Outside on the streets of Saguero, Fernando ambled past closed shops, deserted cafés. After asking around, he knew the general direction of his destination. But the path there he took at random, letting his intuition guide him as much as his senses. His night vision had always been good. Even in the darkness of this unfamiliar place he felt at home and in his element.
He meandered through dismal alleyways choked with trash. He doubled-back at dead-ends, or at some prickle of primal warning that stirred the fine hairs at his nape. Crouched like glinting-eyed goblins in the shadows, common street thugs glanced to him only briefly as he passed. He clearly had nothing on him worth troubling with—just his borrowed clothes, a few measly pesos and the barrio surliness that he wore like an old familiar mask.
Fernando witnessed cats fighting, men fighting. Packs of mangy feral dogs loped past him, panting and yipping. Women shrieked. Bottles smashed. Babies cried. Beggars pawed like animals through rank bins overflowing with refuse. Roving gangs of men smoked and carried on loudly as they cruised from one seedy joint to another. Cars with dim headlights trundled along the cracked and rutted roads, sending the startled rats scampering from the glare.
The night air was damp and faintly reeking, dense upon him. Strolling down some lonely side street, Fernando spied ahead of him in the shadowed alcove of a storefront a man and woman locked together in the grips of heated passion.
The voyeur in him couldn’t resist this sort of spectacle. Pausing by a hedge to smoke, he watched discreetly out of the corner of his eye as they grabbed and ground against one another. The low light made the glimpses he stole that much more tantalizing—titflesh squeezing like raw dough through slatted fingers, a sprung cock pistoning away into the darkness. The moon-white expanse of a bared thigh glowed beneath the hem of a shucked-up skirt. Hushed feminine cries rose in their urgency, punctuating the dampened sound of soft wet sucking and dull, meaty smacking.
“Dios mío, Dios mío…”
Painfully hard, Fernando crushed out his cigarette and moved on, savoring the ache.
In the back of The Red Room, Fernando played cards with his cousin Pedro and his gang of fellow thugs. Fernando lost most of what little money he had left, gained it back again in spades, then lost it all again with such good grace that they were all clapping him on the back and calling him ‘primo’ by the end of the night.
Fernando drank whatever was put in front of him, smoked whatever was passed along to him. Through the haze, he watched the honest whores at their work while dodging the snares of their own watchful eyes. Their predatory interest drew at him like a tangible force, a gravitational pull which he resisted through a force of will yet stronger.
There was one beast of a whore who attracted him in particular. He could see that he’d attracted her in particular, too. Seemingly lost on his way to the toilet, he stumbled past what he took to be her room. When he turned around, there she was, pulling him to her, into her lair.
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