Next to the bullring box office is a café. I went in there, ordered an apricot brandy, and sat down. I told myself to forget about the singing, that what I was trying to do was find her. The place was pretty full, and three or four guys were standing in front of one of the booth tables against the wall. Through them I caught a flash of red, and my mouth went dry. They went back to their own table and I was looking right at her.
She was with Triesca, the bullfighter, and more guys kept coming up to him, shaking his hand, and going away again. She saw me, and looked away quick. Then he saw me. He kept looking at me, and then he placed me. He said something to her, and laughed. She nodded, kept looking off somewhere with a strained face, and then half laughed. Then he ogled at me. By the way both of them were acting I knew he didn't connect me with New York, and maybe he didn't know anything about the New York stuff at all. AH he saw was a guy that had once taken his girl away from him, and had then turned out to be a fag. But that was enough for him. He began putting on an act that the whole room was roaring at in a minute. Her face got hard and set. I felt the blood begin to pound in my head.
A mariachi came in. He threw them a couple of pesos, and they screeched three or four times. Then he got a real idea. He called the leader, and whispered, and they started Cielito Lindo. But instead of them singing it, he got up and sang it. He sang right at me, in a high, simpering falsetto, with gestures. They laughed like hell. If she had dead-panned, I think I would have sat there and taken it. But she didn't. She laughed. I don't know why. Maybe she was just nervous. Maybe she played it the way the rest of them expected her to play it. Maybe she was still sore about Guatemala. Maybe she really thought it was funny, that I should be following her around like some puppy after she had hooked up with another man. I don't know, and I didn't think about any of that at the time. When I saw that laugh, I got a dizzy, wanton feeling in my head, and I knew that all hell couldn't stop me from what I was going to do.
He got to the end of the verse, and they gave him a laugh and a big hand. He struck a pose for the chorus, and then I laughed too, and stood up. That surprised him, and he hesitated. And then I shot it:
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay!
Canta y no llores
Porque cantando se alegran
Cielito Undo
Los corazones!
It was like gold, bigger than it had ever been, and when I finished I was panting from the excitement of it. He stood there, looking thick, and then came this roar of applause. The mariachi leader began jabbering at me, and they started it again. I sang it through, drunk from the way it felt, drunk from the look on her face. On the second chorus, I sang it right at her, soft and slow. But at the end I put in a high one, closed my eyes and swelled it, held it till the glasses rattled, and then came off it.
When I opened my eyes wide she wasn't looking at me. She was looking past the bar, behind me. The mob was cheering, people were crowding in from the street, and all over the place they were passing it around, "El Panamier Trovador!" But in a booth was an officer, yelling into a telephone. How long that kept up I don't know. They were all around me, jabbering things for me to sing. Next thing I knew, she was running for the door, Triesca after her. But I was ahead of him. I rammed through the crowd, and when I got to the street I could see the red of her dress, half a block away. I started to run. I hadn't gone two steps before some cops grabbed me. I wrestled with them. From up the street came shots, and people began to run and scream. Then from somewhere came a rattle of Spanish, and I heard the word "gringo." They, turned me loose, and I ran on. Ahead of me were more cops, and people standing around. I saw something red on the pavement. When I pushed through she was lying there, and beside her, this quivering smile on his face, was a short guy in uniform, with three stars on his shoulder. It seemed a long time before I knew it was the político from Acapulco. I got it, then, that order to lay off the gringo. He couldn't shoot me. I was too important. But he could shoot her, for trying to escape, or resisting arrest, or whatever it was. And he could stand there, and wait, and get his kick when I had to look at her.
I jumped for him, and he stepped back, but then I turned to water, and I sank down beside her, the cops, the lights, and the ambulance going around and around in a horrible spin. If he had done that to her, what had I done?
Once more I was in the vestry room of the little church near Acapulco, and I could even see the burned place on the bricks where we had made the fire. Indians were slipping in barefooted, the women with rebozos over their heads, the men in white suits, extra clean. Her father and mother were in the first pew, and some sisters and brothers I didn't even know she had. The casket was white, and the altar was banked with the flowers I had had sent down, flowers from Xochimilco, that she liked. The choir loft was full of boys and girls, all in white. The priest came in, started to put on his vestments, and I paid him. He caught my arm. "You sing, yes, Seńor Sharp? An Agnus Dei perhaps?"
"No."
He shrugged, turned away, and pulled the surplice over his head. This horrible sense of guilt swept over me, like it had a hundred times in the last two days. "...Never...Never again."
"Ah."
He just breathed it, and stood looking at me, then his hand traced a blessing for me, and he whispered in Latin. I knew, then, I had made a confession, and received an absolution, and some kind of gray peace came over me. I went out, slipped in the pew with her family, and the music started. They carried her out to a grave on the hillside. As they lowered her down, an iguana jumped out of it and went running over the rocks.
The End
James M. Cain, Serenade
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