The Lover My Mother Found in That Shop

I never knew how much damage a book could do until I saw my mother close that novel with trembling hands, as if something inside her had awakened without asking permission.

It was titled “The Thirst of the Desert,” by some Eduardo Salinas, and it told the story of a European woman who let herself be bent to a man who had come from the other side of the sea. My mother, Beatriz, read it three times that winter. Each time she closed it more slowly.

I don’t blame the writer entirely, though for years I spoke his name with resentment. He only put the words on the page. It was my mother who chose to read them as if they were speaking to her.

I have to explain something about Beatriz so what came after will make sense. She was the most devout woman in the Pinar neighborhood. Mass every Sunday, rosary on Tuesdays, first to volunteer whenever St. Christopher’s parish organized anything. My father, Joaquín, adored her with that quiet devotion of men who don’t know how to say I love you and say it by fixing the kitchen tap instead.

And she was beautiful. I say it without shame because it was a fact of the neighborhood, something everyone knew and no one named. A blond mane that didn’t come from any bottle, big blue eyes, a way of walking that pulled the fabric of her dresses tight without her seeming to notice. Men turned to look. She lowered her gaze and quickened her step.

***

The foreigner arrived in the neighborhood one spring, with only the clothes on his back and a battered duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Darian, his name was, though hardly anyone used it. To everyone he was “the bazaar man.”

In less than two months, the man who had appeared with nothing rented the large corner place on Avenida de los Tilos and set up The Leather Bazaar: handbags, suitcases, belts, wallets that smelled of animal and dye. The women of the neighborhood went in to look at the season’s handbag and came out flushed, squeezing their thighs together without really knowing why.

I knew why, or I was starting to guess. Darian treated them all with the same calm arrogance, as if doing them a favor just by looking at them. He didn’t flatter. He didn’t smile too much. He said what he thought with a certainty that would have sounded rude in anyone else and in him sounded like a verdict. And for some reason I didn’t understand then, that made them wet.

He was a big man. Six-foot-three, broad shoulders, huge hands. He wasn’t handsome in the neighborhood sense, but he occupied space in a way that forced you to look at him. Like an animal that doesn’t need to prove it’s dangerous, I thought once, and was frightened that I had thought it.

My coworker Tomás hated him without ever having exchanged more than three sentences with him. He said people like that came here to take everything. I nodded to avoid an argument, but inside I suspected what Tomás really hated was how easily a stranger got what he himself had spent half his life begging for: to be looked at, and for women to wonder on their own what he’d be like in bed.

***

The first time I understood that Darian had noticed my mother was a Sunday, on the way back from Mass. Beatriz was walking a couple of steps ahead of my father, and I brought up the rear, lagging as always.

He was standing at the bazaar door with two acquaintances. When my mother passed, the three of them went silent, and that silence was more obscene than any whistle. Beatriz noticed. She moved toward the curb, uncomfortable, and that small gesture was enough for my father to step up, take her by the waist, and keep walking without looking back.

As I passed by, I heard Darian say to them in slow, deliberate Spanish:

—That woman is going to walk into my shop one day. And she’s going to come in alone. And she’s going to leave with my milk running down her thighs.

One of the others laughed.

—You’re dreaming, mate.

—I’m not dreaming —he said, without raising his voice—. I’m waiting. Saints are the ones who come hardest, because they’ve spent years clenching their teeth.

Those words stuck in me. Far from horrifying me, they woke up a sick curiosity in me, a kind of vertigo in my stomach every time I imagined my mother out of my father’s reach, out of reach of everything that held her upright.

***

The confrontation came weeks later. Again the three of us were coming back from the same place when Darian stepped out of the bazaar and planted himself in front of my mother. He said something in her ear, so close his lips almost brushed her temple. Beatriz went rigid.

My father arrived just as the foreigner stepped away.

—What did he say to you? —he asked.

She shook her head, upset, unable to repeat it. My father insisted, and it was Darian who answered for her, amused.

—I told her she’s got the kind of cunt a woman has when she isn’t fucked right. If she won’t repeat it to you, maybe it’s because she liked hearing it.

My father went for him. He grabbed his shirt with his left hand and raised the other. He never got to throw the punch. The foreigner drove a knee into his stomach with terrible calm, like moving aside a chair, and Joaquín dropped to the ground doubled over, winded.

