The firm gaze fixed, the full mouth like a paralyzed cherry. The uncontrollable nose nervous. Ears buried by the heavy weight of tri-colored earrings: strange, obvious, unpleasant pendants in the colors of the national flag. For the first time I saw her up close, in detail.
She was a camouflaged woman. Smells. Wrinkles. Laughter. Everything was controlled, rigid, remade as if by enchantment.
She spoke, and from the beginning I sensed her words were at once the first and final ones of her life. Both a baptismal and sepulchral discourse.
Dona Hetara, the madam of the bordello on Durango, ministered to the tastes of her clients and the fortunes of her girls. She wasn’t one of those brothel owners who simply run a business with whores. Much abused, Dona Hetara. Lots of bluster. Nothing of the fool about her. She would always say: Di-ver-si-fy. And so she managed not only a whorehouse but a nuns’ school where Dona Hetara, who was very charitable, sent the old hookers to dress as religious and pretend to educate the young hookers who were looking for husbands. Because basically there is no whore who does not aspire to matrimony. It infuriates them that men don’t call them “women” but “broads.” Being a “broad” is being a whore, trash, tamale wrapper,
After a period of time to toughen her up in the brothel on Calle de Durango, Sara was sent to the aforementioned nuns’ school to be refined, and there Don Nazario Esparza met her, for he was always on the lookout for new sensations and fresh meat for his “insatiable appetite” or, in other words, what good were all the furniture stores, hotels, movie houses, and commercial centers, what good were beds if he couldn’t use them to have fun with a good “
“Don’t trouble yourself, Don Nazario. Search no further, I’ll take care of everything. Don’t torture yourself. Take it slow. Buy into the idea that you’re still a great lover. You’re in great shape, that’s the truth. A real cocksman.”
And so the millionaire was seduced by the convent girl Sarita, who lived in a monastery where her parents had abandoned her.
“They abandoned her, Senora?”
“Let’s say they made a present of her.”
“Haven’t they seen her again?”
“Don’t worry, Don Nazario. We demanded a tidy sum for accepting the present and didn’t let them see her again. Sarita is all alone. She’ll have only you, Senor.”
According to what he himself said and his son Errol told us.
You and a motley band of mariachis, thieves, bums, crazies, drug addicts, pimps, bongo players, and all those she hadn’t met but imagined, for more men passed through her head than there were in an army, those who had fucked her and those who would have fucked her if they had known the tricks lodged in the well-disposed body of Sara P. Like a beautiful butterfly that could turn into a caterpillar of pleasure, imitate to perfection the manners of the upper class, and engage in all the wicked lower-class vices. I saw her as a funereal hostess on the day of Dona Estrellita’s obsequies, she was refined but sham refined, something was out of place in her gestures, her dress, above all in the way she gave orders and treated the servants, the arrogant contempt, the lack of courtesy, the essential bad upbringing of Sara P. exposed with a disdain that assimilated her into what the stupid woman believed she despised.
Of course Sara came to the mansion on Pedregal with her virginity intact, and Don Nazario enjoyed the privilege of deflowering her. She was a Scotch tape virgin, astutely fabricated by the false nuns of the dissolute convent, who restored maidenheads as easily as they cooked
Did this repel Don Nazario? Did he care when she said she was giving him what everybody liked, not just her husband? She laughed at him, telling him about sexual experiences that she said were only imaginary and now she was demanding them of the increasingly dazed, distracted old man, bewildered by so much excitation, so much novelty, not realizing that she, even in their closest intimacy, saw him from a distance, scornfully, as if she were reading him, as if he were the day before yesterday’s newspaper or an advertisement on the Periferico. But she didn’t realize she wasn’t humiliating him. She merely excited him more and more, fired his imagination. Esparza saw Sara in every conceivable position, imagined her fornicating with other men, enjoyed this vicarious sex more and more.
She hated him-she says-but he held her as if she were a dog. Eventually he desired his penis to be always inside her. She felt like castrating him. She told him that the more lovers who enjoyed her, the more semen he’d have stored up inside. Imagine, Nazario, imagine me fucking men you’ve never met.
“I’m just telling you. Whores: You take them by the ass, they’re the cheapest. If they sit on top of the man, they’re more expensive.”
Except, at the same time, her marriage to the ridiculous old man made her more and more afraid. She started seeing herself as she wasn’t, greedy, uncultured, spectral. She fervently desired the death of the man who loved, her, desired her, and at the same time kept her cornered by luxury and ambition.
That was when Nazario did her the favor of becoming paralyzed following an energetic sixty-nine. The old man became overly excited and was left half-rigid with a hemiplegia that kept him from speaking beyond a milky- rice mewling. Then she felt again the temptation to castrate him and even put his flaccid penis in his mouth. But she had a better idea. Gradually she scaled a policy of humiliations that began by parading bare-breasted in front of the paralyzed man. Then confused him by walking past his idiot’s gaze, dressed in mourning one day, for a cocktail party the next, finally as a nurse, taking him out in the wheelchair to the Pedregal courtyard without shade so he’d roast a little, hours and hours in the sun to see if he dies of sunstroke, and Nazario Esparza encased in wool pajamas and a plaid bathrobe, without shoes, trying to avoid the direct gaze of the sun and observe how his yellowish toenails were growing…
Alone? Sara laughed a long while, at times with the manners of a modest senorita, at other times with whorish guffaws, what the hell, I brought into the house all the men I only mentioned before, mariachis, bums, my buddies the towel boys from the brothel who brought me warm cloths after lovemaking, bongo players who played tropical music while I danced for the rigid old man, pimps who did everything for him, cooked and served the food. They took the useless old thing out in the midday sun of the damn central plain, like a roast pig, though she pampered him too, put him in the bed and toyed with him, said into his ear Go on, do the nasty to me, whispered Mummies are so tender, and if he stretched out his trembling fingers she slapped him and said Quiet, poison and then stripped and made love with the Mariachi before the astonished, desperate, illogical gaze of Nazario Esparza, who signaled wildly for her to get into bed with him.
“In your bed, Nazario? In your bed all you do is piss.”
It culminated, she recounts, with what she calls “everybody gets to fuck her.” The entire cast of servants and parasites who gathered in the house in Pedregal staged the collective violation of Sara P. in front of Esparza. She exaggerated her poses, her screams of pleasure, her orders to action, she even exaggerated the fakery with orgasms that echoed on the mummified face of Nazario Esparza like a mirage of life, a lost oasis of power, a desert resembling death.
Which came to him, she declared, in the middle of the last staged orgy. It was verified by the bongo player, who could gauge from a distance the beats of the tropical world. It was testified to by the pachuco who searched men who died suddenly in houses of prostitution. Nobody saw him die. Though the Mariachi, who was embracing Sara at the time, says he heard, as in a song of farewell, the words of “The Ship of Gold”:
I’m leaving now… I’ve come just to say goodbye.
Goodbye woman… Goodbye, forever goodbye.
