Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

by Budd Schulberg

  Pancito wanted to sip his Scotch like the man of the world Hilario was determined to think him, but he gulped and a few drops of the unfamiliar liquid went down his windpipe, causing him to choke and cough in a most undignified way. Hilario pounded him on the back attentively. Pancito muttered some spastic apology, but if the pudgy little baker was, in the eyes of Hilario, the soul of discretion, the younger, more prosperous baker was the soul of solicitude.

  “There, there, drink a little water. I realize you are a sober, conscientious man not used to so much alcoholic refreshment in the middle of the day. But as I was saying, if we were to merge our bakeries, Panaderías Cortez y Perez, you could manage the big shop, keep an eye on your daughters in your old one, and leave me free to wander around and search for new locations. You see, I am looking to the future. I am thinking big, I see a chain of panaderías, not just here in our little city, but Cuernavaca, Chilpancingo …” Hilario’s expansive wave of the hand seemed to take in the entire map of Mexico.

  “Don Hilario, you are indeed a man of great vision,” Pancito managed to say.

  “Cortez y Perez,” Hilario intoned. “No longer little hole-in-the-wall bakeries, but first-rate, modern establishments. As a bachelor, I will make the perfect outside man, advance man I believe the smart gringos call it. Your oldest daughter is a solid, responsible girl—teach her to run the little bakery, it will cater to the poor, no use wasting expensive sweets and egg twists on the centavo pinchers. But there is a profit in quantity, we can send down the leftover morning bread to your evening bargain hunters. First we’ll invest our profits in new equipment, new facilities; later we can put our earnings to work for us with ten-percent bonds—someday we might even go into the restaurant business, coffeeshops, like I have seen when I went to visit my great-uncle in Texas—the waitresses will have starched orange dresses—we will add coffeecakes and hamburguesas …”

  In this Scotch haze of optimism the partnership was consummated. Cortez y Perez it was, and this was perhaps the only time in the history of El Bar de los Tres Reyes, of The Three Kings, when the splendid dreams of a long afternoon’s congenial drinking were to be translated into cash-money reality. For the mysterious letters in Hilario’s pocket worked their magic like the lamp of Aladdin, and lo, it was even as Hilario Cortez had promised. Pancito seemed to find himself in the larger panadería. He supervised the baking rather than doing it all himself and he managed both bakeries with a newly discovered authority, an executive ability he had never been aware of before but that must have been in him all the time. Now he was flowing like an underground stream that Hilario had discovered, tapped and channeled up to the surface. He became very sure of himself, but in a quiet and controlled way. The old rages and outbursts of frustration were left behind him, like the cramped and poverty-drab rooms where he had raised his daughters around the corner from his shabby little bakery. After the first year of his partnership with Hilario Cortez, he was able to purchase a small stucco, modernistic house, two stories, with a small patio and balcony. His partner Hilario still liked to refer to him as Señor Discretion, and the name not only caught on around Pancito, but within Pancito as well. He became each day more what Hilario believed him to be. Customers would say, “It is such a pleasure to deal with Pancito”—although more often now they referred to him as Don Alfonso—“If you wish to feel the bread to make sure it is warm before you buy it he never flies into a tantrum, and you can even return loaves you are not perfectly satisfied with and he will accept them with a smile and let you pick out something fresher in its place, or even hand you back your money. Señor Discretion he certainly is, from the top of his bald head to the very heel of his poor lame foot.” Old customers who knew the earlier, irritable, unprepossessing Pancito thought it was a miracle, no less than the healing kiss of the blessed dark Virgin of Guadalupe.

