Three by Cain: Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, the Butterfly Read Free

Frenchman’s tricks cost you three francs, but a Mexican is just dumb. But the main thing was a queer echo in that Olé , like they were laughing at me all the time, and I wondered, all of a sudden,which way we were going to turn when we got out that door. A girl on the make for a bullfighter, you don’t exactly expect that she came out of a convent. Just the same, it hadn’t occurred to me up to that second that she could be a downright piece of trade goods. I was hoping, when we reached the main street, that we would turn right. To the right lay the main part of town, and if we headed that way, she could be taking me almost anywhere. But to our left lay the Guauhtemolzin, and that’s nothing but trade.
    We turned left.
    We turned left, but she walked so nice and talked so sweet I started hoping again. Nothing about an Indian makes any sense. He can live in a hut made of sticks and mud, and sticks and mud are sticks and mud, aren’t they? You can’t make anything else out of them. But he’ll take you in there with the nicest manners in the world, more dignity than you’d ever get from a dozen dentists in the U.S., with stucco bungalows that cost ten thousand dollars apiece, kids in a private school, and stock in the building and loan. She went along, her hand on my arm, and if she had been a duchess she couldn’t have stepped cleaner. She made a little gag out of falling in step, looked up once or twice and smiled, and then asked me if I had been long in Mexico.
    “Only three or four months.”
    “Oh. You like?”
    “Very much.” I didn’t, but I wanted anyway to be as polite as she was. “It’s very pretty.”
    “Yes.” She had a funny way of saying yes, like the rest of them have. She drew it out, so it was “yayse.” “Many flowers.”
    “And birds.”
    “And señoritas.”
    “I wouldn’t know about them.”
    “No? Just a little bit?”
    “No.”
    An American girl would have mauled it to death, but when she saw I didn’t want to go on with it, she smiled and began talking about Xochimilco, where the best flowers grew. Sheasked me if I had been there. I said no, but maybe some day she would take me. She looked away at that, and I wondered why. I figured I had been a little previous. Tonight was tonight, and after that it would be time to talk about Xochimilco. We got to the Guauhtemolzin. I was hoping she would cross. She turned, and we hadn’t gone twenty yards before she stopped at a crib.
    I don’t know if you know how it works in Mexico. There’s no houses, with a madame, a parlor, and an electric piano, anyway not in that part of town. There’s a row of adobe huts, one story high, and washed blue, or pink, or green, or whatever it happens to be. Each hut is one room deep, and jammed up against each other in the way they are, they look like a barracks. In each hut is a door, with a half window in it, like a hat-check booth. Under the law they’ve got to keep that door shut, and drum up trade by leaning out the window, but if they know the cop they can get away with an open door. This door was wide open, with three girls in there, two of them around fourteen, and looking like children, the other big and fat, maybe twenty-five. She brought me right in, but then I was alone, because she and the other three went out in the street to have a palaver, and I could partly catch what it was. They all four rented the room together, so three of them had to wait outside when one of them had a customer, but I seemed to be a special case, and if I was going to spend the night, her friends had to flop somewhere else. Most of the street got in it before long, the cop, the café woman on the corner, and a flock of girls from the other cribs. Nobody sounded sore, or surprised, or made dirty cracks. A street like that is supposed to be tough, but from the way they talked, you would have thought it was the junior section of the Ladies’ Aid figuring out where to bunk the minister’s brother-in-law that had