Something About Ysabel's Dance Lyrics

In the new hotel, on Fiesta Night,
the staff are bored;
Donna Ysabel dances zombie-like,
the guests applaud....
The color is local, the tourists are tanned,
the natives are restless
and everything's second-hand.
Places disappear, but the names
endure as alibis;
memory's hazy here, no-one's really sure
of how time flies....
Well drunk, the bass player
cries into his beer -
are Ysabel's mother or Ysabel dancing here?

After hours all the couriers are
in the bar round the corner
with the drivers in a game of cards....
In bursts Ysabel,
her hair let loose, her limbs set free;
on the tabletops she's dancing to a memory -
conversation stops and every eye
is turned to see...
something about Ysabel's dance.
It's a shrinking world,
it's a fun-packed cruise, a museum trip:
skirt the native girl, check the rabid dog,
rejoin the ship.
There's no Charlie Mingus,
his Tijuana's gone...
this smile for the camera is all just a tourist con.
But after hours all the couriers and drivers know
of a cantina where there's every chance
that she might show;
and maybe Ysabel
will dance the dance for real again,
her mother's footsteps, vice and virtue,
l*** and love and pain.
There's something here
the anthropologist dare not explain,
something about Ysabel's dance....