Bernstein in Mexico

Each morning before leaving for her Spanish class, Norma Bernstein checked the house for spiders, scorpions, lizards and other vermin. She would shake out the sheets, blankets and pillows, inspect the kitchen cupboards and the space beneath the sink and poke a stick into the cracks in the slate flooring.

Bernstein, robed in plaid Viyella, puffing his morning pipe, steaming coffee cup in hand, would smile at her search for noxious pests and say, "No tarantulas, Normie. It's six thousand feet in Tequitlán. No rats, no mice, no scorpions. It's cleaner here than in New Rochelle."

"You can't be too careful," his wife would say.

As Norma gathered up her books--the Academia Tequitlán offered three hours of Spanish every weekday--Bernstein would stroke her adorable girdled behind, kiss her neck and accompany her to the door of their pink-stucco house.

Bernstein would watch her rounded tennis-player's figure vanish down the cobbled street. After briefly admiring the golden sunlight on the white, pink and pale-blue houses, he would return for a second cup of potent coffee. Finally, he would retire to his study on the second floor for several hours of writing.

An assistant professor of sociology at a community college, Bernstein, at 42, had decided he needed surcease from textbook jargon, faculty teas and dull-eyed students. The author of two successful books of popular sociology (The Naked Barrio: Puerto Rican Patterns in a Changing Society and Main Men and Mother-Lovers), Bernstein felt the urge to expand his talents, to come to grips with the "real world," to write a novel. Something earthy, close to the basics of the human condition. New Rochelle and teaching palled; Mexico beckoned. His work in the New York barrio had endowed him with good Spanish. He liked Latins. He drew strength from the sun.

Bernstein inserted a fresh sheet of paper into his Olivetti. As he did so, he heard the rooster.

"Noisy bastard," he said. Smiling, he puffed a cloud of Mixture 77 smoke into the airy hallway he used as a study.

Bernstein wrote:

The village lies north and west of the swarming city. Stands of giant prickly pear, columns of gray-green organ-pipe cactus border the dirt road that wends its way to Tequitlán. The sand of the desert plateau is packed hard--fulvous, arid, a slag heap left by mysterious old gods, an ancient race that eons ago stoked fires, melted metals, burned forests.

Again the rooster shivered the morning silence.

Cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu....

A city boy, Bernstein had spent vacations in the Catskills. He had heard roosters crow. But this one was louder, wilder and more violent than any he had ever heard. Moreover, the cock sounded agonized--as if it were resisting strangulation. The last penetrating note of the bird's cry had a peculiar bent or cracked quality. The abrasive noise tended to linger in Bernstein's ears like a clot of impacted wax.

"Shut up," Bernstein said goodnaturedly. He tore up the paper and rose from the maduro writing table. His slowness in starting on his novel did not bother him. A patient, meticulous man, Bernstein knew that sooner or later the juices would flow. He walked from the study to the rear balcony and looked into the landlady's garden. Señora Ortega grew flaming poinsettias, salvias in primary colors, multibranched cacti.

"Mexico, I dig you," Bernstein said joyfully.

Cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu....

He pointed the stem of his pipe west toward the double spires of the parish church, a minor masterpiece of Churrigueresque architecture. The rooster appeared to reside somewhere in that direction. Bernstein had been warned about Mexico's hill towns by knowledgeable faculty colleagues like Shapiro, who had motored around Mexico two years ago.

"Savage place," Shapiro had intoned, as Norma's round features paled. "Just a veneer of civilization, you realize. Boil your water. Don't eat fresh vegetables. They've still got bandits in the boondocks. If you see a row of stones on the road, turn around. It's a barricade and they're after anything they can steal."

"Nonsense," Bernstein had responded. "I've read the guidebooks and they don't say a word about anything like that."

"Of course not," Shapiro had gone on smugly. "And there's always dysentery, typhus and cholera."

"I don't believe it," Bernstein had replied. "I get the GI shits from the lousy food in the faculty club. How much worse can Mexican food be?"

Shapiro had rolled his popping eyes. "You'll find out. Anyway, with the Mexican vote against Israel, why give them money? Shirl and I are sworn off for the duration. We're taking our sabbatical in Denmark."

Bernstein knocked the dottle from his pipe and watched the bits of tobacco float into the cactus below. Then he crossed from the study--with a guilty glance at his typewriter--to the front balcony. From this vantage point, he had a view of the charming street, the wrought-iron lanterns, the pocket-sized park in which black-eyed children played. Mestizo girls jumped rope. Their brown-skinned brothers kicked a soccer ball.

Down the street came two barefoot men leading four burros laden with firewood. A week ago, Bernstein had bought a load for 20 pesos--$1.60. On cool nights, the wood crackled in the fireplace. Often he and Norma cuddled on the sagging sofa in the living room and made gentle love, the two of them illumined by firelight, snug under an electric blanket.

"Shapiro," Bernstein announced to the street, to the crystalline blue sky, to the pastel facades, "Shapiro, you are a good physicist, but you don't know doodly about Mexico. You wouldn't know paradise if you got there on a pass."

