When I paid the entrance fee, I knew that whatever cool I had, or pretended to have had, was gone. I was going to have to pay for some pussy. Incredible! Unthinkable, but there it was. I stood looking around the hall; the musicians were on a stage. The Johns were young and wore suits—the type of young men you saw in the offices of struggling businesses in Barcelona. They had a little French, a little English, a little German; and they were Catalans and wore gold-rimmed glasses.
The women looked a helluva lot better than they did along the Ramblas and the harbor; they could have been housewives, teachers, secretaries; I looked back at the musicians, who were, all five of them, grinning at me as if they had just measured the size and hardness, of my member. They ranged from purest black to mustard yellow. One of them waved for me to come closer to the stage where, loose-limbed and tall, he was shaking his maracas and singing: “ba ba yah Hello, Yanqui! Ba ba !Click! New York, yeah?”
“We from Oriente Province,” the bassist said. “Oh, man, that Fidel, he kicks ass, so we haul ass—”
“Ba ba yah—”
“—cha chink cha !click cha—where you livin’?” The maraca man leaned toward me. I liked his face. “Sitges,” and I started moving to the music, my coolness undone by a dozen cognacs, some brothers speaking with accents and pussy on the hoof, or was it cash on the maidenhead?
Piano, bass, drums, timbal and maracas, they moved to the finale, all singing, tossing dialogues at each other in the breathing spaces.
The maraca man came down and shook my hand. “We stand up there and play,” he said. “We know why we’re here. Fidel Castro! No more Batista and the good times. Now, Spain and Franco. But then we see you come and we say: What’s that nigger doin’ here?” He laughed, slapping his thighs, and I laughed, looking past him to the women sitting along the edge of the dance floor.
“Yeah, Luis know. We all know. But now you look.” He put an arm around my shoulder and I followed the movement of his head around the room.
“You see, Yanqui? You see her?”
She sat almost alone. There were spaces on either side of her. She was pretty and young—and black.
“Is she Spanish?”
“Carlos,” Luis said, nodding toward the bassist, “saw her when she came in tonight. This is her first time, no?” A chorus of si’s came from the musicians.
“She is a proud one,” Carlos said. “Fafff! It is a fuckin’ poor country, and people can’t fill their bellies with pride. The Spanish, that’s all they left wherever they went—pride. Sheet for this pride.”
“Is she Spanish?” I asked once again.
“She has some Catalan, I would bet,” Luis said. “Her mother’s side.” He winked. “The Spanish women, they like Moros, Negros—” he guffawed. “Niggeros, yah, cha, chink, chink, chink,” and he was cha-cha-cha-ing, winking, grinning.
I wondered how come he was so sure. No matter, I slid around people waiting for the next set to begin and edged up the rows of chairs where she sat. She wasn’t so pretty close up. I stopped and smoked a cigarette, hoping the band would get back to work.
I said good evening to her. She returned my greeting. I asked if she would dance with me when the band started to play again, and she nodded.
“May I sit down?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s a public place, isn’t it?”
The band saved me; we danced.
She was awkward for a few steps, but then, as she came to anticipate me, she improved. When the number was over she smiled for the first time and said, “You dance well.”
“And so do you,” I said. On the stand, between numbers, Luis went into his little dance again, grinning at me.
“Do you come here all the time?”
“No,” I said. “First time.”
“My first time, too,” she said. Her eyes begged me to believe her.
“Nice place,” I said. I glanced at the women—the housewives, teachers and secretaries. They all sat waiting patiently for one of the men to ask them to dance; they possessed none of that jive feminine aggressiveness that one associates with whores. They sat waiting for the beginning of the ritual, a kind of benediction for the “sin” that would follow. She said in what I thought was a bored voice: “We are all very poor and very hungry, and that is why we are here.”
We were dancing again by now. I tried not to look at the seated women. Of course I’d heard of the poor in Spain. The government swept the beggars off the streets. Some people lived in caves. The workers labored for a pittance; farming was almost like slavery. Some of this I’d seen—and closed my eyes against it. I’d never been in a situation like it before. The woodman bringing his wood in his bare feet while I wore two pairs of heavy socks and shoes against the cold of the tile floors of my house; people in the market buying ounces of meat.
“Married?” I asked.
“No, but some are, I suppose. I have a child, a son.” We were standing now, waiting for the next number.
“Are you from Barcelona?”
“Would you buy me something to eat first?” she asked. Her forehead pressed against my shoulder, and she felt suddenly very slight in the arm I pressed against her back.
“Yes,” I said hurriedly.
Outside she pressed her fingers against her lips and took a deep breath. “Come on,” I said. I’d passed this café at least three times earlier. “I know of a place not far away.”
“Just food, just food—”
When she finished the soup she said, “Yes, I am from Barcelona.”
She sipped her wine, looked at the glass. She seemed relaxed now, more vulnerable, even with the soft Catalan conversations going on at the bar.
“I lived with my parents until I had the baby. Then, I had to leave. They made me leave.”
“Where do you live now?”
She glanced toward the kitchen; the next course would be coming in a moment. She shrugged. “Sometimes here, sometimes there. It is very difficult in Spain if you are poor.”
