Chapter Twenty-Four
He’d watched them spend the entire morning in beach chairs. Just lounging, snacking and drinking in beach chairs as a prelude to an afternoon of lounging, noshing and drinking at the Iquana Lounge. So Primo wasn’t surprised to find that the whole thing had just been a dress rehearsal for an evening of lounging, eating and drinking at the pier. What did somewhat surprise him was finding out that these exotic and presumbably rich foreigners’ idea of a high time was cooking fish on the beach like common fishermen.
Building a bonfire by the beached pangas and cooking the pick of Teo’s catch of the day had been an Iguana tradition for decades. Wild John and Teo were the designated cooks, chasing off anyone else who tried to meddle. John’s use of lemon, cilantro, and secret sauce competed for ego strokes with Teo’s genius for blackening big fish with variations on the sarandeado style. Although the cookout was on public beach and drew a ring of onlookers, it was by invitation only: Iguanas in good standing, the crew of Teo’s panga and assorted fishing buddies, and selected strange women. Skewers of fish were passed around as the sunset was regarded, toasted, and critiqued. Cans of Negra Modelo were popped and upended. After the swift tropic nightfall, guitars appeared and a few people started to dance in the leaping light of the fire.
Doc was gnawing a chunk of huachinango off a stick when Primo approached him, two girls in their early twenties shying around behind him. Doc glanced at the girls, gave Primo a look; not bad, kid. The young Indian shrugged and pressed his agenda.
“I’d like you to meet these two girls.”
“So rope’ em in and introduce ’em.”
Primo hesitated a beat, “Well, see. Then I’d like it if you would invite us out for some dancing and drinking. Is this possible?”
“Well, we are on expenses.”
“What I’d like to do is impress them.”
Doc grinned, “How much?”
“I don’t know prices here.”
“No, I mean how manifestly do you want them to be impressed?”
“Oh, you know…enough. ” Primo blurted, “To the ultimate. The whole moviola.”
“Sounds good, ” Doc said, trying to be avuncular, “But only because you’re like the son I hope to hell I’ve never had. And because I’m hoping to save your soul from atheist communism by demonstrating some powerful advantages to the capitalistic posture. Who gets which?”
“Well, I sort of like the short one with the big, you know, blouse. But you know what Marx really meant; To each according to their abilities.
“And from each according to their needs. Amen.”
Primo could tell the table they got at Franzi’s wasn’t Doc’s first pick. He couldn’t see much wrong with it: they were sitting out on a patio fragant with jasmine and dappled in candlelight, separated from the river by a low stone wall flocked with hibiscus and stray shoots of bougainvillea, tucked under the limbs of flowering jacaranda and huge jungle trees with roots that twisted and coiled like molten snakes and limbs the dripped tendrils that rooted in soil and flowered in water. They had an excellent view through the arches of a jazz trio inside and the girls were knocked out. They both stared unabashed at the garden, the silverware and candlesticks, the beautiful rich, the walls hung in strong, mysterious paintings.
Primo spotted the table Doc would have preferred. The same advantages, but backed into the privacy and protection of a huge concave tree trunk and exposed to a second doorway which would show more paintings and more beautiful women. There was an American couple at that table; a handsome, impeccably dressed man in his fifies with a strikingly beautiful woman in her late twenties wearing a dress that seemed to have no back at all. They appeared to be quarreling.
During a break, when the girls had trooped off to the restroom, still goggling at ensembles and memorizing hairdos. Doc asked Primo what he thought.
” Well, you know…These guys are Mexicans.”
“Something wrong with that?”
“Not usually. But this is jazz. I expected Americans. Shouldn’t they be Black Cats?”
Doc loved it. “Don’t you believe it, M’hijo. Jazz is colorblind. ”
Primo nodded. “Why ‘Cats’, by the way?”
“It’s just slang for musicians, guys, vatos.”
“Ah. How strange.”
“Right. Down here cats jack up cars, up there they put down tunes.”
“Okay. But you think these paisanos can play it as well as Negroes?”
“If you really want to compare, they usually have American bands in Mogambo.”
“Should we go there?”
“As soon as the girls get used to this, we’ll haul them up there for the change-up.”
“Ah, sound tactics.”
“Not tactics. Strategy.”
Doc led them up the Malecon, so that instead of coming up on Mogambo on the sidewalk they would approach it from across the street, looking in through the Moorish pointed windows at the Morrocan interior walls hung with zebra and tiger hides and columns wrapped with twenty foot python skins; walking straight in at the big brass gong suspended from crossed elephant tusks.
If the international cool of Franzi’s had impressed the girls, the heavy exotic fantasy of Mogambo floored them. Doc led them on a circuitous tour, letting them gape at the striped pelts, the mirror framed with bronzed jawbones, the life-sized black leopards crouching by the stairs to the balcony, where he selected a table by the front windows flanked by black panther skulls and affording views of both the night sea and another jazz trio, this one led by a chunky black American with a slight resemblance to George Foreman and all the chops in the world. He gestured at the bandstand and the toothy trophy heads and said, “You want black cats, Partner, just say so.”
