The Harder They Fall (14 page)

‘Does he get this thing very often, the homesickness?’

‘Oh, it is nothing,’ Acosta assured me. ‘In the morning after a good sleep he will be hokay. I have the same trouble with him back in Mendoza. When we have first come down the mountain from Santa Maria sometimes he just sits in the truck all day long and I know he has the homesickness very bad. I feel very sorry for him, so one day I go to the daughter of a gypsy fortune teller who has a tent down the way and I say to her, “In my truck is a young man who is very unhappy. Here is ten pesos for you if you will go into the truck and make him happy.” After that I find the two best ways to keep El Toro from this homesickness is to feed
him very much – maybe five times a day – for he can eat like a lion, and to give him the frequent opportunity of girls, for
tiene muchos huevos
and his appetite for the
muchachas
is truly magnificent. It is fortunate for me I find this out, for without the girls I think perhaps it is possible that El Toro goes back to his village and closes the door on his big opportunity.’

Acosta’s shrewd little eyes glowed with self-importance. Oh, it was not so easy as you think to bring this giant so far up the ladder, they seemed to say. I have had tremendous difficulties to overcome. I have had to use my head.

‘Since you have the charge of the public relations,’ Acosta went on, ‘there is something I will tell you of El Toro which is of course not for the publications. He comes from such a very little village where the people know nothing of the world. So El Toro in the hands of women of experience is like
arcilla
…’

‘Clay,’ I said.

‘Thank you. My English has improve a little, yes? To explain how little El Toro knows of the world, one day in Mendoza, when we are still with the circus, Señor Mendez is away having new shoes put upon the feet of the bareback horse. That evening just before the performance El Toro comes to me and says he must see the priest right away to confess the sin of adultery. In all his life he has never commit the sin of adultery. And now he has very much fear that he will never go to heaven. Like all the people of his village, he believes everything of the Church and would rather go to heaven when he dies than lie down with Carmelita in this present life.

‘“With whom do you commit the adultery?” I say to El Toro.

‘“With Señora Mendez,” he says.

‘“Señora Mendez!” I say. “But why do you bother with such an old one when the fairgrounds are full of willing
muchachas
?”

‘“I did not even want Señora Mendez,” El Toro says to me. “But she comes into the truck when I am lying down. She smiles at me and comes over and sits on the edge of my cot. She talks to me and strokes my head and before I realise what has happen, I have commit the adultery.”

‘“Do not look so sorry, El Toro,” I say. “With Señora Mendez you cannot be blame for committing the adultery. Every time Señor Mendez goes into the city for the day, Señora Mendez commits the adultery. Señora Mendez has now almost forty years, and she has been committing the adultery twice a month since she is sixteen. So if it is a sin to be a
contribuidor
to a lady’s five hundred and seventy-fifth adultery, it is surely nothing more than the very little tiniest sliver of a sin.”’

‘If he pulls anything like that up here,’ I said, ‘the public is off him like a shot. We like our heroes to eat wheaties, be good to their mothers and true to their childhood sweethearts.’

‘You understan’,’ Acosta said, ‘I only tell you this now because we are become like one big family.’

Just one big unhappy family, I thought.

‘I hope I have not make El Toro sound like a bad boy,’ Acosta continued. ‘He is only a powerful
joven
– youth with healthy appetites. But I tell you this, since you will
have occasion to be with him much in public and perhaps can help to guard him against certain women he will meet who will have interest in him like Señora Mendez.’

Siamese twins pulling in opposite directions struggled for possession of my spine. The student of modern American writing, of Fitzgerald and O’Hara, had hired out as male nursemaid to an overgrown adolescent pituitary case who allows himself to be seduced by middle-aged bareback riders.

The heat of the night was heavy in the airless room and the walls were too close to each other. Suddenly I had had enough of Acosta with his ungrammatical long-windedness, his charm, which was largely a matter of teeth, and his protestations of benevolence toward El Toro. If Toro had been the victim of seduction, it was a far more radical seduction than the dallying attention of Señora Mendez.

