Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

by Budd Schulberg

  Lupita was trying to explain that Señor Cortez was a fine-looking gentleman who had not yet laid a hand on her. But it was difficult to talk back when Pancito was slapping her across the face, pushing her and cuffing her and shouting the most vile insults he could think of, until finally Lupita sank to her knees, her face reddened from blows and shameful language.

  “Please, Papa, if you will only listen a moment! I will tell you everything that happened. I was turning the corner from the school to our street with my arms full of books when hurrying the other way was Señor Cortez and, zas, we bump into each other like two taxicabs and my books go flying into the street and—”

  “The scoundrel,” Pancito shouted. “Seducer. I know that little game.”

  “Papa! Señor Cortez was very polite. Very suave. He apologized and picked up all my books and dusted me off—”

  “Patted your little behind, isn’t that closer to the truth?” Pancito shouted, and raised his cane to strike out sin.

  “Papa—don’t hit me—all he did was walk me home. Then he asked if he could sit down a moment, out of the sun, and then you walked in—”

  “And not a moment too soon!” Pancito shouted. “Everybody knows Hilario Cortez is the cleverest seducer and virgin-grabber in our entire municipio. If I ever catch him here again I’ll—Oh, I mean it. I’ll …”

  To admit the truth, Pancito Perez wasn’t quite sure what he would do to Hilario Cortez. After the spontaneous combustion of his first face-to-face confrontation with this rival baker. Pancito began to consider the reality of this physical complication: Hilario was as tall, lean and broad-chested as Pancito was short and potbellied. A few inches less and Pancito would have been a dwarf; a few inches more and Hilario would be a giant. He was almost six feet tall and known for the feats of strength he liked to demonstrate at fiestas. He could ride a horse like Zapata and, in fact, he somewhat resembled the legendary hero of Morelos, even to the ferocious black bristle of a mustache around his upper lip. Obviously, Pancito could not beat his rival in a contest of physical prowess. He would have to play the fox to the lion. He would have to outwit his enemy Hilario Cortez.

  He went to The Bass Drum of God to think it over, and staggering home from the cantina he was still pondering it when he happened to pass the small, immaculate house of Maestro Martínez, the schoolteacher of Lupita. Under his name was a sign that read: LECCIONES PRIVADAS, private lessons, and beneath that. PUBLIC STENOGRAPHER—LETTERS WRITTEN IN YOUR OWN WORDS. The pay for a public school-teacher was not enough to marry on or raise a family, and many teachers had to use their outside hours to keep a few águilas in their trousers.

  The moment Pancito saw that sign he knew what he should do. He would send Hilario Cortez such a threatening letter that the big, self-important Don Juan of a baker would never dare to come near Pancito’s prize little guava again. In the plaza there were always a few evangelistas—the common nickname for the public letter-writers who dozed all day by their ancient typewriters waiting for an analfebeto, as illiterates were called, to dictate letters of the heart or urgent requests for money. Often when sitting on one of the park benches watching an evangelista at work, Pancito had thought of sending someone a letter. But the plaza was the favorite haunt of the sabelotodos, the know-it-alls who would enjoy seeing Pancito exposed before the town as a self-confessed illiterate. This was particularly embarrassing for Pancito, as he never would admit that he was an analfabeto. Sometimes, when a piece of printed matter was shoved in front of his face at the panadería, he would pretend that he had left his reading glasses at home. Sometimes, having absorbed Lupita’s digest of the local paper for him, he would pick up the sheet, scan it thoughtfully and announce. “Well, I see the municipio is going to fill the potholes on Hidalgo Street. It’s about time …”

  So it was a welcome sight to see the public-stenographer sign on Maestro Martínez’s gate. Pancito could turn in here without anyone knowing his secret. To acquaintances who might see him enter he could swear he had an appointment to discuss the schoolwork of his daughter Lupita.

