Serenade (23 page)

I had to work fast, because all we had was a three-day layover. As soon as my first suit was ready, I put my fake papers in a briefcase and went over to Pan-American. I found all we would really need was a vaccination certificate for each of us. The rest was a matter of tourist papers that they furnished. I told them to make out the ticket and that I would have the certificates at the airport in the morning. I went over to American Express and bought travelers' checks, then went down to the boat and got her. I had her put on some New York clothes, and we went ashore. Then we went to a little hotel off the Prado. Conners wasn't there when we left, and I had to scribble a note to him, and call that a goodbye. It seemed a terrible thing to beat it without even shaking his hand, but I was afraid even to leave our hotel address with anyone on board, for fear some U.S. detective would show up and they would tip him off. So far, none of them on the ship knew us. He had run into a strike at Seattle in the winter, and cleared with an entirely new crew, even officers. He had carried us as Mr. and Mrs. Di Nola, and Mr. and Mrs. Di Nola just disappeared.

There was no hotel doctor, but they knew of one, and got him around, and he vaccinated us, and gave us our certificates. About six o'clock I went around to the tailor and got the rest of my suits. They were all right, and so were the shoes, shirts, and the rest of the stuff I had bought. The tropicals were double-breasted, with a kind of a Monte Carlo look, the pin-stripe had white piping on the vest and the gray had black velvet, the hats were fedoras, one green, the other black, with a Panama thrown in to go with the tropicals. The shoes were two-toned. On appearance, I was as Italian as Mussolini, and I was surprised to see I looked quite a lot like him. I got out my razor and gave the moustache an up-cut under each corner. That helped. It was two weeks out now, and plenty black, with some gray in it. Those gray hairs startled me. I hadn't known they were there.

In the morning we went to the airport, showed the certificates, and were passed through. The way the trip broke, we could make better time by going through to Vera Cruz, and then turning south, than by making the change at Merida. There had been some switch on planes, and that would save us a day. I didn't want to spend one more hour in Mexico than I had to, so I said that suited me. Where we were going I had no idea, except that we were going a long way from Havana, but where we were booked for was Guatemala. That seemed to be a kind of a terminus, and to go on from there we would have to have more papers than they could furnish us with at Havana. She got sick as a dog as soon as we took off, and I, and the steward, and the pilots thought it was airsickness. But when it still kept up, after we got to the hotel in Vera Cruz, I knew it was the vaccination. She was all right, though, the next day, and kept looking down at the country we were going over. We had the Gulf of Mexico under us for a little while after we hauled out of Vera Cruz, and then as we were working down toward Tapachula we were over the Pacific. She had to have all that explained to her. She had never got the oceans quite straight, and how we could leave one, and then pick up another almost before we had time to look at the pictures in the magazines, had to be blue-printed for her, with drawings. To her, I think all countries were square, like a bean patch with lines of maguey around it, and it was hard for her to get through her head how any country, and especially Mexico, could be wide at the top and narrow at the bottom.

At Guatemala, we marched from the plane into the pavilion with a loud speaker blaring the Merry Widow waltz, a barefoot Indian girl gave us coffee, and then after a while an American in a flyer's uniform came and explained to me, in some kind of broken Italian, what I would have to do to go on down the line, if that was what I expected to do. I thanked him, we got our luggage, and went to the Palace Hotel. Then I got to thinking:

Why are we going down the line? Why is Chile any better than Guatemala? Our big danger comes every time we fool with papers, and if we're all right so far, why not let well enough alone, and dig in? We couldn't stay on at the hotel, because it was full of Americans, Germans, English and all kinds of people, and sooner or later one of them would know me. But we might rent a place. I sent her down to the desk to ask how we went about it, and when we found out we didn't have to sign any police forms, we went out and got a house. It was a furnished house, just around the block from the hotel, and the gloomiest dump I ever laid eyes on, with walnut chairs, and horse-hair sofas, and sea shells, and coconut shells carved into skulls, and everything else you could think of. But there was a bathroom in it, and it didn't look like we would find one any better. The lady that owned it was Mrs. Gonzalez, and she wanted it understood that she didn't really have to rent the house, that she came of an old coffee family, that she preferred to live out of town, at the lake, on account of her health. We said we understood that perfectly, and closed at a hundred and fifty quetzals a month. A quetzal exchanges even with a dollar.

