Nacha's "man" got up to dance with her. When, however, the girl resisted, he lifted her violently in his arms and set her down in the middle of the hall.
"Let me alone! I can't dance...."
"You are going to dance, I tell you.... You are only putting on!"
"But don't you see? I can't ... oh, please!"
The fellow grasped her around the waist and plunged with her into the rhythmic whirl on the floor. The man who sat alone had started at the brutality he was witnessing, as though a question had suddenly been settled in his mind. Something dramatic seemed about to happen, and many eyes watched him uneasily.
Nacha, with no heart for the dance, was not long in freeing herself and returning to the table; now it was quite unoccupied, since all her companions were on the floor. Her escort followed smiling with rage, and sitting down beside her, began apparently to insult and threaten her. His lower jaw was thrown far forward as he spoke; his teeth came tight together, and his lips twisted themselves into all the grimaces expressing anger and contempt.
"You'll pay for this ... as soon as we get out of here!" he said; and meanwhile he clutched her arm in a grip that hurt.
The stranger was now looking closely at the man. The latter was a tall strapping fellow, stockily built. His wide, close-shaven face showed a scar across the chin. He had broad shoulders, a dark skin; and his small hard eyes glittered with something of an Indian's haughtiness and sinister ferocity. A large pearl adorned his made-up necktie. He wore white spats over his patent leather shoes, and large rings on his fingers.
There are plenty of men like this among the porteños! As vulgar as they are rich, they are always showing off their dollars and their women. They each set up a ménage with some pretty girl—for otherwise they would lose "standing." They spend their evenings in the theatres and their nights in the cabarets or, for adventure, ragging with their pals and their sweethearts some convenient victim; drinking champagne, making an uproar, annoying everyone, bellowing at one another. Noisy, aggressive, intrusive, they allow no one to look too pryingly, too persistently, at them! Their right forefingers itch for the feel of a revolver—an appendage that Nature should, to please them, have grown on their right hands. Women, in their eyes, are mechanical toys, objects without human feelings, to be bought and sold as such. And yet women become attached to them; perhaps because they like the manliness that such violence attests; or because these fellows show their women off, give them distinction—of a certain kind. Passion also inclines them to a certain fidelity at times. Some of them moreover are university men, or belong to prominent families. However, they are all office-seekers, all gamblers. They "go across" to Europe occasionally, insulting well-bred people by their arrogance and their grossness as nouveaux riches. In Paris they are always accompanied by cocottes, and make disturbances in dance halls and cabarets to advertise their South-American spirit and self-sufficiency. A repulsive type, in short: a mixture of the barbarian and of the civilized human being, of the gangster and the respectable citizen. The urban descendent of the Argentine cow-puncher is an individual without scruples, morals or discipline, with no law but caprice, and no ideal but pleasure.