They caught two sets of the combo’s very standard Chicago blues-inflected jazz while trying the flan and sipping coffee. Doc spaced to the beat, tripping on the old days when he’d come in with his white duck blazer and Bogart the joint. Play it again and again, Sam, he thought. He said, “So what do you think?”
The girls gushed over the decor and ambience, Primo looked at the band awhile before saying, “That Mexican guy at Franzi makes this bass player sound boring. But this piano player has so much more…what is it he has? Does it have a name?”
“Soul, Chico. He didn’t go to the conservatory like that other guy, but he’s got way more soul.”
“Soul? How can one man have more soul than another?”
“Spirit. Funk. Cool. Blacknuss. Ornithology. Bluesology.”
“Ah. Maybe I see it.” He studied the pianist, who was rolling on the bench, sweating lightly under the light, mugging a little. “There is something black in the sound. A shadow over it, but a joyous shadow. That doesn’t make sense, I guess.”
“It doesn’t make sense. It’s soul.”
“The soul admits of no arguments,” said Blanca, the girl of smaller blouse who had gravitated to Doc, obviously quoting something, “Can we sing our songs in a strange land? Can a man sing with a shadow on his soul?”
Doc, who had been taking the girl’s company courteously but not seriously, decided to pay her more attention. “That’s the blues, Nena. When your soul is dark, what can you do but sing?”
She returned his look calmly, thinking. And said, “Get drunk and dance.”
“See there?” Doc grinned, “All god’s children got soul.”
“Are we getting theological here?” Primo inquired, as though ready to summon the waiter and order as much mass opiate as necessary.
“We are getting ready to drink and dance,” Blanca replied saucily.
Primo quickly blurted, “And you know Doc, this is amazing fun and I really appreciate the grand tour. But I think these girls are like me. We’re not really cafe society people. We’re more ranchero dance, beer bottle people.”
He had made if a sort of question and the girls, a little flustered, dropped their eyes and nodded. Though they had said they were from Guanajuanto, they’d later admitted to being rancheritas, country girls from a long way out of the city itself.
Doc stretched and tossed off the last of his brandy. “So let’s go find some Norteño corral and kick shit and drink out of those damn plastic cups that split and spill your drink in your lap.”
“You know such a place?”
“No, but the girls do, right?”
Blanca said, “We are from Guanajuanto, remember?”
“Ah, right,” Doc stood up and held her chair for her. “But it doesn’t matter. Cab drivers know even more than smart-assed journalists.”
Their taxista found a cumbia dance they’d found at a Lion’s Club out towards the Sheraton, a huge cement courtyard with a big swagering band in satin cowboy outfits and a piano player who loved sampling tricks like sirens and dogs barking. The girls drank delicately from bottles of Tecate and danced their little buns off.
By the time they got back to the condo Amparo had a little trouble negotiating the stairs to the condo, requiring some full-contact assistance from Primo. Once inside, she felt quite overcome and needed to go lie down somewhere, Primo once again happy to assist. At some point the bedroom door closed behind the two of them.
“Your friend has a real genius for intoxication,” Doc remarked as he flopped onto the sofa beside a suddenly lanquid Blanca.
“Oh, she has to get drunk to have sex,” Blanca remarked. “The first time, anyway. After that it’s love, and that’s OK, too. She doesn’t use any birth control, because that would be advance planning. Very sinful and slutty. But what can a girl do when washed by a wave of spirits and passion?”
“An interesting approach to sex morality,” Doc said, “Not totally unheard of in my country. Not as much lately.”
“Oh we Guanajuanto girls are very proper little Catholic whores,” she said with straight face. “Nobody sins in town. Vacations in other places are popular.”
“You seem pretty bald-faced about it all.”
“I am more practical than my friends. I’d rather sin, which can be forgiven, than get pregnant or languish in my own heat or marry any of the burros I’ve met so far. And anything I do, I’d rather do with my eyes open.”
She moved closer to Doc, cuddling in under his arm. He could smell her perfume, her breath, her hair, the elusive bouquet of youth. “You probably know this has been the night out of our girlish dreams don’t you? Just what the Doctor ordered?”
“Well, we were hoping.”
“It’s a memory for a lifetime. Like something you wear on a bracelet and take out to look at over the years. I’ve never felt like that, like I was living in a movie. I don’t know who you are or what you are, but I’ll remember you forever.”
“Well, it’s kicked up a few memories for me, too.”
Blanca sat upright, then swung her leg over so she was sitting on his lap, straddling his thighs and looking down into his face. “I’d like to make it a special night for you, too. So you’ll remember me.”
“Well, it’s hardly an exchange of favors, nena. You shouldn’t feel any obligation.”
“Oh, I don’t feel obliged, I feel sexy and magical and full of sin. How am I supposed to feel after all this?
“Besides,” she whispered as she leaned down to his lips, “you remind me of my father.
Doc sighed before accepting her kiss, “Ah, fathers. Where would be without them?”
He noticed that she actually did keep her eyes open.