It was easy to take. Almost too easy. Eternal sunlight. Dry, clean air. Neat, attractive houses. Little shops that sold leather goods, tinware and woven objects. And, while not effusive, the Tequitlános were polite, soft-voiced and self-effacing. The 100 Americans who had settled there blended into the village. One saw the gringos in the jardin (the main plaza facing the church) shopping in the open market, driving VWs and Toyotas through the immaculate streets.

Maybe, Bernstein thought, it is too neat, too sunny, too civilized. Maybe some of Shapiro's bandits and dysentery were indicated for him to write more. He laughed, pulled his bathrobe around his soft hairy body and relit the pipe. Yes, his writing might suffer. No novel could come out of such placid, orderly surroundings. Even the food (as cooked by their Indian maid, Elvía) was surprisingly bland. Bernstein longed for burning sensations on his tongue, chili peppers that would curl his lank black hair, red-hots that would translate their fire into iron erections and ten-minute orgasms. But Elvía served them overcooked vegetables, meat broiled to a charred chunk, soggy omelets.

Once more, he sat at the typewriter. Immediately, the rooster razored the stillness with its shrilling. Bernstein looked at his wrist watch. It was almost as if the bird were on a schedule, crowing every five, or seven, or ten minutes.

Cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu....

"Shut up, asshole," Bernstein said. He wondered where the noise was coming from. It was pervasive, encompassing, a voice thrown by an avian ventriloquist. Sometimes it sounded as if the bird were in a yard to the rear. Yet when he had looked out from the front balcony, the crowing had seemed to come from the south.

"I said shut up," Bernstein repeated. The rooster ravaged the air four times in succession.

"Señor? You want something?"

Elvía was standing at the head of the stairs. She moved silently, gliding. She would arrive a half hour after Norma had left for school, clean the kitchen, sweep and mop the downstairs, then come up to make the beds and clean the bathroom.

"No, gracias, Elvía. I was talking to myself. Writers do that."

The maid did not smile. How much does she understand? wondered Bernstein. The girl was 19, the mother of two bastards by different fathers. Illiterate, black-eyed, tiny, she had been hired by Señora Ortega, who knew the girl's aunt.

He could hear Elvía in the bedroom, (continued on page 166)Bernstein(continued from page 138) shuffling about in worn shoes. Bernstein made three more false starts on his writing. He cocooned himself in pipe smoke.

Soon Elvia emerged from the bedroom and, as if providing a leitmotiv to her entrance, the rooster crowed. This time it sounded subdued, discreet.

Bernstein took off his thick eyeglasses and stared pensively at the slender girl. "Elvia," he said. His voice clotted. "Come here."

"Si, señor."

She came to the table and stood as if at attention, mop in hand. Wet streaks formed on the slate floor. Bernstein studied the solemn brown face. She was not a beauty, but her skin was like fine beige leather. The slanted eyes were midnight black, the teeth dazzling white, like an alabaster necklace. She wore a short scarlet dress and purple knee socks. Her gleaming black hair was parted in the middle. A single thick braid, like a mule skinner's whip, depended down her back.

"Elvia...."

"Si, señor? You wish more coffee?"

"I wish...."

Gargling faintly, Bernstein put one hand under the scarlet skirt. She did not move. She remained at semiattention, her tiny brown hands locked on the mop.

"Elvia ... I ... you...."

Bernstein stroked the satiny flesh--outside of thigh, inside. As his shivering hand found her crotch (encased in rough cotton underpants), the rooster let out a blood-jelling shriek of such violence as to rattle the windowpanes.

Cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu....

The writer drew his hand from the wiry hairs, removed it from the red skirt. Throughout, the Indian girl had remained immobile. Her flinty eyes were focused into the garden--unfeeling, nonreactive.

"Elvia ... could you ... inside ...?"

"Señor, I need shoes. I need a hundred pesos for shoes. It is not good that someone who has such poor shoes work for such rich people."

Before she finished talking, Bernstein had peeled a 100-peso note from the roll he carried in his bathrobe pocket. He shoved it into her hand. She smiled. The teeth blinded Bernstein.

When she went downstairs to the kitchen to start the comida, Bernstein locked himself in the bathroom and masturbated furiously into a wad of Kleenex. As he exploded and gouts of milky stuff trickled to his guilty fingers, the rooster screamed.

•

In the evening, after a stroll around the jardin and the streets of little shops, a pause to purchase fresh rolls and ripe melons, the Bernsteins would return to the pink house and light the fire. Then they would read or try to catch a ghostly American radio station for news. Sometimes they played Scrabble or gin rummy.

Bernstein told Norma about the money he had given Elvia for shoes.

Norma shrugged. "It can't do any harm. Eight dollars. We pay her twelve a week, and Señora Ortega says that's too much."

"I thought I'd let you know. They say once you spoil them, there's no end to it. She's OK, but that's the last time she hits me up for money."

Norma touched his hand. "Alvin, I have a confession to make. I gave her a hundred pesos for clothing for her children. I couldn't help it."

Both laughed, then kissed.

