It was early in the evening, and he realized he had ten days of summer vacation left. The sun was starting to set behind the estuary. Time always seemed frozen at that hour, and it transformed the entire town, making it appear submerged in an orange and pink liquid, and then a bluish, vacation-like one. No one had anywhere to be. The day’s heat was dying down, and a comfortable breeze cleansed the air; everything was light. The girls started putting beach wraps and skirts on over their worn-out bikinis.
“You should come to the fair tonight. It just started.”
“We might.” (Tejas)
“Like you have anything better to do,” one of them joked (he’d already forgotten all of their names).
“What do you know?”
“And bring him, OK?”
That time, when he turned, he was being devoured by a pair of brown eyes as hard as marbles.
“If he wants to come, you mean.”
“Right, if he wants to come,” the same voice replied suggestively, but he’d already stopped looking at her. Later, getting ready to go to the fair, before he left the house, he couldn’t even remember her face, no matter how titillating the impression she’d made was. He felt he’d behaved timidly, like he hadn’t even responded, and he hated himself for it, but her voice was like an image, rippling through him.
“Where are you off to?” (Mamá)
“The fair.”
“With the kids from the club?”
“Yeah.”
Later at the fair he’d end up unintentionally bumping into them — the kids from the club — but first it was all bright lights. The world at the fair always seemed cagey. Or sad, maybe. All his life, every year, he’d looked forward to the fair as if it were one of the summer’s great events, but now, for the first time, it struck him as exceptionally disappointing, melancholy almost. When he walked in, there weren’t many people yet; it was early still — the time for families, fussy children, carnival giants with oversized heads, for the raffling off of dried-out hams. Preposteroussized dolls gazed down from above, noosed and strangled, their eyes gleefully neurotic. As a kid, he’d come many times with his father to the parking lot where the fair was held every year, and every year he’d been proud to walk in with him, jittery with excitement, as though traveling a luminous highway that bisected the middle of a small, dusty town. His father would talk about how it had been when he was young, or he’d bump into a childhood friend who’d comment on how much the two of them resembled one another, and he’d feel honored and enigmatic. His father would tell whoever it was that he was a good kid. That first fair, though, the one from the early days, seemed to have been switched off, and it was no longer a luminous highway but a thinly lit stream, slightly asphyxiating — the charcoal-grilled seafood had a burned smell, and its thick smoke was off-putting; the music was way too loud and awful; from time to time, in little rainbows of light, there appeared the faces of overexcited children having tantrums as they got off rides. Pablo, Marcos, Tejas, and Rivero were already there with the girls. He’d never seen them dressed up for a night out before. The girls were wearing miniskirts or gaudily bright, tight pants; the boys wore black, as though they’d purposely coordinated, and they were in high spirits. He approached them with a condescending air, as though just playing along with some kid’s joke; it was as if on that of all nights he wanted to be different from them, and he didn’t know why. They drank and took meth. His joy was genuine and categorical, and he danced with one of the girls, acting silly, playing the fool, until he felt her hands on his crotch as he turned. Ten fingers like ten bony, black twigs on his zipper. She wasn’t all that ugly, he thought. She had very thin lips with reddish, almost ocher-colored lipstick and round, brown, childlike eyes. Her tan stopped abruptly, and a white shadow glowed on her shoulder. Which one was she? Frani? Duli? Moni? By that stage, he was too embarrassed to ask.
“So, I guess this means you’re happy to see me,” she joked.
“Yes.”
Thirty minutes later they were a quarter of a mile from the fair, off in the dunes, in the dark. The sand made their steps clumsy, like those of two astronauts abandoned on a dark planet. The girl’s saliva had a strong, fruity taste, as though she’d been drinking perfume; he worried that his near-total lack of experience would be obvious. Each time he kissed her, he felt both excited and a little bit disgusted; her tongue was rough and much larger than her tiny mouth would ever have led him to suspect. When he took off her T-shirt, he saw the whiteness of her two pitiful little breasts, a pair of crosscut lemons with pointy black nipples on top and three hairs sticking out. He licked them. She broke into a fit of laughter. The air looked full of tiny, floating particles. It struck him that she was ashamed of those hairs, and her shame was the one thing about her that moved him that night, perhaps because it was the one thing they had in common. The sea glimmered in the distance, a grayish light, and from time to time the crashing of waves could be heard, like crackling plastic followed by a whispery effervescence. He thought he could summon up his courage now, he could say it now. He leaned closer, but on doing so felt like his face gave him away, like without intending to, he looked somehow pathetic. How can she even like me? he wondered in shock. And then, almost by accident, he said it.
“Will you suck my dick?”
Her face was like a bright landscape suddenly darkened by the shadow of a lone cloud. She went very serious, tugged her shirt back down.
“I liked you better before,” she said, doing up her bra beneath her T-shirt.
And then, after a silence, “I’ll do you if you do me first.”
“Do what?”
“Are you an idiot or do you just act like it?”
Curiosity curbed shame and disgust. His almost complete ignorance of what was before him, right there and then, aroused a strange, biological urge as he watched her sit on the trunk of a pine tree, pull up her miniskirt, and remove her panties. He could hardly see a thing in the murky shadows of the dunes until she was very close, and then the sight of her thing transfixed him. She had a mole on a fold of skin by her crotch, and her hair was waxed into what looked like Nefertiti’s crown, and there was a small tattoo there — a star.
“Is that a tattoo?” he asked, as though striking up a friendly conversation, as though it were a baby in a crib and he were inquiring boy or girl?
“Yes, it’s a tattoo.”
She sounded annoyed, so he decided not to ask anything else. He put his tongue on her thing. He brushed it with pursed lips, not knowing how exactly to move, or not move, and the smell and taste were too new for him to know whether he liked or disliked it. He was leaning toward dislike, but wavering, as though sampling an expensive delicacy for the first time, one that some relative had brought from a far-off land where everyone thought it was just exquisite. He was enthralled, though more by the contemplation of her leg muscles tensing, her buttocks clenching, each movement of his lips and tongue producing an immediate response in a body part whose workings he couldn’t quite comprehend, yet could in some way intuit. After a few seconds, he felt as though he were conducting a science experiment — felt curious rather than excited, almost — but then suddenly, from one moment to the next, the girl clenched his head between her thighs and pulled his hair, gave a little shriek and then quickly pushed his head away.