“You know the old rhyme.” La Torre quoted: “ ‘All Madrid knew it, all Madrid but him.’ ”
“I suppose he would be jealous, eh?”
“In private I don’t know, but in public for sure. He is one of those typical husbands who walk with their wives, their chin nailed to their shoulder, watching them.”
“And with that beard hanging down his shoulder, he must look like a hussar.”
“Hmm. ” handing Paco his drink.
“Some people take marriage too seriously.”
“Are you speaking for yourself, Serrano?”
“No, of her. What the devil! She does not give me a moment’s peace. It is all right during the honeymoon, but not years after.”
“You know? For some people marriage is but the official acknowledgment of mutual obscenity.”
“Poor boy! I don’t blame her. You are so very, very. ”
“So very what?” lifting an eyebrow.
“You know,” stretching herself.
“I would like to crave peace with a woman like yours.” He looked at Paco who was caressing one of Clotilde’s hairy thighs. Her eyes were closed. “If I can relieve you,” he pointed at Clotilde, “we might swap for a while.”
“Impossible. I wish we could oblige you, but she can’t see that. No detrimental implication intended for your charms, but merely a matter of principle.”
“Well, I thought it would only be fair. You are going to get Clotilde anyway. Tomorrow you will be together and I shall be left to look for another married woman model.”
“Please!” I stopped Garcia. “Don’t go and transpose the words now. That would be the last blow.”
With astounding docility, he crossed out a line with his pencil and then said that he might tone down the whole thing in the final draft. When he resumed his reading, I think he missed a few lines:
“It is hell to live with her. She is a neurotic, a case for a doctor. ”
“Or for a painter.”
“Perhaps, but she certainly is a case of bad nerves.”
“From what I know, I think it runs in the family. Look at her brother for instance.”
“But he is not quite as bad. He is the type that won’t jump out of a window and I wouldn’t stick my finger in his mouth. He is an idiot, but Julieta. ”
“And say, how is the jewelry business coming along?”
“Not so well. If it had not been for old Ledesma, who is the only one who uses his head, it would have gone long ago. I advised Fernando in some deals, but he did not want to heed my advice.”
“I don’t blame him.”
“At any rate, we have not been on speaking terms for some time, and that is something good. It happened since I compelled Julieta to take and realize her share in the business.”
“Naturally.”
“Certainly. I did not want the poor innocent girl to lose all her money and. ”
Clotilde seemed to have passed out completely under Paco’s ministrations. La Torre drank another glass of brandy, stood up and said: “I am going into the next room.”
“You don’t have to leave.”
“It so happens that I have to dress for dinner. Otherwise I always like to observe a good seduction. Live and learn, you know.”
When La Torre emerged from his room, dressed, shaven and perfumed, Clotilde was putting on her clothes and talking with no affectation in her voice to Paco who answered distractedly.
“Children, we are ready. I am taking both of you to Botin to help me eat a roasted suckling and celebrate your engagement.”
“You know I can’t go,” she adjusted her hat. “I am quite late as it is.”
“I had forgotten that the bearded ox is back and you still have to comply with your marital duties. We two will go then and oblige Botin.”
While she finished dabbing at her face, La Torre pulled Paco gently to him: “You know, I could have very easily killed you, but why spoil a good situation?”
“Why indeed?”
They chuckled and La Torre filled two more glasses: “To a happy affair.” La Torre sighed and enveloped Clotilde in a sidelong glance. Paco was drinking his brandy with relish that banished any other consideration. “Not bad, eh, Serrano?”
Paco interrupted his operation long enough to answer: “No, excellent brandy.”
La Torre’s thoughtful expression evaporated: “So that’s all you like now?” and Paco answered with the glass still to his mouth: “Aha.”
Garcia looked up: “I can see that you don’t care too much for it Do you?”
“How can you see? You were not looking at me.”
“But I could hear your fingers on the table. Go on, admit it”
“No — it isn’t that — it is that the whole scene could have been handled more expediently by saying that Serrano was a scoundrel.” I waved aside an objection: “All right, and if you want to give an example, you could have said that he went one afternoon to see a friend who was a painter and there seduced his model who had a trusting, if ridiculous, husband, and his friend, who was a very unscrupulous fellow, did not mind, and to make matters worse, they reveled in their sinful ways and celebrated afterwards.”
“Oh, well! If we come to that, we could reduce everything to saying that the world was created, then it lasted for a long time and then ended. That would take care of all happenings and stories, what the devil!”
“Now. Don’t exaggerate. ”
“You are the one who exaggerates. ”
“Look,” I said patiently. “What I mean is all this dialogue. I feel that when there is too much dialogue, it is disguising something that without it would boil down to very little or might not be so easy to swallow. Like coating a pill. I feel that the whole thing — this and much of what you have read to me before — has too much dialogue. Takes too much paper.”
He was in a temporizing mood. He said that he agreed in principle but that he had done it intentionally as part of the presentation, in keeping with the times when the action took place. Stereotyped style, situations, phrases. You know: cursi, and he reminded me that this was not the final draft and that he expected to improve it.
We would have commented and discussed at greater lengths, but there were unmistakable signs of closing the place for the night and the cashier seemed impatient to call it a day. In these semi-biblical surroundings, Garcia had assumed the leadership of a missionary and, although I knew that his funds were low, he insisted on paying the check and leaving a handsomely posthumous donation to a long departed waiter.
We left the tabernacle and walked slowly, passing a free theater on the way, where we had been once before. In this proverbially commercialized city, it was a contrast. It cost nothing to see a performance there, like listening to Garcia’s stories. The same artistic, unprofitable level, but by a natural association of ideas, it made me think of the theater of Tia Mariquita and I was glad that it was too late to go in. We strolled back to Madison Square where we sat on the bench closest to a street lamp that Garcia’s practiced eye could select. We spoke of things not worthy of recollection and then Garcia mentioned a person no less than the American writer O. Henry. Every time he is about to read or discuss his own stuff, Garcia always prefaces things with comments on great writers, thus creating an unfavorable contrast.
I tried to keep the conversation on this auspicious level, to hold it there, deferring the inevitable beyond the limits of our negligible knowledge of American letters, but in the end he won handily as usual. The man goes about armed and carries more paper with him than a newsboy. I have tried to retaliate, carrying something about with me, advertisements, tracts, news clippings, any kind of equalizer that will give me a chance to fight back, but when my resistance has been stubborn, Garcia becomes adroit with: “Shut up and listen,” and the net result is that he reads and I listen.