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As I leaned over to kiss her, I whispered in the Bolivian divorcée’s ear, my voice dripping with irony: “What a fine conquest, Julita.” She winked an eye and nodded slyly.
corpulent and august,
Red Antúnez, dripping with sweat and as red as a shrimp, was beaming with happiness.
Waiters in short white jackets and maids in coifs and aprons were receiving the guests and plying them, from the moment they entered the gate, with pisco sours, carob piscos, vodka and tropical fruit, glasses of whiskey or gin or flutes of champagne, and little cheese sticks, tiny potatoes with hot peppers, sour cherries stuffed with bacon, breaded shrimp, vol-au-vent, and all the tidbits dreamed up by the collective culinary genius of Lima to stimulate the appetite.
The turkey was so tender it melted in his mouth,
“Aren’t you ashamed to be sitting here with the old men? Come and dance, you idiot.”
“Chasing after cunt and assholing with queers.”
Camacho had held forth, dogmatically and eloquently, on the subject of the man in his fifties. The age at which his intellectual powers and his sensuality are at their peak, he had said, the age at which he has assimilated all his experiences. That age at which one is most desired by women and most feared by men.
She was wearing a blue dress and white shoes, and had a salon makeup job and hairdo; her laugh was hearty and spontaneous, her voice throaty, and the look in her eyes downright provocative. I discovered, somewhat belatedly, that she was an attractive woman.
Aunt Julia started to step away from me, I held her back and planted a kiss on her cheek, very close to her lips. She looked at me in astonishment, as though she’d witnessed a miracle.
walking through the feeble cone of light at the foot of a lamppost,
We shared certain of the classic traits of lovers—secretiveness, the fear of being discovered, the feeling we were taking great risks
Los Olvidados,
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one should behave like a gentleman when dealing with gentlemen and like a bastard when dealing with bastards. This was “honor rightly understood”: all the rest of it was errant nonsense.
she said, allowing herself to be kissed, but making no move to reciprocate,
Aunt Julia said, rubbing her nose, which as usual was ice-cold, against my cheek.
Why should those persons who used literature as an ornament or a pretext have any more right to be considered real writers than Pedro Camacho, who lived only to write? Because they had read (or at least knew that they should have read) Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, while Pedro Camacho was very nearly illiterate?
as we danced, my lips nuzzled her neck, my tongue stole into her mouth and sipped her saliva, I held her very close so as to feel her breasts, her belly, and her thighs, and then, back at the table, under cover of the darkness, I fondled her legs and breasts.
both of them were deliberately avoiding looking in our direction. It was all quite obvious: they’d seen me kissing Aunt Julia, they’d immediately guessed everything, and had opted for a diplomatic blindness.
they began to entertain the notion of eventually promoting him to the elevated status of son-in-law.
Because he was so quiet and melancholy, the young man seemed elegant to Don Sebastián.
besides being a virgin, had vim, vigor, and vitality, raven hair, and alabaster skin?
delectable flesh?
Despite the fact that her turgescent horizons and gelatinous jiggling when she walked ought to have alerted him to the danger,
Her reaction was spectacular and caricatural, like a double take in a film. She choked on her Coca-Cola, was overcome by a frankly overdone coughing fit, and her eyes filled with tears.
When I tried to force her teeth apart with my tongue, she resisted, but then she opened her mouth and I was able to enter it and taste her palate, her gums, her saliva. I felt Aunt Julia’s free arm creep around my neck, felt her huddle up close to me and begin to cry with sobs that shook her bosom. I consoled her in a voice that was an incoherent murmur, kissing her the while.
“Plants that don’t grow outside in a garden, amid flowers and insects, become sickly and produce blossoms whose scent is nauseating. This child’s gilded cage is making an imbecile of him.
When they were told that young Joaquín, their apathetic, monosyllabic offspring, was transformed into an energetic, garrulous creature the moment he put on soccer shoes, his parents were delighted.
They called her Virago, but Joaquín had never suspected that this adolescent with the sallow complexion, dressed in blue jeans and a ragged sweater, and wearing a pair of old house slippers, was a female. He discovered this fact erotically.
he discovered—stupefied, erogenized, ejaculating—that his adversary was a woman.
From that time on, she had sworn never again to give herself to a man and to live the rest of her life, for all practical purposes (except, alas, that of the production of spermatozoa?), as a male.
We leapt up from the bed, dazed and happy, and Aunt Julia, beet-red with embarrassment, straightened her clothes, as meantime, like a little boy, I closed my eyes and thought about abstract, respectable things—numbers, triangles, circles, my granny, my mama—to make my erection go away.
her origins: an ivory complexion, dark blue circles under her eyes, an arrogant chin, slender ankles.
In a superhuman effort to overcome the timidity that made him tongue-tied, Cristano Maravillas approached the girl and asked if he could help her water the flower garden.
And when the musicians took a break to have a smoke or a drink, the youngster reverently approached the guitars, stroked them very gently so as not to frighten them, strummed the six strings, and arpeggios were heard…
He was very thin, for (a convincing sign of an artistic nature, a slenderness characteristic of those who are inspired) he suffered from a chronic lack of appetite,
¿Cómo? Con amor, con amor, con amor ¿Qué haces? Llevo una flor, una flor, una flor ¿Donde? En el ojal, en el ojal, en el ojal ¿A quién? A María Portal, María Portal, María Portal…
(if this pedestrian athletic term is the proper one to describe a mission bearing the stamp of—the divine afflatus?)
A hothouse flower, ignorant of the lubricious mysteries of the pollen of the fields, Fátima had acquired a conscience, feelings, grown from childhood to adolescence to adulthood in the aseptic world of the convent, surrounded by old women.
It was a gray day, the fog turned all the people and all the buildings into ghostly apparitions, and the air was so damp we felt as though we were breathing water.
I hadn’t seen her for nearly a year, and though her face was swollen with weeping, I found her prettier and younger-looking than ever.
And my granny, after hugging and kissing me repeatedly, said in my ear in a half whisper so my mother wouldn’t hear, with a sort of mischievous complicity: “And what about Julita—is she all right?”
I’d been having a fit of allergic sneezing for three hours as I dove into syrupy horrors, trying to put together a few serials as though they were jigsaw puzzles, when the door of the cubbyhole opened and Javier walked in.
as he contaminated the atmosphere of the little room with his lustful, seminal intensity,