  As if to reward Pancito for this growth of character, fortune continued to smile on him—no, not merely smile but laugh, roar with a laughter of largess as Hilario outdid his original promise and there were modernized bakeries and branches and finally, on the main square of Cuernavaca, a spick-and-span chrome-and-plastic C & P Coffee Shop with Hot Doggies and hamburguesas “King-Size” and, yes, waitresses with flared-out, starched orange dresses, as splendid as anything you could find in Texas. To celebrate the addition of this restaurant business to their chain of bakeries, Don Hilario and Pancito, excuse us—Don Alfonso—went to Cuernavaca for the grand opening and took a suite together at the plushiest hotel they could find in that gringo-plush, Old Spanish-Indian resort. There were elegant individual cottages overlooking a small private lake on which swam in graceful self-assurance redheaded pintail ducks and stately black swans. The two partners were relaxing on the latticed portico of their bungalow suite as the white-jacketed waiter served them their Scotch, which had been for some time Pancito’s favorite drink. He often told his employees he could not understand how they could tolerate that vile mescal, but of course it was their stomachs, if they wanted to burn out the linings, that was their business.

  “Don Alfonso, I have a little memento for you,” the graying but still flat-bellied Hilario said to his now portly rather than paunchy partner, tailored clothes making the difference. He reached into his attaché case and produced a silver frame in which a neatly typed letter was carefully preserved under glass. “A small token of my regard for you, dear friend and partner,”

  said Hilario, handing over the original letter he had received from Pancito. Pancito knew instinctively what it was. He squinted at it and said, “Hilario, my compañero, my reading glasses are inside in the bathroom—for old times’ sake, will you read me the letter?”

  Actually, Pancito was curious to hear the magic letter. So much had happened that he remembered only dimly what he had written, or rather dictated to Maestro Martínez.

  “It will be an honor to read it,” said Hilario, and he began enthusiastically:

  “ ‘My dear, esteemed friend Señor Cortez, it has come to my attention, as a result of your recent visit, that you are an admirer of the charm and beauty of my daughter Guadalupe. I salute you on your evident good taste and also on your gentlemanly conduct during your visit to our humble home. What my daughter may not have told you, out of inevitable regard for a suitor so distinguished and attractive as yourself, is that she is barely fifteen years old. If you were a lesser man I might feel I have to appeal to you personally, but I fully appreciate that in the case of a gentleman so gallant and blessed with the true chivalric spirit as you are so well known in the community to be, I have only to mention the fact of my daughter’s tender age and leave it to your profound sense of courtesy, maturity and understanding to guide your kind heart and noble soul in lieu of a widower-father’s paternal concern. As gentleman to gentleman, I am, then, ever your humble servant, Alfonso Perez.’ ”

  Hilario Cortez lowered the silver-framed masterpiece with a feeling of tears blinked back behind his eyes. “When I first received this letter, it filled me with the most unbearable guilt,” Hilario said. “For I realized it was you, not I, who possessed that ‘profound sense of courtesy, maturity and understanding.’ After our little ‘altercation’ at your house the first time you found me there—a self-invited intruder—oh, you were quite right to express yourself that forcibly—imagine what you might have written, the names you might have called me, the rude phrases, the insults …”

  “Yes, imagine,” Pancito agreed. And he was not trying to dissimulate. He was not sure he had said all that, not quite; there were, in fact, a few words he did not even understand, but he decided the young, owlish schoolteacher must have put those in to dress the letter up a bit, as a photographer touches up a portrait.

  “Those letters, so full of warmth and wisdom, convinced me to stop trying to woo Lupita into bed and to woo her father into business instead,” Hilario laughed. “But now, time has moved on. Lupita is no longer only fifteen, but almost twenty, an accomplished young lady, graduate of the high school, able to
read and write and be the legal mistress of one of the leaders of the community. In other words, dear friend, I ask no less than the hand of Guadalupe in formal marriage.”

  “Dear Hilario, I am a man who likes to come straight to the point,” said Pancito, borrowing a phrase from his partner, as he frequently did. “In the entire city of Tepalcingo, in fact, in the entire state of Morelos, I cannot think of a husband better suited to the station and happiness of Guadalupe than Don Hilario Cortez. I will break the good news to my obedient daughter the moment I return.”

  When he arrived home from the C & P Coffee Shop ceremonies in Cuernavaca, Pancito found Lupita combing her hair in her dressing room. She had oil-black hair flowing to her waist and she could sit before her long mirror and comb it sensuously for an hour without becoming the least bit bored. When Pancito told her what he had announced as wonderful news, Lupita threw her hairbrush at him. Since those threadbare years of the little bakery, she had grown into a handsome and stately and self-possessed young lady of whom Pancito was extremely proud, when not wondering whether it was the fault of too much education that had made her so unmanageable.

