I didn't have the heart to try her.
My own girl was about thirty and took care of herself better.
With Venezuela writhing and suffering in my arms, I had a longing to take her in the back and undress her and only talk to her – this I told myself.
I was delirious with want of her and the other little dark girl.
Poor Victor, all this time he stood on the brass rail of the bar with his back to the counter and jumped up and down gladly to see his three American friends cavort.
We bought him drinks.
His eyes gleamed for a woman but he wouldn't accept any, being faithful to his wife.
Dean thrust money at him.
In this welter of madness I had an opportunity to see what Dean was up to.
He was so out of his mind he didn't know who I was when I peered at his face.
"Yeah, yeah!" is all he said.
It seemed it would never end.
It was like a long, spectral Arabian dream in the afternoon in another life – Ali Baba and the alleys and the courtesans.
Again I rushed off with my girl to her room; Dean and Stan switched the girls they'd had before; and we were out of sight a moment, and the spectators had to wait for the show to go on.
The afternoon grew long and cool.
Soon it would be mysterious night in old gone Gregoria.
The mambo never let up for a moment, it frenzied on like an endless journey in the jungle.
I couldn't take my eyes off the little dark girl and the way, like a queen, she walked around and was even reduced by the sullen bartender to menial tasks such as bringing us drinks and sweeping the back.
Of all the girls in there she needed the money most; maybe her mother had come to get money from her for her little infant/ sisters and brothers.
Mexicans are poor.
It never, never occurred to me just to approach her and give her some money.
I have a feeling she would have taken it with a degree of scorn, and scorn from the likes of her made me flinch.
In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.
Strange that Dean and Stan also failed to approach her; her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that.
At one point I saw Dean leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross his face as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped and finally bowed his head.
For she was the queen.
Now Victor suddenly clutched at our arms in the furor and made frantic signs.
"What's the matter?"
He tried everything to make us understand. Then he ran to the bar and grabbed the check from the bartender, who scowled at him, and took it to us to see.
The bill was over three hundred pesos, or thirty-six American dollars, which is a lot of money in any whorehouse.
Still we couldn't sober up and didn't want to leave, and though we were all run out we still wanted to hang around with our lovely girls in this strange Arabian paradise we had finally found at the end of the hard, hard road.
But night was coming and we had to get on to the end; and Dean saw that, and began frowning and thinking and trying to straighten himself out, and finally I broached the idea of leaving once and for all.
"So much ahead of us, man, it won't make any difference."
"That's right!" cried Dean, glassy-eyed, and turned to his Venezuelan.
She had finally passed out and lay on a wooden bench with her white legs protruding from the silk.
The gallery in the window took advantage of the show; behind them red shadows were beginning to creep, and somewhere I heard a baby wail in a sudden lull, remembering I was in Mexico after all and not in a pornographic hasheesh daydream in heaven.
We staggered out; we had forgotten Stan; we ran back in to get him and found him charmingly bowing to the new evening whores, who had just come in for night shift.
He wanted to start all over again.
When he is drunk he lumbers like a man ten feet tall and when he is drunk he can't be dragged away from women.
Moreover women cling to him like ivy.
He insisted on staying and trying some of the newer, stranger, more proficient senoritas.
Dean and I pounded him on the back and dragged him out.
He waved profuse good-bys to everybody – the girls, the cops, the crowds, the children in the street outside; he blew kisses in all directions to ovations of Gregoria and staggered proudly among the gangs and tried to speak to them and communicate his joy and love of everything this fine afternoon of life.
Everybody laughed; some slapped him on the back.
Dean rushed over and paid the policemen the four pesos and shook hands and grinned and bowed with them.
Then he jumped in the car, and the girls we had known, even Venezuela, who was wakened for the farewell, gathered around the car, huddling in their flimsy duds, and chattered good-bys and kissed us, and Venezuela even began to weep – though not for us, we knew, not altogether for us, yet enough and good enough.
My dusky darling love had disappeared in the shadows inside.
It was all over.
We pulled out and left joys and celebrations over hundreds of pesos behind us, and it didn't seem like a bad day's work.
The haunting mambo followed us a few blocks.