Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

More shacks, more children, and a short distance beyond this little slum the car stopped before a yellow-walled building. It was solid, made of cement, one story, with a big black cat crudely drawn on the wall and a painted sign: La Pantera.

Hernán led them through the door, toward the music, which was loud and Latin with a pulsing beat of drums. The sound of syncopation filled the large room but competed with other sounds, low animal wails of complaint, an agonizing mooing. The strange, seemingly empty room was the size and shape of a dance hall, with a high ceiling, which was the tin roof of the building. The wide floor was like that in a dance hall, but no one was dancing. Only the music and that horrible mooing filled it. The middle, which could have been the dance floor, was littered with tipped-over chairs and some empty tables and made of cement — a boy was slapping at it with a dirty mop and dragging a bucket.

At first glance the place made no sense — a big hollow noisy space, the music, the animal howl, the clutter, the boy with the mop. Looking harder, Steadman saw activity at the margins, groups of men seated in chairs drinking beer from bottles, scraps of bright color that were the costumes of women, some standing, some seated, at the doorways — a door every six feet or so, around the entire perimeter of the dance floor. Of the fifty or so doors, there were women at most of the thresholds. The women wore bathing suits, most of them were smoking cigarettes, and they seemed demure, patient, passive, and vaguely attentive, as though waiting for a bus that was overdue.

Most of the women sat alone, but near two or three of them were clusters of men. The men sat talking together, their elbows on the tables. Steadman saw that the men were old and tough-looking, and in each case the woman nearby was hardly a woman but rather a girl, sixteen at most, looking watchful.

“Hola” Ava said to one of the young girls, walking past the men. The men pretended not to be interested in or shocked by the tall lighthaired woman and the man in the Panama hat behind her approaching the slender prostitute, who stood up like a schoolgirl, showing politeness.

“Cuál es su nombre?”

“Soy Carmen. Mi apodo es Mosca’’

She seemed shy and was so soft-voiced Ava could not understand her.

“ Vive usted aquí?”

“No. Vivo en Lago Agrio”

“De dónde es usted?” Ava asked.

“Guayaquil,” the girl whispered, and entered the cubicle.

Ava followed her inside, and Steadman joined them, and there was so little room in the cubicle that the girl sat on the edge of the bed, which was just a mattress covered with a stained sheet, the two visitors towering over her, their elbows against the walls.

“Cuánto vale esto?” Steadman said.

The girl clasped her hands. She looked so awkward in her bathing suit and thick-soled shoes. She said softly, “ Dos personas juntas?”

“You’re scaring her,” Ava said, and as she spoke she heard the men outside hoarsely conjecturing.

“I’m just wondering,” he said.

The girl said, “Por mí, normal — solamente normal aquí. Cinco dólares. Pero, número trece, número catorce” —and she gestured to the wall, meaning the cubicles that way— “por allí” —and she became vague, and hesitated. She shrugged. “Otras cosas”

But Ava had been right: Steadman saw a look of fear on the girl’s face, something in the way her mouth was drawn sideways, a brightness in her eyes that was terror. He wanted to leave and he wanted to calm her. He gave her a twenty-dollar bill and motioned to Ava to leave.

The men gaped as Ava and Steadman left, and one of them — the oldest, the drunkest, grizzled and wearing a baseball hat — swaggered to the door, and before the young girl could step out he squeezed her face in his dirty hand and pushed her inside. She sat down on the bed and wrung her hands as the man kicked the door shut.

Hernán had hung back as Ava and Steadman went forward, passing the other groups of men, the single seated women, and toward the far end of the row of cubicles, all of which were numbered — a cot and a mirror and a small cluttered table were visible through each door. The women here were older, potbellied, with slack breasts, pathetic, even ridiculous in bathing suits. They did not look depraved, they looked sullen and badly fed. The music rang against the tin roof and this end of the brothel had a bad smell.

The old black woman in the last cubicle wore a tutu and high-heeled shoes and a pink turban and sunglasses. As they approached, her phlegmatic expression became alert and attentive. She frowned when Steadman met her gaze, but realizing that her head did not follow him, he motioned silently, an onward gesture with his hand. Just then, the racket of harsh wailing beyond the window became shrill, like an animal fighting confinement.

“Number fourteen,” Ava said. “Other things.”

The staring woman in the pink turban heard her and said, “Soy Araña!’

They kept walking past her, past the partition to the window, where that agonized wailing was louder. Steadman looked down and saw a gutter running crimson, bubbling where it was slowed, frothing over the sides, into the dust — a stream of blood outside thickening the soil, losing its redness, making the mud blacker.

Through one of the grimy and blood-smeared windows of the large building just behind the brothel, Steadman saw a blindfolded cow being electrocuted, howling and collapsing on twisted legs as the electrodes of a black clamp were fixed to its head, the cow shitting in fear, expelling great dark muffins of dung. Another window showed a scene of butchery, two men hacking at a bloody animal carcass on a stone slab, and other windows gave onto sides of meat on hooks, men skinning cows, tearing carpets of hairy hide from fatty flesh, knives and cleavers flashing.

“Is the abattoir,” Hernán said, laughing at the absurdity of a slaughterhouse next to the whorehouse, the smells and noises mingled. “You want to see Las Flores. Is another burdel, but not so nice.”

Some people began to dance on the floor that was still wet from the boy’s mopping. But Ava and Steadman could not hear the music anymore, only the sounds of cows being slaughtered and the hacking of cleavers on slabs, the chucking sound of steel blades against thick bone and raw meat. Ava and Steadman backed away.

In the distance they saw Manfred in a stained T-shirt and sweat-plastered hair, watching them. He was carrying his beat-up bag, the weight of the big book showing in it. He turned and walked quickly past one of the girls, into her cubicle. She placed her cigarette in an ashtray beside her chair and followed him.

The black woman who called herself Araña was still sitting outside her cubicle. She cocked her head; her sullen look left her. She stood up and mocked them and, doing a little dance, spun slowly, wagging her bum at them, plucking at her buttocks.

“Buenos días. Que desean?” she said. And then, spittle forming on her lips, she said, “Sodomita” making the word like the name of a delicacy. She leaned toward them, but they had taken a few steps, so her head was canted wrong: her sunglasses faced in the direction of the slaughterhouse, where they had lingered and talked.

Ava said softly, “She’s blind.”

Araña beckoned. She opened her toothless mouth and stuck out her tongue and wagged the long pink thing at them. Then she laughed hard, louder than the dying animals. And she clutched herself and repeated the word: “Sodomita”

“Lo siento” Steadman said to her, and Ava murmured to Hernán, “No comprendo lo que dice.”