Almost Never: A Novel Read Free

dousing, you had to stand under the water for a long time and thoroughly soap yourself, a privilege for which, Demetrio told her, he would be willing to pay an additional fee. Money for Mireya, secretly—really? and she agreed with a smile.
    This mischief, nonetheless, carried a slight risk. Mireya’s argument for compliance stressed that the arrangement would end when someone of ill will informed Madam of what they’d chanced to see. An improbable peril, for lovers could always choose to screw under the shower. We mustn’t forget that the madam was an odd bird, piling ploy upon ploy: shadows within shadows. True, there’d been no hitches on any of the previous days, no undue attention paid. Though Mireya had a surprise for Demetrio on his tenth visit. She blurted it out with dread, fearing that something so beautiful would end ugly and sad.
    One might harbor hopes for good tidings in the wake of that ominous periphrasis “I have something to tell you.” Only trembling and silence, however, followed. Mireya looked down at the ground: the rug crisscrossed with arbitrary lines must have given her an idea: a hint of caution: then—what?—and she muttered an utterance and then one more, and a third that barely made sense at all. In the face of such dread, Demetrio turned to his most vulgar memories from their numerous copulations, including a sequence of voluptuous insults that rose spontaneously from the depth of his soul, verbal sputum such as (we will quote but three): While I’m pounding you with my cock, I want to stick my left index finger up your ass …; Give it to me, baby!; or: I want you to be even more of a whore than you were yesterday; I want you to scratch my balls. But what I really want is for you to understand me. Sexual depravity could go even further: diabolical sex; sexual impudence, a subsequent outburst, but the nature of these statements already indicated the rarefied terror to come.
    Such folly deserves a long hiss from decent folk, theoretically and otherwise, though not from Mireya, for whom a string of such phrases must sound perfectly harmless, poor gentleman, dear me, it wasn’t as if after his outbursts he’d threatened to kill her with a paring knife, not in a million years, just lust, gushing, and nearly idyllic pleasure. In the end, his behavior was quite original and not wholly beyond the pale, so, returning to “I have something to tell you,” let’s get right to the words that ensued: she and her calculations: her somewhat fearful ahem s. At issue was a new command from Madam, one that redounded to her benefit: from now on Demetrio would have to pay an additional fee for each lay, for the simple reason that no prostitute could be reserved for anybody’s exclusive use; if he visited the brothel on a daily basis he would be obliged to sleep with others.
    Ouch. Capricious, given his steady patronage. Such unhealthy devotion was causing universal unease at the Presunción: this was the first time in its history a client had come to sin as punctually as he went, with intrepid daily devotion, to his job…. His needs, oh yes—but why with Mireya, when there were much hotter ones to be had? He’d fallen in love, by an arrow pierced: a catastrophe. This was a business, not a marriage agency: hence the extra fee: let’s see: five pesos the first day; the second, five additional pesos; the third, five more, and that makes fifteen; by the fourth, it was already twenty; the fifth, twenty-five; the sixth, thirty, and—enough already! because the seventh: remember he took a rest? The thing was, by letting one day pass, just one! he effected a return to the reasonable price of five pesos. Great idea. Ouch. A whim. He had no choice! Precise disclosure of the facts accompanied by a lowered head and a tied tongue. Demetrio considered it unfair, this madcap lack of proportion, and decided he would face down the madam that very day: I’ll give her a piece of my mind when I go to pay her. I