  “If you think I am going to marry that ridiculous old man, you are even more stupid than I think you are,” Lupita screamed, for she had a quick-trigger personality, not unlike her father’s in his primitive, prediscretion period.

  “Old man, he’s a full ten years younger than I am,” Pancito argued.

  “After one is thirty, it makes no difference,” Lupita said.

  “But five years ago I had to keep him away from the house. And you were encouraging him, you little hussy.”

  “Five years ago I was a child, it was flattering,” Lupita said. “And when you wrote those stupid letters and he stopped coming, I lost all respect for him. A real man would have found ways to get around you, to make secret rendezvous, to carry me off by force.”

  “Thank the Virgin he was too much of a gentleman for that,” said the frustrated Pancito.

  “You can have him. You seem very happy together. I have made my own choice,” Lupita said.

  “And just who, may I ask, is this fortunate fellow?” asked Pancito with some touch of his prediscretion sarcasm creeping into his voice.

  “Maestro Martínez,” Lupita said.

  “Maestro Martínez, that bent-over little hunchback of a schoolteacher!” Pancito exploded. “He’s a pauper! You’ll both starve to death! I’ll break his eyeglasses! I’ll smash his big dictionary over his head. I’ll—I’ll—have him arrested and packed off to the prison island, I’ll—”

  Maestro Martínez was standing in the doorway. His hair was slightly streaked with gray and he was a little more bent over from so much study and writing, but otherwise he was the same wiry, intense, birdlike man, surprisingly handsome behind his rimless glasses and his studious expression.

  “Señor Perez, I am happy to find you here. I have come to talk to you,” Maestro Martínez began.

  “Cabrón!” Pancito shouted. “You dirty, double-dealing cradle-snatcher, son of a two-peso whore, you—”

  At the first oath, Lupita had run from the living room into the kitchen, not merely shocked by her father’s obscene language, but so she could eavesdrop unseen behind the kitchen door.

  “Well, Señor Discretion, I see that the years have not changed you after all,” Maestro Martínez said quietly.

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” Pancito asked.

  “The foul names you call me for daring to admire your daughter are practically the same ones you dictated to me against Hilario Cortez,” Maestro Martínez explained.

  “Never—I knew I could appeal to my dear friend Hilario as a man of reason and honor,” Pancito said. “To the discretion I showed in dealing with that problem I owe my entire success in life.”

  “I think you mean to the discretion I showed in dealing with that problem,” Maestro Martínez corrected him, and he drew from his pocket some worn pieces of paper. “Perhaps this will refresh your memory—‘Listen to me, you mangy son of a homeless bitch … If you do not stay away from my Lupita I will shoot you in a place where you will have no further interest in molesting innocent children …’ ”

  Pancito shut his eyes. Were those really his words? Yes, some faint echo from the furious poverty of his past warned him not to protest too strongly against the evidence in the hands of Maestro Martínez.

  “This is the actual letter you dictated and had read back to you and signed. You remember you waited half an hour to re-sign the clean copy double-spaced? The second letter was not a duplicate. When I read your outburst, I thought to myself, if Señor Cortez receives this intemperate letter he can turn it over to the police and they will arrest Pancito Perez for threatening to commit assault and battery, even murder. And furthermore, you remember my theory that man is at the crossroads—he can be the most vicious, the most brutal and deadly of all the animals—or he can use his superior intelligence to reason and negotiate and solve his problems in peace. So I rewrote your letter in those terms. You have seen how Señor Cortez responded. It has proved my theory. But I still have your original letters, signed by you to acknowledge that I had put down exactly what you said, insult by insult, obscenity by obscenity, just as you insisted. If you wish, I could send them to Señor Cortez, explaining that the man he valued so highly that he wished to make him a lifelong associate is not really you at all—actually Señor Discretion Himself is me.”

  Now Pancito bent over his cane, feeling weary and humiliated. Maestro Martínez observed that this made him look more like the earlier Pancito of the shabby, fly-specked Panadería Perez. The Don Alfonso he had become walked erect on his cane, as if the cane were actually a gentleman’s accoutrement maneuvered with a sense of grandeur, rather than a crutch to be leaned on in disability.

