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

window, there was going to be trouble. But I wanted to please her. I don’t know if it was the way she took the news of my being broke, or the way her eyes lit up at the idea of hearing some music, or the flash I got of that pretty leg, when I was supposed to be looking the other way, or what. Whatever it was, her trade didn’t seem to make much difference any more. I felt about her the way I had in the café, and wanted her to smile at me some more and lean toward me when I spoke.
    “Señorita.”
    “Yes?’
    “I don’t like the mariachi . They play very bad.”
    “Oh, yes. But they only poor boy. No estoddy, no take lessons. But play—very pretty.”
    “Well—never mind about that. You want some music that’s the main thing. Let me be your mariachi.”
    “Oh—you sing?”
    “Just a little bit.”
    “Yes, yes. I like—very much.”
    I went out, slipped across the street, and took the guitar from No. 4. He put up a squawk, but she was right after me, and he didn’t squawk long. Then we went back. There’s not many instruments I can’t play, some kind of way, but I can really knock hell out of a guitar. He had it tuned cockeyed, but I brought it to E, A, D, G, B, and E without snapping any of his strings, and then I began to go to town on it. The first thing I played her was the prelude to the last act of Carmen. For my money, it’s one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, and I had once made an arrangement of it. You may think that’s impossible, but if you play that woodwind stuff up near the bridge, and the rest over the hole, the guitar will give you almost as much of what the music is trying to say as the whole orchestra will.
    She was like a child while I was tuning, leaning over and watching everything I did, but when I started to play, she sat up and began to study me. She knew she had never heard anything like that, and I thought I saw the least bit of suspicion of me, as to who I was and what the hell I was doing there. So when I went down on the low E string, on the phrase the bassoon has in the orchestra, I looked at her and smiled. “The voice of the bull.”
    “Yes, yes!”
    “Am I a good mariachi?”
    “Oh, fine mariachi . What is the música?”
    “Carmen.”
    “Oh. Oh yes, of course. The voice of the bull.”
    She laughed, and clapped her hands, and that seemed to doit. I went into the bullring music of the last act and kept stepping the key up, so I could make kind of a number out of it without slowing down for the vocal stuff. There came a knock on the door. She opened, and the mariachi was out there, and most of the ladies of the Street. “They ask door open. So they hear too.”
    “All right, so they don’t sing.”
    So we left the door open, and I got a hand after the bullring selection, and played the intermezzo, then the prelude to the opera. My fingers were a little sore, as I had no calluses, but I went into the introduction to the Habanera, and started to sing. I don’t know how far I got. What stopped me was the look on her face. Everything I had seen there was gone, it was the face at the window of every whorehouse in the world, and it was looking right through me.
    “… What’s the matter?”
    I tried to make it sound comical, but she didn’t laugh. She kept looking at me, and she came over, took the guitar from me, went out and handed it to the mariachi player. The crowd began to jabber and drift off. She came back, and the other three girls were with her. “Well, Señorita—you don’t seem to like my singing.”
    “Muchas gracias , Señor. Thanks.”
    “Well—I’m sorry. Good evening, Señorita.”
    “Buenos noches , Señor.”
    Next thing I knew I was stumbling down the Bolivar, trying to wash her out of my mind, trying to wash everything out of my mind. A block away, somebody was coming toward me. I saw it was Triesca. She must have gone out and phoned him when I left. I ducked around a corner, so I wouldn’t have to pass him. I kept on,