sorry for her and we have to take her home, all of us a little tight, and put her to bed, petting her gently as we take off her clothes, slowly, button by button, every zipper, and she does want to, wants to, doesn’t want to, straightens up, covers her face, cries, hugs us as if suggesting something sublime, wiggles out of her slip, kicks off a shoe with a gesture that connotes protest and gets us as excited as we ever can get, how base, how base.  I’m going to have to bust you in the face, Ossip Gregorovius my poor friend.  No desire, no pity, exactly what Dizzy is blowing, without pity, without desire, just as absolutely without pity as what Dizzy is blowing.”

“What a damned drag,” Oliveira said.  “Take that crap off the machine.  I’m not coming to the Club any more if I have to listen to that clown.”

“That gentleman doesn’t like bop,” Ronald said sarcastically.  “Wait a minute, I’ll put on something by Paul Whiteman for you.”

“Let’s compromise,” Etienne said.  “Common consent, sweet Ronald: let’s hear Bessie Smith, the dove in a cage of bronze.” 

Ronald and Babs began to laugh for some obscure reason and Ronald looked through the pile of old records.  The needle made a terrible scratch, something began to move down deeper as if there were a layers and layers of cotton between voice and ears, Bessie singing with a bandaged face, stuck in a hamper of soiled clothes, and her voice got more and more muffled, it came out stuck to rags and proclaimed with neither anger nor plea, “I wanna be somebody’s baby doll,” it fell back to wait, a street-corner voice, one from a houseful of grannies, “to be somebody’s baby doll,” hotter and more yearning, panting now “I wanna be somebody’s baby doll . . .”

Oliveira burned his mouth with a long drink of vodka, put his arm around Bab’s shoulders, and rested against her comfortable body.  “The intercessors,” he thought, sinking softly into the tobacco smoke.  Bessie’s voice thinned out towards the end of the side, and now Ronald was flipping the Bakelite disk (if it was Bakelite) and from this piece of worn-out material the Empty Bed Blues would be born again, a night in the twenties in some corner of the United States.  Ronald had closed his eyes, his hands on his knees, faintly keeping time.  Wong and Etienne also had their eyes shut, the room was almost dark and the needle scratched on the old record; it was hard for Oliveira to believe that all of this was taking place.  Why there, why the Club, those stupid rites, why did those blues come out like that when Bessie sang them?  “The intercessors,” he thought once more, snuggling up to Babs who was completely drunk and was crying quietly as she listened to Bessie, trembling in time to the rhythm or counterpoint, weeping inside so as not to get far away from the blues about an empty bed, tomorrow morning, shoes in puddles, unpaid rent, fear of old age, the ashen image of dawn in the mirror at the foot of the bed, the blues, life’s infinite cafard.  “The intercessors, one reality showing us another, like painted saints pointing to Heaven.  This cannot exist, we cannot really be here, I cannot be someone whose name is Horacio.  That ghost there, that voice of a Negro woman killed in an automobile accident twenty years ago: links in a nonexistent chain, how do we support ourselves here, how can we be meeting tonight if it is not a mere play of illusions, of rules that are accepted and agreed upon, a deck of cards in the hands of an inconceivable dealer . . .”

“Don’t cry,” Oliveira whispered to Babs.  “Don’t cry, Babs, none of this is true.”

“Oh yes, oh yes it is true,” Babs said, blowing her nose.  “It is true.”

“It could be true,” said Oliveira, kissing her on the cheek, “but it isn’t.”

“Like those shadows,” Babs said, snuffling and swallowing the mucus and moving her hand from side to side.  “And it makes you sad, Horacio, because everything is so beautiful.”