Luis had to interrupt his mother’s piano-practice in order to borrow the taxi-fare. She wasn’t interested in hearing about his experience and she was annoyed at the interruption. She was also very annoyed at Chopin, who was resisting her with more than his usual stubbornness. To punish them both, she made Luis stand beside her and beat time. He wasn’t much good at beating time, so she soon had the satisfaction of correcting him. That left only Chopin to be overcome, and Señora Cabrillo was fairly confident that one day she would beat him too. She had the stamina, and Chopin wasn’t getting any younger.
Chapter 4
The following week Luis’s father was transferred to Valencia, where Luis got a job as a waiter and kept it for almost a month.
He quite enjoyed being a waiter, and he learned a lot, especially from serving tourists.
“They say they want coffee,” he complained to José-Carlos, the head waiter, on his third day. “I just gave them their soup and already they want coffee!”
José-Carlos identified the table. “Americans,” he said approvingly. “Give them coffee now. Give them what they want. They ask for coffee, water, ketchup, ice-cream, more coffee, hot rolls, cold rolls, stale rolls, cheese before beef, fruit before fish, soup with jam—anything, as long as we have got it, you give it to them. Make ’em happy.”
“Yes, but coffee on top of soup …” Luis shook his head.
“Listen: don’t tell people what they like.” José-Carlos gave him a shove. “You give them what they want and they’ll give you what you want.”
The Americans got ample coffee and Luis got a good tip. Thereafter his whole attitude changed, and nothing was impossible. He learned to anticipate: hungry patrons need food at once, if it’s only bread and olives; when the steak is tough make sure the knives are sharp; to the man who pays the bill goes the tastiest portion. And so on.
Toward the end, Luis discovered a harmless little ruse which boosted his tips appreciably. He had just presented a bill and he was halfway back to the kitchen when he realized he’d overcharged them. Included an order of mushrooms which got canceled. Tiny mistake. For a second he hesitated, looking back at the table where a large, bald man was laughing at somebody else’s joke while he spread banknotes over the bill. Luis knew what to do: say nothing, cross out mushrooms and pocket the difference. That’s what anybody else would do. So he went back and corrected the bill. At first the bald man was irritated; he thought Luis had forgotten something and was now adding it on. Then he was pleased—more pleased than the few pesetas’ saving was worth. In the end most of it went to swell Luis’s tip.
After that Luis regularly forgot to cancel the mushrooms.
José-Carlos observed how frequently Luis had to return to his tables and adjust the bill, and he commented on it. “I try to make people happy,” Luis said.
“I don’t mind that,” José-Carlos told him. “Just make it eggs mayonnaise once in a while.”
It was neither mushrooms nor egg mayonnaise that got Luis sacked, however, but cherry ice-cream.
He had begun to make something of a personal crusade out of giving customers exactly what they wanted. Coffee between courses was too easy; he nagged the kitchen into stocking hot mustard for the English, pumpernickel for the Germans, escargots for the French. Most of these extras went to waste; too few foreigners used the restaurant. Luis ignored this. Just serving people from the menu was boring; he wanted to surprise them, to bring them the impossible.
One evening the kitchen was going full blast—the chef cooking with one hand and slicing with the other, worrying over what his girlfriend might be doing at that moment, sweat stinging his eyes—when Luis breezed in.
“My friend the rich American wants cherry ice cream,” he announced.
“He’s out of luck,” the chef growled. He began cooking an omelet while he sautéd some kidneys and tried to work out where the fish soup had gone wrong.
“Come on, chef, I promised him,” Luis urged. “He’s homesick, he said he bet we didn’t have cherry ice cream.”
“He’s right. Hot plates!” the chef bawled.
Luis stood and stared. He hated to go back to the American and lose face. On the other hand the chef was obviously choosing to be completely unhelpful. He saw him wince as he slid the omelet onto a plate which was so hot it made the food sizzle.
“You’ve got cherries, haven’t you?” Luis asked.
“Yes.” Kidneys came off, veal went on, another waiter claimed the omelet.
