When her father turned the body over in order to extricate his daughter from the filthy mess, in the shaft of eerie moonlight he saw the face of his own brother Chato Doble grinning up at him, as though the whole affair was a huge joke.
"Chato Doble!" he cried out.
But the girl who was to be La Tarantula, she gave vent to a loud shriek.
The Tarantula had made its first strike.
CHAPTER TWO
When La Tarantula was twelve years old, her father took her to the dancing school of the great Don Jaime Otero, than whom there is no greater dancing teacher of the great Spanish and gypsy dances.
Everyone had told him that his daughter was wasting her time dancing in the low class cafetins and gypsy gatherings. She should be perfecting herself in the technique of the dance with the great Don Jaime Otero.
That was why he had taken her into the bu'ne section of Madrid and was leading her down the dark corridor that led into the patio where he had been told that Otero was teaching his class. The daughter, following her father dutifully, eyed her surroundings fearfully. Never before had she been away from home. And when she saw the rich surroundings, the vast patio with its plashing fountain, the green creepers on one wall, a great woven carpet on the opposite wall, she could not help but shrink within herself, for fear.
From the extreme end of the patio she heard the sound of music, guitar music. This made her less uneasy. Music always did that to her. It was as vital to her being as-the air she breathed. She felt the sinuous strain course into her bones. And her green eyes glittered. She smiled.
Don Jaime advanced to them when he saw them approaching. A class of young girls fell to the flagstones and rested. The two musicians stopped playing.
The father told the great man who he was and why he had come. Otero looked down at the young girl in tow. He saw a slim, slender slip of a girl. A wild mop of raven black hair topped her head. Green depthless eyes smouldered up at him. He looked down at her ankles. They were thinner than a man's wrist and as supple. He dropped to his knees and took the right one in his hands. It flexed like a sword of the best Toledo steel. He looked up at the girl.
"Will you dance for me?" he asked.
The girl looked up at her father. He nodded his head. "What shall my musicians play for you?" Otero asked.
"The Tango de la Flor, she dances best," the father suggested. Otero called the number out to the musicians. After a few experimental flourishes, they started off with the fast, sensuous music. Immediately, the moment the music started, the young girl became another person.
Her body stiffened. Her eyes grew wider. Her arms took on the lines of twin snakes and coiled and twined like live things. Slowly her torso undulated with the music the while her hips rolled in and out and around and her shoulder swayed rhythmically and her buttocks took on the motions of fornication. At times, she would stamp her little foot or snap her fingers or throw back her head so that her long hair dangled down her back in a dark shimmering wave.
"Marvellous!" Otero mumbled to himself.
"Delicious!" Senor Don Juan Gandulla, one of the guitarists, murmured, as he watched the thin dress of the young girl mould itself around her buttocks and in the cavity of her cunt.
But the other student girls frowned and one of them hissed.
Immediately, Otero leaped up, his eyes glaring balefully. "Who dared to hiss this marvellous dancer?" he roared.
None answered. And so, with an imperious sweep of his hand, he dismissed the class. "Begone until tomorrow. Today, I must do nothing but teach this little gypsy girl." He turned to the father.
"I must take this young child in hand!" he said.
"How much will it cost me?" the father faltered.
Otero looked down at the young girl. He saw the budding breasts under her bodice. He saw the gentle slope of her hips. He saw the finely etched nostrils blowing like a thoroughbred horse after a workout.
"It will cost you nothing!" he said. "I shall take her in hand personally. I shall teach her all that I, the great Don Jaime Otero, know about the Spanish dance. She shall live here with me where she shall be ever ready to be taught. And for all this, I shall pay you the sum of twenty pesetas."
The father looked dubiously at the child and then at the teacher. But he saw that the teacher was an old man, that there would be no reason for him to worry about the chastity of his daughter in this great man's home. Besides, the twenty pesetas would come in handy. And there was the widow woman, Maria, who was insisting that she was tired of living apart. She was demanding that he take her into his own home.
With the girl away, all would be perfect. She would be in good hands, she would be taught by the greatest teacher in Spain and, after she was taught, he could have her back again and she would dance for him in his old age.
He consented to Otero's suggestion.
And he crossed the Guadalquivir alone that night. But when he brought his widow woman to his bed the same night, and while he was fucking her, he did not know that at the same time his own daughter was lying in the bed of Senor Don Jaime Otero for the same purpose.
Here is what happened.
The girl danced all day for the master. By nightfall she was thoroughly tired from exertion. All day she had been forced to pirouette and twist, caper and twirl this way and that until she was almost on the verge of tears. Once she had rebelliously thrown herself to the grass-tufted flagstones of the patio and had refused to go on with the instructions.
But Otero had allowed her to rest there for half an hour. After that time, he gently approached her, took her arm and lifted her up again and continued where they had left off.
And all the while, Don Juan Gandulla, who was perspiring over his guitar, watched the girl craftily and, whenever her short dress swirled over her knees, his eyes would pop out with desire for what he saw. For she wore nothing at all under her dress.
That night, when her first lesson was completed, Don Jaime gave the girl over to his duena, Donna Clara, and she took her up to her bedroom on the second floor of the Otero residence. Never before had the little girl seen such splendour in a sleeping room. She approached the splendid silk paned bed and sat on it gingerly and imagined that she would be in heaven if she were to sleep in that. And she felt so tired, too.
But the old duena bade her peremptorily to take her dress off. And when she did so the old woman almost gasped with surprise when she saw the marvellous lines and form of the young girl. She stretched her out on a pallet and there rubbed her tired muscles with smooth sweetsmelling oils, massaging her body gently and working all of the sore tiredness out with her expert fingers. Then she bathed her from head to foot with orange waters and perfumed her hair and all the intimate parts of her body and then finally covered her with a sheer flimsy nightgown of Madeira lace.
All the while, the young girl wondered why she was getting so much attention. But she did not have to wonder long. For she had not been in that marvellously soft bed for fifteen minutes, the door had but scarcely been closed behind the portly old duena and her cheery buenos noches, when another door in the bedroom opened slowly and Senor Don Jaime Otero himself crept into the room and walked up to the bed. He saw the little perfectly formed body outlined under the exquisite silk of the counterpane. He sniffed the air and noted that the girl had been well perfumed as he had expressly ordered.
The girl saw him come closer to her bed. But she was unafraid. For, although her father had stringently kept her body from other marauders, after the unfortunate affair of her uncle Chato Doble, he had been unable to control her mind. All day and all night she dreamt of that marvellous sensation she had experienced when she had felt her uncle's prick poking into her innards and then that last great climax which had left her panting from exhaustion. Nothing in her life had ever happened to her like that. And sometimes, out of curiosity, she had taken a banana and had worked it slowly up into her hot little cunt, poking it in and out as she had remembered her uncle had done with his great big thing that hung down in front of him. And although she had experienced somewhat the same sensation, although she felt the pearly dew issue from her little hole, she still felt that there was something lacking. And so she would dream at night of the goodlooking young bu'ne. But this time, instead of dreaming that he only kissed her and fondled her intimates, she would dream that he dangled a great big thing like her uncle had done, and she would struggle and puff and pant and finally feel the wetness between her legs. And she would awake from the dream happy that she had come off but sad in the knowledge that she could not have a man to comfort her.