3
Testimony of the employee Herminia X:
I was born in the village of Encarnación, state of Mezcala. We were very poor. I was the third of eight children. I had a job as a nursemaid when I was fourteen. I earned twenty-four pesos a month.
A woman by the name of Soledad came to my house one afternoon and spoke to my mother. She said she could get me a job as a servant in Pedrones where they would give me my food, a room, and two hundred pesos a month. My mother wanted me to go that same night with señora Soledad.
There were two other girls in the bus who were also going to work as servants. When we got to Pedrones, we slept in señora Soledad’s house. I knew as soon as I went into that house that this family was not like other families, because there were women standing around in the hall in their slips. Señora Serafina accepted me but not the other two girls who left with señora Soledad and I never saw them again. Señora Serafina took me upstairs to a room and said, “This will be your room. You can keep your things here and have nothing to worry about.”
As soon as she said this she went off and left me in the room by myself. I sat there for a long time and didn’t dare to go out. In the afternoon, señora Serafina opened the door. I got frightened because there was a man with a mustache with her.
“This señor is a very good friend of the house,” señora Serafina said to me. “His name is don Nazario. He wants to see if you’ve been broken in yet.”
(A detailed description follows of her first experience, which is harrowing. She says that she suffered terribly in the beginning, but that she became used to it and even got to enjoy the life. She says she earned a lot of red and blue tokens and owned as many as fourteen dresses at one time. She complains that no matter how much she made it was never enough to pay off what Serafina deducted for room, board, the clothes she bought, and the two hundred pesos Serafina was sending to her mother each month—the declarant and her mother were never in touch by mail because the former did not know how to write or the latter how to read. She also complains that the two hundred pesos never reached her mother. She found this out eight years later when she met her by chance in a market. She says that she never wanted to see her family for fear that they would be ashamed of her because of what she had become.)
* * *
Testimony of Juana Cornejo, known as the Skeleton:
I met the señoras Baladro by accident. I lived on a farm and needed money because my little girl took sick. I went to Pedrones to look for work and walked from house to house knocking on doors until I came to the one where señora Arcángela opened. She said to me, “Sure, there is work in this house but not for a servant. If you are willing to be a whore, I have a job for you.”
I accepted and she advanced me twenty pesos for medicines which did no good because my baby died a few days later. I stayed on with the señoras.
(A list of the places she worked follows. She tells how señora Serafina appointed her room attendant and reports the instructions she received from her: “Nobody leaves without paying. If a customer makes a row, call Ticho [the bouncer].” She says that she never had any problems with her bosses in the twelve years she held that job. She finishes by stating: “The señoras never had any complaints about me and I have none about them because they let me have what I needed, which is why I say they were straight women and if the police put us in jail it was just hard luck.”)
4
For years the Baladro sisters had the idea of opening a third place of business. They were aware that since both the Molino Street and México Lindo houses were located within zones of tolerance—that is, red-light districts—a certain type of apprehensive customer would not patronize those establishments as frequently as they, or the madams, might like for fear of being recognized in the early hours in such a neighborhood. Serafina felt that for this reason Concepción was the perfect town in which to establish the new enterprise: It is well situated, being twenty kilometers from Pedrones and twenty-three from San Pedro de las Corrientes, and so small and little-frequented that its existence is practically a secret from the world.
Serafina Baladro relates the beginnings of the Casino del Danzón as follows:
* * *
Hardly a week after I saw Concepción for the first time, Hermenegildo—Captain Bedoya—brought me the news that he had found a lot that was made to order for putting up a building for the business. Twenty-two meters frontage by eighty-eight meters deep. It was owned by two elderly ladies who had to raise the money to put their brother into an institution for the insane operated in Pedrones by the Sisters of the Divine Word. The asking price was thirty-three thousand pesos.
I liked the property the moment I saw it, but my sister put up objections without ever having laid eyes on it, simply because she had taken it into her head that anything Hermenegildo recommended had to be bad.
“I introduced him to you to sell you a pistol,” she said to me, “not to be your lover.”
And I answered, “I suppose I have a right to live my own life, or don’t I?”
Well, one afternoon, Hermenegildo and I were waiting for her in front of the lot to show it to her, knowing beforehand that she wasn’t going to like it. She arrived in Ladder’s car in a cloud of dust. Even before she was out of the car she was finding fault with the place: It was full of holes, the walls were made of adobe, and things like that. While we were waiting to be let in, she said that its number, 85, was bad luck because the figures added up to 13.
But, as soon as she was inside, her attitude changed. She approved of the size of the lot, the walls, the two trees—one an avocado and the other a lemon tree—the bougainvillea vines, and the price.
“This,” she said when we came to the rear of the lot, “is where I am going to put up a chicken coop.”
Before taking the final decision, the Baladros consulted a licenciado by the name of Canales—a lawyer who held an important post in the state government—regarding possible problems that might arise in obtaining a license to operate a new business. He assured them that there would be none. This was at the time Governor Cabañas had just taken office, long before anyone could have dreamed he might one day crack down on prostitution.