  “Maestro Martínez,” Pancito said in a hoarse, defeated whisper, “are you trying to blackmail me?”

  The slender, wire-bent maestro seemed to smile behind his frown. “Perhaps. Or you might say I am trying to white-mail you. I mean, I am not threatening you with a black lie, but with the pure truth. Lupita and I wish to leave Tepalcingo and go to the capital, to the city of Mexico. We can both attend the national university, where I can work for my master’s degree in philosophy and she can complete her college education and become a teacher as you have always hoped she would.”

  “I thought it was better for her than doing menial labor,” Pancito protested. “But it’s hardly in a class with becoming the wife of a leading citizen.”

  This time Maestro Martínez seemed to frown behind his smile. “Ten thousand pesos will see us comfortably through the first year at the university.”

  “Ten thousand pesos—” Pancito shouted. “Because Hilario Cortez and I own a few bakeries together, you think I am a millionaire?”

  Maestro Martínez glanced at the threatening letters he held in his hand. “So far I have only read you the first letter,” he said. “The third, as you may remember, was even stronger. ‘Rapist Hilario, you depraved son of a rutting she-goat—’ ”

  “Stop—stop!” Pancito shouted. “I no longer know whether I ever used such vile language or not—all I know is, I cannot bear to hear it now. You will have your ten thousand, yes, and Lupita in the bargain. I say good riddance to both of you.”

  “We will make you very proud of us at the university, Father,” Maestro Martínez bowed.

  By the time Pancito saw his partner Hilario again, he had somewhat composed himself and was walking a little straighter on his cane. “Hilario, my dear friend, I am covered with apologies. I do not understand what devil possesses the young ladies growing up today. They are unruly and disobedient. It seems to be a curse of this modern age. Rebeldes sin causa. Lupita chooses to run off to the university with that little lizard of a schoolteacher, Maestro Martínez. Ay, don’t think I couldn’t stop them, don’t think I couldn’t box their heads, get our good friend the chief of police to—”

  “I know. I
know,” Hilario said soothingly. “But you are too civilized, too much the man of peace. If we must use force to gain the things we want, is it not better to do without? You taught me that lesson years ago, Don Alfonso, and I have never forgotten it. That is why I cherished your remarkable letters.”

  “Please, please, you embarrass me with so much flattery about those old letters,” Pancito muttered. “Hilario, perhaps you would do us the honor of coming home for dinner tonight. My daughter Maria Cristina is only a handful of years older than Lupita, she is an excellent manager as you have observed, she cooks like an angel, she plays Chopin on the piano most agreeably and I have a father’s intuition that one reason she has never married is that she holds you in such high respect.”

  “Señor Discretion Himself,” Hilario said, in what had now become a ceremonial accolade, and he put his arm around the shoulder of his dearest and most trusted friend, and thus they walked to their favorite street-corner table at the bar of The Three Kings, and in the finest Scotch whiskey available they toasted themselves and all that is reasonable and wise, harmonious and peaceful in the reach of humankind. And a warm glow came over Pancito, excuse us again, Don Alfonso Perez, as he luxuriated in the admiration of his old partner who so loved him for his moderation and humanity that it was no trick at all for Pancito to accept and believe every word of it himself.

  PASSPORT

  TO

  NOWHERE

  Nathan Solomon loved to paint. He was young, blond and large-muscled; he was a Jew and he wanted to paint Poland. Nathan wanted to paint his Poland vibrant and gay with color, but solemn too, streaked with the solemnity of Jewish beards and Jewish yarmulkes. Sad too, blackened with the sadness of broken windows in the synagogue, the long sad lines of old man Gutterman, whose wife was stoned into her grave, guilty of having a son who ran off with the narrow-hipped wife of the village merchant Pokanski. And mad too, the madness of the Jew Garnitsky, who plodded down the street mumbling the psalms into his long white beard. And mean. Mean as the grasping little child hands that pulled that beard with innocent, self-righteous and frenzied anger.