by John Nichols
Cathy said, “As soon as I have money I’ll buy my dad a Cadillac convertible. I want a swimsuit from Saks and a wedding ring from Tiffany’s. I plan to be married six times. Do you guys like this eye shadow? It’s from Italy.” She turned her head. “Do you think my profile is elegant?”
“I think you are very elegant,” Aurelio said. “But you shouldn’t put quite as much rouge on your cheeks—it’s tacky. As for the eye shadow from Italy, it looks like mud. Brown isn’t your color. You’d be better off with something green or gray, not as dark, and more misty.”
Cathy laughed and flicked her finger coyly against his chin. “Will you buy me some new eye shadow, Mr. Know-it-all?”
“Of course.”
“He’s rich,” Cathy said to me, nodding at the distinguished Señor Porta. “He could walk into Tiffany’s and buy out the entire ground floor. With enough change left over to purchase a palace in Madrid.”
When the rich man smiled he seemed like a clever snake about to swallow a sparrow’s egg.
Cathy bummed a cigarette from Aurelio and said, “I’m having trouble with solear. It’s too moody for me. I hate that transition to bulerías halfway through. It feels wrong. I’m good at the speedy complex stuff, but when it’s too slow I get nervous. I want to be energetic like a pistol shot.”
Aurelio said, “Work on what you hate, and then for that dance alone you will become famous.”
Cathy pouted and reiterated her previous complaint. “Flamenco is killing me. My feet ache, my ankles hurt, I have shin splints. My back is a disaster case. I wish I was dead.”
“The greatest dancers end every night in the arms of death,” Aurelio said. “And they wake up every morning afire like the sun.”
Cathy grinned. “I’m like a hot little sunflower,” she boasted. “Don’t fly too close to me or I’ll burn your wings and you’ll fall into the ocean.”
When we were ready to leave the café Aurelio Porta was first on his feet and he pulled back Cathy’s chair. “Gracias,” she said, plunging her hands deep into the pockets of her shabby overcoat and walking ahead of us.
“That girl has a strut,” Aurelio commented approvingly.
Neither Jorge nor I answered him.
A blast of wind swept away Aurelio’s hat. It bounced into the damp street and was immediately squashed by a car tire. I started after the hat, but Aurelio called me back.
“Let it go,” he said, laughing. “I can easily buy another one.”
32. Death of El Coco
Then El Coco died. That was a shock. Luigi came home and found his body in the bathtub half underwater. The medical examiner concluded it was a heart attack. El Coco had no bank account, no possessions except for the barbells, and only eleven dollars when his pockets were emptied.
“No tengo ni un mango,” Luigi told us at the empanada stand. “What am I going to do?”
“Let the city consign him to a pauper’s grave at Potter’s Field,” Alfonso said.
Even with such a charred face, Luigi blanched. “Are you crazy? He was a pal of mine.”
“Also an Argentine,” Roldán reminded us. “We should take care of our own.”
Alfonso said, “He never talked to us. He hated women. What was his real name?”
“Dagoberto Hoffman,” Luigi said.
“Does he have family down south?”
“No. When he left the patria he wiped the slate clean. He was never going back.”
“How did you come to be friends?”
Embarrassed, Luigi stiffened a little. “I met him at a bar. The Page One.”
“That place is Sodom and Gomorrah,” Alfonso noted.
“Nevertheless, that’s where we met. He was homeless at the time.”
The fat man asked, “Was El Coco religious? If not, we should take up a collection to have him cremated.”
Alfonso dug deep and placed a bill on the counter. “Here’s ten bucks. That’s all I have right now.”
I also contributed a ten even though it hurt.
Roldán removed a twenty from the cash register, adding to the pile. Luigi stared at the money. The burnt face made it impossible for him to shed tears, but we could tell he was moved.
Alfonso said, “Dale, go ahead, take it.”
That night Roldán put a jar on the counter for donations to El Coco’s cremation fund. The rest of us began to spread the word.
La Petisa was upset about the cremation. “He wore a cross around his neck. He should have a proper burial. You’re sending him straight to hell.”
“Tais toi,” Alfonso said, “and give us some money. Pretend you have a conscience.”
