shook hands all around. "Andale, pues, con dios," "go with God," they called
after him.
The two policemen left the bath in a hurry. It wasn't a good catch and it wasn't a bad catch. Two-hundred pesos. Twenty-five for the attendant. Twenty for Paco. Fifty for the Chief. (He got fifty pesos a day, from each pair of detectives, regardless of how they fared.) That meant some fifty pesos for each of them. What a scare they had had!
"Ay, que joto, que joto!" Manuel finished his story, laughing uproariously. "Papacito, did you really show my picture to the joto?"
"Como no, hijo! I always show your picture to the jotos I arrest. It gives people confidence in me. They know I have a family of my own, that I am a man who would understand a delicate situation, and not cause all kinds of embarrassment. Hijito mio, when you grow up, whatever you want to be, don't be a joto. Sooner or later they all pay through their nose."
"No papacito. Don't worry. When I am big, I'll be a detective like you. Then all the jotos will pay me."
"Isn't he adorable?" Manuel asked the company. "Dame un beso, chico, give me a kiss, little one."
Books
A SINGLE MAN, by Christopher Isherwood, N.Y., Simon and Schuster, 1964, 186 pp., $4.00. of the most honest books ever written about a homosexual. It is short. It covers the events of one day in the life of an Englishman of 58 who lives by the Pacific and teaches at one of the sprawling new colleges of which California possesses so many. George lives alone in his canyon house. His lover, Jim, has been killed. in an automobile accident some weeks before. George has not quite recovered his emotional balance from the shock of this loss. But he is managing, as we all must do, to live from moment to moment, hour to hour, until his grief heals.
George is an intelligent man, an emotional man, a man who knows himself well, yet has managed to keep a decent liking for himself most
of the time. Nor has he permitted his insight into others to mar his compassion for them. In the course of the day he lectures to his class, visits a woman dying in General Hospital-a woman who for a time he had hated because she threatened his partnership with Jim-who now, so much younger than he, and so luckless, has narrowed her existence down to a battle against the pain of the cancer that is killing her.
George eats dinner with a woman friend who understands his loss of Jim and equates it with her own loss of a husband (through divorce, not death) and who is terribly lonely as is George himself. After leaving her house he encounters at a beach bar a student of his who has come all this way seeking him though George cannot imagine quite why. He and the student swim drunkenly,
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