Adios Muchachos Read online

  The brightest retort Cosme could muster was a chuckle and, “Do you want to do it right now, in the water?”

  “No, we’ll do that later. I think I’d rather begin over here … Come on over, silly.”

  Alicia sat with her legs spread wide and placed a small stool between them. Cosme got out of the water gracefully, years of training as a dancer taking control of the otherwise very inept young man. It wasn’t that he was a virgin or anything like that, but he had always had other dancers, the girls in the neighborhood and the usual fare that was par for the course. He was totally unprepared for this surprise encounter with an immensely rich blonde who sounded Cuban but evidently had to be a foreigner.

  As he approached, Alicia shed the little cape, which no longer played any useful role, and beckoned to him with one index finger, pointing to the stool with the other. Standing before her, waiting for the next cue, he felt her hands tugging at his thong and tapping his legs for him to lift his feet.

  Alicia expressed admiration of his endowment with a pronounced arching of her eyebrows and an exclamation from the bottom of her soul: “Oh, my God, it’s beautiful … Come here and have a seat like a good little boy.”

  The action by the pond was beginning to drive Victor and Elizabeth crazy. They absorbed every murmur, every sigh, the subtle sounds of flesh on flesh, growing more and more excited. Becoming one with the players, they twisted a little this way and a little that way, panting, gasping, biting each other, pain and pleasure blending, flowing and blending …

  “Oh, Vic, will you look at that.” Elizabeth’s voice had descended to a husky whisper of urgent lust.

  Just then the telephone in the pond room rang.

  “That must be the sculptor; he said he was going to call.”

  “Oh, please don’t stop; please let it ring.”

  “You’re so impulsive; watch out that you don’t have a heart attack.” Alicia reached for the telephone. “Jorge? Oh, you’re a dear … Yes, I love it. It’s beautiful. What did you use to make it so shiny? Vaseline? … For me? … Well aren’t you a horny little pig? … Yes, I’m alone.” She winked up at Cosme and alternated between kisses and chatter on the phone. “Well, I’m not exactly eating, but it’s similar. Bet you can’t guess …”

  On the other side of the mirror, Elizabeth was imitating every one of Alicia’s moves, and Victor, spread-eagled and practically falling off the couch, just let her do her thing as Alicia’s telephone dialogue drove him further up the wall.

  “No, baby, it’s not candy. In fact, it’s a little salty.”

  In his ecstasy, Cosme completely missed the joke.

  “Yeees, very nutritious … I don’t think I could live without this … Warmer, warmer … The shape? Well, it’s like a hotdog, but bigger … and fatter … That’s it. Congratulations! You won the Teddy bear … I’ll say; it’s delicious! Now, that was none of your business … Ciao.”

  Alicia broke the connection, laughing in unison with her soul mate, the faun. Looking up at Cosme, she noticed that his eyes were already disappearing into the back of his head.

  “Not now! Wait a little,” she said, backing away from him. Alicia then began to caress the macrocephalic shaft on the mischievous faun.

  Transfixed by this latest madness of Alicia’s, the three spectators followed the steady oscillations of the thin white hand with the emerald ring. All three felt the nimble playing of those restless fingers on themselves.

  Hunched over on his thighs, Cosme caressed Alicia’s breasts, watching her hands in the mirror before them.

  Working the unctuous member of the faun with one hand, Alicia signaled to Cosme to move to the couch in front of her. He sat on the couch and spread his legs in anticipation, hoping that this was what she had in mind. Alicia got down on all fours and, continuing her work with the faun, let her lips begin to play around the tip of Cosme’s erection.

  Cosme helped her out of the thong she had kept on to increase his anticipation. Her magnificent blushing ass contrasted with the dark tones of the carven image of the faun.

  Between kisses and nibbles, Alicia bit her lips, sighed, turned her eyes. There was nothing false about her performance. She was a genuine artist, one who enjoyed and suffered every instant of creation. This was a woman for whom sex was not a profession, but a divine vocation, a celestial calling, her manifest destiny.

