didn’t give a damn about interrupting his rapturous work routine, arguing to himself that Don Delfín had many times congratulated him for his dedication and his … et cetera and et cetera … Now let’s set him down in Sabinas having a cup of coffee at a tavern. A deliciously cool afternoon.
Later at night, the cold, a speculative disintegration: and he’s off; whether he’d regret it or not; whether he should ask directions. Fear vying with urgency. They’ll tell him once he’s in the neighborhood. That’s why he had to drive around: searching in the outskirts: perhaps it wasn’t so obvious; until someone told him that at such-and-such a house, one that did not even sport a red lightbulb. And Demetrio knocked several times on a corrugated metal door. It took a while for it to open … remember how clandestine, so he—is it already obvious?—had to think up an excuse because the purpose of his visit was solely to get a woman he could fuck. From behind the closed door they told him that they rented women by the hour, not more: okay? What he already knew, somewhat indirectly. More details translated into restrictions that inhibited the solicitor, who was on the verge of saying: Thank you, I’ll come back next week. But he dug in his heels on that threshold of a hell, if it really was one. It’s worth mentioning here that it all transpired through the corrugated door. The madam didn’t open it until she had set the exorbitant fee: one peso and fifty centavos! in comparison with the prices in Oaxaca … a comical bargain … finally a faceless agreement: a nuisance. Demetrio was trembling when he entered. He saw a small room lit with half-burnt candles that looked pretty gloomy, inhabited by monsters or something of the sort.
Whores as living ghouls, alas.
What he saw—ghastly! and suggestive of worse.
Wandering about, like a superfluous emphasis, was a pack of black and gray cats, but not a single white one.
The whores, three on show, were very fat ladies with unkempt hair, all wearing nothing but an apron; grotesque nakedness otherwise: no underpants—really! Seated horrors. All three were wearing flip-flops instead of spike heels, and, which one should he choose? None! but his horniness …
Under his breath Demetrio asked the madam if by some chance she had a female specimen a bit younger and with a nice body and:
“They’re all I’ve got … But I can guarantee you that they do good work … They are professionals.”
Such a long time without an imbroglio … the distasteful as a substitute for—the palm of the hand? … on the ranch? Descending doubts, though not at an avid downhill speed. The ascent, like a fluttering certainty, is never complete, of course, as far as fulfilling whatever need. Go for it! He hired the least ugly and least fat one, probably the youngest, judged on the fly. Then came the sinful march; culmination, that is, unimaginable, in a tiny room whose nauseating effluvia weren’t in the least exciting … Demetrio was even ashamed to take his clothes off. She just had to take off her apron and—ready to go! Stripped naked! And straight to business—oh, my God! The bad part: total consternation, as you can imagine: what kind of erection if … ? But a screw did ensue. It was like penetrating something very deep and very gelatinous. It was a struggle to find contractions that never, well, let’s see: the chubby woman didn’t even manage to touch his arm: kisses on the mouth—not on our life! Though, examining things more closely, what would that sausage with puffy lips (heavily lipsticked) and a snaky and (perhaps) scaly tongue taste like? Moreover, the woman kept rushing him. She wanted that semen to come as if out of a modern electrical appliance, latest model. Verbal aggression not worth reproducing here, for Demetrio, feeling more and more like the victim of an idle simulacrum, brusquely disengaged and with true dis-ease got dressed, the quicker to escape from such pestilence. Here we can offer an analogy: it seemed like the big guy had just been released from a pretty tricky coyote trap.
Fortunately his investment in that experiment had cost him only one peso and fifty centavos.
An infectious, monumental, depressing adventure because it gave him no glimmer of clarity as to the direction his life was taking. Curves and straightaways, though many more curves and perhaps some regression that could be interpreted as a harbinger of a