Then I began to have these dreams. I’d be up there, and they’d be playing my cue, and it would be time for me to come in, and I’d open my mouth, and nothing would come out of it. I’d be dying to sing, and couldn’t. A murmur would go over the house, he’d rap the orchestra to attention, look at me, and start the cue again. Then I’d wake up. Then one night, just after she had gone over to her bed, something happened so we did talk about it. In Central America, they’ve got radios all over the place, and there were three in the block back of us, and one of them had been setting me nuts all day. It was getting London, and they don’t have any of that advertising hooey over there. The whole Barber of Seville had come over in the afternoon, with only a couple of small cuts, and at night they had played the Third, Fifth, and Seventh Beethoven symphonies. Then, around ten o’clock, a guy began to sing the serenade from Don Giovanni, the same thing I had sung for Conners at Acapulco, the same thing I had sung the night I came in big at the Metropolitan. He was pretty good. Then, at the end, he did the same messa di voce that I had done. I kind of laughed, in the dark. “... Well, he’s heard me sing it.”
She didn’t say anything, and then I felt she was crying. I went over there. “What’s the matter?”
“Hoaney, Hoaney, you leave me now. You go. We say goodbye.”
“Well — what’s the big idea?”
“You no know who that was? Who sing? Just now?”
“No. Why?”
“That was you.”
She turned away from me then, and began to shake from her sobs, and I knew I had been listening to one of my own phonograph records, put on the air after the main program was over. “... Well? What of it?”
But I must have sounded a little sick. She got up, snapped on the light, and began walking around the room. She was stark naked, the way she generally slept on hot nights, but she was no sculptor’s model now. She looked like an old woman, with her shoulders slumped down, her feet sliding along in a flat-footed Indian walk, her eyes set dead ahead, like two marbles, and her hair hanging straight over her face. When the sobs died off a little, she pulled out a bureau drawer, got out a gray rebozo, and pulled that over her shoulders. Then she started shuffling around again. If she had had a donkey beside her, it would have been any hag, from Mexicali to Tapachula. Then she began to talk “... So. Now you go? Now we say adiós”.
“What the hell are you talking about? You think I’m going to walk out on you now?”
“I kill these man, yes. For what he do to you, for what he do to me, I have to kill him. I know these thing at once, that night, when I hear of the inmigración, that I have to kill him. I ask you? No. Then what I do? Yes? What I do!”
“Listen, for Christ’s sake—”
“What I do? You tell me, what I do?”
“Goddam if I know. Laughed at him, for one thing.”
“I say goodbye. Yes, I come to you, say remember Juana, kiss you one time, adiós. Yes, I kill him, but then is goodbye. I know. I say so. You remember?”
“I don’t know. Will you cut it out, and—”
“Then you come to boat. I am weak. I love you much. But what I do then? What I say?”
“Goodbye, I suppose. Is that all you know to say?”
“Yes. Once more I say goodbye. The capitán, he know too, he tell you go. You no go. You come. Once more, I love you much, I am glad... Now, once more. Three times, I tell you go. It is the end. I tell you, goodbye.”
She didn’t look at me. She was shooting it at me with her eyes staring straight again, and her feet carrying her back and forth with that sliding, shuffling walk. I opened my mouth two or three times to stall some more, but couldn’t, looking at her. “Well, what are you going to do? Will you tell me that? Do you know?”
“Yes. You go. You give me money, not much, but little bit. Then I work, get little job, maybe kitchen muchacha, nobody know me, look like all other muchacha, I get job, easy. Then I go to priest, confess my pecado—”
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for. I knew that was coming. Now let me tell you something. You confess that pecado, and right there is where you lose.”
“I no lose. I give money to church, they no turn me in. Then I have peace. Then some time I go back to Mexico.”
“And what about me?”
“You go. You sing. You sing for radio. I hear. I remember. You remember. Maybe. Remember little dumb muchacha—”
“Listen, little dumb muchacha, that’s all swell, except for one thing. When we hooked up, we hooked up for good, and—”
“Why you talk so? It is the end! Can you no see these thing? It is the end! You no go, what then? They take me back. Me only, they never find. You, yes. They take me back, and what they do to me? In Mexico, maybe nothing, unless he was politico. In New York, I know, you know. The soldados come, they put the pañuelo over the eyes, they take me to wall, they shoot. Why you do these things to me? You love me, yes. But it is the end!”
I tried to argue, got up and tried to catch her, to make her quit that walking around. She slipped away from me. Then she flung herself down on her bed and lay there staring up at the ceiling. When I came to her she waved me away. From that time on she slept in her bed and I slept in mine, and nothing I could do would break her down.
I didn’t leave her, I couldn’t leave her. It wasn’t only that I was insane about her. What was between us had completely reversed since we started out. In the beginning, I thought of her like she had said, as a little dumb muchacha that I was nuts about, that I loved to touch and sleep with and play with. But now I had found out that in all the main things of my life she was stronger than I was, and I had got so I had to be with her. It wouldn’t have done any good to leave her. I’d have been back as fast as a plane could carry me.
For a week after that, we’d lie there in the afternoon, saying nothing, and then she began putting on her clothes and going out. I’d lie there, trying not to think about singing, praying for strength not to suck in a bellyful and cut it loose. Then it popped in my mind about the priests, and I got in a cold sweat that that was where she was going. So one day I followed her. But she went past the Cathedral, and then I got ashamed of myself and turned around and came back.
I had to do something with myself, though, so when she went I began going to the baseball games. From that you can imagine how much there was to do in Guatemala, that I would go to the baseball game. They’ve got some kind of a league between Managua, Guatemala, San Salvador, and some other Central American towns, and they get as excited about it as they get in Chicago over a World Series, and yell at the ump, and all the rest of it. Buses run out there, but I walked. The fewer people that got a close look at me, the better I liked it. One day I found myself watching the pitcher on the San Salvador team. The papers gave his name as Barrios, but he must have been an American, or anyway have lived in the United States, from his motion. Most of those Indians handle a ball jerky, and fight it so they make more errors than you could believe. But this guy had the old Lefty Gomez motion, loose, easy, so his whole weight went in the pitch, and more smoke than all the rest of them had put together. I sat looking at him, taking in those motions, and then all of a sudden I felt my heart stop. Was it coming out in me again, this thing that had got me when I met Winston? Was that kid out there really doing things to me that had nothing to do with baseball? Was it having its effect, her putting me out of her bed?