Whenever she danced, the idol threw confetti in everyone's hair. The other longhaired girls threw their cigarettes, but no one would catch them. Weeping, they hurled gold and silver necklaces, but these also fell unclaimed on the cobblestones, striking with noises like breaking glass. Just as the orange juice vendor draws his arm in to his naked chest, then jerks it down again so that his body shudders and the extractor shudders and golden droplets spray his chest, so the other girls flailed and shook until they'd spattered each other with sweat. Nobody wanted their juice.
What's her secret? they shrieked.
A ruby, from her mother. (The idol told them that.)
In that lighted plaza dazzled by trumpet-sounds, the trees so garden-green and fresh beneath the purple sky that smelled like cigarettes, boys waited in line just to see the Red Song. The mariachi musicians with golden skeleton-bones up the sides of their black trousers played for no one but her. Whenever she tossed a cigarette from between her breasts, the boys shouted and fought for it, jostling like balloons on ropes, cursing and weeping with desire until the cigarette had been torn to pieces. The boys in white shirts and the girls in black dresses could not see each other. (As they stared at the Red Song, the corners of their eyes were sharper than knives.)
But the madam kept sight of the idol. Whimpering with greed, she made her supplicating embrace, her swollen hands not unlike the two broad ribbons ponytailing down the back of the soda girl who'd come from the corner of the fence where the hedge began, staring into heat and light all day, dreaming of the dance to come when she'd toss her lipsticked cigarette into the crowd of handsome boys who'd marry her.
Before laying down her wares that morning on their bed of fresh ice, the soda girl had gone to the zócalo. It was so early that nobody was there except for an old man feeding rows of pigeons. The soda girl leaped up onto the plinth and danced, the only one there at the center of the world. The old man smiled. He was the idol. That day she scarcely saw her thirsty customers; when they crowded her she stood up and wheeled her cart halfway around the bandstand, looking for less sunshine so as to diminish her trade. She needed no pesos, only dreams. The idol squatted on her head and whispered: Under the night I'll help you, my little amiga. I'll sharpen the ends of your cigarettes so that they'll pierce the boys' hearts! Boys have no minds. — The poor soda girl believed. Bending over her aqua-colored cart, fondling ice, she dreamed herself so deeply into the dance that not even the most lucrative thirst could reach her although she was the nun consecrated to orange fizz.
But that night she danced stamping her foot, soaking her lemon wedding-cake dress with tears. No boy looked at her. Her mouth downturned; her face became a clay mask. To her the Red Song was as unholy as some leather-lashed idol of worm-carved wood. The soda girl threw her cigarettes, and boys' heels ground them on the dirty night's stones. She screamed. She became a clay figurine holding up her breasts.
The other girls stopped dancing. They were stone giants of anger against the sky.
When at last the Red Song threw the lipstick-stained cigarette into that mob, every eye saw its red smudge like the flash of her cheekbone from far away, and it rose above the moon, then tumbled faster than a witch's bone while the madam leaned close to the idol whispering, her hand on the idol's chest, and the cigarette began to come down as the madam's and the idol's legs moved together; they were the only couple dancing; they bobbed, swung and whirled while the idol's starched shoulders swam closer to everything in the balloon-light (his head a little raised so that the white teeth in his yellow death's head could gape down the snake of itself, of its vertebrae and incised ivory counters; the idol had removed his ribs for the occasion and spread them around himself in a fan of rays); the cigarette was falling like death now so that the madam trembled, but she couldn't stop clutching for it and the idol grinned, threw his fingers behind his head, caught the cigarette, and placed it in her hand.
The other girls, the jealous ones, let out a joyous scream like boiling ice.
Slender, so slender, she let her hair down beneath the trees. The madam opened the notebook.
On a gasoline-smelling night of blue walls, the peacock shadows of her dress swayed from side to side. When she spread the colors of her dress, men crawled after her like worms. Bars of darkness, tiger-darkness and tiger-light walled widely shadowed concrete into the nowhere, where she became an icon prisoned in gold. The ice cream man, pushing his stand home to darkness, stopped to catch armloads of red papier-mâché fishes that shot from her as she danced. He wanted to sell them, but they exploded like fireworks.
