The Cotton-Pickers (16 page)

The girls in the Golden Section were visited by men to whom dollars and pesos were as nothing, such as the oilmen who had lived in the bush for six or eight months where they couldn’t spend money, and who came with thousands of dollars burning holes in their pockets. Perhaps they would start out intending to spend no more than twenty, yet might end up next morning begging a peso to get back to the hotel by second-class bus. Then there were those American tourists who came to the country for no other pleasure but just this one, and of course overpaid for every service. There were also the speculators who sold shares of oil stock, gold or silver mines to greenhorns, shares in phantom wells in areas where no oil would be found unless the poor investor carried a can of it to the place. These men, loaded with cash so easily acquired, went from house to house and girl to girl with inexhaustible vitality. Mind you, they went to the mistresses of the art, those highly experienced females who could have made a lively fountain spurt from the driest tree trunk.

The houses of the quarter were mainly of wood and they all looked alike, lined up side by side like Baltimore row houses. They were with few exceptions one-room affairs; the room had only one door which opened directly onto the street, and each room had one barred window which was unglazed but in some cases covered with mosquito netting. The one door was both for security and non-secretive access; there was no alley-entrance business and no slipping out the back way.

Thus, the girls sat in plain view at their open doors, or they stood about, alone or in small groups, chattering and laughing; if they had troubles, they kept them to themselves.

Many of the girls made a practice of sitting at their doors crocheting fine lace or embroidering dainty handkerchiefs. It was a maneuver that never failed. It reminded men who were perhaps having to spend long stretches of time in a foreign country or who had been at sea, in the jungle, the oil field, or the bush for weeks or months on end of the cozy domesticity of their homes.

A man couldn’t pass a door without being greeted by a girl, who invited him with the sweetest of words and gestures to step in and have a good time. Often the invitation was accompanied by such daring promises that the most iron resistance and most holy vow might be overthrown on the spot. Once you had passed by her door, however, the girl would immediately desist, for you would be on her neighbor’s territory where only she had a right to make inviting promises.

There was only one way to pass by these girls easily: “No money,” and you were free to pass, assuming that the girl believed you. In most cases she didn’t, but would playfully proceed to reach into your pockets, never actually lifting as much as a quinto.

The señoritas demonstrated their diplomacy in refraining from coaxing the local, respectable citizens who had to pass through the quarter on their way home. Most of them chose their clients according to their own tastes and by no means accosted every man who passed their door. A man might pause at a door, intent on getting on with a particular girl, but no amount of money or high bidding could win her over if for some reason the gentleman was not to her liking. Some señoritas refused to welcome a Chinese, others a Negro, and some wouldn’t accept an Indian. Yet, as in all businesses, if trade was bad the girls might bring themselves to smile at someone whom three days previously they would have indignantly turned away.

The señoritas gave full value for the money. Yet these mistresses lacked what has been called the love of the adored woman. Time is money, and at the quarter you would search in vain for sweet trifling, for tender playfulness, for hours of desire and groping toward fulfillment. They had high art, yes; what you didn’t get from them was the sweet longing for the lover.

Thus, the girls merely confirmed the priceless value of the loved and loving woman. They knew this, too, and made no attempt to deny it; they sold only and precisely what the gentlemen bargained for. They were artists and good businesswomen; they knew how  to attract their clientele and how to keep the business going.

17

“Oh, now, there you are, Antonio,” I greeted him. “I’ve been looking for you all around the quarter. I thought you must have gone home.”

“No, I wasn’t thinking of going home yet, Gales. Let’s go to the Salon Pacifico and try our luck.”

The Pacifico had a broad main room decorated in gold. Along one side were a number of recesses, each with a table surrounded on three sides by a comfortably padded bench; the back wall had a similar settee along its entire length. Opposite the recesses was a bar with high stools, and on a platform in the corner was the dance band. The walls were decorated with life-size paintings of nude women. These handsome women needed no fig leaves to remind you that they had something to hide. In this country it would be laughable to try to persuade men and women or even children that the human body sprouted fig leaves.

The girls were sitting on the long settee waiting for dancing partners, while the men sat at the bar or in the recesses. Two or three men had girls with them and were conversing with great decorum and with as much animation as if they were in a ballroom of New York’s upper set. But they were enjoying themselves more because they could, if they so wished, say what was in their hearts, whereas in the upper set such talk might lead others to suspect that you didn’t know the niceties of the language.

A one-step dance piece was blaring from the platform, but the men were slow to react; they seemed embarrassed and shy, and if the girls hadn’t given them such friendly and encouraging smiles they never would have brought themselves to dance. They tried to conceal their shyness by sitting at the bar and drinking and drinking, drinking more than they really wanted. It was their way of showing their manliness, for they lacked the courage to show it in any other way. They went on drinking so as to be able to stay in the Pacifico near the girls whose smiles they loved and whose pretty faces they were delighted to see. But despite the smiles of the girls, the men held back and obliged the girls to dance with each other. Finally, a few men plucked up courage and asked a señorita for a dance. Then others began to unbend a little.

After a dance, the men as a rule escorted their partners back to their seats while they themselves went to the bar or to a seat in the recesses; but now and again a gentleman might invite one or two — if he didn’t feel confident, three or four — girls to share his table and drink a bottle of beer or take a shot of something stronger.

“What will you have to drink, señorita?”

“A whiskey and soda for me.”

“I’ll have a cognac.”

“For me, a bacardi.”

“I’ll have a bottle of beer.”

“I’d like a pack of cigarettes.”

They never ordered champagne or expensive wines on such easy invitation, but if a man happened to be there who felt like showing off or was bent on getting through four months’ wages in one night, he would order champagne and goodness knows what else and issue the invitation, “It’s on me, señoritas!” Twenty or more of them might then join in the spree, and things would warm up. On such occasions nothing was forbidden and there was no closing time.

