The girl who was whistling ruffled Ray’s kinky black mat. “Pay me a drink?” she asked.
“Sure; but what will you do for it?” he demanded.
She shrugged. “What is it you want?”
“You might sing what you were whistling. Do you know the words?”
“Putain! C’est ça? Sure I know Carmen. I see it every season. I never miss it. Carmen, Bohème, Mignon … I love them all. But Carmen the most. I saw it three times one season, the artiste who played Carmen was so wonderful.”
“Let’s hear you sing it. I love it, too,” said Ray.
The girl went to the counter, drank an apéritif sec, and began singing:
“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle …”
Her voice was rather hoarse and soiled, incapable of holding a note or ascending very far, but her acting was superb as she sidestepped about the bistro, posing and gesturing with a cigarette between her fingers. It was her manner when she whistled that had piqued Ray to ask her to sing. She was Carmen incarnate in her acting. What a hip-shaker she was!
Comic opera was ever a thing of great joy to Ray. It gave him such a perfect illusion of a crazy, disjointed relationship of all the arts of life. Singing and acting and orchestra and all the garish hues. Fascinating mélange of disorder. No one part ever equal to the other. Like life … like love. All the world on a stage just wrong enough to be right.
Ray recalled the first time he had ascended to the gods to see Geraldine Farrar in Carmen at the Metropolitan in New York. Geraldine certainly did not act that Carmen stuff as brazenly well as this girl. Going down from colored Harlem to the opera then was a stealing away from his high home of heavenly “blues” and ragtime to taste some exotic morsel brought from a faraway other land of music. The pals of his milieu tapped their heads knowingly at his going among the ofay gods to throw away a dollar or two. There were so many charming things at a dollar or so a throw in Harlem. He felt a little lonely going, but was compensated afterward by the blood-tingling realization of how much the composite life of Harlem was like a comic opera. He had traveled far since those days, yet no scene had ever conveyed to him such a sensuous impression of a comic opera as Harlem.
A little lusting for opera in the Ditch was a different thing. It was quite easy to find a companion of a sort in a bistro ready for a trip to the gods of the opera. And Ray never had that feeling, as he had had it in Harlem, of going out of his own warm environment into a marble-cold world of dilettantism.
For a change, a slight operatic tune in the Ditch was not an exotic thing. Such airs flowing through the alleys were as natural as rain water washing down the gutters. It was often a delicious experience for Ray suddenly to hear a girl whistling or singing such a fascinating old favorite as “Connais tu le pays ou fleurit l’oranger …” or “Oui! On m’appelle Mimi …” or a fleeting fragmentary lilt from La Flute Enchantée. It was nonetheless lovely if the melody was broken by a volley of bullets tearing down some dark alley and scaring the Ditch to cover. That enhanced the color of the place as a theater. That endeared the Ditch to him. There was nothing artificial about that. It was as strikingly natural as the high-heeled fancy shoes and the pretty frocks of popeline de soie and crêpe Marocain and all the voluptuous soft feminine stuff parading there in the mud and slime and refuse. The poor overplucked chickens who loved to jazz all night to American ragtime and the music-hall hits of Mistinguett also had an ear for other kinds of music—even as Ray.
“L’amour est enfant de Bohême,
Il n’a jamais connu de loi;
Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime!
Si je t’aime, prends garde a toi!”
The girl flicked her skirt in Ray’s face, and, laughing, ended her song. At that moment Latnah entered the bistro. She had abruptly left Bugsy at the Cairo bar to come to the Ditch. Chère Blanche was familiarly posing against Banjo. Latnah rushed up to her and said in French: “You haven’t done him enough harm when you robbed him and got him in trouble. Now you run after him again. You no good, you damned mean slut. That for you.”
She slapped the girl in her face. The girl screamed and started toward her, but Latnah caught her flimsy frock at the neck and with one fierce jerk, ripped it apart so that it fell at Chère Blanche’s feet. And that was all her clothing. She gathered the pieces about her and fled from the café.
Banjo grabbed Latnah’s wrist. “What in hellfire you come here messing with the gal foh?”
“You fool!” cried Latnah. “Gal no love you. Because you got good clothes now and little money and she thrown out of the maison fermé and got no friend, not even a dirty maquereau wanting her, she running after you again.”
“You lemme manage mah own self and don’t come poking you’ nose in mah business, for I don’t want no black woman come messing me up.”
“I no black woman.”
“You ain’t white.”
“But I no
