Excerpt
Chapter One
The air was getting thick -- if you like calling a garotte of diesel and greasy dirt "air" -- and so before the burning rain began I stepped into the McDonald's. But right away I caught sight of the grotesque troublemaker, the pitiful little fat person whose name was forever escaping me, Subtenente Whoever from Interpren, getting out of his black Czechoslovakian Skoda and standing there on the dark street with my fate in his bands . . . If I didn't go to bed with him again soon, he was going to lift my card.
The two soldiers leaning against the drinking fountain looked between me and the approachingSub-tenente with slow eyes that said they understood what was happening and were completely bored by it.
He came around anyway and stood outside the door and coughed.
"Senorita."
"Senorita," Sub-tenente Whoever said.
The Sub-tenente knocked on my door now. This seemed, all by itself, a slimy presumption. He cleared his throat ... Costa Rica was just across the border. But they would never let me out of this country.
"Senorita," he said through the door, "may you tell to me if you are intending to remain very long?"
"Senorita, if possible I will wait for you . .
Still I thought I could hold out a few seconds longer, hugging the wall -- drugged, like a little kid, by the taste of my own tears on my lips ...
"Senorita. Senorita. Senorita," said the Sub-tenente.
He said something to the soldiers outside and everybody laughed.
"Si. Si. Si," I said. I opened the door. "Sub-tenente Verga!" -- which wasn't his name, but "verga" means prick -- "It's so good to see you again!"
We were doing it on the couch tonight: it was either that or the rug . . . His clothes, civilian clothes, lay in a heap beside mine -- I'd never seen Sub-tenente Whoever in uniform. He was a spy, or something like that. I believe anybody who thought about it would have said he affected the goat-like Lenin look, but in truth his features were unshaped, they seemed to be materializing out of a bright fog, nothing more than a shining blank with shadows floating on it ... Even as he coasted back and forth above me with the lamp behind him, the oval of his face gave out a mysterious light, like the exit from a tunnel . . . "Are you looking at me," I asked him softly, but he was sighing and hiccuping too loudly to hear. I hoped he wouldn't go on long enough to make me sore. I started to worry that maybe I was too thin for him, it's a fact that I'm alwayseither too fat or too skinny, I can't seem to locate the mid-point. Not that the pleasure and comfort of an incompetent small-time official in a floundering greasy banana regime surmounts my every concern, but all men tend to grow innocent, wouldn't you agree, at the breast ... You can't help feeling a little something, if only a small sharp pity, as if you'd just stepped on a baby bird. The bird was going to die anyway, you only shortened its brainless misery . . . "Are you coming? Are you coming?" I was speaking Englisb. He probably didn't know what I was talking about ...