louder voice this time and still drilling her eyes into Mac’s, she said, “¡Mírala! Granny, you speet when you talk como una perra sata rabiosa con la boca llena de espuma,* and it’s getting all over tu pendejocito allí.* ¡Tremenda pareja que hacen, pendeja!”* Now she was as angry as Mac and beginning to show it.
Mac didn’t know a word of Spanish, but even the English part coming out of the rude bitch’s sardonic face was utterly insulting.
“DON’T YOU DARE TALK TO ME LIKE THAT! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? A NASTY LITTLE MONKEY IS WHAT YOU ARE!”
The rude bitch snapped back, “NO ME JODAS MAS CON TUS GRITICOS! VETE A LA MIERDA, PUTA!”*
The raised voices of the two women, the insults whizzing like bullets past Ed’s pale, blanched face from both directions, petrify him. The furious Latina looks past him as if he’s nothing but thin air, a nullity. This humiliates him. Obviously he should rouse his manhood and put an end to the whole confrontation. But he doesn’t dare say, “Both of you! Stop!” He doesn’t dare indicate to Mac that she is in any way in the wrong, behaving like this. He knows that all too well. She would cut him to ribbons for the rest of the night, including right in front of their friends, whom they are about to join inside, and, as usual, he wouldn’t know what to say. He’d just take it like a man, so to speak. Nor does he dare remonstrate with the Latin woman. How would that look? The editor of the Miami Herald dressing down, thereby insulting, some fashionable Cuban señora! That’s half the Spanish he can utter, “señora.” The other half is “Sí, cómo no?” Besides, Latins are quick-tempered, especially Cubans, if she’s Cuban. And what Latin woman in Miami could be this obviously rich other than a Cuban? For all he knows, she is about to meet some hotheaded husband or boyfriend in the restaurant, the sort who would demand satisfaction and thereby humiliate him even more. His thoughts whirl and whirl. The bullets continue to whiz back and forth. His mouth and throat are dry as chalk. Why can’t they just stop!
Stop? Ha! Mac starts screaming, “SPEAK ENGLISH, YOU PATHETIC IDIOT! YOU’RE IN AMERICA NOW! SPEAK ENGLISH!”
For a second the rude bitch seems to understand and goes silent. Then, she reverts to her calm, haughty self and with a mocking smile says rather softly, “No, mía malhablada puta gorda,* we een Mee-ah-mee now! You een Mee-ah-mee now!”
Mac is stunned. For a few seconds she’s unable to speak. Finally she manages to come up with a single strangled hiss: “Rude bitch!”—whereupon she gunned the Green Elf and got out of there with such a lurch, the Elf squealed.
Mac’s lips were compressed to the point where the flesh above and below them ballooned out. She was shaking her head… not in anger, it seemed to Ed, but something far worse: humiliation. She wouldn’t even look at him. Her thoughts were sealed in a capsule of what had just happened. ::::::You win, rude bitch.::::::
Balzac’s was packed. The babble of the place had already risen to the maximum we’re-out-at-a-smart-restaurant-and-isn’t-it-great level… but Mac insisted on recounting the whole thing loudly, loud enough for all six of their friends to hear it, she was so enraged… Christian Cox, Marietta Stillman… Christian’s live-in girlfriend, Jill-love-Christian… Marietta’s husband, Thatcher… Chauncey and Isabel Johnson… six Anglos, real Anglos like themselves, American Protestant Anglos—but Please, God! Ed’s eyes were darting frantically this way and that. Those could be Cubans there at the next table. God knows they’ve got the money! Oh, yes! There! And the waiters? Look like Latinos, too… bound to be Latinos… He’s not listening to Mac’s rant any longer. A phrase pops into his head from out of nowhere. “Everybody… all of them… it’s back to blood! Religion is dying… but everybody still has to believe in something. It would be intolerable—you couldn’t stand it—to finally have to say to yourself, ‘Why keep pretending? I’m nothing but a random atom inside a supercollider known as the universe.’ But believing in by definition means blindly, irrationally, doesn’t it. So, my people, that leaves only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies, to unite us. ‘La Raza!’ as the Puerto Ricans cry out. ‘The Race!’ cries the whole world. All people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds—Back to blood!” All people, everywhere, you have no choice