Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream - pg. 157

They were in the thick of the crowd on the fast dance floor, gyrating wildly, each seemingly in urgent need of an exorcist, and both were scaring the life out of the people nearby, who doubtless saw them as foreign elements (she because of her age, he because he was dangerous), the music did not allow for any normal dance-hold or even for proximity, and so De la Garza was not subjected to torture by the erect cones or horizontal ice picks that he and I had both experienced already, indeed it was he -- and this was what most alarmed Tupra and myself and obliged us to intervene  without further delay or  ceremony -- who was now flailing Mrs Manoia, almost literally, no, literally, and the most surprising thing was that she envinced no pain -- that, at least, was my impression, I've no idea what Tupra thought -- from the unintended lashes that the prize prick kept dealing her as he danced, I mean, you had to be a complete prick to dance in that crazy way, only a short distance away from his partner, performing Travolta-like  turns, presenting Flavia as often with the back of his neck as with his face, completely oblivious to the fact that, with all these fast, abrupt movements, the empty hairnet, with no ponytail, no longer hair to fill it and no weight no constrain or hamper it, could easily turn into a whip, a lash, an unruly riding crop; if there had been some metal ornament on the end, it would have been just like the bolas a gaucho uses to catch cattle or the knut deployed by cruel Cossacks, but, fortunately, he had not adorned it with aglets or bobbles or bells or spikes, any of which would have made mincemeat of Flavia; I shuddered nonetheless, because such ornamental ideas could so easily have entered his vacant head, it would have been just like an idiot of his calbre, disguised as he was as a rapper, as a Napoleonic bullfighter, as the painter-cum-majo, Melendez, in his self-portrait in the Louvre, and as a fortune-telling gypsy with the obligatory hoop earring tinkling  and bobbing (all these things at once, a total mishmash).