Serafina and Arcángela decided to buy. They put up the money in equal parts and the property appears in the deed in both their names. It should be noted that Captain Bedoya received a commission from the sellers for getting them a customer who was willing to pay such a stiff price, and he collected another commission from the buyers for finding them such a reasonable property; he was given five hundred pesos of the fee paid to the notary and kept the fifteen hundred pesos for himself that the sisters gave him to distribute among important persons of the township.
This was accomplished by the middle of February and on the twenty-eighth, the Baladros commissioned an architect to draw up plans for “a whorehouse the like of which had never been seen in these parts.” This architect, in Pedrones temporarily, came from Tijuana where he was reputed to have built a number of brothels. Nobody knew that he was on the run from a dissatisfied client. The Baladros gave him an advance of five hundred pesos.
They were delighted with the plan: fifteen rooms and fifteen baths; a cabaret decorated to represent the ocean bottom—when one looked up one saw sharks and devilfish hanging from the ceiling; two private salons, one done in Arab style, the other in Chinese; and an indoor swimming pool, the purpose of which was not clear to anybody since none of the girls and only an occasional customer knew how to swim.
The five-hundred-peso advance to the architect was all he ever received from the Baladros for the plans, because on the night he delivered them he learned that his whereabouts had been discovered and fled, but his pursuers caught up with him as he stood at the urinal in the men’s toilet in a lunchroom in Tehuacan and put eleven bullets into him.
The Baladros constructed the building from the plans under their own supervision, with the technical advice of a contractor, the suggestions of a young man who h
ad decorated a beauty parlor in Pedrones, and the surveillance of Captain Bedoya “who was like one of the family,” visiting the construction site daily—it being close to the army post—and checking on it as though it were his own property.
5
The outcome of this effort was named the Casino del Danzón. Seeing the building at the present time (1976) it is hard to believe that it was built only fifteen years ago. It looks like a ruin of some ancient civilization—the young decorator had designed a stucco bas-relief for the facade that has crumbled to pieces. Remnants of the sign are still visible on the marquee which reads:
EL SINO DE ON
An old man opens the door. He is the caretaker, a retired policeman, who, for twenty pesos—or less—permits the curiosity seeker—or a group of them—to enter the place where the iniquities occurred. The caretaker accompanies the tour with an explanation.
Here is the cabaret. It is lighted by a single bulb. In the center of the dance floor there is a hole three meters in diameter with heaps of dirt around it. The tables and chairs are piled up in a corner; two plaster devilfish have fallen to the floor and are smashed to pieces; a shark hanging from the ceiling by its tail sways—drafts blow through the room—his jaws two meters from the floor. An illuminated aquarium that occupies almost one entire wall is nearly destroyed, its lights all out. The seaweed and cardboard jellyfish that used to dangle like garlands are gone, as are the globes whose light, according to a description, “between green and violet in color, is diffused from bluish glass spheres that resemble giant soap bubbles . . .”
There is a balcony in the upper part of the wall opposite the aquarium—an unexpected location—its railing gone.
The elements have caused considerable deterioration in the Baghdad Salon. The window frame has been carried off and there is a hole in the ceiling. The caretaker reports that the walls are covered with moss during the rainy season and that swallows build their nests there in the spring. This room, which has a black and yellow floor, is where the “show” used to take place that made the Casino del Danzón famous. People came all the way from Mezcala to see it. Later, in the grim period, the Baghdad Salon was one of the “sealed rooms.”
The swimming pool has been empty practically since the opening night—the water was too cold and nobody was brave enough to go in. The caretaker’s family uses it to store utensils and junk.
All the rooms open on a corridor and remind one more of a convent than a whorehouse. Their furnishings have remained, since the Casino’s legal status is still unsettled. The women lived in spaces barely ten meters square, and were scarcely able to move around the huge beds. In addition to the bed, each room has a wardrobe, a dressing table with a mirror, and a chair with a rush seat. Every cubicle has its own tiny bathroom.
Each woman had some possession in her room that distinguished it from the others: a Divine Countenance hanging on the door, a painted glass pitcher, a clay head of a Red Indian, a photograph of a friend, an electric iron, and so forth.
After exhibiting the rooms, the caretaker leads the visitor to the yard in the rear to see the excavations—the main attraction. It seems that the tour generally ends here. However, if the tip is generous, he will conduct the visitor to Arcángela’s room and show him, by way of a bonus, a photograph of a corpse pinned to the wall. It is of the Baladros’ mother whose picture was snapped as she lay in her coffin with four tapers around it.
When the visitor is back on the street after the tour, he should note an important circumstance: There are only two two-story buildings on Independence Street, the Casino del Danzón and the house next door, the owner of which was señora Aurora Benavides who spent six years in prison because of this particular feature of her home.
