THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS
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became--as Paco grew aware of the eyes around them-increasingly
stalled and static instead: an isolation on a desert island.
He fumed to find his private life becoming public jest.
-Who's the son of a Turk?
-Oh, that's Concha Vidal's latest fancy boy.
The moment he entered a room where she was, the movement
of people knowingly stranded them together, but pruriently encircled.
Even the members of his band had developed a special smile for him,
which he could feel widening as he turned his back. Once, hi's nerves
snapping, he swung a fist at the saxophonist, disrupting a morning
rehearsal. His apology dropped like a pebble on the bandsmen; he had
always been aloof with them: they were now frankly hostile. They
complained that he skipped rehearsals to take his querid01. shopping.
Paco grimly broke off with the senora. He ignored her at the
night club and eluded her over the telephone. She wrote to ask what
was wrong: he did not reply. She came herself to his hotel: he was
always out.
He had resumed his solitary explorations of the city but what
he now saw increased his discomfort: the heat-dazzling panic-edgy
streets darkened in his brains with doom, dirt, danger, disease, and
violent death. Some venon was at work here, seeping through all the
layers, cankering in all directions. The senora's world of mansions
might sit uneasily on its avenues; the hovels of the poor squatted no
less nervously on their gutters. The avenue matrons might not get up
from a mah-jongg session for days and nights except to eat and re–
lieve nature; the gutter matrons breakfasted, lunched, supped, and
suckled their babies right at the gaming tables, and frequently relieved
nature there too. And the young people who emerged each morning
from the world of bugs in your bed, pigs and poultry in the rooms,
and gutters sluggish with excrement and drowned rats, were no less
brushed, polished, plucked, painted, perfumed, silk-shirted, nylon-hosed,
wrist-watched, and bejeweled than the spoiled darlings in the world
of the avenues.
Paco sensed an unreality in both worlds: the people who occupied
them did not seem to be living there at all. They denied the locale–
but their denial was not the asceticism of the mystic nor the vision of
the reformer, but merely the aversion of the opium eater. They stepped
over reality as they stepped across their gutters-with the transient
frown of the tourist, the neutral disgust of the foreigner. Their drugged
eyes denied the garish imitation mansions no less than the patched-up
tenements where four or five families lived huddled together in each
