of sand turning gray in the rain. Never has a place of entertainment looked gloomier, more forbidding. Even its neon signs were repellent, square, you remember? Everything about them established a precise hierarchy of attractions: the singer (male or female) at the head of the marquee, then the band, then a pair of dancers, finally the magician, the clown, the dogs. It was like a list of political candidates, or a menu for an embassy dinner, or even a death notice: here lies a singer, a band, two ballroom dancers, a magician â¦
The women were like the place, like the color of smoke inside the cabaret. They were the reason we went there. The closed society denied us love. We believed that, having left our fiancées at home, those maidens whom we couldnât seduce physically without ruining them for marriage, we could come to the capital to study law and meetâas in the novels of Balzac or Octave Feuilletâan experienced lover, rich, married, who would introduce us to the ranks of the wealthy and powerful, in exchange for our virile services. Hélas, as Rastignac would say, the Mexican Revolution did not extend to sexual liberty. The city was so small then that everybody knew everybody else; groups of friends were exclusive, and if within one of the groups some member made love to another, not even the crumbs of that banquet reached us.
We thought of our provincial fiancées, preserved like apricots, maintained in a state of purity behind the iron grilles on their windows, barely within the range of a serenade, and we wondered if our identity as provincials only put us in an even more sordid position in the capital: either we got ourselves a virginal fiancée or we went to dance with the tarts of the Guay. They were almost all small, powdered, with the blackest eyes and the cheapest perfume, flat-chested, without hips, with skinny legs and shapeless asses. They had thick lips and limp hair, sometimes bullied into place with clips; they wore short skirts, mesh stockings, kiss-me-quicks smeared on their cheeks like question marks, their every other tooth was gold, their every other pore was marked with smallpox; their heels tapped the dance floor, the tapping of their heels resounded as they went out to dance and returned to their tables, and between those heelbeats you heard the sound of their feet dragging, in the slow steps of the danzón.
What were we looking for, if these cheap hetaeras were so ugly? Only sex, which wasnât so great either?
We were looking for a dance. Thatâs what they knew: not how to dress, or speak, not even how to make love. Those jokers of the Guay knew how to dance the slow danzón. That was their trick: to do the danzón, that ceremony of slowness. They say the best dancers of the danzón can dance in a space the size of a postage stamp. Second prize goes to the couple who can dance in a space the size of a single tile. Two bodies glued together, their movement almost imperceptible. Clothed bodies, flesh palpitating but almost still, the reflection of a dream as much as of a dance.
Who would have thought that those beaten-down girls possessed the genius of the danzón, responding as they did to the flute and the violin, the piano and the maraca?
Those hot little tamales from the venereal barrios of a city where nobody even used toilet paper or sanitary napkinsâa city of dirty handkerchiefs before Kleenex and Kotex, just think, Bernardo, this city where the poor clean themselves with corn husksâwhat poor, biting poetry would their tragically restrained feelings produce? Because something else came from their world of rural misery, transferred from the destroyed haciendas to the city, the fear of making noise, of bothering the rich and being punished by them.
The nightclub was their answer. The music of the bolero allowed those women, rescued from the fields and exploited again in the city, to express their most intimate feelings, vulgar but
The women were like the place, like the color of smoke inside the cabaret. They were the reason we went there. The closed society denied us love. We believed that, having left our fiancées at home, those maidens whom we couldnât seduce physically without ruining them for marriage, we could come to the capital to study law and meetâas in the novels of Balzac or Octave Feuilletâan experienced lover, rich, married, who would introduce us to the ranks of the wealthy and powerful, in exchange for our virile services. Hélas, as Rastignac would say, the Mexican Revolution did not extend to sexual liberty. The city was so small then that everybody knew everybody else; groups of friends were exclusive, and if within one of the groups some member made love to another, not even the crumbs of that banquet reached us.
We thought of our provincial fiancées, preserved like apricots, maintained in a state of purity behind the iron grilles on their windows, barely within the range of a serenade, and we wondered if our identity as provincials only put us in an even more sordid position in the capital: either we got ourselves a virginal fiancée or we went to dance with the tarts of the Guay. They were almost all small, powdered, with the blackest eyes and the cheapest perfume, flat-chested, without hips, with skinny legs and shapeless asses. They had thick lips and limp hair, sometimes bullied into place with clips; they wore short skirts, mesh stockings, kiss-me-quicks smeared on their cheeks like question marks, their every other tooth was gold, their every other pore was marked with smallpox; their heels tapped the dance floor, the tapping of their heels resounded as they went out to dance and returned to their tables, and between those heelbeats you heard the sound of their feet dragging, in the slow steps of the danzón.
What were we looking for, if these cheap hetaeras were so ugly? Only sex, which wasnât so great either?
We were looking for a dance. Thatâs what they knew: not how to dress, or speak, not even how to make love. Those jokers of the Guay knew how to dance the slow danzón. That was their trick: to do the danzón, that ceremony of slowness. They say the best dancers of the danzón can dance in a space the size of a postage stamp. Second prize goes to the couple who can dance in a space the size of a single tile. Two bodies glued together, their movement almost imperceptible. Clothed bodies, flesh palpitating but almost still, the reflection of a dream as much as of a dance.
Who would have thought that those beaten-down girls possessed the genius of the danzón, responding as they did to the flute and the violin, the piano and the maraca?
Those hot little tamales from the venereal barrios of a city where nobody even used toilet paper or sanitary napkinsâa city of dirty handkerchiefs before Kleenex and Kotex, just think, Bernardo, this city where the poor clean themselves with corn husksâwhat poor, biting poetry would their tragically restrained feelings produce? Because something else came from their world of rural misery, transferred from the destroyed haciendas to the city, the fear of making noise, of bothering the rich and being punished by them.
The nightclub was their answer. The music of the bolero allowed those women, rescued from the fields and exploited again in the city, to express their most intimate feelings, vulgar but
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