by Jack Kerouac
She is wearing a long dirty dress and a shawl and her face is pale, little rings under the eyes, that thin patrician slowly hawked nose, those luscious lips, those sad eyes—and the music of her voice, the complaint of her song, when she talks in Spanish to others . . .
AH SACRISTI—the sad mutilated blue Madonna, is Tristessa, and for me to keep saying that I love her is a bleeding lie—She hates me and I hate her, make no bones about it—I hate her because she hates me, no other reason—She hates me because I dont know, I guess I was too pious last year—She keeps yelling “I dunt care!” and hits us over the head and goes out and sits on the curb in the street and doodles and sways—Nobody dares approach the woman with her head between her knees—Tonight though I can see she’s alright, quiet, pale, walking straight, coming up the stone steps of the thieves—
El Indio aint in, we go down again—I had already twice visited El Indio’s to check on him, not there, but his brown daughter with the beautiful brown sad eyes staring out into the night as I question her, “Non, non,” is all she can say, she is staring at some fixed point in the garbage of the sky, so all I do is stare at her eyes and I have never seen such a girl—Her eyes seem to say “I love my father even tho he takes narcoticas, but please dont come here, leave him alone”—
Tristessa and I go down to the slippery garbage street of dull brown cokestand lights and distant dim blue and rose neons (like rubbed chalk crayon) of Santa Maria de Redondas, where we hook up with poor bedraggled wild looking Cruz and start off somewhere—
I have my arm around Tristessa’s waist and walk sadly with her—Tonight she doesnt hate me—Cruz always liked me and still does—In the past year she has caused poor old Bull every kind of trouble with her drunk shenanigans—O there’s been pulque and vomiting in the streets and groans under heaven, spattered angel wings covered with the pale blue dirt of heaven—Angels in hell, our wings huge in the dark, the three of us start off, and from the Golden Eternal Heaven bends God blessing us with his face which I can only describe as being infinitely sorry (compassionate), that is, infinite with understanding of suffering, the sight of that Face would make you cry—I’ve seen it, in a vision, it will cancel all in the end—No tears, just the lips, O I can show you!—No woman could be that sad, God is like a man—It’s all a blank how we go up the street to some small narrow dark street where two women are sitting with steaming cauldrons of some kind, or steamcups, where we sit on wood crates, I with my head on Tristessa’s shoulder, Cruz at my feet, and they give me a drink of hot punch—I look in my wallet, no more money, I tell Tristessa, she pays for the drinks, or talks, or runs the whole show, maybe she’s the leader of the gang of thieves even—
The drinks dont help much, it’s getting late, towards dawn, the chill of the high plateau gets into my little sleeveless shirt and loose sports coat and shino pants and I start shivering uncontrollably—Nothing helps, drink after drink, nothing helps—
Two young Mexican cats attracted by Tristessa come and stand there drinking and talking all night, both have mustaches, one of them is very short with a round baby face with pear-like cheeks—The other is taller, with wings of newspaper stuck somehow in his jacket to protect him from the cold—Cruz just stretches out right in the road in her topcoat and goes to sleep, head on the ground, on the stone—A cop arrests somebody at the head of the alley, we around the little candle flames and steampots watch without much interest—At one point Tristessa kisses me gently on the lips, the softest, just-touchingest kiss in the world—Aye, and I receive it with amazement—I’ve made up my mind to stay with her and sleep where she sleeps, even if she sleeps in a garbage can, in a stone cell with rats—But I keep shivering, no amount of wrapping in can do it, for a year now I’ve been spending every night in my sleeping bag and I’m no longer inured to ordinary dawn chills of the earth—At one point I fall right off the crate I occupy with Tristessa, land in the sidewalk, stay there—Other times I’m up haranguing long mysterious conversations with the two cats—What on earth are they trying to say and do?—Cruz sleeps in the street—
Her hair hangs out all black across the road, people step over her.—It’s the end.
Dawn comes gray.
PEOPLE START PASSING to go to work, soon the pale light begins to reveal the incredible colors of Mexico, the pale blue shawls of women, the deep purple shawls, the lips of people faintly roseate in general aubeal blue—
“What we waiting for? Where we goin?” I’d kept asking—
“I go get my shot,” she says—gets me another hot punch, which goes down shivering through me—One of the ladies is asleep, the dealer with ladle is beginning to get sore because apparently I’ve drank more than Tristessa paid or the two cats or something—
Many people and carts pass—
“Vamonos,” says Tristessa getting up, and we wake up ragged Cruz and waver a minute standing, and go off in the streets—
Now you can see to the ends of the streets, no more garbanzo darkness, it’s all pale blue churches and pale people and pink shawls—We move along and come to rubbly fields and cross and come to a settlement of adobe huts—
It’s a village in the city by itself—
We meet a woman and go into a room and I figure we’ll finally sleep in here but the two beds are loaded with sleepers and wakers, we just stand there talking, leave and go down the alley past waking-up doors—Everybody curious to see the two ragged girls and the raggedy man, stumbling like a slow team in the dawn—The sun comes up orange over piles of red brick and plaster dust somewhere, it’s the wee North America of my Indian Dreams but now I’m too gone to realize anything or understand, all I wanta do is sleep, next to Tristessa—She in her skimpy pink dress, her little breastless body, her thin shanks, her beautiful thighs, but I’m willing to just sleep but I’d like to hold her and stop shivering under some vast dark brown Mexican Blanket with Cruz too, on the other side, to chaperone, I just wanta stop this insane wandering in the streets—
No soap, at the end of the village, in the final house, beyond which is fields of dumps and distant Church tops and the bleary city, we go in—
What a scene! I jump to rejoice to see a huge bed—“We’re coming to sleep here!”
