Out of the window, in through the door. Handsome Bustamante was one of those cheeky, thieving womanizers who’re often up to their necks in fraud and filth, on the downhill slope to death. “See if you learn from me, Goyo, I’m a dab hand at doing it slowly — one hand on Paula’s tits and the other on Tina’s oyster,” and he started laughing at his own joke as if his teeth would fall out they were so chuffed. Worst of all, it was true. He was really good-looking and fantastically agile. There you see the lunacy of Providence, some are born under an unlucky star, yet others come with a halo of the most luscious of dames, handsome, arrogant, and pampered like a fairy prince on a honeymoon far from the catastrophe.
Handsome Bustamante, so simple, supple, womanizing, and gorgeous, arrived as Gelo de los Ángeles’s replacement on the trapeze, and while he was at it, he switched on a torrent of lust in the empty reservoir of the Stéfano circus. In a flash he laid any living flesh and still didn’t find enough candidates to satisfy his wayward lusts. I don’t know why he took to me, but the fact is I performed as the flag-bearer for his horny quests, scouting for his whims wherever we holed up, in the villages, steppes, or wastelands of Spain. There existed no place where I couldn’t sniff out a brothel, the red light of a bordello, or the provincial reserve of a cat house concealed on the third floor, left-hand side of a mansion, with honor and gas in each room, but no lift. “Goyo, you don’t disgust me, you make me lucky,” the bastard would say, stroking my neck as if I were an animal he was fond of or felt sorry for. Although he didn’t come with wings, he flew on the trapeze better than Gelo de los Ángeles, which was all to the good when it came to settling up with pudgy Di Battista. He coaxed Doris through the air with the Herculean strength of his hands and inspired her to try leaps, pirouettes, and corkscrews she’d never before attempted in the roof of the big top, quite self-confident with the precision afforded by her healthy new partner. At the end of their act, just like Gelo, Bustamante slid down the rope to the ring, where he’d give Doris the shivers with the black caress of his cloak as if it were the nocturnal garb of a vampire, the kind whose blood burns in eternal fire. The spectacle of that embrace was breathtaking, and, oblivious to any skullduggery, the audience clapped like crazy, as it was. The fleshy tentacles of his hands gripped the sides of her breasts till her eyelids fluttered, flirtatious and feminine, with a rush of adrenalin, and now and then even produced a gleaming bead of desire. If it was wondrous to watch them swirling through the air, it was even tastier to peer at them behind the mask of that embrace, a couple of Lucifers, or beasts from hell, slavering over each other’s bodies for the pure thrill of it. I saw the dampness welling in the forks of their thighs and was distraught by all that frenzy that didn’t involve me, simply out of envy and the desire to penetrate, once and for all, soft female places. Longing is longing and a void is a void, so it is written, and one can do nothing to overturn the enigmas of Providence. I can hardly invoke the ruins of my flesh, but I know what it’s like to struggle up a steep slope. Nonetheless, over the years I’ve done things to open up the doors of desire so I can pleasure my whims: I’ve reduced life to merchandise. Now I buy everything, I sell everything, and, apart from giving worldly prestige, it sedates.
Handsome Bustamante tapped me on the neck, and I licked his hand with the tip of my tongue, at the ready like a docile dog. I counted more than a thousand fucks before I gave up. All full on, all satisfactory. I sometimes felt like sidling over to Mandarino to find his kind of consolation, but he gave off such a stench and his horniness was so sui generis I didn’t try him once.