“And you’ve got ice cream.”
The chef nodded and basted a chicken.
“Well then, make me some cherry ice cream.”
“Sweetbreads” the chef shouted. “Piss off,” he told Luis evenly.
Still Luis hesitated. He had thought the chef liked him, responded to his charm, was amused by his eccentric demands. How to overcome this new indifference? Be even more outrageous? “What’s the problem?” he asked, half-grinning. “Even a tenth-rate dump like this can afford a spare mixing-bowl, can’t it?”
For an instant the chef was motionless, frozen in time. Then he turned with the tray of sweetbreads in his hands and hurled it at Luis. Lumps of bleeding meat rained against his face and splattered the kitchen. The tray just missed his right ear and smashed into a stack of serving-dishes. Luis gaped in astonishment while cold blood ran from his chin to his collar. “Piss off!” the chef howled, and flung a chopping-block at him. Luis fended it off with his hands and the bruising pain aroused him. He backed away, dodging a small loaf, a half-cabbage, a coffee-pot, a ladle, not dodging a nearly-full tin of English mustard. The uproar brought the proprietor at a run. He hustled Luis out by a back door and kicked him—literally kicked him—into the street. “Imbecile!” he shouted. “Maniac! Cretin!”
“But you don’t know what happened,” Luis protested. An old man, picking through a bin of kitchen waste, paused to listen.
“You have enraged my chef! What else is there to know?” The door slammed. Luis stood trembling with shock, pain, anger, shame.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” the old man reproached. “Good chef, he is.” He held up the remains of half a roast chicken. “Have a taste of this, friend. Exquisite flavor. Out of this world.”
This time Luis said nothing to his parents. It was the beginning of his true growing-up: from now on he would make his own decisions without informing or consulting anyone. Luis had made the great adolescent discovery—not only do parents not know everything; if you don’t tell them, they never get a chance to find out.
During the next year he had seventeen jobs and was fired from all except three, which he quit.
He walked the streets, selling peanuts. Fired because he got into a fight with a rival peanut-vendor and lost. Worked as a window-cleaner for a few days until the paralyzing boredom made him quit. Sacked for incompetence or insubordination as a stable-lad, bookshop assistant, roadmender, bellhop and delivery boy. Got a job gutting fish and rapidly came to hate the smell so much that he quit and went to work as a florist’s assistant, until one day a rich and elderly customer came in and ordered a dozen red roses for her dog.
“When did he die?” Luis asked as he wrapped them.
“He isn’t dead,” the customer said stiffly. “These flowers are for his birthday.”
“His birthday?” Luis stopped wrapping. “Flowers don’t mean a thing to dogs, you know, madam. Not a thing.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Dogs are colourblind. That’s a scientific fact. And they can hardly smell flowers at all. Food, yes. Roses … Well, you might as well give him a photograph. Or a book.”
“Young man, you are being extremely impertinent.”
“Madam, I’m only telling you the truth. I mean, if you want red roses because you like red roses, that’s different, that’s understandable, take these. But if all you want is to make your animal happy I can think of many better ways: nice juicy bones, scraps, perhaps hot gravy—”
“All right, all
right, Cabrillo …” The florist had arrived, flushed and flurried. “I’ll take care of this.” He thrust Luis into the back room. Luis didn’t wait to be told; he knew by now what that grating tone of voice meant. He moved on and got a dreadful job clearing tables in a sleazy hotel diningroom, quit after three days and was hired as a room-service waiter by a much grander hotel. There, at the age of slightly more than sixteen, he lost his virginity.
The event took place in an expensive suite on the fourth floor. Breakfast had been ordered. Luis took up the tray and found a youngish woman, still in bed. She was astonishingly beautiful, like the glossy stills of filmstars he’d seen displayed outside cinemas: lustrous red hair tumbling around a fresh, provocative face; brilliant eyes; shining lips; dazzling teeth. She told him, huskily, to put the tray on a bedside table, and as he walked across the room he felt enormously elated, as if a vast audience of tens of thousands was watching him.
