The Bell Tolls for No One. Charles Bukowski

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       Dancing Nina

      Nina was what you might call a flirt, a vamp. Her hair was long, her eyes strange and cruel, but she knew how to kiss and dance. And when she kissed and danced, she had a way of offering herself to every man that few women had. That made up for a lot of deficiencies and Nina had a hell of a lot of deficiencies.

      But Nina was what she was.

      She was a tease. She’d almost rather tease than do the actual thing. What Nina lacked was the ability to choose—she simply couldn’t tell a good man from a bad one. The American female, in general, has this same frailty. Nina simply had an overdose.

      I met her through a circumstance in Los Angeles that I will not bore you with.

      She was hot and she was laughter and she made good love on the bed. Neither of us wanted marriage (she was married before) and I thought, at first, I have finally met my miracle woman.

      I noticed her absentness of mind, her repeating of phrases, her telling the same stories again and again. Most of her speech and ideas were borrowed, heard from other minds. But she had this certain invisible flair which I didn’t recognize then as the ability to tease.

      I thought she simply loved me.

      But at the first party I took her to, I looked up and thought, great god, what have I got hold of here? She didn’t simply dance, she actually copulated in front of everybody. It was her right, of course, to copulate in front of everybody. Of course, she didn’t copulate, it only appeared that she did.

      Nina was the hit of the party. Nina was the hit of all the parties.

      She was the Eternal Whore come to tease the Genes. We had arguments over her dancing because I still loved part of her.

      “I’m too smart for them,” she said. “When the party’s over and I’ve turned the male on, I’ll slip out the back door and vanish.”

      “But that’s a lie, you see. You offer yourself to men and then you run away. That’s a lie. You’re trying to get even with something.”

      “Listen,” she said, “you’ve got this fuck-chain on your leg. I don’t. I float free. When I’m dancing, I don’t even think of you. I think of the music and I think of his dancing, whoever I’m dancing with. I float free—I am a great white bird in the sky.”

      “O.K., fine.”

      “You’ve said before that when I dance, I betray you. How can I betray you?”

      “You know how,” I replied. “Dancing can be more sexual than copulation. There’s more movement and people watching. There are the eyes, the getting closer and closer. I know you, bitch. You’re no great white bird—you’re the Whore of the Centuries . . . ”

      “You’re a son of a bitch, Charlie. You just don’t understand.”

      I don’t know why I hung on.

      Maybe I just wanted to hear a story, maybe I just wanted to write a story. I suppose the tragedy of her dancing was that she thought she was a great dancer. I had seen great dancing—things that people practiced months, years, lifetimes to bring out.

      Nina just brought sex right on out, she did that well, but it was hardly great dancing.

      I once saw a white woman in a Turkish café one night. It was one of those places where you ate downstairs, then went upstairs to drink. The dark girls were doing their natural quiet movements alone, and then the American woman, a nicely-shaped blonde got up and did her thing. She did it well but it was ugly because it was so obvious. They asked the woman and her escort to leave and the white American woman screamed obscenities at us—all the way down the stairway. What she never realized was the difference between art and artlessness. Then I turned my eyes upon the dancing dark girls who flowed like rivers of realness to the sea . . .

      Besides the parties, I got other bits of information from Nina, mostly upon the love bed, before or after. One might call them confessions or perhaps, in her case, exhilarations.

      “Yeah. Well, there was this clothing store. I went in to get my husband something. There was this guy there. He was very sarcastic to me. Oh, I always go for these sarcastic guys . . . ”

      She looked at me but I avoided her cruel eyes.

      “He took me behind a curtain and kissed me. There was a little room in the back. He walked behind me and had his cock out and there were some guys there and everybody laughed. I came back later and I told him, ’You’re just a queer, aren’t you? You’re just a queer!’ ”

      “Was he?” I asked.

      “I think so.”

      “O.K. . . .”

      “You know,” she continued, “I didn’t cheat on my husband much. Just maybe once or twice. This one guy, well, I told my husband I had taken his cock out and kissed it but I hadn’t screwed him though.” More stories: she’d placed an ad in an underground newspaper and gotten 50 answers. One guy left his phone number so Nina called him. She met the young, thin guy in a coffee shop. Then he asked her to drive him down to the park because he’d left his car at the park. “I drove him down,” Nina told me, “but I should have known better. He got me real hot, he knew he had me hot, and he had this huge curving cock like a scythe. I never saw anything so big. But he wouldn’t tell me his name. I didn’t want to get pregnant so I said no. He got angry and said, ‘I’d rather screw a guy—at least they don’t bother me with all this shit!’ ”

      “And you let him go?”

      “Yes, and you should have seen it—Huge, curving, like a scythe!”

      I don’t know. There were many battles and many turnings between us. I made a living as a writer which meant I didn’t have much money but much time. Time to think—time to love. I suppose that I was in love with Nina. Even though I was 20 years older than her.

      One weekend I drove her all the way to Arizona where she put on a special three-hour dance show in a ranch-house with a homosexual. She wore a pair of red pajamas with strands that flopped open to show her belly and bellybutton.

      I drank most of the night in СКАЧАТЬ