I laugh, fix up my hair a bit, roll up my sleeves a bit, have a burning desire for a little mustache, even if it were as ridiculous as the one the hotel receptionist has; I try to imitate a look of oily lust so I can mix in, lose myself in the macho clientele shouting clothes, clothes, and ass, ass, and who stretch out their hands to touch the girls dancing to a salsa; but one voice dominates everything, the shouts, the music, the dancing of the naked girls on the dance floor: You can look, you can listen, you can even sniff, but around here you can’t touch anything.
I make out a woman sitting under a Count Dracula light opposite the sound equipment, protected by a shield of plastic and Plexiglas. She wears a pearl necklace and a velvet bustier with a white, raised collar, like a cloud or a parachute, behind her neck. She’s just like Snow White. She protects herself in front with the plastic shield and covers her back with the stiff, high collar. The fact is she dominates the scene the way she dominates her head, which is covered with hairpins and looks like a porcupine. She must be afraid that not every hair’s in place.
“Welcome to a night hotter than last night,” she declaims. “You can look, you can listen, you can even sniff, but around here you can’t touch anything.”
A drunken guffaw, and a potbellied man rushes out onto the dance floor expressly to touch a dancer. Everyone shouts in protest: the rules of the establishment — a gentlemen’s agreement — are being broken. All Snow White has to do is speak calmly into the microphone, “Security, security,” and a phalanx of bare-chested masked men in wrestling tights disposes of the drunk in two or three quick movements. He’s rushed out amid the laughter and wisecracks of the young men present.
Snow White invites a man to step out onto the floor and sit down on a little straw chair. The spotlight falls on me. Snow White shouts, Lights, lights on the guy in pink; The guy in pink they all shout, pushing me onto the floor, the too low chair where I sit down and receive instructions: You just look, listen, and sniff, but please don’t touch.
No one may touch the girl, as svelte and sinuous as a cobra, with traits of all races, Chinese, African, and Indian, and perhaps even Danish. Every movement of her undulating dance around me, my chair, my nervous hands, my open arms, my powerless legs (all movements I don’t know how to control) invites me to do that which is forbidden: touch her, give a face to this woman, distinguish her from her faces without face: Chinese, African, Indian, all the same among themselves but not her; she brings her hands closer with their long fingers, a diabolic extension of her small, slave-girl body, closer to my face, as if she were using her fingers to draw me new features, my unexpected face, my ideal mask …
I take her by the wrist, I bring her mouth to mine, the music stops, silence takes over, no one says anything, no one protests as they did before, the bouncers don’t grab me and throw me out on my ear, Snow White approaches slowly, abandoning her little platform, and slowly separates us, softly, almost like a tender mother who discovers the first kiss exchanged by an innocent brother and sister.
(Her getup is grotesque: she’s potbellied, and her miniskirt reveals fat knees and clear-plastic sandals. She has trouble getting the skirt to stay put on her gut; the same with the velvet bustier that squashes her tits flat. Only the white collar, like a cloud, detracts from her being anchored to the earth and creates the illusion that she’s floating.)
Just before dawn
I’m sitting next to Snow White. I try to convince her: “They should all come with me.” When she shakes her head, I’m afraid her hairpins are going to fly into my face, like the arrows in the face of Saint Sebastian, evoked by the gay bartender at Maggie’s. “No, my dancers aren’t for sale. If someone told you this was a whorehouse, they put one over on you.” “Are you telling me your girls don’t screw? What is this, the School of the Sacred Heart of Jesus?” “What do you know about nun schools when you’re a heretical gringo?” “I’m Irish: Do they fuck or don’t they?” “No, they get cocaine from their lover-boys, very late, when the party’s over and the sun’s coming up.” “How long does the pleasure last them?”
Snow White raises the volume of the music, and the men still there (quite a few) pay the girls to dance on their tables. The bids keep going higher, as if it were a Christie’s auction, to see a little more, but what the girls give most is their own supreme position: standing, but bent forward, the ass toward the customer, they reveal the slit between the cheeks but then suddenly shake them again, attracting toward their perfect smoothness the real attention, the real temptation, the promised pleasure.
When they finish dancing, the girls wash up in four transparent shower stalls, strategically placed so the public can watch them comfortably, Snow White explains to me in the most precise terms. Four glass shower stalls, four svelte girls, gorgeous, perfect, soaping themselves up, rinsing themselves off, like Venus from the sea. The foam bubbles up and concentrates in their hair; the water runs between their breasts in two streams, the lather pausing on their nipples before pouring down toward their navel, then, in one rush, gathering, captured and happy, in the pubis. A fat guy, asleep against the glass partition, is missing the best part of the show. Everyone laughs, and Snow White proclaims from her plastic and Plexiglas cage: “NO TO PROSTITUTION, NO TO SEX FOR MONEY. MY MAIDS CAN GET AIDS.”
In Los Angeles, I’d just read García Márquez’s bestseller. Now I’m thinking about love in the times of AIDS. No matter. I didn’t come here to take precautions.
6:47
I told them I wanted nothing from them, that I was just offering them a little pleasure sail. Get a little sun, Snow White told them, let a little light into the place where the sun doesn’t shine, assholes. No one said anything about money. I only asked that there be seven, including Snow White. But she wasn’t going for it. I’m the Wicked Stepmother, she said with an ineffable smile, I’m the one who offers the poisoned apple. But I, generous to a fault, insist on assigning her the role of heroine.
The day began gloriously, and the seven I picked (Snow White insisted on being the Wicked Stepmother and not giving up her own role; I insisted on calling her Snow White) were delighted to go out for a sail, with no demands, just to get a little tan, to kick back a little, practice napping, be somewhere else … That’s what Snow White told them to bring them around. I only asked for a minute to pick up my things at the hotel. I didn’t give up my room. I threw the few things I brought with me in my bag, making sure I had my shaving kit, my toothpaste and toothbrush, deodorant. The girls would look divine in the sunlight, despite a sleepless night and the dancing. I could tell I looked gray, unshaven, bloodshot, dry skin. The different drinks I’d had gathered into a fist inside my head, hammering at it. The girls saw me and probably said to themselves, We won’t have any problems with this wreck. I barely had time to look at myself in the mirror. With repulsion, I thought about the coffee-colored receptionist in his guayabera. He wasn’t there. How right they were to let him out only at night; sunlight would destroy him.