“Can you stay for a little while?” she asked, turning toward him.
“Yes, of course.” Luis noticed that her shoulders were bare, and his heart began to hurt his ribs. “Do you want me to … Do you need something …”
She smiled so happily that he found himself instinctively smiling back.
“Oh, I think so,” she said. Her long, slender naked arm came out and tugged at his trousers. “I want you to take off those silly clothes.”
His fingers trembled and stumbled. The waiter’s uniform was disapproving and awkward. A button sprang off the jacket. A shoelace locked itself in a knot. Sunlight flooded the room, and street-sounds reached him distantly and harmlessly, as if from another world. Luis, trying to step out of his underpants, got his left foot caught and had to hop strenuously to save himself from falling over.
At last he was out of those silly clothes, shivering a little for no reason of temperature, breathing more deeply than necessary. He stood for a moment, toes worrying the carpet, and felt his skin make a million tiny shifts and adjustments to the touch of the air and the pleasure of her gaze.
The sheets were silky, cool as liquid. She was unexpectedly warm, almost glowing, and thrustful. Luis was not very good but that didn’t matter because she soon took charge, and she was more than good: she was astonishingly, outstandingly marvelous. She led Luis on a grand tour of her universe: first gliding, then flying, then falling, then climbing; diving, racing, strolling, teetering, shimmering, stalling, flaunting, brawling, storming, pounding, blasting, bounding, surging, soaring and, at last, bursting. It was magnificent but it was not what Luis had imagined it would be like. There were no overwhelming spiritual insights, for instance. He had expected a new vision or two, yet the image which swamped his brain at the end was of himself plunging into a colossal bowl of melting cherry-ice-cream. Still, he was grateful.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She stretched that slender, naked arm again and touched the coffee-pot. Not hot. “Go into the bathroom and get dressed,” she said. “I shall send for more breakfast.”
They ate together, she propped against a hill of pillows, he sitting on the side of the bed. He watched her all the time, seeking a flicker of animal passion in her delightful face and finding nothing but loveliness. They talked, but it was all about Luis: where he had lived and what he wanted to be. It was easy and utterly enjoyable, a taste of life at a level of luxury and confidence that Luis had never before known.
After half an hour she held out her hand. He stood, feeling adult and serious, and they shook hands. “Goodbye,” she said.
And that was that. She had not told him her name, nor asked his. He went back to work, gave them some excuse for his absence which they clearly didn’t believe, but he didn’t care. He knew that he was utterly changed, his whole life was changed; he could think only of her, remembering and reviving every glorious detail. For the rest of that day he went about in a slight daze. The kitchen staff decided that he had fallen down some stairs and concussed himself.
He went home, shut himself in his room and indulged his impatience in an orgy of anticipation, mentally rehearsing their next meeting in every possible mood and manner—witty, intense, casual, noisy, brooding, friendly, dramatic. Each would be a wonderful, incomparable experience. He tried to sketch her and made such a hopeless hash of it that he burned the paper. He studied his face in the mirror, wondering which part she found attractive and testing different expressions for impact. He took a long, hot bath, scrubbing his body until it tingled with purity, and then he examined it in his wardrobe mirror. He suffered a moment of despair when he noticed that his legs were not quite as strong as his stomach and chest; but it passed. He lay on his bed and made glorious plans, while dusk slowly drained all the light from the room and his limbs grew cool as earthenware.
Next morning he was at the hotel early, before the other room-service waiters arrived. This reinforced the concussion theory. As the breakfast orders came in he worked with fearful speed, hastening back to the kitchen in a constant panic in case he missed the call from the suite on the fourth floor. Sweat made his shirt dank and his face sticky. Normally talkative, today he was silent. The kitchen staff watched him uncomfortably: if he wasn’t working he was looking for work. It was unnatural. They preferred the old, argumentative, back-chatting Luis.
By nine o’clock no order had come. Luis was in despair. He refused food and straddled a chair in a corner, chewing his nails and watching the telephone. His legs ached from pounding up and down stairs.
