Lunar Follies

SEA OF MOISTURE

1. We see Private First Class Earl Fruchter in the shower room of a Mexican whorehouse, the realms of gold, if you please, with Nora, Elvira, Isabel, and Margot. All are naked, all are wet, all are glowing in the steam, all are laughing.

2. Just down the hall in this establishment, Ofelia’s, in the large “salon,” that contains the bar and dance floor, Private First Class Sklar rests his elbows on a table, while the sixteen-year-old Purita, her skin a creamy tan, bends her sizzling glance, in wild surmise, upon him — and what enamored bride in the drowsy numbness of a honeymoon morning, ever looked so lovingly upon her exhausted groom?

3. Yet Sklar, along with Sergeant First Class Eddie Trainor, a medical-aid man late of the badly mauled 24th Infantry Division, faces all aflame, are being sexually fondled by the forever panting Lola, of El Paso and Piedras Negras, she of the pastel chiffon cocktail dresses, matching heels, and faint acne scars. Sklar and Trainor groan as Señorita Lola leaves off her expert manual attentions, since she, as Corporal Whitehouse once put it, “ceases upon the midnight.”

4. Color photographs, in a snappy collage, reveal a passel of exuberantly drunken soldiers, in khakis and the flowered garments known as “AWOL shirts,” madly dancing with their chosen whores, and the noise made by these revelers can easily be imagined; at a table in the crepuscular rear of the room depicted, and barely discernible

5. in these images that pretend to offer us the truth about the febrile disturbance of young libidos, is Paulina, who may be remembered by some as the Indian girl partial to ice blue underwear, which sets off her silken-gold thighs to perfection, and which makes her a local bright star, christened, by Sergeant Beldino, Señorita Lingerie.

6. What wild ecstasy for Private Archie Griffith to pretend that Paula is his fiancée, his as-yet-unravished bride, his Judy or Barb, this tall, dark girl,

7. who will not remove her brassiere and thus grant Private Griffith the sight of his fair Joan’s ripening breast; and so, in leaden-eyed misery, he pays Paula an extra dollar if she will leave her stockings on, so as to assure himself of her profession; for what fair wife in Private Griffith’s native town of Belleville, Illinois, would go to amorous bed so flagrantly deshabille?

8. Rills of crimson wine and spiced cold mushrooms have no place amid the raucous, sweaty, fevered lusts and drunken laughter of Ofelia’s; nor of the 1-2-3 Club, the Palma de Oro, Señora Amor’s, and the Cadillac, but are substituted for by icy Carta Blanca cerveza and bowls of salty green olives.

9. This dark photograph — there is no light to speak of — shows Celia, Visitación, Teresa, and Clarita smiling in the darkness, their teeth gleaming whitely, their naked bodies in sweet repose, the dull opiate of a night’s sweated wages protecting them from starvation, illness, brutality, the clap, and even poisoned wine, for yet another day.

10. Some soldier, passed out on the floor of the Club Mosaic, the last oozings of his last bout of mescal nausea pooled by his all-American chin, dreams of

11. flies on summer eves, of downy owls, and of the face of the carelessly beautiful whore, Julia Emilia Suarez. He sighs. He will marry the fucking lovely bitch, for he loves her, and she be fair; more happy love (and she be fair!).

12. We come to understand these things, for Jenny Shuttle worth-Robson, an assistant professor of cultural studies at Johns Hopkins, has explained the gestures and signs and obscured metonymies of the photographs and cinematic “stills” in this “BORDERTOWN” exhibition, in her introductory essay to its sumptuous catalogue. Professor Shuttle worth-Robson is a recognized expert in the everyday lives of what she has termed “brothel-entertainment workers, “but what the whores themselves call schifuzza, or, more informally, schijuzz’ or schi’. Nobody has determined how the Italian word has come to be used the world over.

BORDERTOWN: Loves and Lives in Mexico: To December 31st.