  Maestro Martínez was still in his twenties, with a slight, wiry build, stooped beyond his years, with rimless eyeglasses that lent a fussy, male old-maid look to a face that otherwise would have seemed attractively vigorous and lean. The house was small but exceptionally clean, the tile floor immaculate—none of the clutter of Mexican lower-class life. With Maestro Martínez, cleanliness and order were signs of modernity and progress. They spoke for a man who scoffed at the miracle of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose goals were pure reason and science, a world swept clean of superstition and blind emotion. A product of the state university, he was the sort of Mexican progressive who advocates such iconoclastic ideas as honest elections and planned parenthood. One whole wall of the front room was lined with books: neighbors gossiped that Maestro Martínez sat up reading books until three or four in the morning. Only on the national holidays, Independence Day, Cinco de Mayo, the Anniversary of the Revolution of 1910, would Maestro Martínez be seen in the cantina, and then he would drink a few beers and explain to willing listeners the historical background of the days they were celebrating in a state of profound inebriation. A thoughtful fellow was Maestro Martínez, with passionate convictions held in dispassionate check. For the maestro’s strongest conviction was in pacific solution to man’s problems. “Man is the most violent of all the animals,” he liked to lecture his classes. “Faced with a problem, man’s first instinct is to attack it violently. A man strikes out by instinct. He must be taught to negotiate. He will never be thoroughly civilized until he learns to operate in the light of reason rather than from the dark caves of emotion where he still lives.”

  Maestro Martínez was buttressing this favorite theory with some pertinent reading from Auguste Comte when Pancito burst in on him. “Good evening, Señor Perez, won’t you sit down?” the young teacher said pleasantly as he rose and bowed. “Here is Maestro Martínez at your service.”

  “I am too goddamn mad to sit down,” Pancito shouted, brandishing his cane and almost losing his balance. “I want to send a letter that will tell a rotten skunk why he should crawl into his hole and die like a dog in the final stages of rabies.”

  “Please. Señor Perez, you are mixing your metaphors, you must compose yourself,” Maestro Martínez said quietly.

  “The devil with my—whatever you call them,” Pancito shouted. “When the honor of my daughter is at stake, I must use words that will chop the snake down like a machete, not tickle him like a feather.”

  “At your service.” Maestro Martínez shrugged as he sat down to his fifty-year-old máquina de escribir that should have been in a typewriter museum.

  “To Señor Hilario Cortez—” Pancito shouted as if he were face to face with the nemesis of Lupita, in fact even a little more aggressively, because he would have been slightly intimidated by the overpowering physical presence of Hilario Cortez.

  “To el estimado Señor,” Maestro Martínez corrected gently, adding the conventional courtesy.

  “To hell with that estimado,” Pancito shouted. “That I should be courteous to the thief of the one jewel in my humble crown? I did not come here to argue with you about courtesy. I came to tell you a letter that will shoot into his heart like a poisoned arrow.”

  “OK—no estimado—proceed,” said the maestro, who was rather proud of his gringo slang. “Shoot.”

  Pancito cleared his throat and launched his dictation: “Listen to me, you mangy son of a homeless bitch, this is Pancito Perez talking—no, change that ‘Pancito’ to ‘Don Alfonso’—If you do not stay away from my Lupita I will shoot you in a place where you will have no further interest in molesting innocent children. This is no idle threat. Poke your lecherous head in my house once more and I will chop it off with my machete and stick it on the gatepost outside my house so all the people in Tepalcingo can see what happens to whoremongering old bats who suck the lifeblood from innocent little girls like my angelic Lupita. You filthy rapis
t, beware!”

  Pancito was so carried away that he seemed on the point of attacking Maestro Martínez with his cane. “Type my name at the bottom, ‘An outraged father bent on vengeance, Don Alfonso Perez,’ and then I will sign it,” he instructed. He had learned to sign his name with a flourish that made forming individual letters unnecessary.

  The fingers of Maestro Martínez worked rapidly to keep pace with Pancito’s rage. His efficient, objective manner gave no hint of his personal reaction to the content of Pancito’s message. When he finished, he read it back to Pancito in a dry, academic tone that lent a curious malice to Pancito’s honest outpouring of parental wrath. Satisfied that he had said what he had come to say, Pancito affixed his furious signature. “Now I will type a clean copy double-spaced,” Maestro Martínez said. “Then you can sign the official one and drop it in the mailbox on your way home. I hope it will bring you the results you desire.”