But in the bed is a big fat woman with black hair, and beside her some guy with a ski cap, both awake, and simultaneously a brunette girl looking like some artist gal beatnik gal in Greenwich Village comes in—Then I see ten, maybe eight other people all milling around in the corners with spoons and matches—One of them is a typical junkey, that rugged tenderness, those rough and suffering features covered with a gray sick slick, the eyes certainly alert, the mouth alert, hat, suit, watch, spoon, heroin, working swiftly at shots—Everybody is shooting up—Tristessa is called by one of the men and she rolls up her coat sleeve—Cruz too—The ski cap has jumped out of bed and is doing the same—The Greenwich Village gal has somehow slipt into the bed, at the foot, got her big sensuous body under the sheets from the other end, and lies there, glad, on a pillow, watching—People come in and out from the village outdoors—I expect to get a shot too and I say to one of the cats “Poquito gote” which I imagine means little taste but really means “little leak”—Leak indeed, I get nothing, all my money’s gone—
The activity is furious, interesting, human, I watch truly amazed, stoned as I am I can see this must be the biggest junk den in Latin America—What interesting types!—Tristessa is talking a mile a minute—The be-hatted junkey with rough and tender features, with little sandy mustache and faintly blue eyes and high cheekbones, is a Mexican but looks just like any junkey in New York—He wont give me a shot either—I just sit and wait—At my feet I have a half full bottle of beer Tristessa had bought me en route, which I’d cached in clothes, now I sip it in front of all these junkies and that finishes my chances—I keep a sharp eye on the bed expecting the fat lady to get up and leave, and the artist gal at her feet, but only t
he men hustle and dress and get out and finally we leave too—
“Where we goin?”
We walk outa there through a saddler’s prompt line of crossed sword eyes of miux ow you know, the old gantlet line, of respectable bourgeois Mexicans in the morning, but nobody stops us, no cops, we stumble out and down a narrow dirt street and up to another door and inside a little old court where an old man is sweeping with a broom and inside you hear many voices—
He pleads with me with his eyes about something, like, “Dont start trouble,” I make the sign “Me start trouble?” but he insists so I hesitate to go in but Tristessa and Cruz drag me confidently and I look back at the old man who has given his consent but is still pleading with his eyes—Great God, he knew!
The place is a kind of unofficial morning snort-bar, Cruz goes into dark noisy interiors and comes out with a kind of weak anisette in a waterglass and I taste—I dont want any particularly—I just stand against the dobe wall looking at the yellow light—Cruz looks absolutely crazy now, with high hairy bestial nostrils like in Orozco the women screaming in revolutions but nevertheless she manages to look dainty too—Besides she is a dainty little person, I mean her heart, all night long she has been very nice to me and she likes me—In fact she’d screamed in a drunk one time “Tristessa you’re jealous because Yack wanted to marry me!”—and but she knows I love unlovable Tristessa—so she’s sistered me and I liked it—some people have vibrations that come straight from the vibrating heart of the sun, unjaded . . .
But as we’re standing there Tristessa suddenly says: “Yack” (me) “all night”—and she starts imitating my shiver in the all-night street, at first I laugh, sun’s yellow hot now on my coat, but I feel alarmed to see her imitate my shiver with such convulsive earnestness and Cruz notices too and says “Stop Tristessa!” but she goes on, her eyes wild and white, shivering her thin body in the coat, her legs begin to crumple—I reach out laughing “Ah come on”—she gets more shivery and convulsive and suddenly (as I’m thinking “How can she love me making fun of me seriously like that”) she starts to fall, which imitation is going too far, I try to grab her, she bends way down to the ground and hangs a minute (just like descriptions Bull had just given me of heroin addicts nodding down to their shoetops on Fifth Avenue in the 20’s Era, way down till their head hung completely from the necks and there was nowhere to go but up or flat down on the head) and to my pain and crash Tristessa just bonks her skull and falls headlong on it right on the harsh stone and collapses.