  She now ran the tip of his phallus over her eyes and her brow. She smelled it and licked it like some luscious tropical fruit yearning to give up its nectar. Never breaking the rhythm of her hand on the faun, Alicia added a general swaying of her whole body, and as her lips slid along the long and the thick, up and down on Cosme, she flexed her body, raising her butt to bring it into contact with the erect faun. Still kissing Cosme, she pushed back the tiniest bit with every sway, dilating herself methodically with little twists against the tip of the anxious anointed phallus of the faun. And five minutes later, ecstatically impaled by the laughing faun, her hips moved in the tight rotation she had so often tried to teach Victor, who was now fearing he would not be able to wait for Elizabeth: “Oh, god, I know I’m going to die if I don’t come soon. She’s crazy.”

  And there was Elizabeth saying she wanted a faun just like that one; and when Victor saw Alicia turn her hind quarters toward Cosme and take him in, replacing the faun, he could no longer control himself and exploded with an orgasm that Elizabeth received with cries of pure joy. “Yes! yees!! yeees!!! yeeeeeeees!!!! yeeeeeeeeeees!!!!! Oh, come, come Vic, come my darling, now Vic, noooow, yeeesssssss, ohhhhhhhhhhh, ohhhhh, ohhh, ohh, oh …”

  In his final orgiastic convulsions, Victor ripped off the thousand-dollar wig with the braids and ivory beads, revealing the contrast of the golden mulatto body makeup with the white freckled skin of Elizabeth’s bald head.

  Even with the dark make-up, Hendryck Groote had not been able to cover the birthmark behind his ear.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Three

  Alicia’s performance was finally over. Elizabeth returned to the living room in her role as lady-in-love, wearing her usual sweet smile—although the smile was a lot closer to dumb than to sweet because after eight martinis, the last four of which she had wolfed down like a lush slapping back bourbons, she no longer had much control over her facial muscles.

  Rieks Groote and Elizabeth were two completely independent people who lived in worlds far apart. In their relations with Victor, each had their own style and never crossed the dividing line. Their conversations were different, their roles were different, and one world never entered into the other. When Rieks was with Victor, he never mentioned Elizabeth, and Elizabeth acted like Rieks did not exist at all. Victor and Rieks talked or argued about business, never about anything else. Elizabeth and Victor also had their spats, but never about business and only when Elizabeth had a sporadic bout of jealousy. Whenever she felt her confidence waning or got to doubting the sincerity of his affection, she would attack Victor on any pretext.

  Victor was fascinated by his talent for keeping up the two personalities so convincingly; they were so coherent and so completely distinct. And yet, in the month of September, when the dispute about the commissions introduced a great divide between Victor and Rieks, relations between Victor and Elizabeth also suffered.

  They had gone for almost a month without seeing each other, but twenty days before enjoying Alicia’s contortive machinations with her two fauns, Rieks had called Victor to his office and informed him that van Dongen had run a thorough analysis of the entire operation and that the report had convinced him that Victor’s demands were entirely fair. He wanted him to know that he was leaving that very afternoon for Holland, armed with the iron-clad justifications delineated in the van Dongen report, to have it out with his brother in the presence of the Board.

  A few days later, Rieks returned and announced that all his demands had been accepted and that the legal papers to that effect would be ready for signing by the end of January. Victor thanked him sincerely for
the intervention in his favor and felt an immediate need to meet with Elizabeth and make her very happy. That same afternoon, he left her a note at her house.

  As a rule and as far as rules go, Victor was straight; he did not feel physically attracted to Elizabeth. But when she got herself up in those provocative dresses, with her exotic perfumes and other hidden charms, well, she was able to stimulate him. She would start him slow and then, in the dark, when the moment of truth arrived, Victor responded like a real man, experiencing supreme satisfaction inside of Elizabeth.