"Boy, are we ever a pair of bleeding heart liberals," Bernstein said. Guilt over his wandering right hand, the probing of Elvia's thighs washed away. The maid was part of the scene--sunburned, impoverished, fascinating in her tawny way. He would not touch her again. He would give her no more money. He would treat her with that cruel indifference in which Mexican men excelled.

"The book goes well, Alvin?"

"Badly. It's the only aspect of our life here that I find unrewarding."

"So?" Norma asked. "Maybe you weren't meant to write fiction. Alvin, you wrote two meaningful books on sociology. Maybe that's your bag. Forget the novel. Why not make tapes of village life, that kind of thing?"

"Oscar Lewis did it already. There isn't much new on Mexican villages." Bernstein put a log on the fire, reflecting that his heating bill for the winter would come to $3.20 with his next purchase of wood. In New Rochelle, his tenant would be lucky to get through the winter for less than $200 a month for fuel oil.

"We could go back early," Norma said.

"No, I love it here. Well, I like it." He pushed cinders and ashes under the cracking sticks. "It's too good is the real problem. Too civilized. Clean, orderly, quiet. Those wonderful Indians. The sun. A cloud now and then would be a help. Day after day, bright-blue skies, hot sun, dry air, peace and quiet."

She snuggled close. They wore bulky knitted sweaters against the evening cold, slept in sweat suits and ski caps. "The writing'll come, Alvin. I have faith. What a dope I was, raising that fuss about bandits and scorpions and cholera. It's safer than New Rochelle."

"But not conducive to creative work. Utopia isn't the best climate for art."

Distant crowing filtered through the locked windows. The rooster sounded worn out, wearied by its incessant screaming.

•

In gratitude for the shoes, Elvia invited the Bernsteins to her home, to meet her children and other members of the family.

The house, or complex of houses, was not more than a quarter of a mile from the street on which the Bernsteins lived. But because of the hilly, ridged terrain, it might have been five miles away. Bernstein and his wife trudged up sloping streets, past shuttered windows, alleys strewn with donkey turds, packs of pariah dogs and an occasional beggar, to a high, ruinous wall. Two doorways had been cut into the crumbling facade.

Within, three crude houses surrounded a filthy court in which chickens, pigs, dogs and cats scratched and squabbled. A half-dozen seminaked children played amid the shards and dirt. They were of varying ages and sizes. All had the same black piercing eyes as Elvia.

The maid came out of one of the houses. She smiled, baring the teeth that had so inflamed Bernstein. She wore a pair of gleaming black-leather pumps with brass buckles.

"Not very sensible," Norma said. "She threw the money away. Alvin, wouldn't you think she'd have gotten loafers or work shoes?"

"Be tolerant, Norma. It's one of her few pleasures."

"Several women emerged. Two were sisters, two were cousins, one an aunt. They were all small and brown. Bernstein wondered where the men were. Father? Brothers? Uncles? Were either of the fathers of her children in residence? He did not ask. Elvia was busy showing off her two small sons. They seemed to Bernstein to be sluggish, mild children.

"Will they go to school?" Norma asked in hesitant Spanish.

"If we have the money," Elvia said. "It takes much money."

"Oh, we can help," Bernstein blurted. "I mean later, when they grow up. If it isn't too much."

Norma darted a warning glance at him.

The sons, one two years old and the other three--my God, Bernstein thought, she had the first kid when she was 16!-- (continued on page 221)Bernstein(continued from page 166) began kicking a scuffed soccer ball.

"Nice boys," Bernstein said to Elvia.

"Juan and José," Elvia said.

"Their fathers?" asked Norma.

Two dogs snarled and went for each other's throats in a battle over a bone. Chickens skittered. Dust clogged Bernstein's delicate nostrils. Norma pressed her scarf to her mouth and nose as the dogs rolled and kicked. A girl beat them with a broom and they ran off, yelping.

"Gone," Elvia said.

"Forever?" Bernstein asked. "They live near here?"

"Gone for today," the maid said. "A cockfight. All the men went to León for the riña de gallos."

"Oh, cockfighting. You hear that, Norma?"

A sullen stout woman in a gray rebozo came out of one of the hovels. She folded her arms and studied the Americans with resigned eyes.

"My mother," Elvía said. "Momma, these are the people I work for."

The woman nodded.

Elvía laughed and put a hand to her mouth. "Momma is angry. All the men went to the cockfight and left us. And there is work to do here, so she is angry."

The mother squinted at Bernstein and his wife. It was not quite an unfriendly stare; rather, one of incomprehension. Then she entered the house.

"How old is your mother?" Norma asked.

"Thirty-five."

"Good God," Norma said in English. "She looks fifty-five."

"It's a tough life."

Elvía lifted up the younger boy and showed him to the Bernsteins. He was surprisingly clean. "Juan has no father. He was killed after a cockfight by bad men. Señor, you can be his godfather. It will be a great honor."

"For me or him?"

"For both of you."

"We'd better go," Norma said. "I'm getting depressed." Piglets snuffled at her feet. A dog squatted and dropped loops of yellow turds.

"The children need milk," Elvía said.

Norma gave her 40 pesos.

"Such beauty and such poverty, side by side," Norman said as they left. She was looking at the church towers, the blue sky, the green-and-brown hills.

