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id="heading_id_44">The Green Boudoir</
>
I
Those famous festivities on All Saints’ Day and the Day of the Dead! The parade ground, Monotombo Square, and the Portuguese Mothers Arcade were crammed with liquor stalls and beer stands, roulette wheels and playing cards. The rabble rushes to see the toy bulls on fire being chased through the porticos on Penitents Way. Bands of jokers tear about snuffing out streetlights, making the flames on the bulls they’re running burn even brighter. A buffoon, braggart moon dissects the vast dark sky: smoke from oil lamps blackens seedy entrances to freak shows, gambling dives, and hucksters’ stalls. Blind men strum and sing to the huddled poor. The posse of Creole ranchers—ponchos, sabers, tall sombreros—takes up position behind the circle of gaming tables and fortune-tellers. Copper-skinned, barefoot, raggle-taggle gangs gallivant; on the church steps Indian potters sell clay bells covered with big garish circles and stripes. Hags in black and young kids do a roaring trade in funeral bells that tinkle gloomily like an Andean quena, recalling the legendary, suicidal Peruvian friar. Boisterous guffaws on all sides. In arcades and dive bars, guitars strum ballads about miracles and thieves:
Diego Pedernales came
from good stock.
II
Baby Roach’s cathouse had strung colored lights across the square and lit candles for the dead in the Green Boudoir. Lupita la Romántica was in a hypnotic trance. In her crocheted wrap, her topknot at half-mast, she responded to Dr. Polish’s excited gaze and gestures by panting, yielding, and, exhausted, emitting an erotic, “Ohhh!”
“Speak, Señorita Medium.”
“Ohhh! In a dazzling light, climbing a broad staircase...I can’t. He’s gone...He’s lost me.”
“Go until you find him, Señorita.”
“He’s entering a doorway guarded by a sentinel.”
“Does he speak to the sentinel?”
“Yes. I can’t see him now. I can’t...Ohhh!”
“Try to see where you are, Señorita Medium.”
“I can’t.”
“I order you to.”
“Ohhh!”
“Try to see where you are. What’s around you?”
“Ohhh! Stars as big as moons shooting across the sky.”
“Have you left the terrestrial level?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Answer. Where are you?”
“I am dead!”
“I shall bring you back to life, Señorita Medium!”
The mountebank put the stone from a ring on the sleeping strumpet’s forehead, waved his hands over her, and blew on her eyelids.
“Ohhh!”
“Señorita Medium, you will now wake up, happy and without a headache. Very happy, wide awake and feeling no aches or pains.”
He droned on, mumbling like a priest at mass. Big Mamma was shouting down the corridor, and in the square, full of dancing, drinking, and groping, Colonel “Dainty” Domiciano de la Gándara was having one hell of a time.
III
Colonel “Dainty” Domiciano de la Gándara twangs the strings of his guitar. Yawning gaps in his shirt and breeches coincide to bare the round, smiley belly of a Tibetan god. He sports slippers and wears a revolutionary mambí’s jaunty hat tilted to show off a red scarf and earring. Winking and strumming, he talks dirty to the babes in low-necked nightgowns, their hair hanging loose: big, black, with rippling muscles and curls, he’s dressed in a sweat-soaked guayabera and baggy breeches held up by a belt with a silver buckle. Bacchanalian laughter bursts out after his every lewd joke. “Dainty” Domiciano, almost always in his cups, likes to hang out in dives and knocking shops, loves to raise the roof and make mayhem at the end of a night on the tiles. Unkempt and uppity, ladies of sin rock back and lap up the hustle-bustle from behind glowing red cigarettes. “Dainty” Domiciano spluttered, strummed, and twanged a last note of the most recent thunderous version of the ballad of Diego Pedernales. His brass rings glinted and his head shone against his gleaming guitar.
The guards led the prisoner
on a skinny steed,
betrayed by an informer,
in Valdivia’s Field.
A jealous farmer’s daughter
did the evil deed.
IV
He was tickling the sickly ivories in what they called the Green Boudoir Lounge. While the uproar continued out on the patio, the empty lounge loomed large and lit up, barred windows open to the marketplace, breeze rippling the muslin curtains. Blind Bright-Eyes—his mocking moniker—played scales to the song of a skinny girl so depressed and ugly she looked like a workhouse slave. By the wall near the window two mulatto bitches vied over their fortunes as the cards were dealt: face paint brightened their sweet features and muddy honey complexions; their jet-black chignons bristled with combs—an Oriental drama in green tints and lacquer. Blind Bright-Eyes tickled the dirty ivories of the braying piano that passed its days in a shroud of black cloth. The girl sang, deadpan as a dead child, dragging the harmonies from her sad, swooping neckline, a small offertory tray gleaming mournfully on her chest.
Don’t kill me, treacherous dream!
Your image in my thoughts
is a bonfire of chaste passion!
In the pallid light of the empty lounge, her pallid voice struck an unbearably high pitch.
is a bonfire of chaste passion!
Couples danced in the marketplace, swaying to the lilt of the danzón, languishing and lethargic, as they swept past barred windows cheek to cheek. Responding to the singer’s tremolo, the colonel, lousier than a low-down bum, hit a chord on his guitar:
Don’t kill me, treacherous dream!
V
The green silk curtain balloons under the boudoir arch: a pretentious bed shimmers in the mirror. The altar candles flicker. Lupita moaned. “By all the souls in Purgatory, I’ve had enough! What a dream! My head’s splitting!”
The mountebank soothed her. “You’ll soon get over it!”
“Turtles’ll grow beards before I let you hypnotize me again!”
Dr. Polish changed the subject, flattering the strumpet with his mountebank ploys. “You’re a fascinating instance of metempsychosis. I’m sure I could get you a contract with a Berlin theater. You could be famous! This has been a fascinating experiment!”
The strumpet pressed her temples, stuck shiny, jeweled fingers into her dark tresses. “I’ll have a splitting headache all night!”
“A cup of coffee will take care of that...Dissolve an ether capsule in your cup and soon you’ll be back in shape, ready for another experiment.”
“One’s enough!”
“Wouldn’t you like to try it in public? With clever direction, you’d be famous enough to perform in New York. I guarantee you a percentage. Before the year’s out, you’ll be framing diplomas from some of Europe’s most prestigious universities. It was the colonel who told me about your case, which is of so much interest to science—from every perspective. You owe it to yourself to make a study of other individuals already initiated into the mysteries of magnetism.”
“You’re not going to dupe me again, not even with a wallet full of banknotes! That experiment almost killed me!”
“There’s no risk when one adheres to scientific procedures.”
“There’s a rumor going around that the blonde who was once your assistant died on stage.”
“That I was in prison? That’s a bald-faced lie! Do I look like I’m in jail?”
“You must have filed the bars of your cell.”
“You think I’ve got those kind of powers?”
“You’re a wizard, aren’t you?”
“The study of magnetic phenomena can in no way be described as wizardry. Are you now free of your cephalic discomfort?”
“Yes, it seems to be going away.”
Big Mamma shouted down the passage, “Lupita, somebody wants you.”
“Who?”
“A friend. Get a move on!”
“I’m off. If I wasn’t so hard up, I’d have kept tonight free to worship Blessed Souls.”
“Lupe, you could be big on stage.”
“The very thought scares me stiff!”
She swept out of the boudoir, skirts rustling, followed by Dr. Polish. That necromantic rogue, with his fairground show, was in big demand at Baby Roach’s cathouse.