Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

  On his way out of the studio, Dreher had to pass the projection room, where they were testing sound tracks of Jeanette MacDonald singing “The Blue Danube.” The lilting rhythm almost seemed to make his head sway, but the movement was mostly in his mind.

  That lovely spring afternoon in Vienna. He had just finished his new play and was celebrating with friends at a sidewalk café. Over the radio had come the strains of “The Blue Danube,” and just as it seemed as if the entire place was beginning to sway, the waltz was harshly cut off. Suddenly, in a nightmare, they were listening to the trembling voice of Chancellor Schussnigg. This day has placed us in a tragic and decisive situation … the German Government … ultimatum … we have yielded to force … God protect Austria!

  That had been the signal for the explosion … the thunder of Nazi threats and Nazi boots along the cobblestones … the last night … full of hoarse screams futile cries the death-rattle of old Vienna … and there was Lothar, Lothar my only son just turned twenty-one a scholarship student at the university still wearing the red-and-white ribbon of the Republic … my Lothar tying some clothes and books into a hasty bundle whispering: They are hunting every leader of our Fatherland Front … I must get out. Remembering. The mad rush to the station … the fear-crazed crowd fighting for places on the train … and the new conquerors of Vienna dragging them off … Then the last hope of freedom, the steamer anchored in the Danube ready to sail for Prague … Remembering: the small boat the muffled oars the friendly Danube the beautiful blue Danube where Lothar learned to swim … then the angry putt-putt-putt-putt of the motorboat full of the cruel young faces of Lothar’s classmates and Lothar slipping over into the dark water diving down to leave behind the ghastly path of their searchlight … and the beam always flashing across the darkness to pick him out again … the sound of steel winging along the surface like ducks … the grotesque pizzicato of the bullets plunk-plunk-plunking into the river …

  Harold Edson Brown was reading Dreher’s script. “You don’t have to read it,” the producer had told him. “Unless you want an idea of what I don’t want.” Brown had looked at the title, Last Waltz in Vienna, and had only meant to skim through the first couple of pages, but here he was on one hundred and two, feeling every second of Dreher’s last night in Vienna. For a moment the power of Dreher’s script drove so deep it reached the evaporating pool of integrity buried within him. He still knew real writing when he saw it. He was going to rush up to the producer, slam this script on his desk and shout the truth. “The climax where the old musician is playing a Strauss waltz in a Viennese beer garden as the tramp of Nazi troops and the sound of their drums begin to drown him out—the old Viennese playing louder and louder as if trying to make the voice of old Vienna heard above the tumult—until finally nothing but brown shirts and the roar of their feet, voices and martial music fills the screen and sound track—that will be one of the most terrific moments in the history of pictures!”

  But when Brown finished reading he shoved the manuscript under a bunch of loose papers in his bottom drawer, violently pushing it out of his mind. He wondered if he was going to let it lie buried there forever. One of these days (maybe), when he couldn’t look his fat check in the face any more, he was going to pull it out and fight for it and watch it blast his piddling little comedies off the screen.

  He tilted his chair back, sprawled his feet across the desk and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. What’s the matter with me today? I’m getting soft, I’m sitting around mooning like a goddamn sophomore, he lashed himself as he washed ideas out of his head with a healthy slug.

  At the same moment Hannes Dreher was slowly climbing off a bus in Hollywood, wondering how to tell his family that the money they were waiting for to buy their way out of Vienna might not be coming for a long, long time.

  Harold Edson Brown took his customary place at the writers’ table. He was completely recovered. He wore a smile the way a winning racehorse wears a wreath.

  “What’s the big grin for?” the gag man asked him. “You look like the cat who just swallowed a producer.”

  “Better than that,” Brown laughed. “Just got a new assignment. And I’m tickled to death. The Blue Danube.”

  “Don’t forget to change the names of the characters from First Waltz,” the gagman said, “so the audience won’t know it’s a rehash.”

  “Rehash hell!” Brown said. “Wait’ll you hear the new angle I got on it—a twist on the Student Prince. I’m going to give it that real Viennese schmaltz!”