What happened next is burned into me and I still don’t know how to order it. My mother lunged to hold Darian back so he wouldn’t keep going. And he, instead of pushing her away, used her. While pretending to let himself be restrained, he ran his hands over her waist, her hips, her back, slowly, as if he had every right in the world. He slid one hand down to her ass and squeezed it fully, his palm open, weighing it. With the other he brushed her breast over her blouse, and pinched her nipple beneath her bra with two fingers, short and precise, like someone testing a ripe fruit. Beatriz looked him in the eyes and begged him to stop, but she didn’t let go, and I saw her hard nipples pressing up through the fabric.

—Please —she said, in a thread of a voice—. Stop.

And he stopped. But before letting her go, he brought his mouth to her ear and whispered one last thing. I saw my mother’s breath catch. I saw how, for a fraction of a second, she stopped pushing and simply stayed there, held against that huge body, eyes closed, her hip pressed against a bulge that, from where I stood, I could see growing beneath the foreigner’s trousers.

Between my father, still on the ground, and me, we pulled her away and got her into the entryway. She didn’t stop looking toward the bazaar until the door closed.

From that day on, my father never spoke to the foreigner again. And my mother started taking longer than usual to come back from errands.

***

I learned to read her. On the days she walked past the bazaar she put on a little lipstick she didn’t wear to go to church. She loosened the top button of her blouse at the corner and buttoned it back up when she got home, thinking no one saw. I saw everything.

For weeks I watched her fight a silent war. She prayed more. She cleaned the house with a fury that made no sense. One night I found her sitting in the dark kitchen, Salinas’s novel closed on the table and her fingers resting on the cover as if it burned. Her other hand was tucked between her thighs under her nightdress, still, clenched, as if she were holding herself back. She didn’t see me. I backed away before she did.

One afternoon in June, my father stayed late at work and my mother said she was going to buy thread. She left wearing a blue dress I didn’t remember, her hair loose, and turned toward Avenida de los Tilos. I followed her half a block behind, my heart pounding as if I were the unfaithful one.

I saw her stop in front of the bazaar window. I saw her hesitate. And I saw her push the door open and go inside. The sign on the entrance turned to “closed.”

***

I went around the building. There was a narrow alley leading to the back room, and a high, filthy window left ajar to let air in. I dragged over a plastic crate, climbed up, and looked.

Darian had her against the back counter, between rolls of leather and unopened boxes. He wasn’t forcing her. That was the part that left me speechless: my mother, the woman of Tuesday rosaries, had her hands gripping his forearms and was drawing him toward her.

—We shouldn’t —I heard her say through the glass—. This is wrong.

—I know —he replied—. That’s why you want it. That’s why you’ve been coming to stare in the window for two months with your panties wet.

Beatriz let out a low moan, as if those words had gone in deeper than a hand. He lowered the straps of her dress slowly, like someone unwrapping something that already belonged to him. The fabric fell to her waist. Underneath, the white bra, the kind she wore to Mass, could barely contain two heavy, very white breasts, the nipples already hard, showing through the cups. My mother didn’t cover herself. He ran his fingers over the lace, unhooked it with one hand, and let her breasts fall free. He weighed one whole breast in his palm, bent down, and bit her nipple. Beatriz closed her eyes and threw her head back, and from her mouth came a sound I had never heard from her before, hoarse, defeated.

—Suck them —she begged him, her voice breaking—. For God’s sake, suck them.

And he did. He took one nipple entirely into his mouth, pulled, let it go with a wet pop, moved to the other. He nibbled them and then licked them slowly, with his broad tongue, while with his free hand he lifted her skirt to her waist. He slipped his fingers over her panties and touched her cunt over the fabric.

—You’re soaked —he said, almost contemptuously—. You’re soaked, rosary lady.

—Shut up —she gasped—. Shut up and do it.

He got down on his knees. He pulled her white panties down to her ankles, spread her legs with both hands, and buried his face in her cunt without ceremony. I watched Darian’s head move between my mother’s thighs, saw his tongue emerge and lick her slit from bottom to top, slow, long, and I saw Beatriz dig her fingers into his black hair so he wouldn’t pull away. Her knees buckled. He held her ass with both open hands, squeezed it, and kept eating her while she writhed against his mouth. He sucked her clit with his lips, nibbled it, slid two thick fingers deep inside her, and my mother gave out a long moan that didn’t sound like my mother.

—I’m going to come —she whispered, terrified to say it—. I’m going to come in your mouth.

—Come —he answered against her cunt, without stopping licking her—. Come in the foreigner’s mouth.

And she came. She came with his head trapped between her thighs, biting her fist, in a shudder that ran down her whole back. I had never seen her face like that. None of us had ever seen it.

Before she had even caught her breath, he stood, unbuttoned his trousers, and took out his cock. It was thick, long, much bigger than anything I could have imagined in my mother’s hands. He was rock hard, pointing toward her belly, a prominent vein running underneath. Beatriz looked at it for a second with her mouth open and, without meaning to, licked her lips.