"A land of extremes," Bernstein said solemnly.

•

The following day, as soon as Norma had left, Elvía arrived, a half hour sooner than usual. She finished her chores in the Kitchen. Bernstein could hear her soft tread as she climbed the stone steps with the bucket and mop.

"Buenos dias, Elvía."

"Buenos dias, señor."

Bernstein turned from the table and shoved back the typewriter. He was off to a good start. He would open his novel at a cockfight. A marvelous bit of symbolism.Macho, savagery, a metaphor for the whole country.

"Coffee,señor?"

"No, Elvía. Come closer. Do you like your shoes? Did you buy milk for the babies?"

"Si, Señor. The shoes are very pretty. The babies have milk."

"Then say thank you to señor." He felt himself a corrupt, scheming knave. Bernstein had always prided himself on his sense of honor, his openness.

"Gracias, señor."

"Closer, Elvía. Put down the mop and the bucket."

She did so. As she approached, Bernstein, already hard, turned in his chair and embraced her hard narrow hips. Then he put his trembling hands under her skirt and pressed his nose against her budlike breasts. His hands found the cotton underpants and peeled them downward, then kneaded the smooth mounds of her ass. He began to groan.

"In the bed, Elvia. Por favor...."

"The señor will return."

"Not for several hours."

"Señora Ortega will hear us. She will be angry."

"She sleeps all morning. Come, little one."

Bernstein fell to his knees. He pulled down his pajama trousers and thrust his rod between her knees. So, he thought, must it have been when Cortes took Maliche, when Pizarro's horny soldiers seized the brown-gold bodies and created a new race.

"This is a sin, señor."

"No, it is beautiful."

He lifted her in his arms. The fallen pajamas impeded his passage. His penis preceded him by several inches, a baton or guidon. On the unmade bed, he entered her. As he did, the rooster screamed.

Cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu....

The sustained, demonic noise had never sounded more enraged to Bernstein, more vindictive. As if the bird were outside the bedroom window, perched on the balcony, observing them.

Pumping, thrusting, Bernstein imagined he was melting, vaporizing, infusing his substance with the brown flesh of the girl. Long before he came, he sensed he was due for the grandest orgasm of his life. And this was old, Bernstein thought, as he banged away, because she did not respond. Elvía lay beneath him inert, black-eyed, mouth slightly parted.

The orgasm began at the nape of his neck and in his Achilles' tendons, then spread like crackling fire along a short-circuited wire. The sizzling flames fused in the small of his back, then roared into his laboring belly and inflamed crotch, and climaxed in an explosion of titanic dimension.

At the moment at which the first spasms began, the rooster renewed its assault on Bernstein's ears. With each contraction of vesicles, vessels, muscles and flesh, the cock crowed, louder and louder, more enraged, until, when Bernstein came, the crowing overwhelmed the bedroom, drowning the gasping man in raucous croaks.

Cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu....

Cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu....

Blear-eyed, soaked in sweat, drained, Bernstein flopped to one side. His flabby chest and paunch rose and fell as he gulped for air. He could see Elvía vaguely, as if under water, retrieving her underpants, padding to the bathroom. Water tinkled. A Gauguin waterfall?

Strange, Bernstein thought, how she accepted me. But did she come? Through-out, she lay beneath him, resilient, smooth, boneless, like one of those inflatable life-size sex-shop dolls, equipped with apertures.

"Coffee, señor?" she asked, as she came out of the bathroom, smoothing her dress.

"Yes, Elvía."

Bernstein dressed. He was energetic, ready to attack the typewriter, spill out words, ideas, concepts, as effusively as the had just spilled his seed.

As he struck the first keys, the rooster croaked. It was not the ear-rending shriek that had accompanied Bernstein's climax but a strangled noise, as if the bird were frustrated.

At night, Bernstein made prolonged love to his wife. They lay in the firelight, and when it was over, they decided that their sojourn in Mexico was a dramatic success. Both felt invigorated, fulfilled, at ease with each other. Norma was ready to augment her three hours of Spanish with afternoon classes in weaving and batik. Bernstein vowed to resume his tennis. Both were optimistic about prospects for his novel.

"Alvin, this place is easy to take," Norma said. "Could you live here all year round?"

"I might be able to. It costs us one third of what it takes to maintain the house in New Rochelle."

"The kids?" The Bernsteins had two sons, one in college, one in high school.

"The boys will manage. They can stay with friends during vacation. Norma, we owe this to ourselves."

But at night, in the frigid air, he could not sleep. The rooster, which up to this point had not commenced its crowing until first light, now appeared to have lost its sense of time. It shrieked all night long.

Once, Bernstein got up to urinate. The flash of light from the bathroom set off an insane crowing that lasted a minute.

"Son of a bitch," Bernstein said.

Norma said she had slept soundly. The long session of sex in the living room had sent her off into deep, dreamless sleep. She had not heard the rooster.

"Guess my ears are supersensitive. I hear it all day. And now all night."

"Maybe they'll eat it for Christmas."