  When Alicia came on the scene, things got even easier. Their sexual relations became something they both awaited with great anticipation. They would conspire and speculate like young lovers about what that crazy girl would think up next. Because Alicia was priceless. She had brought mystery and expectation to their strained relations. She was imaginative, creative, a genius at improvising; she drove Victor and Elizabeth into erotic frenzies. Sometimes she would make fun of her lovers. Once she threw a bowl full of Sicilian olives on the floor and told her lover that he should try to pick them up with his buttocks; as many as he managed to pick up, that many minutes she would prolong her fellatio on him. Elizabeth laughed like a child and begged Victor to do the same.

  From the moment Alicia appeared on the scene, Elizabeth no longer had to start her overtures from zero. As soon as Alicia came on stage and Elizabeth appeared in her attire, Victor was ready, magnificently tumescent. Elizabeth began to feel like a beautiful and sexy woman; her attraction to and confidence in Victor swelled. When she closed her eyes, she could almost return to her adolescence, those years of yearning when she dreamed of being in the arms of someone like Mel Gibson.

  From the room that doubled as a theater loge during Alicia’s performances, they could still see the scene of her latest exploits. Alicia and her wonderful dancer had left some time ago. Of that evening’s prodigious sexual ministrations, only the faun remained … smiling.

  Elizabeth closed the armoire and ran the curtains, humming something under her breath. She poured herself another martini, prepared a whiskey on the rocks for Victor, and proposed a toast: “To us!”

  They stood, touched glasses, and drank.

  Victor rolled the couch back to its usual place in the middle of the room and collapsed onto it. He was wearing only shorts and, despite the air conditioning, felt warm.

  Half an hour and two martinis later, Elizabeth’s tongue was heavier than ever, and her mastery of high-heel shoes had gone the way of her tongue. She kept chewing on a strand of hair, making it even harder to understand what she was trying to say.

  Victor was feeling no pain, flying low, but he was hardly drunk, and when he saw her gulp down another martini, he gently took it from her and set it on the table. “That’s enough, Elizabeth, even you must realize that you’ve already had too much to—”

  “If I were as drunk as you think,” she interrupted, obviously quite drunk and defiantly set on proving otherwise, “do you think I could do this?” She started to whirl like a dervish on a single heel with her arms spread, but suddenly lost her balance and collided against Victor, who held her up by the waist.

  “Let’s go to bed, Elizabeth; you’re very drunk.”

  “Youuuu are drunk, amigo … now let’s see if you can do this one.” She attempted to make a four—that is, to stand on one leg, arms spread out wide, and cross the opposite ankle over the knee—but she fell over sideways.

  Victor let out a mocking laugh and sprang up from the couch to show her how to do a four. Elizabeth pushed him back down and leaped on top of him, pretending to be furious and on the attack, and finally wound up laughing along with him, biting him, kissing him until they collapsed on the floor in a heap of twisted bodies. They stayed that way for a few minutes until their laughter died down.

  Sitting on the floor in the lotus position, Elizabeth took an olive from the lower shelf of the liquor cart. “Now, you look at me! I’ll show you who’s the drunk.”

  And with the olive between her index finger and thumb she closed one eye, took aim, and attempted a three-pointer into an empty narrow-neck vase standing about five yards away. To her immense surprise, she made the basket. She lunged up from the couch and started a tottering victory dance amid cheers and whistles. Then she took the dish of olives and put them up against Victor’s nose, exclaiming, “Go ahead, my drunky wunky, let’s see what you can do!”

  Victor took an olive halfheartedly, shot, and watched the olive role under the nearest table.

  Elizabeth’s mocking laughter rang through the room and Victor took another shot, then a third, none of which found their mark.

  Elizabeth was enjoying his defeat so much. She whistled; she jeered; she shot him a bird and a Bronx cheer.

  For his fourth attempt, Victor went through a grotesque reproduction of the whole routine he had so often seen in professional basketball. He took the olive with both hands, pressed it to his chest, lifted his head to measure his distance. Then he breathed deeply, got his concentration, and propped his elbow on the palm of his left hand. With a neat break of the wrist, he catapulted the olive in a high arching shot that missed the vase by a wide margin.