—Get on your knees —he ordered.

She did. My mother, the one with the missal, knelt between the leather boxes and opened her mouth to a stranger. He took her nape in one hand and pushed his cock in slowly, until I saw Beatriz’s tears spring to her eyes and her throat give up. He pulled it out, tapped the gleaming head twice on her tongue, and pushed it back in. He fucked her mouth slowly, holding her by her blond hair with both hands, and she let him, swallowed, moaned with his cock inside her. A strand of saliva hung from her chin to her naked breasts.

—That’s it —he told her—. That’s how a saint sucks cock when she finally gets it.

He lifted her by the hair, turned her, and bent her over the counter with one firm hand between her shoulder blades. He hiked her skirt all the way up over her hips and left her white ass bare. He spread her cheeks with his thumbs. Beatriz let herself be positioned, palms flat on the wood, breath coming in ragged bursts that fogged the varnish. He ran the tip of his cock along her cunt slit, soaking it, and with one thrust drove it in to the root. She bit the back of her own hand not to cry out, and even so a sharp moan slipped free, echoing off the back room walls.

He wasn’t gentle. He held her by the waist with both hands and moved her to his rhythm, without asking, and each thrust tore a moan from her that she tried to swallow and couldn’t. The flesh of my mother’s ass trembled with every blow. The wet sound of his cock sliding in and out could be heard, the clash of his hips against her buttocks. He spat into her asshole and ran his thumb over the ring, pressing without quite entering it, while continuing to fuck her cunt.

—This too —he told her—. Another day, this too.

—Yes —she panted, far gone—. Anywhere you want.

He yanked her hair back, arching her spine, and forced her to lift her face to the filthy mirror on the wall. He held her there, cock buried to the hilt, and made her watch herself while he took her.

—Look —he said in her ear, without stopping his thrusts—. Look what you are when no one can see you. Look at the face you make when you’re fucked right.

And she looked. What I saw in her reflected face wasn’t shame. It was something else, something that had no name in the parish vocabulary: the face of someone who had finally stopped fighting herself. Mouth open, eyes wet, tongue showing between her teeth every time the foreigner’s cock hit her depth.

—Say it —he demanded, driving harder—. Tell me what you are.

—Yours —she moaned—. I’m yours. I’m a whore. I’m your whore.

—The bazaar whore —he said, sealing it—. Say it.

—The bazaar whore —she repeated, and came again, shaking over the counter, squeezing her cunt around the cock that was ripping her open.

He held on a few seconds longer, teeth clenched, and then spilled inside her. I saw him shove his hips against her ass and go still, groaning low, emptying himself. When he finally pulled his cock out, a stream of white semen ran down the inside of my mother’s thigh, shining against her pale skin. She stayed bent over the counter, trembling, her legs barely holding her up, not making any move to clean herself.

He held her like that for a moment, one open hand on her damp back, marking a possession my father had never known how to claim. He ran two fingers through her dripping cunt, gathered up his own come mixed with hers, and brought it to her mouth. Beatriz opened her lips and sucked his fingers without opening her eyes. Then she stepped away, got dressed, and said something to him I couldn’t make out. My mother nodded without looking at him, picked up the dress from the floor, and wiped her thighs with her panties before tucking them into her pocket.

I climbed down from the crate before she came out. I walked home the long way, my legs weak and the certainty that something I had thought was stone had just come apart.

***

Beatriz got home half an hour after I did, carrying a spool of blue thread in her hand in case anyone asked. No one did. She went into the kitchen and started making dinner, humming, and that was the first time in years I had heard her hum. As I passed behind her to get a glass, I smelled her. She smelled of another man’s semen beneath her perfume.

She went back to the bazaar many more afternoons. She learned to invent errands, to loosen the button at the corner, to come home with flushed cheeks, eyes far away, and her panties balled up in her purse. My father kept fixing faucets and saying I love you with his hands, unaware that his wife had found, behind a leather counter, a version of herself the house had never allowed her to be: a female who let her ass be opened between boxes, who learned to swallow a whole cock without coughing, who came four times in an afternoon and went back to make the sign of the cross before dinner.

I never said anything. Sometimes I wonder if I stayed quiet to protect her, to protect my father, or to protect that secret which, without my wanting it, had also become a little bit mine. I never knew how much damage a book could do, I still think. But I no longer know whether it was damage. I only know that my mother, after that, stopped closing books slowly. She slammed them shut and went out into the street, her cunt already wet before she even turned the corner.