The proprietor had his legal license, all stamped and hung up in plain sight, to manage his business so that it did not run at a loss. To avoid misunderstanding, he had signs hung up, such as “All Drinks One Peso.” There was no need for police regulation, in price or anything else. The customers and proprietors regulated things between themselves by the free play of supply and demand, through free competition, and the absence of conditions imposed by over-restrictive licenses. If too many bars opened there was no need for the authorities to intervene; the ones that were superfluous went broke of their own accord. Only the ones that gave good value for their money survived.

Antonio and I had taken a table when we came in. We ordered beer. Then we danced with two girls and invited them to sit with us; they ordered whiskey. We didn’t quite know what to say to them, and I felt sorry for them while they were making every effort to get a conversation going. I was glad when another dance started; we could make more progress with our feet than with our tongues.

For the sake of talking, we asked them all sorts of silly questions. Did they have to see their health doctors every week or every two weeks? Did those who didn’t dance in the cafés have to pay more rent for their apartments than the dancers? What were their earnings?

They must have thought us very green to be asking such silly questions, when we might have been talking about more interesting things. But their amiable manner didn’t desert them; it couldn’t, for they couldn’t allow themselves the luxury of moods and pouts, which would be bad for their business.

“Will you have another of the same to drink, señorita?” I asked the girl with whom I had danced. “Thank you, señor, that will be fine.” “Then I’ll order,” I said.

There she sat, and after a few sips of the drink I had ordered, the girl started a conversation.

“I’m from Charlottenburg,” began Jeannette. “Oh, I thought you were a Parisienne,” said I.

She was flattered. The genuine French girls, she said, called her “Boche” when they were having one of their frequent rows. Her real name was Olga, but she had her health certificate in the name of Jeannette, with a photo to authenticate it.

Jeannette had lived in Buenos Aires during the war of 1914-1918. She had been very active in her profession there and had made a small fortune.

“I suddenly got the urge to go back home and see what it looked like,” she told me.

She found her father and mother living in the most pitiful circumstances. Before the war her father had been with a big Berlin firm as factory doorman, but had been dismissed after the war because a disabled veteran had been given preference. Her father and mother had lived poorly all their lives, saving and saving for their old age, investing their money in government savings bonds; but when the government devalued the currency, and thus cheated orphans, widows, servant girls, and honest old folks out of their savings so unscrupulously that if any private individual had dared to do it he would have been publicly branded and perhaps imprisoned, the supposedly gilt-edged security of the Bartels family — Jeannette told me this was her German family name, though I didn’t believe it — became scraps of paper so worthless that they couldn’t even have been put to good use in an outhouse.

The Bartels decided to gas themselves, but just at that point they received a two-week supply of groats, rice, and dried vegetables along with a tin of corned beef from some charitable organization, and with this they kept body and soul together for another four weeks.

Then one fine afternoon Jeannette arrived without warning, having traveled from Buenos Aires to Hamburg. She brought with her so much money that she could have bought up a whole street in Charlottenburg, for she had dollars from the New World.

“My dear girl, how did you come by so much money?” her mother asked.

“I married a cattle rancher in the Argentine. He owned two million head of cattle, and when he died he left me a little fortune.”

“Whoever would have thought that my girl would have such a stroke of luck?” said the mother. Thus, Jeannette was known in the neighborhood as the Argentine millionaire’s widow.

With a handful of dollars, Jeannette bought her parents an apartment house that before the war had been worth maybe a half million marks. She had the title made out in her own name, so businesslike had she become in the New World, but her parents were assigned the income from the apartment house. Then she bought them a good number of sound shares that would move with the stock market prices; these she deposited with a dependable banking firm, with instructions that the dividends when due were to be paid to her parents.

This business over, Jeannette took a few weeks off to treat herself to a good time, which she well deserved after the strenuous years that lay behind her.

For the proper enjoyment of these weeks of pleasure the cooperation of the opposite sex was, of course, required. Pleasure is barely conceivable without it. But Jeannette didn’t make it a matter of her professional business; being on vacation, she carefully chose a gentleman with whom she knew she could enjoy herself.

The Bartels had moved into the apartment house; with official permission from the housing authorities they were allowed to occupy the flat on the top floor, which Jeannette had had built at her own expense. One morning Father Bartel went to Jeannette’s bedroom to speak to her and found her in bed with a gentleman. Jeannette and her friend had sat up late in a cabaret, drinking plenty of champagne, and for that reason he had not wakened in time to take his leave at a respectable early hour, in propriety and silence.

Father Bartel wanted to beat up the man, or shoot him, or deal with him in some other drastic manner. The gentleman, however, was tactful and well-bred; so with supreme dexterity he succeeded, despite Bartel’s aggressions, in getting himself more or less dressed. Then, with Jeannette’s help, he maneuvered himself to the door, onto the stairway, and away. He was safe.

Not so Jeannette. Her father, no longer obliged to deploy his forces on two fronts, gave her the full fury of his anger.

“Why did you come here, you whore, and shame us in front of everyone?” he roared at his daughter. “Better I’d have committed suicide as an honest doorman than to be so disgraced by my own daughter. You’re nothing but a whore, damn you. I’m done with you! Leave my house at once!”

The mother tried to calm him, but only made matters worse. The old man was furious, for the honor of a factory doorman had been trampled into the dirt. He had, as he insisted a hundred times, grown old with honor, and now when he had one foot in the grave, he had to suffer humiliation at the hands of his own daughter whom he had always regarded as an angel from heaven.

Jeannette listened to all this in silence. It seemed to her so remote, so strange, and indescribably silly that she felt it was all taking place on a stage, and that she was in the audience watching an old-fashioned piece of melodrama.