If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

I

Fernando was a bastard, but a lucky one. His father’s name was Juan Francisco Aurelio de San Martín, a politician and patrician whose conquistador ancestors had grown rich first off blood spoils then off sugar cane and slaves. The slaves had long since been freed. The family’s sugar plantations had long since been sold. The spilled blood had returned to the earth, but the spoils had compounded through the centuries. By hook or by crook, the San Martín family remained one of the wealthiest and most influential old dynasties in Bogotá.

Fernando’s mother’s name was Carmencita. She bore little other name than this. She was a mestiza of no account, a bar singer with nothing to recommend her except her strange allure which was more sensual than beautiful. An animal litheness to her movements. The fathomless black wells of her eyes, which shone now and then when they seized upon a man’s, darkly enchanting in their glitter of carnal promise.

Juan Francisco was a true Don Juan, a man of seemingly inexhaustible romantic appetite. His zeal for the women he pursued was matched only by his callousness in the dispatching of his conquests thereafter. That he fell under the spell of Carmencita was no great surprise—what was more surprising was that even after he’d possessed her this spell of hers yet held him in sway. Perhaps it could even be said that Juan Francisco had at last found his match in her.

Theirs was a volatile relationship. Knowing his father’s proud, contrarian character, Fernando supposed that Juan Francisco resented and possibly even feared the depth of his passion for Carmencita. The very voluptuousness in her which had so attracted him now drove him to mad heights of jealousy and rage.

He who had scoffed at his friends and their pampered mistresses found himself purchasing an entire apartment in which to shut Carmencita up. She was a wily thing, however, and Juan Fransisco’s controlling behavior only provoked her, inciting her to seek out assignations whenever his back was turned. More than once he was compelled to hasten from a legislative session or a fiesta—even his firstborn son’s birthday celebration—on hearing that Carmencita had been spotted carousing around somewhere or another.

“God damn it,” he growled, shoving into his coat as he made for the door with his wife and son crying after him, “I’ve had enough! I’m putting a leash on the woman.”

Juan Francisco did not in fact leash her. But when plying her with luxuries failed to curb her wantonness, he resorted to brute force, locking Carmencita up in the apartment and fitting iron bars to the windows. Predictably, she did not take well to this incarceration. Like a caged tigress she prowled night and day, lunging ferociously at Juan Francisco whenever he came to call upon her. He met her attacks with equal rancor and aggression. Whether they fought or fucked it was violently so. How this violence might have escalated, none could say, for it was during this term of captivity that Fernando was conceived, and their tempestuous lusts cooled at last.

Carmencita was not a maternal woman. Not long after Fernando was born, she took to singing in bars again, leaving him to be looked after by whatever woman in the barrio he could be foisted upon at a moment’s notice. As soon as he was capable enough to look after himself, he did so. He spent long hours roaming the streets with the other urchins or playing alone in the once-lavish apartment which his neglectful mother rarely frequented and his absent father never did.

Randomly, it seemed, Carmencita would remember him—perhaps when she wished to console herself from some failed dalliance or other such insult to her pride. They would spend all day together roving through the markets or lounging around the apartment. She would hug him and kiss him and sing to him—only to him, strange lullabies in a language only she knew. He would stare into her dark eyes as she sang. Lost in the lightless depths of them, mesmerized.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy