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and they
told me we were parked outside Victor s house and he was already at the door
of the car
with his little baby son in his arms, showing him to us.
 You see my baby? Hees name Perez, he six month age.  Why, said Dean, his
face still
transfigured into a shower of supreme pleasure and even bliss,  he is the
prettiest child I
have ever seen. Look at those eyes. Now, Sal and Stan, he said, turning to
us with a
serious and tender air,  I want you par-ti-cu- lar- ly to see the eyes of
this little Mexican
boy who is the son of our wonderful friend Victor, and notice how he will
come to
manhood with his own particular soul bespeaking itself through the windows
which are
his eyes, and such lovely eyes surely do prophesy and indicate the loveliest
of souls. It
was a beautiful speech. And it was a beautiful baby. Victor mournfully looked
down at
his angel. We all wished we had a little son like that. So great was our
intensity over the
child s soul that he sensed something and began a grimace which led to bitter
tears and
some unknown sorrow that we had no means to soothe because it reached too far
back
into innumerable mysteries and time. We tried everything; Victor smothered
him in his
neck and rocked, Dean cooed, I reached over and stroked the baby s little
arms. His
bawls grew louder.  Ah, said Dean,  I m awfully sorry, Victor, that we ve
made him
sad.
 He is not sad, baby cry. In the doorway in back of Victor, too bashful to
come out, was
his little barefoot wife, with anxious tenderness waiting for the babe to be
put back in her
arms so brown and soft. Victor, having shown us his child, climbed back into
the car and
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proudly pointed to the right.
 Yes, said Dean, and swung the car over and directed it through narrow
Algerian streets
with faces on all sides watching us with gentle wonder. We came to the
whorehouse. It
was a magnificent establishment of stucco in the golden sun. In the street,
and leaning on
the windowsills that opened into the whorehouse, were two cops,
saggy-trousered,
drowsy, bored, who gave us brief interested looks as we walked in, and stayed
there the
entire three hours that we cavorted under their noses, until we came out at
dusk and at
Victor s bidding gave them the equivalent of twenty-four cents each, just for
the sake of
form.
And in there we found the girls. Some of them were reclining on couches
across the
dance floor, some of them were boozing at the long bar to the right. In the
center an arch
led into small cubicle shacks that looked like the places where you put on
your bathing
suit at public municipal beaches. These shacks were in the sun of the court.
Behind the
bar was the proprietor, a young fellow who instantly ran out when we told him
we
wanted to hear mambo music and came back with a stack of records, mostly by
Perez
Prado, and put them on over the loudspeaker. In an instant all the city of
Gregoria could
hear the good times going on at the Sala de Baile. In the hall itself the din
of the music
for this is the real way to play a jukebox and what it was originally for was
so
tremendous that it shattered Dean and Stan and me for a moment in the
realization that
we had never dared to play music as loud as we wanted, and this was how loud
we
wanted. It blew and shuddered directly at us. In a few minutes half that
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portion of town
was at the windows, watching the Ameri-canos dance with the gals. They all
stood, side
by side with the cops, on the dirt sidewalk, leaning in with indifference and
casualness.
 More Mambo Jambo,  Chattanooga de Mambo,
 Mambo Numero Ocho  all these tremendous numbers resounded and flared in the
golden, mysterious afternoon like the sounds you expect to hear on the last
day of the
world and the Second Coming. The trumpets seemed so loud I thought they could
hear
them clear out in the desert, where the trumpets had originated anyway. The
drums were
mad. The mambo beat is the conga beat from Congo, the river of Africa and the
world;
it s really the world beat. Oom-ta, ta-poo-poom oom- ta, ta-poo-poom. The
piano
montunos showered down on us from the speaker. The cries of the leader were
like great
gasps in the air. The final trumpet choruses that came with drum climaxes on
conga and
bongo drums, on the great mad Chattanooga record, froze Dean in his tracks
for a
moment till he shuddered and sweated; then when the trumpets bit the drowsy
air with
their quivering echoes, like a cavern s or a cave s, his eyes grew large and
round as
though seeing the devil, and he closed them tight. I myself was shaken like a
puppet by it;
I heard the trumpets flail the light I had seen and trembled in my boots.
On the fast  Mambo Jambo we danced frantically with the girls. Through our
deliriums
we began to discern their varying personalities. They were great girls.
Strangely the
wildest one was half Indian, half white, and came from Vene zuela, and only
eighteen.
She looked as if she came from a good family. What she was doing whoring in
Mexico at
that age and with that tender cheek and fair aspect, God knows. Some awful
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grief had
driven her to it. She drank beyond all bounds. She threw down drinks when it
seemed she
was about to chuck up the last. She overturned glasses continually, the idea
also being to
make us spend as much money as possible. Wearing her flimsy housecoat in
broad
afternoon, she frantically danced with Dean and clung about his neck and
begged and
begged for everything. Dean was so stoned he didn t know what to start with,
girls or
mambo. They ran off to the lockers. I was set upon by a fat and uninteresting
girl with a
puppy dog, who got sore at me when I took a dislike to the dog because it
kept trying to
bite me. She compromised by putting it away in the back, but by the time she
returned I
had been hooked by another girl, better looking but not the best, who clung
to my neck
like a leech. I was trying to break loose to get at a sixteen-year-old
colored girl who sat
gloomily inspecting her navel through an opening in her short shirty dress
across the hall.
I couldn t do it. Stan had a fifteen-year-old girl with an almond-colored
skin and a dress
that was buttoned halfway down and halfway up. It was mad. A good twenty men
leaned
in that window, watching.
At one point the mother of the little colored girl not colored, but dark came
in to hold
a brief and mournful convo cation with her daughter. When I saw that, I was
too ashamed
to try for the one I really wanted. I let the leech take me off to the back,
where, as in a
dream, to the din and roar of more loudspeakers inside, we made the bed
bounce a halfhour.
It was just a square room with wooden slats and no ceiling, ikon in a corner,
a
washbasin in another. All up and down the dark hall the girls were calling,
 Agua, agua
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caliente! which means  hot water. Stan and Dean were also out of sight. My
girl
charged thirty pesos, or about three dollars and a half, and begged for an
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