  Pancito was on his way back to the bakery after lunch next afternoon when he happened to see Hilario Cortez coming toward him. The rival baker looked particularly big that afternoon and Pancito found himself nervously slowing his steps. But Hilario surprised him by calling out, “Good afternoon, my friend, how very nice to see you today,” and passing by with a cordial smile. Pancito resumed his normal pace with growing confidence. Hah, isn’t that typical of bullies, he nodded to himself. You stand up to them and threaten to put them in their place and the wolves turn into frightened sheep.

  But on his way home for lunch the following day, he was quite sure he saw Hilario hurriedly leaving and rushing down the street in the opposite direction. Again he cursed and cuffed Lupita and stormed off to The Bass Drum of God to fuel rather than drown his anger. Then he went again to Maestro Martínez. This time he put it even stronger. He called on the foulest language he could remember. Maestro Martínez abandoned his professional objectivity long enough to question whether such obscenities should be allowed to go through the mail.

  “Put it down, Maestro, word for word. I know what I am doing,” Pancito insisted. “There is only one way to deal with monsters.”

  Maestro Martínez sighed, eloquently, and typed away. Pancito studied the finished product carefully, as if he could read every word of it, and signed it with a furious flourish, the tail of the final “o” on Alfonso surging across the page like the savage thrust of an avenging sword.

  The next time Hilario Cortez spied Pancito, he not only waved to him but made a point of crossing the street to intercept him. Still apprehensive, Pancito took a tighter grip on his cane, but Hilario could not have been friendlier. “I just received your second letter,” he began, “and I want to tell you how much I appreciate it. I must confess that I have had an almost uncontrollable desire to possess Lupita. But your letters have moved me to reconsider. You are clearly a man of the most unusual intelligence and tact.”

  Pancito simply did not know what to say. He stared at Hilario in stunned amazement. Finally he summoned up all the dignity he could find for the occasion, muttered a “Thank you, sir, and good afternoon,” and walked on. He walked straight to The Bass Drum of God to celebrate his victory. On his third mescal he began to feel he had not gone far enough. Obviously, he had his old enemy on the run. But Hilario Cortez was a shrewd one. He was muy listo. Now he was trying to get around Pancito with flattery and honeyed words. But Pancito Perez would show him who was boss. He had a fourth mescal and was ready to face the formidable typewriter of Maestro Martínez.

  “Rapist Hilario, you depraved son of a rutting she-goat,” he began his mescalated dictation.

  “Señor Perez, are you sure you are in a condition to write another letter tonight?”

  “Stop interrupting how my mind is thinking,” shouted the inspired Pancito. “Put it down. Every word. Just as I say it—You don’t fool me with your lying mouth, you whoring son of a two-peso puta—”

  “Señor Perez!”

  “Every word,” Pancito shouted, waving his cane like General Santa Anna leading his troops on the Alamo.

  Maestro Martínez gave another philosophical shrug and went on typing. When it was ready, Pancito looked it over with exhausted satisfaction and signed it with another angry scrawl. “That will keep the depraved beast from turning this whole town into a red-light district,” Pancito said, handing Maestro Martínez a soiled, hard-earned ten-peso bill.

  “Thank you, Don Pancito. I hope my poor efforts to reflect your true feelings will bring the moral solution you desire,” said the schoolteacher with the Oriental humbleness that is also in the Mexican.

  Results were soon in coming, and they could not have surprised Pancito more if the Virgin of Guadalupe had swooped down and personally invited him to dance a paso doble.

  Two days later Pancito was just locking up his shop when he saw Hilario coming toward him. Pancito’s first impulse was to duck back into his shop, lock the door and sneak out the back way. For in the sober headache of morning, Pancito knew that even for him he had gone a little too far. Such words as he had spewed in rage and frustration and anti-Goliathism invited the challenge of violence, of pistol fire and the metallic clashing of machetes. But it was too late for Pancito to escape. The long, well-shaped legs of Hilario quickened their pace and the rival was upon him.