She forked over twenty bucks, still protesting. “He should be buried at a Christian site with his barbells. He was a sweet and considerate man who never spoke ill of anyone. He was a gentle creature, timid and shy, not at all blasphemous like the rest of you infidels. He never tried to hump me and he was always polite.”
“I don’t want your fucking money,” Luigi said. “Take it back. Go buy some panties and lipstick for Popeye.”
Alfonso clapped his palm atop La Petisa’s hand as she reached for her cash. “Don’t be a nincompoop, Luigi.”
La Petisa removed her hand. Luigi picked up the twenty and ripped it to shreds.
Gino said, “I never liked that guy. I think he was a puto.”
According to Alfonso, “That’s immaterial now. Hand over some loot.”
Gino balked. “El Coco hated women, you know.”
“I do, too,” Alfonso said. “Now, open your wallet.”
Gino said, “Screw you,” and parted with five bucks.
Alfonso said, “That’s not enough. Blondie gave ten and he’s not even from Argentina.”
“Try and take a penny more from me, profe.”
“I don’t want his fucking money,” Luigi said.
“This isn’t about you,” Alfonso said, “it’s about El Coco. Grow up.”
Luigi tore Gino’s five-spot into little pieces.
Popeye said, “I’d contribute ten dollars but that jealous asshole would just tear it up.”
“No he won’t,” Alfonso promised. “I’ve had a talk with him.”
Popeye was adamant. “I don’t trust him. He’s crazy.”
“No I’m not,” Luigi said. “I learned my lesson. Now, give me the ten bucks.”
“Fuck you.”
Carlos the Artist gave fourteen dollars. He remembered, “I had a conversation with El Coco once.”
“What about?”
“He asked me to buy a dress for him at S. Klein’s.”
“What did you do?” Gino was horrified.
“I bought the dress. What’s wrong with that?”
Eduardo wrote a check for four hundred dollars. Luigi almost fell over backward. “I don’t need four hundred dollars. Are you crazy?”
“I don’t have four hundred dollars,” Eduardo said. “The check will bounce because there’s only twenty-nine bucks in my account. Good. Then I’ll be arrested and deported and I’ll be rid of Adriana. This city is too small for both of us.”
“Quit drinking,” Alfonso suggested. “Pull yourself together, nene. Stop smoking marijuana.”
Chuy surprised us all. “How much more do you need to light the fire?”
“Eighty-seven dollars.”
The rich gigolo pulled a roll from his pocket, and, pressing it against his hip with the stump of his left wrist, he peeled off five twenties.
“I liked that guy,” Chuy said.
Gino asked, “Why?”
“Because he had a lot more guts than you do.”
After Luigi took care of the cremation details he returned to the kiosk asking, “What shall we do with the ashes?”
Alfonso said, “El Coco loved America. Let’s take him to the Statue of Liberty.”
“Are we allowed to do that?”
“Only in America.”
Everybody agreed to carry the ashes on a ferryboat over to the Statue of Liberty where
we would scatter them.
“I will bring an Argentine flag,” Carlos the Artist vowed. “And some Rimbaud for the eulogy.”
“I’ll steal some holy water,” La Petisa said.
“I don’t want your holy water,” Luigi said.
Gino’s job was to locate a Bible.
“Fuck your Bible,” Luigi said.
Chuy would supply the flowers.
And Eduardo planned to attend the obsequies so he could gather ideas for his own funeral.
But at the appointed hour only Alfonso, Roldán, Luigi, and I showed up at the Battery and boarded the Staten Island Ferry with El Coco’s ashes. Luigi was relieved. “If La Petisa or Gino or the marinero had showed up, I wouldn’t have got on the boat.”
A bright sun was shining on this first day of spring which still felt like winter. A pretty mist was lifting off the cold water. Seagulls made a racket around us. Roldán was bundled up like an enormous walrus wearing galoshes and wool-lined leather mittens in addition to his raccoon coat. Luigi had on two ratty sweaters, gloves, and a funny ski cap. But Alfonso had donned only his silly thin serape and the purple scarf. Not only had he lost Renata’s obnoxious hat, but he had misplaced Sofía’s gloves as well. His teeth chattered all the way over and back.
