The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories

by Geoffrey Household

  Isabelita was a little startled at the other woman’s assumption of equality. Her first impulse was to snub Anna, but she vaguely realized that they were not on common ground, and so, with Spanish good sense, set out to define her position.

  “There’s only one art,” she said firmly. “Learn and train, and train and learn, and then, if you have it in you, you can dance; and, if you haven’t it in you, you can’t dance. My professor said he could teach me to hold my heels together, but only the good God could teach the blood to run in them.”

  Her swift heels rolled a faint tattoo on the hard floor. It pleased her. Without moving from her seat, indeed hardly moving at all, she let hands and shoulders, eyes and head, dance to the demon drumming of her heels. The little gem of art ended in ten seconds. It was a mere epigram translated into movement; yet it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, all three polished, inevitable, and full of humor.

  “I think the blood runs in you if you would let it,” Isabelita went on, “but you haven’t learned and trained yet.”

  “It’s an entirely different technique,” said Anna.

  “Ay de mi!” laughed Isabelita. “It’s no technique at all! Have a drink, frigid one, and I will teach you how to dance!”

  “I would rather,” Anna said, “that you taught me how to handle the men upstairs.”

  When the two shows were over, the girls had to entertain at a not unpleasant little cabaret above the music hall. They were paid for their attendance and they received a liberal commission on such champagne as they could persuade their escorts to buy; in return they permitted them immediate caresses and exaggerated hopes. Isabelita was thoroughly used to this epilogue to her dancing. It was unavoidable in most of the halls she toured. She undertook it with vivacity, and, if surrounded, as she often was, by admirers who had deliberately come upstairs to compliment her and buy her supper, with enthusiasm and much good-fellowship. Anna, accustomed to the sentimentality of the German cabaret, disliked the franker spirit of the Spanish and was unable to handle it. Her request to Isabelita, while an obvious attempt to change the subject, was quite sincere. To the star, however, it seemed that Anna had refused point-blank her offer of help and contemptuously asked her for information that any harlot could give as well.

  “It is easy,” replied Isabelita.

  “But how?”

  “I do not know. Laugh—drink—be respected! With me they do not go beyond the bounds of what can be permitted.”

  Anna was exasperated. She had already heard Isabelita rebuff too personal a compliment with a bawdy joke. She had seen her cut up an overwhelming amorous advance with laughter. Anna herself had attempted this method. It had repelled advances with too much success; the customer had paid his bill and gone home without a word. Yet this crude, plump dancer, utterly unable to analyze the secrets of her own power, could allow herself the haughtiness, licentiousness, and humanity of a mediaeval queen.

  “It’s like dancing,” said Isabelita. “One must know how it is done. There is no second-best.”

  “If it comes to the worst, one can always break a glass,” suggested Maruja humbly.

  “Little fool, it should never come to that!” laughed Isabelita.

  “But it does sometimes,” Maruja sighed.

  “Lord, what a child! Look, Anna! I will show you what Maruja is talking about.”

  Isabelita picked up a tall goblet, holding it by its short stem, and tapped it three times on the corner of the table. At the third tap the goblet smashed, leaving a long, spear-headed sliver of glass attached to the stem.

  “That will frighten any man,” she said, “but why one should want to frighten a man I do not know.”

  Anna fingered the glass weapon curiously.

  “Did you ever use it?” she asked Maruja.

  “I once tried,” admitted Maruja. “But the glass broke in the wrong place, and he was very kind and tied my hand up and after that we were lovers.”

  Isabelita gurgled with deep laughter. Her laughter was like a bell under water.

  “You would, Maruja!” she cried. “You would, little angel! And it’s so easy to break in the right way! Look!”

  She picked up glass after glass, collecting them with swift snatches from her own box and the box behind her, smashing them cunningly on the edge of the table, and laying in front of her a row of deadly little irregular instruments that might have been made for a Dresden-china surgeon. The waiters hastened in from all sides.

