The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes

Author:Carlos Fuentes
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

14

The peso went rolling toward the edge of the small plaza. Pedrito heard a distant pianola; even in the confusion of the fiesta, he knew where the music was coming from. He hummed along. Who didn’t know that tune? Sobre las olas, Tomás Arroyo whispered into Harriet Winslow’s ear. The loveliest night of the year, Harriet Winslow whispered into his, as the pianola tinkled away in some abandoned and invisible corner of the hacienda; a man and a woman in the ballroom the General had saved from the fire and presented, she said, to the night, to the moonlit night.

They danced slowly, repeated in mirrors like a sphere of blades that cuts wherever it is grasped.

“Look. It’s me.”

“Look. It’s you.”

“Look. It’s us.”

They danced, embraced, in the waning hours of the fiesta. She was dancing the slow waltz with him but also with her father: I am dancing with my father, just back from Cuba, decorated in Cuba, promoted in Cuba, saved by Cuba, savior of Cuba.

“We went to save Cuba.”

“We’ve come to save Mexico.”

Harriet dancing this night with her ramrod-straight, decorated, brave father at a soirée welcoming the heroes of Cuba, tricolor rosettes on the bosoms of all the women, WELCOME HOME HEROES OF SAN JUAN HILL, her uniformed father, with stiff mustaches and hair smelling of cologne, proud of his slender daughter in her whirl of taffeta, Captain Winslow with a slightly different scent, and she, burying her nose in her father’s neck, smelling the city of Washington there, that false Acropolis of marble and domes and columns sunk in the wet mud of a pernicious tropics that dared not say its name: a Southern suffocation, a jungle of marble like a grandiose and empty cemetery, the temples of justice and the government sinking into an equatorial, devouring, spreading tangle of undergrowth: a vegetal cancer rooted in the foundations of Washington, a city moist as the crotch of an aroused Negress: Harriet buried her nose in Tomás Arroyo’s neck and smelled a Negress’s swollen, velvety sex: Captain Winslow, I am very lonely, you may have me at your pleasure.

As they danced, Tomás Arroyo squeezed the foreign woman’s waist and pressed closer to the warmth of her belly. He imagined the tangled growth there as a beautiful forest he would always see from afar, and from behind a door of mirrors the boy Tomás Arroyo came out to dance with his mother, his mother, his father’s legitimate wife, his mother, the straight and clean woman without a weight of clouds on her shoulders, without a crown of cold winds on her brow, without eyes ashen from the sun, but clean, no more than that, a clean woman, dressed cleanly, combed cleanly, shod cleanly, dancing with her son the waltz Sobre las olas that they had heard so often far away in the big house, where they could keep out prying eyes but could not keep in the sounds of the music.

The music was so intense that it gave voice to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.