Afterward, stepping off the ferryboat onto Manhattan, Roldán slipped and crashed to the pavement. Grimacing, he clutched his wrist. “Ouch!”
We grappled him onto his feet and a taxi rushed us up to St. Vincent’s Hospital where X-rays revealed that the wrist had been fractured. Two hours later we hit the sidewalk as darkness fell and it began to snow once more in the winter without end. Roldán was wearing a cast.
We aimed east along Greenwich, crossed Sixth Avenue onto Eighth Street, and stopped at the Orange Julius stand. Invited by the fat man, each of us ordered a Julius with an egg and a hot dog that we gobbled hungrily as we moseyed south past the Jungle Tap Room and crossed to Washington Square. Streetlamps in the empty park cast circles of harsh light interrupted by falling snowflakes.
We halted. Roldán, Alfonso, and Luigi lit cheap cigars to honor El Coco, exhaling clouds of stinky smoke that evaporated among the snowflakes.
“Who’s next?” the cocinero asked.
“Not me,” Luigi and I answered simultaneously.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” Alfonso joked in English.
33. Duende
Aurelio Porta told me that Cathy Escudero had duende. “It’s not something you can teach a person,” he whispered into my ear at the dance studio. “You have to be born with it. And this girl is brimming over with duende. She’s not conscious of it herself, she is so busy concentrating on the technical aspects of her craft. But the way she moves is like a gitana from Spain a thousand years old in her gypsy culture. She is like a ravishing murderess who loves to lick the blood off the knife afterwards. That is the magic of her art.”
Aurelio had to lean very close to me when he said these things because Cathy’s heels were battering the floorboards and Jorge was attacking the guitar in a controlled frenzy. They were electrifying. The dancer grabbed her skirt and swished it back and forth; she frowned and glowered and bit her tongue and grimaced. Her T-shirt was drenched under the armpits. Sometimes she yanked her dress up and down and we caught a flash of her cotton panties.
Aurelio never changed his tone of voice: “A champion race-horse has duende,” he continued. “And Pelé possesses it, of course. Fangio had duende, and Manolete, too. And especially Gardel. Carlos Gardel had so much duende it caused his plane to hit another plane on the runway when he was only forty-eight. Gardel makes Frank Sinatra look like an amateur choirboy.”
Jorge’s fingers were a blur and Cathy was fast-stamping at the end of her alegrías. I was riveted by her performance, but Aurelio Porta never quit talking.
“Certain Americans have duende,” he said. “Marlon Brando has it, and the late James Dean. Duende is an aberration in the soul. It is like a fire out of control. You don’t see many old folks with duende—the force kills you early and you can’t even stop yourself. You’re not supposed to. All great artists are doomed. This chica is going to burn brightly for a short time and then the lightning inside will electrocute her. She will burst apart in flames. I hope I have a ticket to the performance because it will be horrible but exciting to watch. Duende is tragic, and when you see somebody who has it you must make the sign of the cross and spit in your palm. Duende is a curse. It makes people sacrifice themselves to give us pleasure. Duende is an enchanted living death for the person who has it.”
He whispered these things loudly into my ear like a stockbroker giving quotations over the phone while Jorge and Cathy practiced to become famous and doomed. Outside on a gray afternoon random raindrops fell from the moody sky.
The studio was filled with thrilling music and frantic dancing. I fixated on Cathy’s feet, then on Jorge’s fingers. How could those two be so coordinated and exuberant?
“She has good footwork, but not great,” Aurelio Porta said. “And technically she is competent but not too far above average. Yet that other thing, that fever, that instinct for presentation, that totally self-absorbed and self-destructive euphoria—that is special, that’s duende. One in a million. She doesn’t even know where it came from or how to control it. Like an erection in men. I can sell her, I know, even though she’s not Spanish. I absolutely guarantee that she’s going to be famous.”
Jorge and Cathy stopped in unison with a bold and emotional flourish. Cathy held the pose for eight seconds until Aurelio Porta clapped, saying, “Bravo. Estupendo.”
When Cathy knew she had been wonderful she became grumpy. “I stink,” she muttered, panting, trying to catch her breath. “I dance like a wooden puppet. I have arthritis already and I’m not even twenty. Shit.”