So in a couple of days we moved in. I found a Japanese couple that didn't speak any English, Italian, or Spanish, and we had to wigwag, but there was no chance of their finding out too much. I was practicing Spanish morning, noon and night, so she and I would be able to talk in front of other people without using English, and I tried to speak it with an Italian accent, but I still wasn't sure I was getting away with it. With the Japs, though, it was safe around the house.

So then we breathed a little easier, and began to shake down into a routine. Daytime we'd lay around, mostly upstairs, in our bedroom. At night we'd walk down to the park and listen to the band. But we'd always sit well away from it, on a lonely bench. Then we'd come back, flit the mosquitoes, and go to bed. There was nothing else to do, even if we had thought it was safe to do it. Guatemala is the Japan of Central America. They've copied everything. They've got Mexican music, American movies, Scotch whisky, German delicatessens, Roman religion, and everything else imported you can think of. But they forgot to put anything of their own in, and what comes out is a place you could hardly tell from Glendale, California, on a bet. It's clean, modern, prosperous, and dull. And the weather gives you plenty of chance to find out how dull it really is. We hit there in June, at the height of the rainy season. It's not supposed to rain in Central America, by the books, but that's wrong. It rains plenty, a cold, gray rain that sometimes keeps up for two days at a time. Then when the sun comes out it's so sticky hot you can hardly breathe, and the mosquitoes start up. The air gets you down almost as bad as it does in Mexico. Guatemala City is nearly a mile up in the air, and at night that feeling of suffocation comes over you, so you think you'll die if you don't get something in your lungs you can breathe.

Little by little, a change came over her. Mind you, from the time we left New York we hadn't said one word about Winston, or what she did, or whether it was right or wrong, or anything about it. That was done, and we steered around it. We talked about the Japs, the mosquitoes, where Conners was by now, things like that, and so long as we jumped at every noise, we seemed to be nearer than we ever had been. But after that eased off, and we began to kid ourselves we were safe, she began moping to herself, and now and then I'd catch her looking at me. Then I noticed that another thing we never talked about was my singing. And then one night, just as we started downstairs to go out in the park, just mechanically I did a little turn, and in another second would have cut loose a high one. I saw this look of horror on her face, and choked it off. She listened, to see if the Japs had caught it. They seemed to be in the kitchen, so we went down. Then it came to me, the spot I was in. On the way down I hadn't even thought about singing. But here, and any other place south of the Rio Grande, for that matter, my voice was just as familiar as bananas. My picture, in the lumberjack suit, was still plastered all over the Panamier show windows, Pablo Bunan had played the town not a month before, even the kids were whistling My Pal Babe. Unless I was going to send her to the chair, I couldn't ever sing again.

I tried not to think about it, and so long as I could read, or do something to get my mind off it, I wouldn't. But you can't read all the time, and in the afternoon I'd get to wishing she'd wake up from her siesta, so we could talk, or practice Spanish, and I could shake it off. Then I began to get this ache across the bridge of my nose. You see, it wasn't that I was thinking about the fine music I couldn't sing any more, or the muted song that was lost to the world, or anything like that. It was simpler than that, and worse. A voice is a physical thing, and if you've got one, it's like any other physical thing. It's in you, and it's got to come out. The only thing I can compare it with is when you haven't been with a woman for a long time, and you get so you think if you don't find one soon, you'll go insane. The bridge of the nose is where your voice focuses, where you get that little pull when you cut loose, and that was where I began to feel it. I'd talk, and read, and eat, and try to forget it, and it would go away, but then it would come back.

