A young American travels into Latin America to escape his past and begin anew, only to discover he cannot escape himself.
Excerpt
Chapter 21
A few days later he figures, what the Hell. The whole idea of waiting for fifteen is ridiculous. It will be just as sick and wrong, if it is sick and wrong, three days before or three days after she turns fifteen. In a different time, in a different culture, for a different man, there would have been a custom that forbid it or a rite to condone it. But now, for Paul, there is only his own raw lust driving him.
They go together. He is now beyond worrying about being seen, just as he is beyond worrying about teaching hung over or even drunk or calling his worst students names and making Ingrid cry when he suggested she would earn a C in his class when she grew a brain.
They go together, arm in arm. She was excited when they planned it. Now she quivers and Paul knows she is afraid, knows she is having second thoughts. She is unnerved by the voices of the dead as they stroll down Third Avenue. Laughter bubbles out of Paul, disconcerting her even more. He laughs like the strange men in movies who take women to dark places and kill them.
The Hotel San Pedro is cheap and asks no questions, just as it has never asked questions when Paul comes with the schoolboy. The stairs reek of garbage, just as the streets do, as if there were no demarcation between the streets and the entrails of this carcass of a building where the least-discussed functions of the city occur. The room is spare and tidy, in that there is so little inside it that it would be almost impossible to disorder its contents. The smell is not forceful but is certainly there and it briefly repulses Maria. Paul nearly shoves her in, then calms her by stroking her smooth, brown cheek, running one finger down the tendril of hair in front of her ear.
The door is shut and she hugs him fiercely, not from passion but from fear. She has never been in a place like this. Her family came poor from the mountains but to be poor in the mountains is different than poverty in the city. One can be human and poor in the mountains. Here, they are all animals.
Paul opens the window. The universe is giving birth to itself outside. The noise disguises the creak of the bed when Maria sits down on it. Paul instructs her to take her clothes off in a voice that is lost amid the birth pangs of hot, expanding creation. She does so slowly but clumsily. She has done things with him but never this. He sees hesitation in her face. She will not do it on her own. She stops.
He pulls her shirt off her as if she is too young to clothe or undress herself. She neither hinders nor aids the process. At certain intervals he stops and kisses her, touches her, whispers unintelligible things in her ears.
Suddenly the power is in him. A few moments earlier he was doing it because he had planned it, as if he were keeping an obligation with someone else. Now he burns inside not with passion but with the same unspeakable heat of the new cosmos whirling about him and investing his flesh. Power. Power is in action and the power is his when he takes it from her.
Maria is not unaffected by this. She is obviously confused but willing now. The transitory heat of creation flames lick at her flesh and the desire sinks into her.
Paul finishes quickly, ignoring her cries. This is not an experience to be enjoyed. True pleasure will come later. This is a ceremony to be performed, to get out of the way.
An hour later he is planning. He must get her on the pill. Not simply to do it again, but to make her do it, to force her to. To make her facilitate it. But he does not bring it up now. Now she quivers like a rabbit and clings to him.
There’s no way back now, Paul thinks smugly. He sleeps dreamlessly for an hour. Then they dress and go. She is limping a little as they walk out and he sees a man smile as they walk past. Paul looks out at the streets and the decrepit buildings around them and loves this city, this world. He is free here.
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Copyright 2008 Robert Paxton. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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