  SEÑOR

  DISCRETION

  HIMSELF

  For as many years as the townspeople of Tepalcingo could remember, Alfonso (Pancito) Perez had been the proprietor of one of the smallest, poorest and most bedraggled bakeries. The Panadería Perez was a shabby little square in the wall of one-story faded-pastel storefronts that ran along a side street leading from the plaza. The back half of the bakery, thinly partitioned, was a hot, cluttered kitchen where the bolillos, pan blanco and panes dulces were made fresh every morning. Pancito always dominated the baking, barking out instructions as if his daughters had never learned how to prepare the dough and form it into the familiar shapes that decorated the fly-specked shelves until the end of the day.

  In the morning a few old customers would make their purchases while the bread was still warm and fresh. In the evening the crumpled poor, barely a notch below Pancito on the local totem, would creep into the dark little shop just before closing time and buy the cold, stiffening unsold bread for half its original price, only a few centavos more than it had cost Pancito to produce it. The only way Pancito stayed in business at all, and maintained his thirty-five-pesos- or three-dollar-a-day profit, was because the genetic fates had been kind to him. If he had been a farmer he would have needed sons, but in the little bakery daughters served him very well, and here he enjoyed his only inheritance—María Cristina, age twenty-one, Rosita, nineteen, Esperanza, seventeen, and Guadalupe, the youngest, the one they called Lupita, a precocious fifteen.

  María Cristina, Rosita and Esperanza were not exactly ugly. They were more what people, out of charity, like to call “plain.” All three resembled their dead mother, thin and dry and dutiful. They were good girls. They did as they were told. They worked hard and went to mass on Sunday; and although they were still very young, they seemed already to be in training to become very old. María Cristina was rather advanced in years for a maiden in Tepalcingo. She was the homeliest of the four and the most strongly possessed by sense of duty. She had mothered the others, was a veteran at the job before she was twelve, had cooked for all of them and mended the clothes and prepared the home remedies when they were sick. She was a deeply religious girl and had wanted to become a nun, but Pancito had not been able to spare her. The family would have fallen apart.

  Pancito, which can be literally translated as “Little Bread,” was a good father, within his limitations. But his limitations were considerable. After his wife, Beneficencia, had died—suddenly, it seemed to him, though neighbors could see she had been slowly wasting away—Pancito had felt extremely sorry for himself and had gone from the Panadería Perez to his favorite cantina, The Bass Drum of God, where he would drink mescal beyond his capacity and describe Beneficencia in terms far more glowing than ever he had granted her during her brief tour of duty on earth. “But thank God,” he would say to Celestino the bartender, the only one who would listen, “He has seen fit to bless me with hardworking daughters who respect their father and who do not throw their dresses over their heads for the first little hoodlum who comes along. Rebeldes sin causa, that is what they are,” he would shout over his shoulder at the domino players who were always in the same booth minding their rattly business across from the bar. “Rebeldes sin causa.”

  Pancito had heard that phrase read to him by his youngest daughter, Lupita, from the local newspaper in connection with an assault of hampones on the Panadería Cortez, the proud establishment of Hilario Cortez, who had a bakery thre
e times as large as Pancito’s. To the unrelenting envy of Pancito, the Panadería Cortez had just installed overhead neon lights. The hampones, or young hoodlums, had managed to break into the modernized bakery of Hilario Cortez and had thrown empty beer bottles at the new-style neon tubing, but had disdained stealing any of the bread. Not even a single pan dulce. They had smashed Hilario Cortez’s pride-and-joy neon lights merely for the sake of smashing, a strange, nihilistic disease that seemed to be spreading south from the monster gringo republic beyond the Rio Grande.

  “Rebeldes sin causa, rebels without cause, just like in the movies,” Lupita had said.

  “A decent young girl of fifteen should not have any knowledge of such degrading movies,” Pancito had scolded. “How many times must I tell you—you are forbidden to see the gringo movies.”

  “Papa, where could I get the pesetas to see the movie?”

  “Then what has made you such an expert on this shameless pelicula?”

  “My teacher spoke about it in school. Maestro Martínez.”