An hour later, Bernstein was in bed with Elvia. She smelled of wood smoke and cooking oil. If anything, his orgasm was more violent this time. Again, when he reached the outer limits of pleasure, that ineffable tingling, tensing and release of muscles, the rooster, in time with Bernstein's exhalations and contractions, crowed across the yards and gardens of Tequitlán.

•

The days now assumed for Bernstein a kind of perfection that he never imagined, in all his boyhood fantasies, could be achieved by mortal man.

Tastes, odors, tactile sensations assumed a richness that hitherto had eluded him. In his plaid Viyella robe, he would grasp Elvia to his fat body as soon as she arrived. For ten or fifteen minutes, they would make love. The thundering climax, always accompanied by the rooster's tortured screaming, would then be followed by a morning of writing, eating, walking, a molding into the rhythms and customs of Tequitlan. Their Spanish improved. They made friends. They bought objects fashioned of tin, brass and copper. Norma registered for a course in batik. Bernstein wrote an article for the American Sociological Journal.

Only the rooster intruded in their Eden. Did Norma hear it? Yes, she said, sometimes. "But, sweetie, after the way you make love to me every night, I go off as if I've been drugged."

It seemed to Bernstein that the rooster had gone insane. It crowed incessantly. "It's like a guy playing a loop on a tape recorder," he complained to Norma. "I swear there's some fiendish peon out there running a Sony. As soon as he sees our light go out, he activates the playback button. That goddamn rooster has no sense of time. It can't tell night from day."

It was no longer a joke. Bernstein, full of vigor and jism during the day, writing, screwing Elvia and his wife, eating, walking, absorbing colors and sensations, could not sleep. Usually, the rooster waited until two in the morning, when Bernstein would begin to doze, and unloose a long, bellicose croak. At other times, it kept up a kind of running commentary for an hour or more--short, peremptory rasping noises.

"I hate to do this, hon," Bernstein told his wife, "but I can't sleep in this room. It's too close to the garden and the bastard is back there somewhere in one of those barnyards."

He moved his bed into a narrow utility room, locked the door, taped the crevices in the windows. Still the noisy crowing seeped through. He jammed cotton into his ears, then swimming plugs, pulled his wool cap over his head. The rooster was not to be denied. Its shrieks found their way through stone walls, windows, curtains, pierced cotton, plugs, cap and left Bernstein glassy-eyed, trembling and lightheaded each morning.

Elvia would arrive. Somehow, he would manage to gather up his failing strength, overcome his exhaustion and guide her to the bed for his morning devotions. Temporarily refreshed--his morning fix--he would try to write for several hours. The rooster seemed to let up a little as he worked. Now and then, the truncated crowing would emanate from some distant yard. By midday, the rooster was content to remind Bernstein every half hour that it was around, resting for a long night of shrieking.

"It's no use," Bernstein whimpered to Norma one evening. They had spent the day looking at houses. They loved Tequitlán. It would be their retirement house. At each house they were shown, Norma would find her husband cocking his ear, squinting at the horizon, surveying the yards and gardens around the property.

"What are you doing, Alvin?" she had asked.

"Fucking roosters. I'll buy a house only if it comes with a guarantee there's no rooster anywhere within hearing distance."

She worried about him. Yet he seemed reasonably happy. He remained agile and energetic in bed. But he could not sleep. He lay awake, waiting for the first cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu of the night. Even during the day, while working, he was dominated by the bird. Deep in concentration, formulating a sentence, he would hear the rooster. Invariably. Bernstein lost his train of thought and had to rip the paper from the typewriter.

One morning, after an especially wild bout with Elvia--he had gotten her to strip to her satiny skin and he had been able to rise again for a second performance--he asked her if she knew who the rooster belonged to. The bird had crowed with frenzied vigor after both of Bernstein's discharges.

"Señor, that is the bird of my uncle Luis."

"Your uncle?"

"Si, señor." She hooked her cotton bra and drew the cotton panties over her narrow hips. "He is the one who has fighting cocks."

"Where? Where is his place?"

"Over here," Elvia said. The scarlet dress slipped over her head. She stood before him with bucket and mop. Her face was an Aztec mask--unsmiling, metallic.

"Near where you live?"

"More or less, señor."

Bernstein's head swiveled. But that was a half mile away. How could the rooster penetrate walls, homes, gardens, hurl its voice halfway across Tequitlán and assault his ears? More and more, it seemed to Bernstein that the rooster was seeking him. Norma claimed she heard the rooster only now and then. Señora Ortega said she knew of no rooster. The neighbors laughed when he mentioned the crowing. Roosters were part of life, they told Bernstein. One ignored them, the way one learned to ignore the buzz of a bee.

That afternoon, Bernstein, sated with the heavy comida, drowsy after a short nap, set out to wander the back streets of Tequitlán. It might have been a town depopulated by atomic radiation. Not a soul was in evidence. The sun splashed on whitewashed walls, cobbled streets, pink fountains and arches.

Bernstein stopped a youth on a bicycle. He was selling day-old copies of the Mexico Daily News. Bernstein bought one and asked him if he knew the house of Luis, who had fighting cocks.

"I will take you there," the boy said.

Bernstein gave him two pesos after the boy led him through a back alley, up a hill, past more shuttered houses, to a long gray façade. It was windowless. A soaring, peeling maduro door stood in the midst of the monolithic wall.