“Where is your baby?”
“With friends. He is not so much a baby anymore. He walks and almost talks.” The waiter came with the chicken and rice, the shallow dish of vegetables that were extra. The girl stopped talking and began eating. There were so many things I wanted to ask her. When she came up for breath and another sip of wine, smiling now with a real luster in her eyes, she asked, “Are you rich?”
I shook my head. I wondered that there were people in the world who might believe me to be rich. How very poor they must be!
“American, not Cuban like the musicians, yes?”
I nodded.
“Americans are rich.”
“No,” I said. She began to eat again, with the slow deliberation of one determined to finish the entire task before him. “A very few are rich, but most are not. Like Spain, like France, like anywhere. All Americans want to be rich, though. That’s a part of the culture.”
“Rich is good,” she said, looking up at me as a few grains of rice sprayed from her fork to the table.
“I have not seen any black Spanish people,” I said.
“Because there aren’t many. My father is an African, from Sierra Leone. He was a seaman who came here before the war. He met and married my mother. Now he teaches English to the students who think they’ll need it to get ahead in the world. I’ve disgraced them and so—”
“Don’t you work?”
“There are no jobs for women. Very few. In this country, it is the man first, always the man,” she said, snappishly. “I was a waitress until two weeks ago. Business was bad, and nobody wanted a waitress, not even a black one who would be an attraction here, you understand.” She dipped back into the serving pan, cleaned it out with a whisk of the fork. “How did you learn Spanish?” she asked.
“In school. Why?”
“The way you speak it, it’s cute.”
Dessert and coffee came almost as soon as she’d finished. “Well, I guess I’m ready.” She finished the wine in her glass,
then swirled her coffee and looked at the table.
“Would you like to go to Sitges?”
She frowned. “Sitges? A hotel is closer. Sitges is so far.”
“I mean,” I said, “to live with me. You and your son.”
First she stared and then she laughed, quietly, cautiously. “Sitges,” she said again. “But what would I do there?”
“Be with me. I’ll take care of you as long as I’m in Spain.”
Her eyes flicked quickly back and forth across my face, seeking answers to the questions she was asking herself. She saw what she wanted to see, perhaps what I couldn’t conceal. She dropped her head. “We don’t even know each other’s names.”
“Cato Douglass, and I come from New York.”
“Ah, New York.” There was something like awe and envy in her tone. “Are you married?”
“Divorced.”
“Children?”
“A son.”
A little smile played on her smooth, brown face. I ordered more wine. “What do you do here in Spain?” she asked.
“I think a lot about my life and the world, I guess, and I write things—books, articles, poetry.”
The lashes of her eyes were long and curled. “I see.” She put her elbows on the table. I poured from the second bottle. “Do you know,” she said, “I have never been with a black man.”
“And I have never been with a black Spanish woman.”
“Any Spanish woman?”
If I’d been able, I think I would have blushed. “No.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since fall.”
“How long will you stay?”
“I don’t know. Until something tells me it’s time to go.” I could see her thinking, almost. “There are buses into Barcelona and back every day,” I said.
She sipped from her wine again, a long, delicate sip. “I’ll go tonight and see.” She shrugged as if to say, What do I have to lose? “And if I like it, tomorrow I’ll go get my son and come back.”
The cab driver was a Basque. Not even the Catalans rested easily with Basques. When he had driven us to my house and I’d paid him, the girl and I stood in the cold, quiet night before the gate leading to it. Then she walked slowly behind me, and I turned to look at her, sensing her thoughts.
There I was, a stranger in her country, living in, it must have seemed to her, a very fine house, while she, a Spaniard in spite of her color (as I was an American in spite of mine), did not know from one night to the next where she would sleep. There was nothing I could say to make her know I understood; my Spanish wasn’t good enough. Few languages can adequately explain anything like that. And Uncle Sam must have been smiling out of his star-spangled heaven, furthermore, because, like all other tourists (though black people are special cases), I was proof that Democracy Works! Never mind Mack Parker and Emmett Till and Little Rock; if all was so bad, how had I managed to get away? I was, standing there, my key in the lock, incontrovertible proof that America was indeed the land of the free; the masses no longer huddled, except on flights to Europe during summer vacations.
“Fire?” I sat her down near the fireplace and mashed some paper and pine twigs together and began a fire.
At first I did not hear her. Her words sank in just as I was about to ask what it was she’d said.
“And when you leave?”
Perhaps all things commence from mutual need. What we had ferreted out, one from the other, was our mutual loneliness. (Later, much later, on a couple of midnight-to-dawn phone-in talk shows over radio, I would come to understand how insidious, how pernicious, loneliness could be, understand it through those voices trying not to show it while those same voices, attached to empty souls, wandered over the wires to talk about anything so long as another voice responded. These would be frightening experiences, the wee small hour darkness fused with the latest technology—which emphasized the loneliness of the strangers groping through the night.) Besides the loneliness, and the obvious need for someone to respect her real person, I was to her a have. Plainly, she was a have not. She would let me use her presence, her laughter (I knew it was there), her son, in exchange for living in my house. Clicking in my mind was this further thought: perhaps she hoped she would get from me what no white Spaniard had ever given her. (I had heard them on the Ramblas and calles as I passed—Sssssst! Mira! Mira! Un Moro! Moro!) In order to be rid of the Moors they had to laugh at those related to them.
