Don Luis De V
La Tarantula an Erotic Tale of Spain
CHAPTER ONE
The Tarantula is a poisonous spider.
It spins no web as a snare but catches its prey because it is fleet of foot.
Its home in the ground is lined with silk. Remember these things.
It is told in the villages that one who is bitten by this dreaded scourge falls to the floor as one dead. And only by the skilful use of magic can he be brought out of his deathlike trance. For then the subtle strains of music excite an overpowering desire in him to dance, until he falls to the floor bathed in profuse perspiration but secure in the knowledge that he has been rid of the envenomed virulence. City doctors from Madrid and Seville, they scoff at this statement. But the old men of the village who sit in the square after a siesta, in the sun, and soak in God's sunshine, they know far more about the bite of the Tarantula than do the august and revered doctors. For they have lived long. They know life. They know, too, of the human tarantulas that have infested our dear somnolent Spain.
They know of her whom men call La Tarantula.
And as these old men of the village soak the suffusing beneficence of the sun into their bewrinkled faces, they talk through their beards of the woman whom they knew in their youth as La Tarantula.
She, too, caught her prey because she was fleet of foot. For she was the most agile gypsy dancer in all of Spain. Like her dreaded namesake, she lined her home with silks and satins and varicoloured laces and shawls, there to ensnare her men in the oldest trap in the world, her vagina, her cunt, offering to her victims the million- pleasured joys of its throbbing, pulsating essences but insidiously marking them with the death's head.
For it is recorded that, of all the lovers that La Tarantula harboured to her bosom, not one there was who died a natural death, not one there was who in his deathbed was able to smile sweetly up to the ceiling and receive the prayers of his loved ones gathered around him. All of them died violent deaths, as men should die, by the sword, by the fire and by the beast.
La Tarantula was ill-starred.
She was born in Triana, the gypsy settlement, across the Guadalquivir in Seville. It was in this section of the city that the notorious Carmen worked in the cigarette factories for which that part of town is famous.
When La Tarantula was born, a porcelain factory close by burst into sudden flame. It was an ill omen. The world should have known that she was both for the pleasure and the death of man.
When she was ten years old La Tarantula became a woman. In the south the blood runs hot. Passions bloom in children like gorgeous hothouse flowers, before their time. Girls' breasts take on that roundness which makes them fit the eager palms of man. Their hips take on that snaky sinuousness that beguiles the male into ecstasies of expectancies. Their pubic sections become starry with faint hairs that do not hide the tiny pouting lips of their virgin vaginas but deck them as though with a filmy curtain of sheer mantilla lace, so that when one sees the jewel between their legs one's eyes grow wide with desire and one's breath comes in short laboured gasps out of sheer forepleasure.
It was when she was ten years old that she attracted the attention of her uncle, the notorious Chato Doble. He was a powerfully built gypsy famous for his strength and agility and cunning in driving a bargain.
As a horse trader he had no equal. It was told of him that he filled an old nag's ears with quicksilver so that they would not droop with age.
Once he stole a mule from a tavern keeper in Granada, clipped its hair and tail, and disguised it so perfectly that he was able to sell it back to the man from whom he had stolen it. It was this sort of a man who eyed La Tarantula when she first felt the pangs of womanhood creeping into her blood.
She had awakened one morning to find a few tiny specks of blood in her bed. At first she thought that it was the blood of some crushed bedbugs that infested the two rooms in which she and her father lived.
But they were much larger than the usual blobs of blood. And when she saw that there was blood, too, around the warm little hole between her legs she let out a shriek of fear and fell back against the wall.
Immediately, her father came rushing into the room from the outside where he had been sunning himself. Behind him was the towering figure of Chato Doble, her father's brother.
'What's the matter, child?' her father cried.
La Tarantula could say nothing. All she could do was point to the blood on the bed. Her father shrieked out a curse when he saw the blood. 'Who! what mother's bastard raped you? Venga a Cani! come on, gypsy! tell me!'
La Tarantula could not understand her father. Nobody had raped her, she whimpered. She had slept alone all night. She did not tell her father that she had had a beautiful dream in which a beautiful Spanish don from across the river had kissed her and had fondled her and had made love to her. 'I awoke from sleep,' she said, 'and there was the blood.'
Her uncle Chato Doble pushed his way in past his brother who was standing in the doorway. He looked down at the bloodstains. Then he looked down at the shapely young body of the girl, his niece. He saw the well-rounded breasts budding into bloom like a pair of flowers. He saw the well-rounded loins of a young girl shaping out from what had previously been an adolescent's slim, ugly shanks. He realized that the child that had once been a spindly-shanked girl was blossoming out into a woman. And his heart told him that, although she was his niece, she was still a woman and she was beautiful. And his penis between his legs told him that her cunt was beautiful to see and, what was more, more beautiful to fuck. 'Cristo!' he swore beneath his beard as his eyes glittered for her.
Then, taking his brother aside, he whispered something into his ear, the while the girl lay back against the wall and eyed the two men fearfully. She saw a gleam come into her father's eyes. Then a look of relief settled into his features. 'So that is all,' he sighed.
'What, father?' she enquired anxiously.
Her father advanced toward her and seated himself on her bed. 'Cover yourself up well, my child,' he said, 'for there are men in the room with you. You have already become a woman.'
And she was glad. For she knew now that she was no more a child. That she could flirt with the bu'ne who came from across the river to see the gypsy girls dance. That she would be dancing herself soon, feeling their hot eyes piercing her to the very marrow of her soul.
But Chato Doble had seen her naked. He had seen many women naked in his life. His prick was as long as his life and as active. He had snaked it thousands of times into the quivering quims of Spanish ladies and gypsy girls. But never before had he seen a woman's body that compared to the body of his young niece. There was a velvety smoothness to it that almost hypnotized the hands, begging the fingers to touch of its sleekness. There was a curve to her loins that promised a thousand love tricks. And although he realized that he could be guilty of no greater crime, in fucking the daughter of his own blood-brother, he still coveted her in his heart. In fact, he remained at the house of his brother for a much longer time than he had ever done before. Usually, he dropped into his brother's hovel in Triana for only a short visit. In no time, after a repast of gazpacho and a glass of oloroso, he would be off again to Castile or Granada or wherever his heart so willed. But now, now his heart willed him to remain. To remain in his brother's house where he might feast his eyes on the loveliness that was his brother's daughter.
Night after night he would turn and twist on his pallet in the kitchen, dreaming fitfully of the beautiful body that he had seen in the gloom of the room, but nearly always unable to close his eyes in sleep because he knew that less than ten feet away from him there reposed that same glorious body of which he dreamed and for which he ached. Hours he would spend in sleepless nights detailing to himself the marvels of her beauty, going over each of her charms like a monk fingers his rosary, reluctantly allowing each to slip away and avidly seizing another charm and fondling it in his mind until he almost grew mad with desire.
But there were two things that deterred him from getting up and slipping into his niece's room. One of these deterrents was the heinousness of the crime of incest. Another was the custom of dido among the gypsies. He realized that when a gypsy girl was married she must show proof of her virginity by staining the white sheets of her
