I am in San-Antonio since one hour only. I can appreciate finally, a certain peace after this exhausting journey before finding a lodging for the night.
I observe the canals, the faces that encumber the coffee-shops, the lovers on the benches, the passers-by loitering peacefully in this flowery oasis; the canals are spread out and lengthen freely, without any constraint, under the disciplined and encumbered streets of the city. An elegant and very beautiful lady approach and sits down at a table close to mine. I cannot prevent myself from looking lengthily at her, and I tremble in my body, imagining an adventure with her to furnish those few days I have to waste in this city of south Texas.
She throws a glance to me, underlined by a discrete smile. I can hardly interpret this gesture; is it the manifestation of the traditional friendship, without any sexual intentions of the American women, or is it a skilful attempt to seduce me? I return her smile and I dare engage conversation with her, banal remarks on a banal subject not likely to let transpire, the sexual instincts that suddenly haunted me.
We share, from now on, the same table. I could sense some certain euphoria, achieving partly, my lubricious intentions. The minutes that follow are extremely pleasant but always stamped by an emotional neutrality, I perceive in her, nothing more that could make me hope for no more than a friendly meeting. I learned that she had been married and divorced, and she awaits her daughter whom, she must bring back home on her suburban house, like she does every evening after work. This table is their usual place of meeting. Thus, I am fixed; I am only an inoffensive pastime, a cocktail snack to accompany her, while she ingests successive
coffees of a such insipid taste; I help her furnish these too lengthy minutes waiting for her daughter. After a long moment of conversation on many anodyne subjects she says to me:
- "My daughter is finally here."
I see somebody approaching from far, or would it be something? I had difficulty to imagine it is indeed a girl and that she is her daughter, she, an elegant woman of an aristocratic pace whose traditional beauty does not tally with the general aspect of this unmatched thing approaching in our direction. A small and undisciplined being, resembling to a clown escaped from the menagerie of a circus, more than a girl from a well-born family.
- " She's very special " her mother told me, who perceive in my glance, a certain sign of astonishment. With a voice full of contrition in front of the inevitable, she says:
- " I suppose it will pass her. "
Of course it will, like it happens to us, all of us who lived our hours of nonconformism. I see her zigzagging around the tables, defying, provoking the guests sitting at the tables, tiny plague, slim and too high on her legs, she is variegated like a tramp escaped from the imagination of Bertold Bretch.