Bernstein peeked through a mail slot and saw a dusty courtyard. Old lumber and chunks of masonry lay about. He rapped at the door.

An old man shuffled toward the door and opened it. Bernstein entered.

"Is this the home of Luis?"

"Sí, señor. He is sleeping."

"Wake him up. Tell him Señor Bernstein is here. The employer of his niece Elvía."

The man shuffled away. I should have known, Bernstein thought. Too early in the afternoon. They'll sleep for hours. He wandered to the rear of the courtyard. Junk abounded--parts of old washing machines, refrigerators, hunks of rotting furniture. Against one wall, he saw the cages. There were a dozen of them, each containing a somnolent chicken. Which one?

Three men came out of the house. They hitched trousers, rubbed their eyes. They did not appear unfriendly. All manifested the same half-smiling politeness characteristic of Tequitlános.

"I am Luis," the shortest and fattest of the men said.

"The uncle of Elvía?"

"Sí, señor."

"You know who I am?" Bernstein asked. A frank smile helped, he thought. With primitives, certain facial gestures conveyed friendliness, acceptance. Smile. Raise eyebrows. Nod.

"Sí, señor. In Señora Ortega's house."

Two cocks came strutting out of the darkened house. They pecked at the dirt, walked in high-stepping fashion. Bernstein had never seen a fighting cock. They did not look especially vicious. They were leaner than the usual barnyard rooster. Their combs had been clipped, as had hackle and rump feathers. They had a denuded, stripped-down look. They seemed to Bernstein vaguely reptilian.

One of Luis' companions picked up a cock. It was a long-necked, leggy creature, covered with sparse feathers. He cradled it in his arms. He stroked it, kissed its back, began to massage its chest. Bernstein found something obscene in the affection lavished on the bird.

"One of your birds keeps me awake," he said.

"Señor?" Luis squinted beneath his straw hat. His unshaven face--rather handsome, a sort of seedy Gilbert Roland--was dull with disbelief.

"One of your cocks crows all night and all day. I hear it all the time. Sometimes in the midst of the night, all day long, while I am working. You see, I am a writer and--"

"Sí. Elvía has told me about you."

"This rooster is driving me loco, Luis. I must ask you to silence it."

Luis blinked a few times. "It is in the nature of fighting cocks to crow. One accepts this. No one in Tequitlán has ever complained about my cocks."

The presence of the men evidently aroused the dozing roosters in the cages. Several stretched, flapped their cropped wings, craned their naked necks and began to make persistent croaking sounds. One raised itself on spindly shanks and emitted a cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu. But it was a muffled noise, not the ear-blasting shriek emitted by Bernstein's bird.

"Like that," he said. "Only much louder. You can ask Elvía. She knows how much noise that bird makes. I cannot sleep or work or think. I am going mad."

Luis' companions bent head to head. The onyx eyes and gap-toothed mouths were leering. Bernstein heard the word chinga or chingado clearly, the universal Mexican expression--fuck, fucker, fucked, fuckee, fucking. A thousand permutations. Paz or Fuentes, or some other Mexican writer, had done an entire chapter on the meanings, nuances and subtleties of chingar.

He heard it again. One of the men whispered behind a callused brown hand. "El escritor chinga la criada." "The writer screws the maid."

"I must buy that rooster," he said. "The one that makes all the noise. I will pay well."

"Señor, I have twelve fighting cocks, all as dear to me as the hair on my wife's head, and elsewhere. I have trained them, fed them meat and eggs, bathed them, massaged them, made them brave, and I do not sell them."

"I will pay more than you ever get for your best fighting cock. I will pay double for that son of a whore of a cock that is driving me insane."

The man holding the bird whispered in Luis' ear. The other man wandered off to the cages, removed two birds and set them down on the patio.

"But which bird is it?" Luis asked gently. "Señor, you say you hear one rooster--"

"I'd know its scream anywhere. A terrible noise. I want it."

"Which one is it?"

Eyes tearing, Bernstein looked about the sun-flooded yard. The demon knew he was there, knew he wanted to kill it. And so it was silent. Bernstein managed a brittle laugh.

"Luis, you must know the one I mean. Find the one that makes the noise, the loudest of your cocks. I will give you two hundred pesos for it."

Again, one of the companions muttered. This time, unmistakably. Bernstein heard the word chinga and the name Elvía. They knew. They all knew. A defiant macho bloomed in Bernstein's sunken chest, stiffened his spine. To hell with them. Let them know. Let them look at a real screwing, fighting gringo. He would handle them the way Sam Houston handled Santa Anna at the battle of San Jacinto.

"Four hundred pesos for the cock."

Luis shook his head. "Señor, if you give me so much money, I will be able to buy ten more fighting cocks. And any one of them might be louder than the one you buy. You will make me rich, give me many cocks and still you will not sleep. Permit me to say it, for I am an ignorant man, but it is all in your mind. The Devil has put the noise of a rooster in your ears. Ignore it. Refuse to hear it. There is no such rooster."