But maybe this time Toro would make it pay. He had the size. Honest Jimmy had the connections. Nick had the money. I had the tricks. And the American people, God bless them, had the credulity. You couldn’t blame them entirely. They were a little punchy too. They had taken an awful pasting from all sides: radio, the press, billboards, throwaways, even airplanes left white streamers in the sky telling them what to buy and what to need. They could really absorb punishment, this nation of radio listeners and shop-happy consumers, this great spectator nation. Only like the game fighter who smiles when he gets hit and keeps boring in for more, they were a little more vulnerable for every encounter. Now perhaps, if the winds are favourable (and if they aren’t it may be possible to move wind
machines up into the wings), they will be swept on to El Toro Molina, the Giant of the Andes, come down from the mountain heights to challenge the Philistines, like Samson, and avenge a countryman’s defeat.

‘Well, we’ll pick you up tomorrow about an hour before train time,’ I said.

‘Hokey-doke,’ Acosta said. ‘We will be very please.’

From the bedroom came a loud somnolent groan and the sound of a heavy churning of bedclothes. Acosta went to the bedroom door and looked in. I stood behind him, having a clear view over his shoulder. Toro had kicked off his covers and was lying naked on the bed. The bed was not long enough to accommodate him and a chair had been placed at the end of it to support his feet. This gave an unnatural appearance to the scene. It was as if a tremendous marionette, bigger than life, had been put away between performances. In sleep his face had the set, oversized features of a dummy’s head exaggerated for comedic effect.

And I thought, here we are planning his career, patterning his life, taking him to California, matching him with Coombs, surrounding him with managers, trainers, fixers, press agents, and yet he has never been consulted. I could induce the people of America to love him, hate him, respect him, fear him, laugh at him or glorify him, and yet I had never really spoken to him. What were his preferences, his feelings, his ambitions, his most intimate hungers? Who knew? Who cared? As soon ask Charlie McCarthy whether he would object to doing two extra Saturday performances. Toro had been put away for the night. When Jimmy and Nick and Danny and Doc and Vince and I were ready to
pull our particular strings in a coordinated effort, the Giant of the Andes would be made to bend his massive torso through the ropes; another tug and his hands would go up in the stance traditional to pugilists for five thousand years; and then he would be guided through the motions calculated to please the cash customers who put their money down to see what is technically supposed to be an exhibition of the manly art of self-defence.

Restlessly Toro rolled over on his side and muttered something in Spanish that sounded like
Sí, sí, Papá, ahora, ahorita
– yes, yes, Father, now, right away. How many thousand miles was Toro from the Columbia Hotel? What little task had his father given him, so trivial and everyday and yet so deeply cut into the section of the brain that never sleeps, that keeps working on like an automatic furnace in a dark, sleep-ridden house?

Perhaps Papa Molina had told Toro to carry the completed barrels out and set them in front of the shop. Toro might have been sitting down to midday
comida
with his brothers and was wolfing his third helping of
pollo con arroz
, while his father, wiping the hot sauce from his mouth with his sleeve and patting his belly indulgently, was saying, ‘All right, my boys, a good meal for a good day’s work. Now back to the shop.’

Outside, the street was full of people for whom midnight is noon. Broadway was charged with their insomniac energy. Just as in a protracted visit to a hospital one often begins to feel symptoms of illness, so on Broadway in the early a.m., caught up in the restless overstimulated going-
and-coming
, you suddenly find your second wind and your eyes
snap open in exaggerated wakefulness. So I turned west off Broadway, heading for the row of shabby brownstone houses between Eighth and Ninth Avenues where Shirley’s place was.

Shirley lived on the top floor, in one of those flats which turn out to be surprisingly comfortable after you’ve climbed the dark narrow stairs that look as if they should lead to a tenement. She had the whole floor, two bedrooms (with coy little boy-and-girl dolls perched at the head of each bed), a living room, a small barroom and a dinky kitchen. It wasn’t set up as a place where men came to have women. It was really a kind of informal call house, with the girls going out to work. Only once in a while, if he were someone Shirley had known a long time, a fellow could use the extra bedroom. The other part of Shirley’s business moved over the bar that usually kept busy until after the good people had punched in for their morning work. The shades were always drawn in that little room and the lighting was so discreetly low that I still remember the oppressive sense of decadence that came over me one morning when I thought I was leaving there around four and came out to face the blinding, accusing daylight and the sober, righteous inhabitants of an 8 a.m. workaday world.