She went to her purse and extricated two cigarettes, handing one to Jorge. She rustled further seeking matches until Aurelio flipped over a book that skidded across the shiny floor, stopping at her feet. Kicking off her shoes, Cathy bent to retrieve the matches then leaned against the wall with her eyes closed, smiling. Jorge set the guitar flat on his lap and inhaled smoke luxuriously.
We savored the quiet. I was sweating as if I’d been dancing right along with Cathy Escudero.
“I’m going to retire when I’m twenty-five,” she said. “By then I’ll be a millionaire and a cripple.”
Cathy slid down the mirror to a sitting position on the floor, hiking her dress up into her lap which gave us a glimpse of the white panties. Eyes closed, she seemed unaware of this fact.
Nobody said anything. Embarrassed, I averted my eyes, looking out a window. In the twilight most city lights had come on, but I could still see large foreboding clouds high above the Hudson River.
34. Handsome Anthony
Eduardo, Alfonso, and I attended a movie at the Waverly: Il Bell’Antonio. In Italian with English subtitles, it starred Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale. It had been written by Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of Alfonso’s heroes and the director of Accatone! Marcello played a handsome Sicilian rogue who fell in love with Claudia, the beautiful, virginal daughter of a town big shot. Despite his reputation as a womanizer, Marcello could not consummate the marriage. He had become impotent. This caused an enormous scandal. Marcello had failed Claudia, her parents, his own family, the church, the politicians, and all the rich businessmen of the city. Qué Vergüenza! Marcello’s mother and father grew frantic. Claudia’s parents demanded an annulment. Everyone was horrified that Marcello could not “be a man.” Finally, Mastroianni admitted to his best friend that all his life he could easily screw prostitutes, shop girls, and casual affairs, but if he truly loved a woman he couldn’t muster an erection.
When we left the theater, Eduardo said, “Fuck that movie. I hated that stupid film. Those Italians have their heads up their own rectums.”
As we crossed Sixth Avenue, aiming for the empanada stand, Alfonso said, “Wait. Consider the dilemma. Pasolini was pointin
g out all the hypocrisy. It’s an interesting story about how social mores, and especially religion, corrupt the nature of true love.”
“Qué va!” Eduardo flung up his hands. “Marcello was a jerk. And why didn’t Claudia help him out with a blowjob? That icy girl reminded me of Adriana.”
“What do you think, blondie?” Alfonso asked.
“I felt sorry for Marcello,” I answered. Truth is, the movie had terrified me.
At the empanada stand Roldán was talking sign language to the blue-haired amazon who knew Popeye—toothless Martha.
“Just my luck,” she crowed. “The three most attractive studs in New York City.”
Alfonso ordered coffee; Eduardo demanded a mate; I asked for a Coke. Martha sidled over to Eduardo, casting her arm around his shoulders.
“Whattayou say, big boy?”
Eduardo shook her off, rolling his eyes around. “No hablo inglés,” he grumbled.
“He doesn’t speak English,” I lied.
She laughed. “Who cares what he doesn’t speak? Language is not at issue here.”
In Spanish Roldán asked, “How was the movie?”
Alfonso said, “Eduardo didn’t like it.”
“Why not?” The cook began washing stuff in his tiny sink.
“Because Claudia wouldn’t give Marcello a blowjob.”
“What are they talking about?” Martha asked me.
“It’s all slang,” I said. Hello, déjà vu. “I really don’t understand a word.”
35. See You Later, Alligator
I was prowling around the neighborhood at three A.M. when I bumped into Roldán and Santiago Chávez heading north past St. Anthony’s Church on Sullivan Street. Inside the two cardboard boxes they carried were nestled tomorrow’s empanadas. A tall, melancholy man, Santiago never visited the stand during commercial hours. But every night he helped the fat man cart the next day’s product up to the kiosk.
Santiago ran a bakery hidden in his basement on Sullivan Street. You would never know it existed except for the wonderful odors seeping onto the sidewalk between midnight and five A.M. Roldán set his alarm for three each night so he could get up, walk south, and fetch his empanadas. Then he went back to sleep until noon.