The man who had taken the two birds from the cages was holding them head to head, as if daring them to fight. Egging them on, Bernstein reflected grimly. One of the roosters struggled free and began to peck at the one in the man's arms. Hideous, defeathered, crop-headed monsters. He imagined them with the curved steel gaffs on their legs, gleaming two-inch spurs.

"All right," Bernstein said. "But if I hear that rooster again, I'll come here and kill all of them. You will have many dead birds."

"You would not, señor. That is a terrible crime in Tequitlán. A man's cock' is his life."

Inhaling, his lungs clogging with yellow dust, Bernstein walked to the door. The old man was holding it open. Then he heard the crowing, the loud, abrasive, rising scream. It was like the raspberry bleat or mouth fart unloosed as soon as the teacher turns his back on a class in freshman English.

Bernstein spun about. Beneath Luis' legs, naked neck erect, beady amber eyes staring at him, was a rooster considerably larger than the others. Its comb had been completely cropped. Its wings and body feathers were dirty gray, the breast dirty red. It promenaded on stiff yellow (continued on page 230)Bernstein(continued from page 224) legs, displaying the ugly spurs.

"You," Bernstein said. "You bastard. I heard you." He took a step toward Luis. "Five hundred pesos. That's forty dollars. My last offer."

"I cannot sell Gómez. He is champion of Tequitlán. Next week in León, he will be champion of Mexico."

Gómez arched its obscene neck, raised its beak and shattered the air.

Cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu....

"That's it," Bernstein said. "I have rights, even though I am just a tourist. That bird must be silenced. I will bring the police here."

"The police understand as we do," Luis said gently. "What good is a fighting cock if it cannot crow?"

"Seven hundred pesos."

"No, señor. Impossible."

•

Bernstein lay awake all night. He had jammed cotton into his ears and pulled a woolen cap over his head. He tried to sleep in the living room, then upright in the kitchen. Then behind locked bathroom doors, sprawled in the tub on top of sofa cushions. It was useless. Now that the rooster had seen him, it seemed to have summoned up dreadful new sounds, longer and wilder screams. Bernstein found himself trying to anticipate the demonic shrieks, like a starter in the 100-yard dash trying to outguess the gun. Through it all, Norma slept on her side, snoring, untroubled. And throughout the town, he knew, people slept, undisturbed by the screaming bird.

•

But his passion for Elvia did not diminish. Exhausted, hollow-eyed, sweating, unable to concentrate at the typewriter, he took her to the bed each morning.

They talked little. Their loving assumed a ritual nature. Never did she smile. The teeth gleamed at him. He exploded. And at the, precise second, Gómez shrieked, sustaining a final mad note to match Bernstein's last gasp.

"No goddamn bird can get the best of me," Bernstein whined.

He showered and shaved after Elvìa had cleaned the bathroom--and gotten 50 pesos from him for antibiotics--and sat at the typewriter. As he touched the keys, Gómez crowed.

Bernstein leaped from the table and flew to the balcony. Enraged, he shook his fist in the direction of the yard where the fighting cocks lived. "Bastard! Son of a bitch! Shut your goddamn mouth! I'll slit your throat, you lousy, rotten prick, you filthy cocksucker!"

He cursed on in English, until Señora Ortega, serene and gray in her black dress, emerged from her tiny apartment adjoining the house. "What is wrong, Señor Bernstein?" she asked. "Are you ill?"

"The rooster. I am being driven insane. Don't you hear it, señora? Doesn't it keep you awake?"

"I hear many roosters."

"But this one is very loud. I cannot think or write. My wife and I cannot stay here if this goes on. I tried to buy the rooster from Luis, but he refused. I am suffering. I will have to leave."

"You must not leave."

Bernstein knew it was out of season. Forever suckers, he and Norma were paying about double the rate, having come to Tequitlán ignorant of rentals. "Yes, I will leave tomorrow, unless that bird is silenced."

The old woman's eyes were distorted behind thick lenses. "You cannot leave. Life is too good for you here." She leered. Ah, she knows, Bernstein thought. She knows about Elvia.

"Life is fine, señora, but--"

A series of raucous cu-cu-ru-cuuuuus obliterated his words. As he remained on the balcony, pressing his throbbing skull between his hands, Señora Ortega entered her apartment and emerged again with a cardboard box. She offered it up to Bernstein.

"What is this?" he asked.

"Rat poison."

"I am not a man to use poison."

"Everyone does. Throw it over the wall at Luis' place. Kill the bird if you hate it so much."

Bernstein opened the box. Inside were irregularly shaped clay-colored pellets resembling kibbled dog food. They were odorless and powdery, not at all lethal in appearance.

"Be careful with them. They are as strong as sin. Toss them over the fence and the roosters will be dead."

•

In the evening, Bernstein and his wife tried to make love at the fireplace in their favored manner, the two of them clothed and snug under the blanket. But he failed. Norma began to worry about him. He told her that they could no longer stay in Tequitlán while the rooster robbed his sleep, tortured his working hours.

"Poor Alvin, I don't mean to laugh, but it's comical."

"Theater of the absurd. Oh, you sleep through it, and you don't have to work here during mornings when it's especially wound up. It's sending me to a loony bin. Norma, unless I can stop it, we're leaving."

