She was playing with a drop of blood, a little red drop of blood which other people thought to be a ruby. She let it be a secret inside her cupped hands.
Slender like a candle, she let her hair down beneath the trees. Every night men gathered, heads high, hands high, feet and shoulders wide, to watch her arrive. The bandmaster powdered the faces of the dark-suited musicians who anticipated in her the white eyeshine of sexual intelligence.
Round faces, mustachioed and laced, puffed at the silver trumpets. When her hair tumbled down, the red-uniformed man beat his silver drum. Every time she smiled, three mandolins played by themselves. A blind man tinged his triangle when she stretched her whitestock-inged legs beneath the black skirt. She cocked her hip, and an admirer brought alive his tuba like a gleaming snail. She blinked, and the guitar-player sang.
The other whores stood a little apart from her. This was at the madam's wish. They were the second-best.
A boy was walking by. All at once he began to sleep an endless dream of luminescent pears caged in marble. He needed the sugarcane taste of her sweat when she laid her black hair down on the white bone of his shoulder. Her armpits tasted like ginger, almonds, sugar, and, above all, sweating cocoa butter.
He searched his pocket for pesos. The head turned knowingly; silver earrings whirred across black hair-space to flicker for a moment in front of that reddish-brown face. Her eyes, her eyes — blacker than blood!
The boy remembered how boys practice bullfighting in the park, how the one who is the bull bows low, snorting, as he holds a pair of bull's horns to his forehead. He snorts again, kicking dust as the matador wheels the red cloth in slow motion, the knife hidden behind. Afterward he can lay his horns down, wipe the sweat from his nose, and stand. But the boy could not become human again.
Will you go with me, Red Song?
Where?
Under the darkness.
Yes, I'll go there. That's a good place.
He took her hand, which was as hot as a Mexicali night. The madam made a cross in her notebook. The blind man tinged his triangle like eyes funneling down into the bullring. As she walked away beside her lover, past the smiles of backpointing boys, past all the padrotes sitting in the park, the madam lowered her pencil, the bandmaster raised his baton, and the musicians made a new song that no one had ever heard before.
She hid in her skirt of starched-white froth, her new skirt as delicious as wedding cake, turning her face away, giggling when his mouth pursued her. He'd married her for each of thirteen nights. But not yet could he hope to draw a slow kiss out of her.
Under the night I'll help you, his friend said. His friend was a new friend, an old friend, a brown rain idol with holes in his mouth.
I can help myself, said the boy. Tonight for me she'll let down her dark hair. Tonight she'll undo the silver buttons of her black dress.
She's nothing but a pair of buttocks, the idol said. Remember, in this world no one has a mind but you and me. Tell her that, when you buy her lighted shopwindow breast.
In this world only the Red Song has a mind! the boy said fiercely. Are you my friend or only your own?
Ask for the ruby, the idol whined. Remember it when she takes you under the night.
The idol was gone. The boy's arm slipped, hard and brown, around the Red Song's neck, cutting her hair in two.
He walked her quickly past the National Palace, where less lucky men stood in front, raising sheets tied to two sticks, two men to a stick, red flags and umbrellas and bullhorns, dust, a man selling Pop-sicles; the sheets said: GIVE US THE RED SONG. He walked her between the hedges of the Alameda, his smile in her eyes, his hand on her neck. (He was as gaudily unstable as the colored parasols in the park.) He craved the way she could grab handfuls of her blouse and offer it to the breeze.
Red Song, show me your little ruby this night.
I have no ruby. I only have a mind.
The round lamps came on as fragrantly yellow as lemons, hovering among the trees. The hurdy-gurdy attendant, attired like a sixteen-star general, cranked the air full of sweetness. The fountains jetted their eternal orgasms. Suddenly the attendant's identically uniformed triple-secret double marched to the boy and asked to be paid. The boy's heart vomited. He did not pay, because he needed every peso for the Red Song. The man went away whispering: You listened, but you did not pay. You stole the fruit of my mind.
The wet statues in the fountain had become as black as whaleskin. Everyone took ease in the benches that bound the nested circles of cobblestones whose center the fountains owned. Couples promenaded in step. There was still enough light to gleam on the backs of the women's high heels. But now it got dark quite suddenly, like tolling bells.
The boy swallowed and said again: Red Song, please let me take your ruby, your pretty little ruby. .
