In the Alameda his dear friend called helpers: frogmasked, kiln-baked women with spread legs. For him they quickly caught a hundred pesos in crickets. Why sell their songs? This live money was precious, being sought by every soft brown hand heavy with rings. He came back guided by the light of marble on her cheekbones. Hopping onto her sleeping belly, they became obsidian counters carved with hieroglyphs and scowling slant-eyed girls. The Red Song woke smiling. As soon as she'd caressed those smooth black counters of preciousness, she stood up and took his hand.
She took him down the tunnel of fingernails between two churches windowed with dripping eyelashes. Following those ants which resemble triple beads of amber, she led him down blueflower-tiled stairs, down dark stone stairs guarded by moonmaned iron monsters, square-tongued gargoyles, down into the cave-smell beneath the rock-lobed ceiling, and her tongue thrust inside his mouth, dripping with saliva that burned like lemon juice. Then she brought him to the place like the twining roots of shadow on a trumpet's bowl, like the white grooves of dress shirts between black-suited shoulders. — Now give me just ten pesos more, she said in his ear. The hundred you gave me is nothing. Ten pesos, ah, ten little pesos is less than nothing, just a ghost to keep nothing good company.
The night was as dark as a beetle's belly. He held out his hand in the darkness, and the idol put ten pesos in it. So she led him to a deep chamber in the earth, where the idol's skeleton with its jade deathmask lay inside an immense sepulcher of white stones, the corner slab inscribed with designs. Then she let down her hair. — One peso more is all I ask, said the Red Song. A single peso, not even for me. It's only the ten pesos that asks it.
Desperate in the darkness, he snatched the idol's coin back, clenched it between his teeth and bit it until it burst and one more peso spurted out. Then she led him to the chapel of paper animals. He became the paper lion.
When a woman's head rides a man's heaving shoulder, there's a certain dark bird carved in lava that screeches. That sound the idol always hears; there's no escape. The idol flew down between the Red Song's breasts and said to her: He stole everything. Every night now until you die, you'll have to let your hair down beneath the trees.
The boy did not hear. So proudly and joyfully he watched the turquoise earrings still trembling at the edges of her dark face, the pale, downcurving fingernail of light below her eye, the other crescent, very tiny, just under her lower lip. Yawning, he waited for the darkness between her eyelashes to widen. Her ruby glittered on his tongue. Then he swallowed it.
The Red Song pushed him away from between her breasts. (His head was the idol's head.) He stared with sleepy eyes. She said to him: I know I have no mind. I'm nothing but a pair of buttocks. I heard you say that. And you, your mind lies under the night! Where's my ruby?
The boy smiled abashed and said: I threw it in the river.*
You have no mind! she cried. You're only a child who wanted ice cream in the shivering of the bells.
With sunny hair and spider-legs, the idol came to drink down her frothy hair. She did not see, but the boy did. The idol said to him: She claims that you have no mind! She means to eat your mind! You'll be darkness if you stay with her.
The Red Song sobbed out: You have no mind. And you made me bleed for your mind's sake.
Just as the beggar-woman jerks her baby awake upon the rich man's approach, so the idol woke the boy's anger, which was a little idol clutching and scratching at the grilles on the window of his heart, the grilles like square gold claws. So long she'd tormented him! His anger was the matador's silver dagger hidden always behind the red cloth.
You have a mind… he said, trying yet to love her.
Sitting beside him on a monument wall, she drew her knees under her armpits like a grasshopper and said: You have no mind.
His anger lurched the way that when you have a fever the flowers on the curtains crawl nauseatingly. He shouted into her face the Three Holy Names. (Everyone knows them.)
Her lips opened. She saw the paper animals. Her ruby was in the paper lion's mouth. She sat for a moment like a naked statue bronzily balancing on air. Then her dark head fell down upon his snow-white shirt.