  “I pay, sons!” exclaimed Isabelita grandly, throwing down a twenty-five-peseta note. “Quiá! It’s dead here! The caballeros must have something to look at until I dance again!”

  The musicians were already tuning up, warbling like a gaunt and hungry roost of black-backed birds before the dawn should bring them to such fullness of melody as they had. The places left vacant by those who had stopped only for the first show had new tenants. The smoke and laughter thickened. Men passed and repassed the back of the artistes’ box, exchanging pleasantries with Isabelita and her companions.

  Isabelita preferred to receive her court after she had danced and not before.

  “Let us go and change,” she said.

  The three gathered their shawls around them, smiled at the floor and the gallery, and filed out of the box; then through the artistes’ door, and down their dirty staircase to the dressing room.

  The second show, like the second act of a play, developed the atmosphere created by the first. It was more intimate and less superficial. The entertainers remembered that the second house had dined well. They were also mindful that those of the capitalistas who had been sufficiently attracted by the romance of the performer would afterwards go upstairs to the cabaret to explore the reality of the woman. The singers of couplets thought more of the words than of appropriate and improper gestures. The dancers asked the electrician for less, and more entrancing, light. The guitarist, who had a wife and family to support and gave his regular and automatic best at every performance, changed his greasy black tie for a clean one.

  The lions were good-humored—hungry, but playful. They insisted that the singers of the more outrageous couplets should suit action to word and permit the den a full view of their delights; they were complimentary to the dancers; they entertained each other with their remarks; and they felt a generosity reflected on themselves when the Conde de Urdiales, who sold automobiles and was an amateur of music and women, vaulted on to the stage from the box opposite the artistes’, crowned the guitarist with a velvet brassière left behind by the preceding turn, and covered the bottom of his Cordoba hat with silver.

  When Isabelita’s number was reached, she was a little drunk. She had not taken enough alcohol to render her careless of her surroundings, only a single golden glass of manzanilla which intensified and quickened the current of sympathy between stage and floor. She was of Spain rather than in it, of her audience rather than performing before them. The reaction of the audience was ecstatically physical. The nerves of their spines shivered in sensuous pleasure under the music of her fingers and the beat of her heels. The tradition of Rome and of Africa in the classic dance expressed the desires of those cells of Rome and Africa which had been passed down from womb to womb into the bodies of that living crowd. Isabelita filled the sordid hall with a concentrated essence of Spain—of pageantry and bulls, of village fiesta, of wailing song under moon glare on white wall and yellow rock; precise and delicate images of savagery and passion. The three tiers of males talked, applauded, drank, and behaved more or less as at all other performances, but their dreams as they watched her played over their love of the race and its unknown destiny, inspired by the art rather than the shape of woman.

  To Anna in the dressing room came also this communal current. The music, the rhythm of Isabelita’s heels and castanets, the swinging of her skirt seen from the wings, were much the same as they had been at the earlier show, yet they had
intenser meaning. She, like everyone else in the place, was a little drunk on Isabelita’s single glass of manzanilla. That glass of good wine in the stomach of a consummate artist had commanded, inevitably, the response of five hundred men and a few women eager for any emotional experience which would lift them out of their daily lives.

  Isabelita entered the dressing room silently and with tears in her eyes. The applause thundered and thundered from the hall. The audience, released from her spell, were impatient with their own hands because, crashed together, they could not make more noise. Maruja, the following turn, they hardly noticed. She was wise enough not to call any lasting attention to herself. She crooned rather than sang to her Teddy bear, and what the words were nobody knew or cared. The stream had not passed her by, but she did not attempt to swim on it. She knew she was good to look at and was content. So, while they collected their thoughts, were her audience.

  While Maruja was still on the stage and three minutes were yet to go before Anna’s turn, the manager came into the dressing room. His usually kindly face glowed with annoyance through a carpet of unshaven bristles.

