Except that it wasn’t chile sauce that came out of the bottle but a man, diminutive but recognizable by his charro suit, his mariachi hat, and his Zapata-style moustache.
“Patrón” he said, revealing his hairy head, “you’ve saved me from a yearlong imprisonment. No gringo would open me up. Thank you! Your wish is my command!” concluded the tiny charro, caressing the pistol he was carrying on his hip.
For a moment, Dionisio “Baco” Rangel remembered the joke about the shipwrecked man who’s spent ten years on a desert island and one day sets free the genie in a bottle. When the genie asks him what he wants, the man asks for a really great mama. And what he gets is Mother Teresa.
Dionisio decided to be frank with the little charro from the bottle, who looked just like a character in Abel Quezada’s cartoons.
“A woman. No — several women.”
“How many?” asked the little charro, ready, it seemed, to populate a harem if necessary.
“No,” explained Dionisio. “One for each course I ordered.”
“Served with each course, master, or instead of each?”
“That I leave to you,” said Dionisio “Baco” Rangel, the universal Mexican who is, was, and shall be our protagonist. He said it indifferently, accustomed as always to the unusual. “Like the dish being served, with the dish being served …”
The little charro made a magician’s wave, shot into the air, and disappeared. In his place, there appeared, simultaneously, the waiter and a thin woman with dark, lank hair and bangs, starved-looking, bony as Popeye’s girlfriend or Modigliani’s models, the total opposite of the fatties Dionisio had so perversely dreamed of. She was armed with a Diet Coke, which she drank by the teaspoonful as she gazed at Dionisio with eyes at once bored, ironic, and tired. The same eyes, with infinite weariness, explored the American Grill as she wondered out loud, in a drawl as long as the Mississippi, what she was doing there and whom she was with. He said he’d asked the genie in the bottle for a woman. He didn’t manage to surprise her. Suppressing a yawn, the anorexic gringa answered that she’d asked for the same thing. There’s no luck worse than sharing luck with someone else. She’d asked for a man — she smiled with immense fatigue, infinite hunger — leaving everything to chance because every choice she’d made in the past was a poor one. She’d let someone else choose for her. She was available, completely available.
“I’m a terrible lover,” she said, almost with pride. “I’m just warning you. But I never take any blame. The man is always the one to blame.”
“That’s true,” said Dionisio. “There are no frigid women. There are only impotent men.”
“Or enthusiasts,” ruminated the skinny woman. “I can’t stand enthusiastic lovemaking. It takes all the sincerity out of it. But I can’t stand sincerity either. I can only put up with men who lie to me. Lies are the only mystery in love.”
She yawned and said they should postpone their sexual encounter.
“Why?”
“Because the only important thing about sex for me is being able to erase all trace of my sexual partner. All this is very tiring.”
Dionisio reached his hand out to touch the skinny woman’s. She pulled hers back with repugnance and laughed a cabaret laugh.
“How do you act in private, when no one’s watching?” asked the Mexican. She showed her teeth, drank a teaspoon of Diet Coke, and disappeared.
The shrimp cocktail also disappeared. For an instant, Dionisio wondered if he’d eaten it while he’d chatted with the anorexic New Yorker. (She had to be from New York; it was too pat, vulgar, predictable for her to be from California. At least boredom and fatigue in New York have literary foundations and don’t result from the climate.) Or, thinking he was eating a shrimp cocktail, had he eaten the gringa who had so carefully avoided looking him in the eye? (Was she trying to avoid being discovered or even guessed at?) He couldn’t bear the curiosity of knowing if he’d eaten with her or eaten her or if everything might end up — he trembled with pleasure — in a mutual culinary sacrifice …
He heard the charro’s shot, the waiter placed the vichyssoise on the table, and opposite him, eating the same thing, appeared a woman, fortyish, but obviously and avidly enamored of her childhood, with a Laura Ashley dress and a red chignon crowning her Shirley Temple curls. These odd accessories could not distract Dionisio from the repertoire of grimaces accompanying the words and noisy soup slurping of this old Shirley counterfeit, who between slurps and grimaces managed to express only excitement and shock: how exciting to be sitting there eating with him, how shocking to know a man so romantic, so sophisticated, so, so, so … foreign. Only foreigners excited her — it seemed unbelievable to her that a foreigner would notice her, she who lived only on dreams, dreaming about impossible, shocking, exciting romances, all her life dreaming of being in the arms of Ronald Colman, Clark Gable, Rudolf Valentino …
“Do you ever dream about Mel Gibson?”
“Who?”
“Tom Cruise?
“Who’s he?”
No, she had no complaints about life, she went on, making her faces, rolling her eyes, shaking her curls like a luxury floor mop, raising her eyebrows to her topknot, nodding her head like a porcelain doll — and also hissing like a snake, clucking like a hen, howling like a she-wolf before confessing that when she went to bed she sang lullabies and recited Mother Goose, though through her mind (everything was shocking, exciting, unheard of) passed horrible catastrophes, air and sea disasters, highway mayhem, terrorist acts, mutilated bodies, so the lullabies and pretty verses were to exorcise the horrors — did he, an obviously foreign, exciting, sophisticated, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful gentleman understand?
As she spoke the word wonderful, this Alice in Blunderland, blond and pink, faded into a haze. The soup, too, had disappeared. Dionisio gazed at the empty bowl, disconsolate. Again the charro’ shot rang out, the waiter served the steak, and an extremely beautiful and elegant woman appeared, in a black tailored suit, with pearls at her neck and bracelets on her wrists, perfectly coiffed and made-up and showing a considerable amount of cleavage. She stared at him in silence.
Dionisio cut his meat without saying a word and raised a bloody morsel (he’d requested medium) to his mouth. At that precise instant she began to speak. But not to him. She spoke into a cellular telephone which she held in one hand while she touched the divide between her breasts with the gesture of a woman perfuming that crevice of pleasure before going out to dinner.
“I’m making an exception and eating sitting down, you understand? I never have time to sit down; I eat standing up. This seems abnormal to me.”
“But what’s so strange—” interrupted Dionisio, before realizing that the woman was talking not to him but to her telephone.
“Miss? You think I miss you?”
“No, I never said—” Dionisio decided to make a mistake. Damnation.
“Listen,” said the beautiful woman in the black tailored suit showing a considerable amount of cleavage, her breasts barely hidden by the (appropriately) double-breasted jacket. “I get my faxes at one number. I don’t have a name or address. I don’t need secretaries. My computer is with me wherever I am. I have no place. No, I don’t have time either. I’m proving it to you, stupid. What does it matter to me that in Holland it’s midnight if it’s three p.m. in California and we’re here working …?”