She jerked her hand away and her face lost colour.

‘I’m not a Mexican!’ she said. ‘I’m an American.’

I shook my head.

‘No,’ I said. ‘To me you’ll always be a sweet little peon. A flower girl from old Mexico.’

‘You dago sonofabitch!’ she said.

It blinded me, but I went on smiling. She stomped away, the shoes hurting her, restraining her angry legs. I was sick inside, and my smile felt as though tacks held it there. She was at a table near the musicians, wiping it off, her arm churning furiously, her face like a dark flame. When she looked at me the hatred out of her eyes bolted across the room. Hackmuth’s letter no longer interested me. I stuffed it into my pocket and sat with my head down. It was an old feeling, and I traced it back and remembered that it was a feeling I had the first time I sat in the place. She disappeared behind the partition. When she returned she moved gracefully, her feet quick and sure. She had taken off the white shoes and put on the old huaraches.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s my fault, Camilla.’

‘I didn’t mean what I said.’

‘You were alright. It was my fault.’

I looked down at her feet.

‘Those white shoes were beautiful. You have such lovely legs and they fitted so perfectly.’

She put her fingers through my hair, and the warmth of her pleasure poured through them, and through me, and my throat was hot, and a deep happiness seeped through my flesh. She went behind the partition and emerged wearing the white shoes. The little muscles in her jaws contracted as she walked, but she smiled bravely. I watched her at work, and the sight of her lifted me, a buoyancy like oil upon water. After a while she asked me if I had a car. I told her I didn’t. She said she had one, it was in the parking lot next door, and she described her car, and we arranged to meet in the parking lot and then drive out to the beach. As I got up to leave the tall bartender with the white face looked at me with what seemed the faintest trace of a leer. I walked out, ignoring it.

Her car was a 1929 Ford roadster with horsehair bursting from upholstery, battered fenders and no top. I sat in it and fooled with the gadgets. I looked at the owner’s certificate. It was made out to Camilla Lombard, not Camilla Lopez.

She was with somebody when she entered the lot, but I couldn’t see who it was because it was so dark, no moonlight and a thin web of fog. Then they came closer, and it was the tall bartender. She introduced him, his name was Sammy, and he was quiet and not interested. We drove him home, down Spring Street to First and over the railroad tracks to a black neighbourhood that picked up the sounds of the rattling Ford and threw the echoes over an area of dirty frame houses and tired picket fences. He got out at a place where a dying pepper tree had spilled its brown leaves over the ground, and when he walked to the porch you could hear his feet wading through the hissing dead leaves.