"But there are roosters all over Mexico."

"We'll go to Guatemala."

He did not tell her of his visit to Luis, his offer to buy Gómez, the poison the landlady had given him.

"It was so good here a few weeks ago," Norma said. "I never saw you so energetic, so happy. Alvin, we didn't make love like that since our honeymoon. Your work started so well. Oh, darling, try to forget that dumb chicken."

Bernstein shivered and drew the electric blanket around his unshaven neck.

At half past two in the morning, Gómez emitted its first shriek. Norma stirred and went back to sleep. Bernstein got out of bed and buttoned his sheeplined coat over his sweat suit. He put on jogging sneakers and a wool knit cap, drew on a pair of woolen gloves. He took the cardboard box containing the poison and sneaked out of the house.

Brilliant moonlight, of a luminosity Bernstein had never seen, painted the streets silver white. One could read a newspaper in the bright light. If Tequitlán was silent by day, at three in the morning it might have been an ancient cemetery. He walked on crepe-soled feet up and down the hills on which the town was built, until he came to the house of the cock trainer.

A moment's analysis was in order. Señora Ortega had bid him toss the pellets over the wall. A problem there. The long gray façade, windowless and quite high, posed a problem. Moreover, the roosters were kept at the rear of the compound. Then Bernstein recalled that some chicken-wire fencing had been used to patch holes in the rear wall. An assault from the rear was indicated.

He tiptoed around the corner and entered an alley, where a pariah dog snarled at him. Then he followed the cobblestone path to an open field behind Luis' house. The moon inundated the scrubby, burned-out earth with an antiseptic glow. Bernstein made his way past the rusting corpses of abandoned automobiles to the wall. Between the field and the wall was a sloping drainage ditch, redolent of raw sewage.

He inhaled nocturnal aromas--laminations of shit, sweet grass, dry earth. Then he clambered down the incline, felt the slime at the bottom of the ditch suck at his ankles. He slipped and fell. He had always been poorly coordinated. The cardboard box dropped from his hands. The crumbly gray pellets scattered about, blending with the muck.

"Oh, my God," Bernstein muttered. How could he ever explain to anyone what he was doing? Luis and his friends would find him wallowing in filth, scratching in the earth for bits of poisonous clay. Impossible. He was a man with a Ph.D. and two published works on social problems. An old street joke skittered through Bernstein's marbled mind. Well-paying job offered: separating fly shit from brown pepper with boxing gloves.

"I'm cursed," Bernstein sobbed. "It's impossible. I can't find the crap." Already the toxic pellets were dissolving in the fetid stream, fortifying the flow of liquid turds "To each his own," Bernstein sniffled.

Gómez crowed furiously; crowed twice again.

"All right, motherfucker," Bernstein said. "You asked for it."

He struggled up the opposite bank, feet sliding, grabbing at roots and rocks, and blundered toward the wire fencing. Inside, the moonlight spread its glow on the dead earth.

His hands tore at the wire. He succeeded in yanking one side loose from the boards. With bleeding palms, he pulled the wire aside and crawled into the patio.

Gómez was waiting for him. The rooster seemed bigger than Bernstein remembered. He was strutting arrogantly, the small head erect, the metallic eyes glinting in the moonlight. Once it flapped its cropped wings, stretched its neck and unloosed a series of choked shrieks, the ugly noises that had ruined Bernstein's hours at the typewriter.

"Got a goddamn repertoire, haven't you?" Bernstein asked. He approached the bird, bent low, hands forward. "Let's hear the real big one. The one you use when I come, you fucking vulture."

Gómez accommodated him. It arched its back, raised wings and unloosed the shrill, reverberating scream that Bernstein had heard the first time he made love to the obsidian-eyed maid.

"Your last croak, buddy," Bernstein gasped.

He lunged at the rooster. Always clumsy, even as a boy, he thought. He tripped on a coil of rusted wire and tumbled to earth, his tortured hands trying to break his fall.

The rooster screamed once more. Raising himself awkwardly on forearms and elbows, Bernstein looked up and was suddenly frozen. He was sure he'd seen a flash of steel in the moonlight where no steel ought to be at that hour. Could they have left the cock armed?

A light was turned on in the compound. Bernstein heard sleepy voices.

"¿Qué pasa?"

"¿Qi, qué tal?"

At that moment, the rooster lofted itself from the ground in a flurry of wings and kicking legs and flew at his head. Bernstein seemed to feel the hooked blade of the gaff dig into his carotid artery. He tried to reach for it, but his arms would not respond.

"Screw it," he said. He wept softly. "You win, you son of a bitch."

As his sight dulled and his senses ebbed, his ears heard a final cu-cu-ru-cuuuuu. It sounded almost tender and wistful, full of grief and compassion.

"As Bernstein's hand found her crotch (encased in cotton underpants), the rooster let out a blood-jelling shriek."

"He would open his novel at a cockfight. A Marvelous bit of Symbolism. A metaphor for the whole country."

"His passion for Elvia did not diminish. Exhausted, hollow-eyed, sweating, he took her to bed each morning."