Then I began to have these dreams. I'd be up there, and they'd be playing my cue, and it would be time for me to come in, and I'd open my mouth, and nothing would come out of it. I'd be dying to sing, and couldn't. A murmur would go over the house, he'd rap the orchestra to attention, look at me, and start the cue again. Then I'd wake up. Then one night, just after she had gone over to her bed, something happened so we did talk about it. In Central America, they've got radios all over the place, and there were three in the block back of us, and one of them had been setting me nuts all day. It was getting London, and they don't have any of that advertising hooey over there. The whole Barber of Seville had come over in the afternoon, with only a couple of small cuts, and at night they had played the Third, Fifth, and Seventh Beethoven symphonies. Then, around ten o'clock, a guy began to sing the serenade from Don Giovanni, the same thing I had sung for Conners at Acapulco, the same thing I had sung the night I came in big at the Metropolitan. He was pretty good. Then, at the end, he did the same
messa di voce
that I had done. I kind of laughed, in the dark. "...Well, he's heard me sing it."

She didn't say anything, and then I felt she was crying. I went over there. "What's the matter?"

"Hoaney, Hoaney, you leave me now. You go. We say goodbye."

"Well--what's the big idea?"

"You no know who that was? Who sing? Just now?"

"No. Why?"

"That was you."

She turned away from me then, and began to shake from her sobs, and I knew I had been listening to one of my own phonograph records, put on the air after the main program was over. "...Well? What of it?"

But I must have sounded a little sick. She got up, snapped on the light, and began walking around the room. She was stark naked, the way she generally slept on hot nights, but she was no sculptor's model now. She looked like an old woman, with her shoulders slumped down, her feet sliding along in a flat-footed Indian walk, her eyes set dead ahead, like two marbles, and her hair hanging straight over her face. When the sobs died off a little, she pulled out a bureau drawer, got out a gray
rebozo,
and pulled that over her shoulders. Then she started shuffling around again. If she had had a donkey beside her, it would have been any hag, from Mexicali to Tapachula. Then she began to talk "...So. Now you go? Now we say
adiós."

"What the hell are you talking about? You think I'm going to walk out on you now?"

"I kill these man, yes. For what he do to you, for what he do to me, I have to kill him. I know these thing at once, that night, when I hear of the
inmigración,
that I have to kill him. I ask you? No. Then what I do? Yes? What I do!"

"Listen, for Christ's sake--"

"What I do? You tell me, what I do?"

"Goddam if I know. Laughed at him, for one thing."

"I say goodbye. Yes, I come to you, say remember Juana, kiss you one time,
adiós.
Yes, I kill him, but then is goodbye. I know. I say so. You remember?"

"I don't know. Will you cut it out, and--"

"Then you come to boat. I am weak. I love you much. But what I do then? What I say?"

"Goodbye, I suppose. Is that all you know to say?"

"Yes. Once more I say goodbye. The
capitán,
he know too, he tell you go. You no go. You come. Once more, I love you much, I am glad...Now, once more. Three times, I tell you go. It is the end. I tell you,
goodbye."

She didn't look at me. She was shooting it at me with her eyes staring straight again, and her feet carrying her back and forth with that sliding, shuffling walk. I opened my mouth two or three times to stall some more, but couldn't, looking at her. "Well, what are you going to do? Will you tell me that? Do you know?"

"Yes. You go. You give me money, not much, but little bit. Then I work, get little job, maybe kitchen
muchacha,
nobody know me, look like all other
muchacha,
I get job, easy. Then I go to priest, confess my
pecado
--"

"That's what I've been waiting for. I knew that was coming. Now let me tell you something. You confess that
pecado,
and right there is where you lose."

"I no lose. I give money to church, they no turn me in. Then I have peace. Then some time I go back to Mexico."

"And what about me?"

"You go. You sing. You sing for radio. I hear. I remember. You remember. Maybe. Remember little dumb
muchacha
--"

"Listen, little dumb
muchacha,
that's all swell, except for one thing. When we hooked up, we hooked up for good, and--"

"Why you talk so? It is the end! Can you no see these thing? It is the end! You no go, what then? They take me back. Me only, they never find. You, yes. They take me back, and what they do to me? In Mexico, maybe nothing, unless he was
político.
In New York, I know, you know. The
soldados
come, they put the
pańuelo
over the eyes, they take me to wall, they shoot. Why you do these things to me? You love me, yes.
But it is the end!"