Daniel Sada - Almost Never

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 precipitous conclusion, so much so that on his way back to La Mena he felt as though he were approaching an abyss.

The headlights of the pickup, in addition to shedding light on the familiar route, seemed to place in his path armies of nopales and huisaches: rising abruptly out of the earth or descended from the heavens: no! for God’s sake — not now! Interlopers! Frauds! A world of thorns. Certainties that when passing were merely glanced sidelong, fade-outs rather than fortuitous disappearances or the semblance of a current rushing backward. The (illuminated) illusory was so real, so apocryphal because so fleeting. Then, when he arrived at La Mena, he would have liked to see a single lightbulb, one electrical surprise to counteract, given the splendor of the mass of stars, but — what a fool! what a doltish delusion! it would be forever before electricity would come to that region. Not next year, nor the following, not in a lustrum, nor in a decade. The bulb relief — O remora! A highfalutin fantasy: a teensy and allusive stigma of what might or might not happen three decades from now … If only there were a bulb (just one one-hundred-watt bulb, let’s say) Demetrio would acknowledge that this ranch was his ideal place, and he, of course, the wise pioneer chosen by God to build first a hamlet, then a village, and then a city: a fervent founding father, but the darkness — primitive, shapeless, constricted thus rank because so narrow: now errant, now repellent, now the dregs of the dregs, and, therefore, a reality that not only dejects but imprisons. When he saw how uncertain all this was, especially when it was almost midnight, Demetrio realized he couldn’t live there much longer. Neither alone nor accompanied. Renata, in the meantime, resurrected. Sexual meekness that required a maximum of spiritual meekness, a future in dribs and drabs in exchange for true power. What a paradox! The big guy had taken this job to be closer to her and in the end he was much further away. The lack of communication, the workload increasingly heavy. He could neither send nor receive letters, and a trip to Sacramento, without knowing the roads well: ah, he would get gruelingly lost. He didn’t even try. It would be so risky, tempting perhaps, but … Renata instead inspired him to focus on his job. If he killed a goat, there in the thick of the blood Renata’s smile appeared. If he milked a cow (he’d already learned how), he encountered the oneiric semblance of her beauty in the spurts of milk. If he heard songs on the radio, his darling appeared to him suspended in the breeze. And during his trips to Sabinas and Nueva Rosita, Renata’s face, above the clouds, began to appear, and the intense green of her eyes dyed the white and blue of the sky. Then dissipation. Then the magnetism of her voice saying: Come, come love me. Don’t abandon me. In fact, some time before, in an about-face and with unexpected force, Benigno asked him:

“Did you have fun in Sabinas?”

“No way. I had a terrible time.”

If only he had made the effort during one of his daytime trips to those half-town-half-cities and asked ever so casually if there happened to be a more upscale congal … No, not that, not now: stubbornness fortified in a sorrowful interior … He didn’t want to find out (ignorance and its acrid ups and downs were better), for he also didn’t want to touch himself down there and thereby create confusion: never again! It’s just that without love, sex was disgusting and fraudulent, gratuitous suffering, disgusting gratification. So, on the plus side, the longing for indestructible purity and endurance. And the reinforcement of his fixation on one sacred ass, the one he predicted would overflow with beauty and mystery, the notion of a tunnel with flexible walls, but still steely and quite slippery, something like a divine — yes? — chalice placed in the middle of a bizarre altar; vulgarities (almost) for a boost, also so as not to give much of himself to anybody: to wit: Demetrio was becoming more silent. He no longer sought conversation: the essential, a kind of casual dissipation. True that Bartola made him food, but the only word he offered in return was “thanks,” a mere euphonic abstraction in spite of the fact that she brought him his plate of beans, or eggs with salsa, as well as flour tortillas and a glass of milk, to his quarters; the family stopped inviting him over, but the manager’s refusal operated with more vigor: fists raised, pounding the air; also, boorish stomping, even kicking up some dust. Even on Christmas Eve, Demetrio preferred to dine alone, perhaps so as not to recall his mother, nor his second mother, nor Renata, nor — whom else? A mental blank: a discipline of sorts: barely a blur: an oblique achievement. When New Year’s Eve rolled around, he chose to drive the pickup about three miles away from La Mena to avoid any hugs for — Happy New Year! To gaze at the stars, to glimpse vague signs … He fell asleep in the cab of the pickup, hungry by design, bundled up warmly (he’d bought loads of clothes in Sabinas), wearing — who would see him? — a thick wool hat with earflaps, and a double-knit scarf, and — of course! his privacy tripled. He didn’t even chat with Don Delfín when he came, when he handed over the weekly take: astonishing numbers — so precise! and otherwise just the stern yeses and nos, one or another sentence spoken as if to summarize a civility after hearing a particular command. So there wasn’t even a (diplomatic) Christmas embrace, nor one for New Year’s (so graceful). Who could explain his disdain?