I was admitted by Lucille, the dignified coloured maid. From the barroom I could hear Shirley’s Capehart, her prize possession, playing one of her records: Billie Holiday, with Teddy Wilson on piano behind her, singing, ‘I Cried For You’. It was so dark in the little room that at first all I could see was the glow of customers’ cigarettes and Shirley behind the bar, with a drink in her hand, smoking one of
her roll-your-owns. She was wearing something long, cut low in front and zipping all the way up the side that was either an evening gown that looked like a fancy housecoat or the other way around. She was singing along with Billie:

When she saw me she said ‘Hello, stranger,’ and gave me the big squeeze. She was feeling good tonight.

The record changer had dropped on another Holiday, the slow and easy ‘Fine and Mellow’, and Billie’s voice, lowdown and legato, belonged in the room.

In the loveseat by the window a statuesque blonde with a face that would have been beautiful if it had been less frozen was trying to fit into the arms of a runty Broadway comic. Sitting on the floor with his back against a chair was a big, fine-looking Negro. In the chair, running her hands through his hair, but not getting much of a play from him, was a white woman in her late or middle thirties who looked like one of those lushes who come from very good families with plenty of lettuce. As she reached down to embrace the Negro, she brushed her drink off the arm of the chair.

Like any fastidious hostess, Shirley glared. ‘In about
three seconds,’ she said to me in an undertone the woman should have been able to hear if the flit hadn’t stopped up her ears, ‘I’m going to give that lush the brush.’

Leaning over the radio was a slender Latin girl with an unexpectedly beautiful face. ‘She’s my new girl,’ Shirley said when she saw where I was looking. ‘Seems like a nice kid.’

We had had a talk about Latin girls once and she knew I thought they were the only ones who went into this business without losing their basic love for men or their enthusiasm for the act of love. Anglo-Saxon professionals, as a group, are a sullen, miserable lot who dispatch you with businesslike efficiency or cold-blooded bitterness.

‘Come here, Juanita,’ Shirley said. ‘I want you to meet an old friend of mine.

‘Isn’t she something?’ she said, as we shook hands. Juanita looked down in embarrassment. She patted the girl’s hand fondly. ‘Have a drink, dear?’

‘Coca-Cola,’ the girl said, making it sound Spanish.

While Juanita’s eyes were hidden in the glass, Shirley nodded toward her and then raised her eyebrows in a quick questioning gesture. I shook my head. Juanita was obviously an admirable girl, but she wasn’t what I had come for.

‘How about a little gin? I’m leaving for the coast tomorrow and I want to try and get even. This is strictly a business call.’

‘Come into my parlour,’ Shirley laughed. ‘You’re just in time to pay my bills for the month.’

I pulled the oilcloth off the kitchen table while Shirley got some cold chicken from the icebox.

I dealt. Shirley picked up her cards and said, ‘Oh, you stinker.’

‘Sorry dear,’ I said. ‘I feel mighty tough tonight.’

‘Want some beer with the chicken?’

‘Mmmm.’ My mouth was full of chicken. ‘Damn good chicken.’

‘I fried it myself. No one else ever gets it crisp enough for me.’

Shirley played her hand skilfully and caught me with nine.

We laughed. I was beginning to feel better. I always picked up around Shirley. She generated an atmosphere of health and – yes, security. It was strange after all these years in New York that a gin game in Shirley’s kitchen with cold chicken on the table and a beer at my elbow was the closest thing to home I had found in Manhattan.

Halfway through the next game, Shirley said quietly, ‘What gives with you and my rival your last night in town?’

‘Oh, hell, I don’t know. I’m loused up over there.’

‘Feel like talking about it?’

Shirley seemed to be paying more attention to her cards than to my troubles, but she always had a knack of listening in a kind of detached, almost disinterested way that made it easier to go into things like these.