VI
Two Incidents and One Snag
1
The Casino del Danzón was inaugurated by the Baladros on the night of September 15, 1961. Among those who attended the celebration were: licenciado Canales, the private secretary of the governor of the state of Plan de Abajo; licenciado Sanabria, the private secretary of the governor of the state of Mezcala; Congressman Medrano; one railway-union leader and two peasant leaders; the manager of the San Pedro de las Corrientes branch of the Mezcala Bank; a number of businessmen; and the proprietor of a stable of over a hundred cows. Two of the three mayors who were invited arrived at two A.M., immediately after having concluded officiating over the Independence Day ceremony in their respective townships. The Baladros had reached the pinnacle of their social career, a fact of which they were unaware since they considered that yet other heights remained for them to scale.
At midnight—the festivities started somewhat late—the doors of the balcony opened and Arcángela stepped out, a bell in her hand, together with licenciado Canales, who carried his country’s flag. Arcángela rang the bell to attract the attention of those below and everybody applauded. When there was silence, licenciado Canales waved the flag and pronounced the following version of the traditional Cry of Independence: “Long Live Mexico! Long live national independence! Long live the Heroes who won us our liberty! Long live the Baladro sisters! Long live the Casino del Danzón!”
Licenciado Canales’s words were received with shouts of approval.
(This was the first incident. Congressman Medrano and one of the peasant leaders were of the opinion that vivas jointly for the national heroes and the Baladro sisters constituted blasphemous juxtaposition and brought word of the incident to the ears of Governor Cabañas who at once dismissed licenciado Canales from his post and broke off his friendship with him, thereby nullifying the only influence the Baladros had at the state house of Plan de Abajo.)
At the inaugural celebration, the Baladros, wearing evening gowns for the first time in their lives—Serafina describes her dress as iridescent—received their guests in the dining room of the house and not until all were together did they usher them into the cabaret. The decorations caused an unforgettable impression. When the exclamations had died down, the girls entered, nicely dressed and elegantly coiffed. Serafina chose this moment to announce that everything would be on the house for the evening. This statement gave rise to confusion: The guests took it to imply that “everything” included the girls, whereas the girls assumed it to mean that if nobody had to pay a check, they had no obligation to go to bed with anybody.
After the “Cry of Independence,” witnesses say, Arcángela led the guests to the Baghdad Salon where the “show,” in which three women participated, was presented for the first time. Several of the spectators became overexcited and would have incorporated themselves into the spectacle had Arcángela not stopped them.
When everybody had returned to the cabaret, the dancing began, and the second incident occurred.
What happened was this: Licenciado Sanabria, whom nobody had ever suspected of equivocal tendencies, was suddenly overcome by a murky passion and felt impelled to dance with Ladder, who had come into the cabaret to deliver a message. The two men danced a danzon entitled “Nerëidas” from start to finish before the horrified assemblage—nobody else dared to dance. At the conclusion of the piece, Ladder thanked his partner and left. Licenciado Sanabria then tried to dance with various other gentlemen who declined his invitation. He realized, finally, that he had cut a sorry figure and held a grudge ever after against all who had been witnesses to his disgrace—and against the Baladros, in particular, for having been instrumental in his succumbing to temptation. This ill will was to play an important part in the story, as will be seen later.
2
The snag was the following:
What got into Governor Cabañas that caused him to do something that had never entered anybody’s mind in Plan de Abajo in one hundred forty years of independent government—the banning of prostitution?
The motives suggested by the various explanations for this mystery are like branches springing from a single root, which is that, of all the governors in the history of Plan de Abajo, Cabañas was the most ambitious and stub
born. His predecessors, all provincial politicians, were quite played out by the time they took office, whereas Governor Cabañas came to the governorship fresh and strongly motivated to push to new heights in his career. This drive, coupled with the fact that the country had not been governed by a native son of Plan de Abajo in some one hundred and twenty years, kindled in him the idea that he was presidential timber.
He reorganized the state government along the lines of a small-scale republic—the tax office was renamed the Ministry of the Treasury, the board of improvements became the Ministry of Public Works, and so forth. And, he was bent on demonstrating that being capable of governing the one so effectively he would certainly be just as capable of governing the other, if the powers that be gave him the opportunity.
In addition to changing the names of the departments, Cabañas embarked on a number of monumental public works—a state office building, a highway, and a tunnel—which cost an enormous amount of money and produced a deficit that Cabañas had to compensate for by raising taxes.
He wished to accomplish this in the form least painful to the taxpayers and, to that end, he organized “businessmen’s colloquies.” These consisted of the governor arriving in person at the various cities where he would meet with the businessmen of the area in the casino of each place for the purpose of demonstrating to them that the taxes they paid to the state were a pittance and that it was urgent for them to pay more. The businessmen responded to this call by pointing out that the state was a pigsty and not worth even what they were currently paying. They raised complaints about everything from the diameter of the sewer pipes and the insufficient water supply to the plague of centers of vice “to which the authorities shut their eyes.”
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