  “Pancito—wait—I must speak to you.”

  In fear Pancito waited. Hilario came to him with a great smile of affection such as Pancito had never seen before. “Pancito, my dear fellow, I must speak to you. Your last letter convinces me beyond any doubt. You are surely the wisest man in Tepalcingo. Won’t you join me for a copita at The Three Kings?”

  Pancito hesitated, but the seeming sincerity of Hilario’s invitation was beguiling. A little wary, Pancito accompanied the towering Hilario to the most respectable sidewalk café on the plaza. There Hilario ordered not tequila or mescal but whiskey escocés, to express the solemnity and high quality of the occasion.

  “To our friendship, begun in strife, may it mature and ripen into prosperous brotherhood.” Hilario toasted.

  Pancito merely touched glasses with a half-swallowed “Salud.” He was confused to the point of stupidity. What was Hilario’s game? Was he simply fattening Pancito up for the kill? One night he had seen this happen in The Bass Drum of God. The editor of the local paper was invited to sit down and have a drink with a local politico who thought the journalist had insulted him in print. They had three ostensibly friendly drinks together when suddenly the politico went berserk, grabbed the journalist with a terrible oath and started pounding his head against the wall with one hand while he slapped him viciously with the other until blood began to spurt from his victim’s face. It had been an ugly and frightening spectacle, at the same time muy mexicano, and Pancito feared that any moment he might suffer the same shift in emotional weather.

  But if Hilario felt any resentment at Pancito’s latest effort at literary violence, he concealed it convincingly. In fact, he startled the anxious Pancito by saying, “Don Alfonso, I am a man who likes to come right to the point. I must confess I am charmed by your letters. They are little masterpieces.”

  “I—try to write as I talk—say what I think,” Pancito muttered.

  “Then let me say I like the way you think. You are obviously much more a man of the world than, no offense intended, you would seem to be at first appearance. Your letters have convinced me that you are Señor Discretion Himself.”

  “A thousand thank-yous,” Pancito said, taking heart and signaling to the waiter for another round. “Now it is my turn to buy you a drink. You see, I had thought you might be offended—”

  “Offended! My good fellow, my good friend, I should call you. I was flattered. I’m not sure I didn’t go back for a final visit with Lupita just so I could receive another of your extraordinary letters. Look”—Hilario patted the inside pocket of his jacket—“I keep them right here. Once in a while I take them out and reread them, as I would a poem by Octavio Paz.”

  Pancito paid for the new round of w
hiskies escocés, a new alcoholic experience which he found not at all to his taste, thought of all the insulting names with which he had assaulted Hilario and wondered if his “new friend” had gone mad. Well, maybe the man thrived on insults. Pancito had heard about those types—were they not called masoquistas?

  “But now to the point, as two practical men of commerce.” Hilario snapped Pancito back to attention. “I have a business proposition to make to you.”

  Pancito sipped his Scotch with a clumsy effort of poise to cover his confusion.

  “You have a small bakery, I have a somewhat larger one, and they are on the same street, only a block and a half apart,” Hilario Cortez began. “So every day I take a good deal of business away from you, but you also take a little business away from me. I am a baker and you are a baker, but frankly, I am a man of ambition, a little too restless, a little too modern to spend all my life peering into an oven or measuring out panes dulces for pimply adolescents. In other words, I do not have the temperament to spend the next twenty-five years—or fifty, if I live as long as my father—in a hot kitchen or behind a counter.”

  Hilario raised his glass and touched it to Pancito’s with an appreciative smile. “Health—and money, lots of money, to the two of us.”

  “To the two of us,” Pancito mumbled, a little high on the foreign whisky and the heady talk.

  “So I began to speculate,” Hilario went on. “The more I thought about your letters, the more strongly I asked myself, perhaps the man who is the soul of discretion, of understanding, and with such intellectual control of his capacities, and at the same time an excellent baker with a lifetime of experience, who knows how to make a pan dulce that melts in the mouth and to write a letter as sweet to the mind, is he not the perfect partner I have been looking for?”