CHAPTER EIGHT
It took a long time for La Tarantula to recover from her experiences in Tangier. Returned to Seville, she hovered between life and death in the throes of an undulant fever that sapped all her strength from her.
Forever, she was envisioning the bodies of those that had died in sexual service to her. Her uncle Chato Doble, Otero, the dancing master, Don Juan Gandulla, the guitarist, Cazuela, her maid, Don Jose Caloro'a, the tenor, El Gallo, the matador, Vibora, the Miura bull, the Arabian and La Niobe, her young dancing protegee, all of them fled across the miasma of her mind. Like disembodied spirits, their wraiths hung about her, taunting her with the death's head that overshadowed her lovers.
For a whole year she malingered, wasted almost to a shadow of what once had been the notoriously beautiful La Tarantula, the gypsy dancer. After a year she began to take on weight. Desire to live returned. The shadows of the dead past died down so that they became scarcely perceptible. But they still remained. For that is the tragedy of life. The dead do not die. For they live on in memory in the minds of those who are alive. They cling tenaciously to life although their bodies have rotted away into dirt and their skulls have become nests for scorpions.
But lying in the beneficences of the Spanish sun, she gradually became healthier until soon she had regained her once-resplendent figure and virility. In no time she was being booked throughout the city for appearances in her famous dances. But men avoided her as though she were the plague. No matter how they thrilled at her dancing, no matter how they desired to get the provocative gypsy into bed, there to fuck the life out of her, they never approached her. They avoided her, for the death's head glowed evilly above her like a dead star.
But she continued to dance all the while. Apparently, the fire, the zest was still with her. But, she herself knew that she was only a consummate actress, that the passion she simulated was only a cheap tawdry imitation of what had once been genuine feeling and emotion.
Being a woman and being even more than a woman, for she was La Tarantula, she felt the urge of sexual pleasure demanding some sort of consideration. She could not see a pair of flies on the windowpane but she was forced to think of herself in a similar position with a man on top of her jousting away merrily to a pleasurable orgasm. In her mind's eye, she roved backward to all of the fucks of the past, going over the details of each one, retracing her actions and emotions at each fuck, working herself up to pitch until she could control herself no longer.
It was when she dreamed of El Gallo that she awoke from her sleep one night, her forehead bathed in sweat, a tremendous itching in the vicinity of her cunt distracting her. A bowl of bananas lay on the night table close by. Without thinking, without knowing what she was doing, she seized hold of one of the bananas and pressed it slowly between the lips of her itching hole. She squirmed in pain as the rough edges bit at the tender flesh. But it was a pleasant pain for it made her think of El Gallo's prick. And all the while, as she pushed the dildo up and back inside of her, she imagined that the matador was lying on her and that it was his prick that was stirring her and not an ordinary banana.
Soon, stimulated by the action of the implement, she began to feel a suggestion of her former emotions returning. Her breath came faster.
Her nostrils quivered. Her ass worked itself impetuously about on her bed sheets. Up and back she thrust her hips, attempting to sink the shaft of the banana in as deeply as she could get it. Suddenly, as she made a violent thrust, her fingers slipped off the end of the banana and the thing shot into her cunt, stopping at the end of her cervix.
Immediately the contact sent an electrical thrill through her. Puffing madly now, she separated the lips of her outer cunt with her left hand and, with her right hand, inserted her forefinger into the throbbing surfaces of the inner cunt and there she seized hold of the alreadystiffening clitoris. Then, bending her chin down onto her breast as far as she could, she tried to seize hold of the nipple of her breast with her mouth. With the aid of her right hand, she lifted the nipple up to her lips and she seized hold of it avidly, sucking at it and mouthing noises like a babe at its mother's breast. Thus, diddling her clitoris with her right hand, stiffening the nipple of her left breast with her left hand and sucking the nipple of her right breast with her lips, the shaft of the banana sunk deeply into her hole and touching her innards, she managed to work herself up to a supreme orgasm. Up and down her body worked itself spasmodically. The bedsprings creaked. The bed shook. Her breath steamed from her nostrils. Moans issued from her lips as she tongued her nipple.
Then she came in a grand overrushing spasm, the fluid spurting over her fingers and dripping from the lips of her cunt. Tiredly, she dropped the tit from her mouth. Her busy fingers fell away from her lips. But the fingers of her other hand remained in her cunt, feeling the passionate vibrations of the muscles therein and the hot fluid of her orgasm moistening the entire hole.
But as she lay back against the cushions, she saw a black hooded figure emerge from the window that opened up into a balcony that ran around the patio.
In the chill morning gloom she saw the figure put her finger to her mouth as though commanding her to silence. When her eyes became accustomed to the dark, La Tarantula saw that her visitor was a nun from the nearby convent. Still wordless, the nun helped her on with her clothes, although La Tarantula noticed that the nun was not overly fast in helping her do that but allowed her hands to linger on her buxom breasts and curvetted flanks.
'What do you want?' La Tarantula asked.
The nun said only, 'Come!'
They went. The nun led her down the steps and out onto the street.
Through the dark streets of the night they went, La Tarantula following faithfully after the nun, not daring to speak a word in objection because, after all, it was a nun who was leading her. Besides, the situation smacked of something different, something to change the awful deadly monotony of life as it had existed for La Tarantula in the past year.
Out of the gloom, La Tarantula saw a great hulk of a figure bulking like a fortress. At first she did not recognize it. But when they got closer she saw that it was the old nunnery of La Novedad. Wild conjectures flew about in her head. What did the nuns want with her? Why were they bringing her there? What had she done? Was she to repent for the death of her lovers?
The nun pulled a knob. A bell tinkled faintly in the bowels of the inside. The heavy door slid open a few inches. The nun, leading her charge, slithered into the slim aperture. La Tarantula saw that they were in a moonlit patio. About fifty other black-robed nuns were grouped around an inner circle. Two of them had guitars which they were strumming occasionally. She found herself being led up to the centre of the ring. An elderly nun beckoned to her. She was the Mother Superior, La Tarantula knew. Breathlessly, she advanced to the nun.
'You are she who is known as La Tarantula?' the nun asked her in a low voice.
La Tarantula nodded her head.
'Good!' the other said, 'we are here to witness your notorious dance!' and with a wave of her finger she indicated something to the nuns who were at her side. Immediately, with an avidity that was alarming, they set upon the frightened girl and began to strip her clothing from her.
Lasciviously, their eyes followed every bared spot on her. Lewdly, their fingers lingered on her breasts, her hair, her thighs. She felt their hot breath breathing on her flesh. And, as each new feminine delight was displayed, she could hear definite sighs coming from the group of nuns circled about her.
In a few moments, she stood there in front of them stark naked. In the silver moonlight that streamed over her olive-skinned body she appeared to be an alabaster statue carved from the purest of stone. The hollows and the shadows in her glowed dully. Her breasts, their contours accentuated by the shadows which they cast, stood out like twin beauties. Her pubic section with its triangle of hair and its jewel of a cunt nestled in it like a dark ruby in a case, brought a chorus of sighs and moans from her audience.
'Dance!' the nun commanded.
The two guitarists set up a strumming on their instruments. For the moment, La Tarantula stood where she had been placed, her body quivering from the cold. But when she felt the power of the music insisting itself into her body, she began to dance as she had never danced before. Something told her it was going to be the last time she