  “You must put more on, Anna,” he began. “I told you—”

  “Why?” she interrupted curtly.

  “Why? Because I have just been fined by the civil governor for permitting your indecency.”

  “Indecency! How dare he! And the others—look at them! Oh, how dare he! How dare he! Schweinerei! …” She broke into a torrent of hysterical German, her Spanish unable to deal with the rush of anger—the first genuine emotion she had felt in Spain.

  “For the love of God, shut up!” The manager was almost weeping. “They’ll hear you out in front!”

  “I do not care if they hear me down the river!” shouted Anna. “The damned, dirty civil gov—”

  She felt a soft hand clapped over her mouth and turned in fury.

  “Sh-sh, chica!” said Isabelita, holding her. “Do not be indiscreet! Ay, and I thought you Northerners were cold!” she added with gentle humor. “If only you could show such passion in your dance!”

  “Oh God, what do any of you know about dancing?” Anna cried, her voice breaking with misery.

  “Well, to you it may not seem much,” answered Isabelita with an air of finality as of one not wishing to argue. “Shall we go to the box, Maruja?”

  The child Maruja, just come from the stage, slipped an evening frock over her head and followed Isabelita wonderingly. It seemed to her to be the moment when rival artistes began to throw plates at one another, yet she could imagine neither of these goddesses indulging in such vulgarity. Conscious of storm clouds, she did not know what lightning, if indeed any, would follow. She fled after Isabelita, her pretty head still struggling through the opening of her frock.

  Anna slowly and deliberately took down a scarf from her peg and wound it about the breasts that had dared to offend the civil governor. The suppressed anger of the Northerner possessed her. It was in perfect harmony with the sultry atmosphere of emotion. She strode out of the wings, slinking forward on long, golden, slender legs, without a trace of the temporary malaise she had felt on former occasions. The crowd, to whom a rumor of the civil governor’s action had come, received her with applause in which was a note of pity. Not that they disapproved of the governor; they considered that for the dignity of his office he could have done nothing else.

  Anna’s act, to them as to him, had been vaguely indecent. Still, there was the eternal pity of the Spaniard for the human being that had to earn its bread in spite of the arbitrary and ever-interfering preventions of the law.

  The passion in Anna’s heart gave her for the first time a feeling of intimacy with her audience. Insult and outrage had shattered the detachment with which she had always gone through her series of moderately pretty movements. Possessed by a berserk demon which had to be exorcised by violent action, she hurled herself into the music. “Give the swine something they can understand!” she shouted to herself. “Oh, give them something they can understand!” She tried, but her dance had fury without form. She challenged comparison with the wretched posings of the early turns. She even attempted some stock tricks from the Spanish dances, recollections of the easy grace of Isabelita. It was incredibly bad—burlesque without humor. It was hysteria, the negation of all art.

  Isabelita, watching from the artistes’ box, was disgusted by such a profanation. She had utterly lost the regal pity with which she treated the failures of her fellow performers. Twice offended by Anna, she was now hard and insensitive. She caught the expression of the Conde de Urdiales in the opposite box and giggled. He was watching Anna with blank amazement—with the absurdly puzzled expression of a man who has drunk rather too much and suddenly been transported on the magic carpet of another’s unaccountable emotion into an unintelligible world.

  Rising to her feet, she began to imitate Anna’s dance within the confines of the box. A touch of her hand produced a slight disheveling of her glossy hair which suggested Anna’s bob. She pinned a hastily folded table napkin across her flowered bosom. A bottle on the table represented the sacred flame. Her shawl became a wickedly funny veil. With every exquisite movement of her body she pretended delirium and inefficiency. Anna raged on through her dance, knowing nothing of the parody until she saw the eyes of the pianist flash up to the artistes’ box. She looked at the audience; up to that moment she had felt them, but only seen them as a blur of faces. They were all looking away from her and up to the box. They were not laughing, but an uneasy grin seemed to dominate every face. She followed their eyes to Isabelita, gay, careless, and imitating her.