“Oh no Tristessa!” I cry and grab her under the arms and twist her over and sit her in my haunches as I hunch against the wall—She is breathing heavily and suddenly I see blood all over her coat—
“She’s dying,” I think, “suddenly she’s decided now to die . . . This insane morning, this insane minute”—And here’s the old man with the pleading eyes still looking at me with his broom and men and women going in for anisette stepping right over us (with gingerly unconcern but slowly, scarcely glancing down)—I put my head to hers, cheek to cheek, and hold her tight, and say “Non non non non” and what I mean is “Dont die”—Cruz is on the ground with us on the other side, crying—I hold Tristessa by her little ribs and pray—Blood now trickles out of her nose and mouth—
No one’s gonna move us outa that doorway—this I swear—
I realize I’m there to refuse to let her die—
We get water, on my big red bandana, and mop her a little—After whiles of convulsive shuddering suddenly she becomes extremely calm and opens her eyes and even looks up—She wont die—I feel it, she wont die, not in my arms nor right now, but I feel too “She must know that I refused and now she’ll be expecting me to show her something better than that—than death’s eternal ecstasy”—O Golden Eternity, and as I know death is best but “Non, I love you, dont die, dont leave me . . . I love you too much”—“Because I love you isnt that enough reason to try to live?”—O the gruesome destiny of we human beings, each one of us will suddenly at some terrible moment die and frighten all our lovers and carrion the world—and crack the world—and all the heroin addicts in all the yellow cities and sandy deserts cannot care—and they’ll die too—
Tristessa now tries to get up, I raise her by little broken armpits, she leans, we adjust her coat, poor coat, we wipe off a little blood—Start off—Start off in the yellow Mexican morning, not dead—I let her walk by herself ahead of us, lead the Way, she does so through incredibly dirty staring streets full of dead dogs, past gawking children and old women and old men in dirty rags, out to a field of rocks, across that we stumble—Slowly—I can sense it now in her silence, “This is what you give me instead of death?”—I try to know what to give her instead—No such thing better than death—All I can do is stumble behind her, sometimes I briefly lead the way but I’m not much the figure of the man, The Man Who Leads The Way—But I know she is dying now, either from epilepsy or heart, shock, or goofball convulsion, and because of that no landlady is going to stop me from taking her home to my room on the roof and letting her sleep and rest under my open sleepbag, with Cruz and me both,—I tell her that, we get a cab and start to Bull’s—We get off there, they wait in the cab as I knock on his window for the money for the cab—
“You cant bring Cruz here!” he yells. “Neither one of em!” He hands me the money, I pay the cab, the girls get out, and there’s Bull’s big sleepy face in the door saying “No No—the kitchen is full of women, they’ll never let you through!”
“But she’s dying! I’ve got to take care of her!”
I turn and I see both their coats, the back of their coats, have majestically Mexicanly womanly turned, with immense dignity, streaks of dust and all street plaster and all, together, the two ladies go down the sidewalk slowly, the way Mexican women aye French Canadian women go to church in the morning—There is something unalterable in the way both their coats have turned on the women in the kitchen, on Bull’s worried face, on me—I run after them—Tristessa looks at me seriously “I go down to Indio for to get a shot” and in that way that normal way she always says that, as if (I guess, I’m a liar, watch out!) as if she means it and really wants to go get that shot—
And I had said to her “I wanta sleep where you sleep tonight” but fat chance of me getting into Indio’s or even herself, his wife hates her—They walk majestically, I hesitate majestically, with majestic cowardice, fearing the women in the kitchen who have barred Tristessa from the house (for breaking everything in her goofball fits) and barred her above all from passing through that kitchen (the only way to my room) up narrow ivorytower winding iron steps that shiver and shake—
“They’d never let you through!” yells Bull from the door. “Let em go!”
One of the landladies is on the sidewalk, I’m too ashamed and drunk to look her in the eye—
“But I’ll tell them she’s dying!”
“Come in here! Come in here!” yells Bull. I turn, they’ve got their bus at the corner, she’s gone—
Either she’ll die in my arms or I’ll hear about it—
What shroud was the reason why darkness and heaven commingled to come and lay the mantle of sorrow on the hearts of Bull, El Indio and me, who all three love her and weep in our thoughts and know she will die—Three men, from three different nations, in the yellow morning of black shawls, what was the angelic demonic power that devised this?—What’s going to happen?
At night little Mexican cop whistles blow that all is well, and all is all wrong, all is tragic,—I dont know what to say.
I’m only waiting to see her again—
And only last year she’d stood in my room and said “A friend is better than pesos, a friend that geev it to you in the bed” when still she believed anyway we’d get our tortured bellies together and get rid of some of the pain—Now too late, too late—
In my room at night, the door open, I watch to see her
come in, as if she could get through that kitchen of women—And for me to go looking for her in Mexico Thieves’ Market, that’s I suppose what I’ll have to do—
Liar! Liar! I’m a liar!
And supposing I go find her and she wants to hit me over the head again, I know it’s not her it’s the goofballs—but where could I take her, and what would it solve to sleep with her?—a softest kiss from pale-rosest lips I did get, in the street, another one of those and I’m gone—
My poems stolen, my money stolen, my Tristessa dying, Mexican buses trying to run me down, grit in the sky, agh, I never dreamed it could be this bad—
And she hates me—Why does she hate me?
Because I’m so smart
“AS SURE AS you’re sittin there,” Bull keeps saying since that morning, “Tristessa’ll be back tapping on that window on the thirteenth for money for her connection”—
He wants her to come back—
El Indio comes over, in black hat, sad, manly, Mayan stern, preoccupied, “Where is Tristessa?” I ask, he says, hands out, “I dont know.”