Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,22
upstairs. Of course, I get a percentage of everything you earn.”
Gabriela gasped when she realized what he was talking about: prostitution. That was out of the question. She was determined to stay a virgin until she met someone she loved, and Gabriela was in no hurry to get married. She’d seen how marrying at seventeen had shattered her mother’s dream of becoming a ballerina, and it was not going to happen to her.
“Look, you don’t have to sleep with the men you give private dances to,” Miguel said. “Just sit on their laps with your bra off and tease them—rub your body against them, breathe in their ear—and they’ll pay you.” He looked at her closely. “You could probably charge a hundred pesos a song. The rich businessmen who come here like a young, innocent-looking girl like you. You’re who they dream of when they’re in bed with their wives.”
A hundred pesos a song? That was tempting, but the thought of sitting on strange men’s laps and rubbing her naked breasts against them repulsed her.
“I just want to be in the show,” she said.
Miguel shrugged. “We’re short a girl, so you can go on in the chorus tomorrow tonight. It’ll be two hours of rehearsal a day and one show a night.”
That sounded heavenly to Gabriela. La Europa was a far cry from the magnificent clubs like the Tropicana or the Sans Souci, but she was immensely grateful to have any job as a dancer. As she walked out of the dingy club into the sunlight, she felt that the long, dark night of her soul that had begun eight years ago was finally beginning to lift.
On the way back to her apartment, Gabriela couldn’t help thinking about how long and dark that ordeal had been. It had started when she was a nine-year-old girl riding a bus to the Home for Children Without Parents and Family, as the Americans called it. The bus was filled with other United Fruit Company workers’ children who had been orphaned by the sugar cane fire that destroyed hundreds of acres of the plantation. Before that, Gabriela’s childhood had been a happy one. Her father had a good job as a stoker for the company railway line, and her mother, who could not have more children after Gabriela was born, brought in extra money teaching dance at a school.
The rumor was that someone had deliberately burned the cane to protest how the workers were being exploited, even if innocent lives had to be lost putting out the fire. No matter who had caused it, the fire had left Gabriela feeling like an only child in the most desolate sense of the word. She had no idea of her ancestry—all of her relatives had died or moved far away long ago. And now her parents were gone. Most of her possessions were gone too, but not the half of a silver locket that her mother had given her as she lay dying from her burns. Gabriela had no idea what had happened to the other half, but she loved the remaining piece with all her heart. She wore it on a chain around her neck and swore that she would never take it off.
Gabriela felt a pang of that old desolation as she recalled how day after day of her years in the orphanage had dragged by in the same bleak routine of classroom lessons, household chores, and cafeteria meals. She didn’t know how she would have survived if Sister Evelina hadn’t found Gabriela holed up in the kitchen one night, dancing around in the darkened room while she listened to a classical musical station on the Haitian cook’s radio. After that, whenever she could steal time from running the orphanage, the kindly nun had sat down at the rickety piano and played melodies from the classics while Gabriela danced to her heart’s content.
At seventeen, Gabriela had left the orphanage and struck out on her own. Her plan was to enroll in ballet school after making enough money as a showgirl at the Tropicana, the Sans Souci, or some other elegant place known for putting on fabulous nightclub extravaganzas. But after a long string of humiliating auditions, Gabriela was at her wit’s end. She was almost out of money. She didn’t want to become a maid or a dishwasher—she’d had enough of those chores to last a lifetime—or worse, a waif on the street. And God help her, she would rather jump off her balcony