9:05. No call.
9:11. The telephone rang. Luis felt all his gloom and misery lift like a theater curtain, turning the kitchen into a place of color and light. A businessman on the second floor wanted breakfast. The curtain thudded down.
Luis took the man’s tray and was back by 9:20. No other orders had come in. He began to feel slightly lightheaded with uncertainty. The obstinately dumb telephone became a hateful object; the whole kitchen was oppressive, unbearably squalid. The thought of that sun-splashed heaven waiting on the fourth floor made him feel as if he were trapped in a greasy tomb.
Waiting and stillness were impossible any more. He slipped out and began prowling the corridors. His shoulders were hunched, his eyes were strained, his fingers kept up a running battle with his thumbs. For the first time in his life Luis was sick with love, and it had sapped his wits.
His legs carried him upward, floor by floor; his brain was too swamped with desire to have an independent opinion. Groups of guests walked past him, talking of leisurely, pleasureful things; and when Luis met a curious glance from one young man—snowy blazer draped fashionably about the shoulders—he wanted desperately to explain that he didn’t really belong in this silly uniform, that he deserved to be one of them, if only …
The door to the suite on the fourth floor was shut. Luis stared, unblinking, trying to see through the wooden panel and summon the mistress of his delight who lived and breathed so easily on the other side. His stomach muscles kept clenching and relaxing and suddenly clenching again, as they used to do at school just before he went into a boxing-match. He raised an arm to knock, lost his nerve and walked away. Stupid feeble fumbling braggart! he shouted silently. Last night you were spilling over with big plans. Now look at you. Gutless. Brainless. Useless!
For ten minutes he paced up and down the corridor, thinking up things to say when she opened the door. “I was afraid you might be feeling unwell, and so …” Or: “It would give me great pleasure to know your name …” Or: “I just came to say thank-you,” plus an irresistible smile which would add: Please …
The sound of a door opening made him twitch guiltily. It was the wrong door. Somebody placed a breakfast tray in the corridor and went back inside.
Luis walked over and looked at it. He had no reason to look at a used breakfast tray, God knows he’d seen plenty of them, but by now he was beyond reason. Grapefruit, boiled eggs, rolls, coffee. Rind, shells, crumbs, dregs.
These people had eaten. Why had
n’t his goddess eaten? She needed food. How could she give unless she also took? He shook out the napkins, covered up the debris, and lifted the tray. Without actually making up his mind he reached a decision; or maybe a decision reached him. He walked to the suite and knocked quite firmly, one-two-three. His balls ached pleasantly with desire.
The sound of the door handle raised a broad, brash grin to his face. Flowers, he thought, should have brought flowers! The door swung open and a black-bearded man with a wrestler’s chest stared down. He had gangster’s eyes and he was wearing only a bath-towel. “What?” he snapped. Luis wet himself a little.
“Room service, sir,” he said in a voice which cracked. His grin had fallen off and left his face vacant.
The man’s black and heavy brows drew together: gun-sights searching for a target. Despair descended on Luis like a sudden sickness. He knew at once that the man knew everything: he knew when Luis had been here before and what had happened and why he had come again. The man reached out and Luis flinched, but all he did was lift a napkin, to reveal a gutted half-grapefruit. Inside the suite Luis briefly glimpsed the woman before she moved quickly away. She was still very beautiful but now she looked nervous.
The man took the ruined grapefruit in his fingers and collapsed it. His other hand clasped the back of Luis’s head. He rammed the grapefruit into Luis’s mouth, prodding the edges home until Luis’s lips were stretched and his cheeks were bulging. He dumped the dregs of milk and coffee onto Luis’s head and flung the sugar after them. He hooked his fingers around Luis’s belt, tugged savagely enough to bend his spine, and dumped a dish of marmalade inside his trousers. Then he placed one enormous bare foot against Luis’s quivering stomach and heaved him ten feet backward until he hit the opposite wall with a mingled crash of body and crockery. The door slammed.
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