  Anna signaled to the musicians to stop at the end of the bar and walked into the wings without another glance. The audience clapped feebly. They had not laughed, nor had Anna wept. The tension in that hall was terrific. The mood of exaltation aroused by Isabelita’s dancing had never descended, and on to it came the impact of a hysterical woman on the stage and a wild act of comedy at which none could laugh outright. Only Isabelita, insolent and triumphant, neither realizing the supreme effect of her own performance nor heedful of her later cruelty, was insensitive to the storm of suppressed and conflicting emotions that she had raised.

  Miguel de Urdiales signaled across to her and to Maruja to meet him in the cabaret. The house emptied. The sweepers began to pass between the tables brushing together the sawdust and cigarette ends.

  Anna was quite calm as she dressed. She was alone in the dressing room, for the rest of the girls had already gone upstairs. The sweat dripped at intervals from her armpits and ran down her golden sides. It was cold sweat, not the pleasant warm dampness of exercise, and she vaguely wondered at it. She was not thinking of Isabelita or of her uncompleted berserk mood. Indeed, she was not thinking of anything at all. She gave exaggerated importance to every motion of dressing, and talked to herself aloud in trivial little exclamations. She took particular care over her make-up for the cabaret and was astonished at the brilliance of her eyes and the stillness of her face. She put on a straight white frock that well showed the athletic and lovely lines of her body.

  She was remote and calm when she walked into the cabaret. Those few of the customers who had not patronized the music hall and did not know who she was assumed her to be some frigid and self-sufficient tourist waiting for the husband or friend who at that moment was depositing his hat and coat.

  Isabelita and Maruja sat at a table near the door with Miguel de Urdiales and two of his friends. They needed a third woman to complete the party.

  “We must invite her,” said the Conde de Urdiales.

  He heaved his tall figure off the low, gaudily upholstered bench. Youth and dignity concealed a slight unsteadiness of the feet. He approached Anna courteously. She bowed and walked silently before him to the table.

  “Sit here, chica!” said Isabelita genially and with a little remorseful smile, patting the chair next to her.

 
Anna thanked her and sat down.

  “A barbarian, the civil governor!” Isabelita went on. “But do not mind, girl! We all admire you and will make you at home. Isn’t it so, caballeros?”

  The three men vied with each other in paying compliments to Anna, who accepted them pleasantly and remotely.

  “I behaved badly,” admitted Isabelita with regal frankness, “but it did me no good and it did you no harm. We shall be friends, I know it.”

  “I am sure of it,” replied Anna gravely.

  Her mind was still running on trivialities; they occupied it so thoroughly that she had not given a thought to her surroundings. The cold sweat still trickled down her sides. She was able to contemplate Isabelita quite calmly, even to admire, very distantly, as if it belonged to a complete stranger, her superb good nature.

  “And you, little flower,”—Isabelita turned to Maruja,—“you say nothing. What is it?”

  “I am afraid,” answered Maruja simply, with a little shiver of her naked shoulders.

  “Que va! Everybody is sad this evening except me. Let us drink, Miguel!”

  Miguel de Urdiales poured her a glass of champagne and then filled the other five glasses. Isabelita drank hers, tilted back her chair, and, with the air of a merry queen to whom all things must be permitted, propped up her bare legs on the table. They were beautiful so, the blue veins and muscles stretched tight beneath the round knees.

  “Will you dance?” asked the man on the other side of her.

  “Not yet. Let the place wake up a bit.”

  To anyone entering at the moment, the cabaret would have seemed fully awake. The high stools at the bar were each supporting a man. The tables were fairly full. The orchestra blared over a cheerful undertone of voices. But Isabelita loved an extravagant communal spirit. She liked to see flowers thrown and much outrageous jesting and the whole house dancing a jota in the middle of the floor. She didn’t much care for foxtrots, but she enjoyed a solo with the rest of the cabaret playing the chorus around her.