The Spanish make very remarkable floor tiles, and I was studying them because I didn’t know how to answer her. When I did look up, she hunched her shoulders, stood, took off her thin, hip-length jacket and said in English as we walked down the hall toward the bedrooms, “Let’s see what else goes with the house.”
She made breakfast quietly and efficiently and we sat down in a gray dawn. “And now it is morning,” she said. “Do you still want to do it?”
“Yes.”
She nodded, and I think she was relieved. Monica Jones—that was her name—would go to get her son, Federico García Lorca Jones, and return in the afternoon. Better to have what you know you can get for a little while than to have nothing and not know where anything else was coming from. I could see her reasoning, but the sheer banality of the way things worked made me pensive.
“Is it true,” I asked, “that they just stood Lorca up and shot him?”
She nodded. She talked a lot with her body; nodded and made a pistol with her finger and jerked it several times.
“Isn’t it dangerous to name a child after him?”
“Oh, they think it is a joke because I am black, you see, and he is black, and when I shout for him in a park—FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA JONES!—people become frightened until they see who Federico García Lorca Jones is.”
(What a fine little road
from Cadíz to Gibraltar.
The sea recognizes
my step by its sighs.)
I laughed because I felt good, and while she was gone I grew to like her more and I felt this tingling in my body, as though goose pimples were changing places.
We wintered nicely, the three of us. We were triple curiosities in the village: a family, which took much of the danger out of my single, wandering person, a family in blackface, yes, but a family still, and the Spanish have a thing about families.
Then one day while Monica was shopping and I was keeping Federico, the mailman brought a single letter from an S. Merritt. I ripped it open.
Dear Cate:
So you’ve escaped. I envy you. And I also envy you the acceptance of your novel, but it is all friendly envy. Is there such a thing? Not really, I suppose.
Cate, my marriage—yes, I did marry Robert—is high on the rocks. And I am pregnant. Would you, could you, imagine that he left me for a white woman, one of those long, blue-eyed, blond creatures, classically American, as they say.
I would suppose, dear Cate, that that is precisely the reason why you left, so you too could wallow unmolested in a country far from America, where black women must be almost nonexistent! How alike all Negro men are!
Negro women must put up with this kind of behavior; what else can they do but bear it, grinning only when it is advantageous to do so or when they finally have their revenge?
Will you bring back a European lady? I for one would not be surprised, but I would be civil, should we ever meet again, even friendly, as we were before.
By then I expect to have my first collection of poems ready for a publisher. You didn’t know I wrote poetry, did you? Well, you always were pretty wrapped up in yourself.
As ever,
Selena
At first I simply could not understand the letter. We had never been friendly, really. She tolerated me, though I was much attracted to her. And, also, at first I didn’t know what there was about her letter, her sitting down to write it, that made me think momentarily of Gittens. But I came back to that thought: Selena had gone a little mad.
I thought of trying to explain i
t all to Monica, but one had to be an American to understand, so I did not. When she asked why I seemed to be brooding, I said that I was thinking, and she hugged me from behind and kissed my neck and teased me about the limitations of the brain. Federico, sitting on my rug, smiled at us and clicked and drooled.
Rupert cabled that he was on his way to see me with the galleys. The schedule had been altered, and my publisher now wanted to bring the book out early in the summer, after the spring crush. He was traveling to Aix-en-Provence with his family, then would fly down to Barcelona.
Like many, he had never been to Spain because of Franco; he had supported the Republicans. He was coming because of me. Excitedly, I explained to Monica what galleys were, and as I did, little shadows chased across her eyes. What we had not talked about since that first night, my leaving, now loomed large every time the postman came bicycling down the rutted road.
Rupert was surprised at my family. Sitting before the fire one of the three nights he spent with us, he said, “And here I thought you were suffering alone and in silence, drunk on cheap wine, working away. But here’s a whole fine family. Pretty much like your own, I guess. You’re not alone. That’s bullshit, being alone, you know. It’s terrible.”
Long, long after that night, Monica quietly serving coffee after dinner, then discreetly going off to bed, and long after that, when Rupert died under a thousand tons of snow while skiing in Switzerland, I remembered what he said. Perhaps I remembered so well because it was a thing I already knew.
“It’s better, yes,” I said. “And I’ve been working my ass off, too.”
“How did those interviews go?”
“Okay.”
“Johnson,” he mused. “God, he was so much better than so many others back then.”
I looked at him. “For example?”
“Hemingway, for starters.” He sighed. “How’s the new book? Shall I wait to look at it?”
“I wish you would.”
I think he preferred that, too. His grunt sounded like approval. “You are planning to come back around pub date?”
“Sure.” I thought then that pub date was a momentous event in a writer’s life.
“Good. That’s wise. Don’t cut loose, like Dick Wright. Did you see him while you were in Paris?”
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