  This time Elizabeth went absolutely wild. She whistled; she jumped; she ran from one end of the room to the other doing everything fans do when the other team misses a free throw.

  On the last of her comic dashes, Elizabeth slipped on one of the olives and, unable to regain her balance in the spiked heels, fell backward against the nearest of the planters. One of the lanceolate tips of the ornamental iron work around the border of the planter found its way to the base of her occipital bone, penetrating into the rachis bulb.

  Instant death.

  Elizabeth lay on her back, her head at almost a right angle with her chest, framed in greenery streaked with sprays of Alpinia Purpurata. With her wig slightly askew and the exaggerated make-up, she looked like a forgotten mannequin. But her darkened skin, surrounded with highlights of intense scarlet from the Alpinia framing her face, was already beginning to take on the ghastly green hue of a cadaver.

  The pit of the olive of destiny had etched a perfectly straight line on the waxed parquet floor.

  1996

  SCRIPT AND PROPS FOR A MOVIE WITH A HAPPY ENDING

  Chapter

  Twenty-Four

  Alicia was fast asleep. The telephone rang several times before it managed to wake her up. It stopped ringing. She covered her eyes with a pillow to block the harsh ceiling light.

  Margarita came through the door and tapped her on the shoulder. Alicia mumbled something and turned over.

  “Wake up, child! Victor has been trying to reach you.”

  “What time is it? What does he want?”

  “It’s 4:30. Go ahead, take the phone. He says it’s urgent.”

  Alicia took the phone and plopped it on her ear. “What? … Do you know what time it is? I’m completely asleep, forcrisake!” Alicia propped herself up on her elbows and suddenly looked very awake and interested. “Your wife? … OK, I’ll throw something on and leave immediately.”

  She hung up the telephone and only then realized that Margarita had been standing by the bed all that time, wringing her hands and waiting for some explanation of what could possibly be so urgent. Alicia just looked at her, pensive and in a terrible mood.

  “Is anything wrong, Ali?”

  “It looks like Victor’s wife has had an accident …”

  “What happened to her?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “So what do you have to …”

  “What do I know, Mother? If he’s asking for my help …” she trailed off, shrugging her shoulders and considering the question-and-answer period over.

  Alicia leaped from the bed. Margarita watched her nude daughter walk toward the bathroom in her short, smooth finishing-school stride.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Five

  An ashtray full of half-smoked butts; Groote’s body covered wit
h a silk sheet; a gilt mantle clock telling the world the time was 05:15.

  Victor heard the sound of the automatic gate, crossed the living room, peeked through the blinds, and identified Alicia’s white convertible coming up the driveway through the garden and toward the garage. Victor triggered the garage door from the inside; he had already moved his own car into the backyard to make room for Alicia’s. As he accompanied her through the kitchen into the living room, he tried to prepare her for the shock.

  “Something terrible has happened,” Victor began in a low, unsteady voice.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Well, more or less,” Victor hedged.

  “More or less? What kind of an answer is that?”

  Alicia had never been in this house. They passed right through to a living room almost as large as the one in the adjoining house. The first thing Alicia looked for in the room was the silvered side of the great screen. The wall where it was supposed to be was completely covered by plush red curtains. She had not noticed the body lying against the planter behind the sofa on the opposite end of the room.

  Alicia turned to confront Victor. “So? Out with it! What’s going on?”

  Victor took her by the hand, led her around one end of the sofa, and pointed to the lump on the floor under the sheet.

  Alicia stopped in her tracks and muted a tiny scream with her hands cupped over her mouth.

  Victor walked right up to the lump and pulled back the sheet so that Alicia could see the body. Her head pinned on the lance tip, the woman’s hair was splayed out in a fan shape.

  “A mulatto woman? Is she dead?”

  Victor nodded.

  Alicia could feel the skin on her temples tightening. Victor pointed between the open legs of the body to the trail of the slip that had taken her life; two meters away, in a straight line from the body, was the crushed olive, and strewn around the room were several more uncrushed olives.