  “Martínez! He is an atheist! He taught school two years in California. He is a pocho. I have a good mind to go to that school and hit him such a crack with my cane on his know-it-all skull that—” Pancito was fond of launching grandiose threats of violence that he had difficulty in rounding out rhetorically. He was short, barely five and a half feet high, and it was his potbelly as much as his profession that had given him his nickname. He also had a slight limp from a touch of rickets in his childhood, but this did not discourage him from threatening bodily harm to people half his age and twice his size. Although his cane was a crutch, it could quickly become his lance. Undersized, put upon, easily triggered to anger, Pancito Perez saw himself as a mailed champion of his own right to be alive, to have a place in this world, be it ever so humble, as long as it was not without dignity. Since Pancito could not read, he had only a hearsay acquaintance with Don Quixote, and so was not truly aware of how closely he reflected Cervantes’s true knight. But Don Pancito was ever ready to raise his cane and charge into battle against the human windmills arrayed against him.

  “Papa,” Lupita reminded him, “only last week you were praising Maestro Martínez and telling me how much I could learn from him if only I would study harder.”

  “Don’t contradict your father,” Pancito shouted, outraged at his daughter’s logic. “Can’t a man praise someone for his intelligence and knowledge of books and at the same time damn him for his atheism and his worldliness? Now get on with your studies. I must get back to the bakery before those lazy sisters of yours destroy what little is left of my business.”

  “Very well, Father,” Lupita said, and opened her mathematics book that had to do with mysterious letters as well as numbers and made Pancito feel both proud and inferior in the presence of her unexpected scholarship. That and her inexplicable beauty gave Pancito twinges of anxiety. Lupita was a strange fruit on the tree of Perez. She was full-bosomed and ripe rather than plump, like a mango ready for plucking when the skin has turned from green to yellow gold and its firmness gives satisfying form to the softening yellow fruit that waits within. Often when he looked at her, Pancito wondered if she could be truly his. It did not seem possible that his shy, hardworking, life-drained Beneficencia could have put horns on him. Even if she had had the inclination, when could she have found the time, and what cabrón would have taken the trouble? Yet, when Pancito looked into the voluptuous, high-cheek-boned face of his youngest daughter, he recognized not a single feature of his own, and certainly none of Beneficencia’s. Guadalupe, his rapidly maturing Lupita, was a lush mango hanging from a dried-up pepper tree. All of the beauty of the family Perez had funneled into her, and all of the brains. Neither Pancito nor his wife nor the three older sisters had been able to read and write, and so Pancito had decided that Lupita would be the first member of the family to break the literacy barrier.

  When she read the local newspaper aloud to him, Pancito’s feelings ran against each other like the opposing currents of a riptide. He felt a puffer’s pride in her unique achievement and at the same time a resentment that this near-child fifteen-year-old already knew so much more than her father. It made her sassy and difficult to manage. Just the same, the virtues of higher education outweighed the personal disadvantages to Pancito, and he had begun to hope she could finish the secundaria and even move on to become a teacher. Since Pancito was resigned to the hard fact that he would never be more than fifty pesos ahead of himself, that he would never have a bakery even half the size of the grand Panadería Cortez, status meant everything to him. To have a daughter who could rise above menial labor, who could be elevated into the professional class as a maestra, this was the star to which Pancito might hitch his wobbly little wagon.

  “Well, no rest for the weary,” Pancito said as he drained the glass of dark beer with which he always washed down the meager midafternoon comida. “I’m off to catch another eagle.” On every silver peso was engraved the Mexican águila, and Pancito was fond of describing his financial pressure as “too many mouths and not enough eagles.” Like many men who cannot read or write, Pancito was inclined to outbursts of eloquence. In his youth he had been a partisan of the Obregón revolution, and two of his favorite postures were politically oratorical and verbally combative. When he was addressing an audience of three or four half-listeners in The Bass Drum of God, or when he was tongue-lashing some absent enemy (and the farther away the target the more ferocious his attack), Pancito was able to put out of mind his petty-bourgeois poverty and the insufficiencies of his figure and his position. Self-propelled by his own anger or rhetoric, the roly-poly baker in his tight, threadbare double-breasted suit (a one-hundred-peso secondhand acquisition necessary as a symbol of shopkeeper status) was no longer earth-bound or bakery-bound or bound to the faded walls of the sour-smelling Bass Drum of God.

  Pancito was cooped up in his cell-like panadería with his solemn-faced daughters a minimum of ten hours a day. He unlocked his shop every morning at five A.M. (including Sundays) to start the baking with the heavy but shapeless resentment of a man serving a life sentence for a crime he not only did not commit but cannot even identify. Yet he felt strangely guilty, guilty for having been born, guilty for having been a spindly and undernourished child, guilty for having grown up short and pudgy and slightly lame, guilty for having lost his wife to the graveyard before the four girls were fully reared, guilty for having what was generally acknowledged as the sorriest bakery in Tepalcingo, guilty, inexplicably and inexorably guilty of being Pancito Perez. Pancito Perez the Failure. Waking up in the dark to face the same day he had endured the day before, he could almost hear that defeatist phrase forming in his mind. Only quick gulps of mescal and the release of shouted anger had the power to change Pancito Perez the Failure into Pancito Perez the Man.

  When summer came, waves of heat from the oven rolled out to embrace the heat waves from the sun-fried cobblestones of the narrow street; by noonday Pancito felt like one of his steaming loaves ready to burst its crust. The three daughters worked quietly, stoically, managing to triumph over perspiration, perhaps because there was not enough juice in them to pour out in protest against their fate. But Pancito made up for them. He groaned, he cursed, he pitied himself, he called on the Holy Virgin to take a little belated interest in the Panadería Perez. He kept up such a commotion that finally María Cristina said, “Papa, instead of suffering here with your dolor de cabeza, your sorrow of the head, why don’t you go home and put a cool towel on your face and try to calm yourself. There will be very little to do here until the sun is low.”

  Ordinarily, Pancito would have argued that his presence was essential, that María Cristina could not count well enough to make proper change, that she was not an aggressive enough salesman in urging a customer to buy an extra pan dulce, that she was not strong enough to ward off the blandishments of Faustino, the unshaven policeman who never paid for his purchases and who came around behind the counter and peacocked in his un
pressed, dirty brown uniform. If given enough time, Pancito could think of a hundred reasons for not entrusting the Panadería Perez to his three well-meaning but ineffectual daughters. But this time his head was pounding with the heat and with such a sense of failure that he hardly cared whether María Cristina sold an extra pan dulce or not, or whether Patrolman Faustino raped the daughters one by one or all together. This was a monumental headache, a milestone of a headache, and his unexpected decision to give in to it and quit the shop early put certain forces into motion that were to change the entire chemistry of his life.

  The phenomenon began when Pancito, holding his small, fat hands to his temples, pushed open the door of his house with his foot and saw something that made him forget his headache like that. There at the table where Pancito always sat down to his private comida was Hilario Cortez, whose prosperity he had always resented but whom he now hated with righteous passion for daring to violate his precious virgin Lupita. To be factual, Hilario Cortez was only sitting at the same table with Lupita and feeling his way very carefully, as befitted a man about town. But Pancito knew that a forty-year-old man does not come to discuss the agrarian problem or civic betterment with a ripe and uninitiated fifteen-year-old guapa.

  “Get out! Get out!” Pancito screamed, waving his cane in the air like a righteous flag. “Out, you lecher, you rapist, you pervert, you despoiler of children!” Hilario Cortez managed to duck the wild swings of the cane as he ran out of the house, with Pancito shouting after him, “Help! Police! Rape! Rape!” Hilario Cortez turned the corner on the run while Pancito loudly expressed to the entire street his moral objections to this unnatural assignation between the depraved Señor Cortez and his innocent Lupita. As soon as he stepped back into the house, however, his attitude toward his precious darling shot into reverse. “Lupita, you little tramp, for this I struggle and sacrifice and get up in the middle of the night to get a head start on the eagles so that you can go to school—for this, so you can whore around with an old man who has enough years to be your grandfather!”