The Foreign Student Who Taught Me Not to Fear

Beside his grandmother, Bruno stirred the noodles, browning slowly over a bed of oil and garlic. He lowered them carefully into the boiling pot, but the care came from habit and not attention: really, he was somewhere else. As he went on with the meal he had to divide himself between the stew and the soup, and while his grandmother squeezed large yellow lemons, something went wrong. The carrot slipped off the cutting board, or the pan started making a noise as if everything were sticking.

—You’re not here, my boy —Doña Remedios told her grandson—. Land, please, because the girls are going to arrive from the university and we need to have the food ready. It’s the first week and we need to make a good impression.

But there was nothing that could distract him more than that sentence. Suddenly all the impressions of the last few days crowded into his head.

***

First he remembered a girl walking into the guesthouse. Her name was Camila, or at least that was the name she had introduced herself with. Straight hair, a glossy black like the plumage of a grackle. Pale skin, but fresh and luminous. Her face ended in a fine chin, in contrast with two fleshy cheeks and dimples that appeared when she smiled. Her mouth, bright red from the cold, with the lower lip swollen. A turned-up nose, small ears. Two slanted eyes, yet wide open, deep and shining.

Bruno made it a rule not to look at women’s bodies, much less at those of the guests who stayed for a while at his grandmother’s house. It was not always easy, because women from Eastern Europe often arrived there, tall, blonde, with strong features, as if they wanted their bodies to be touched at least once by the tropical sun. Bruno felt a mixture of fear and reverence for them, so he tried to remain more or less absent when they appeared. When he had to serve them food or collect the monthly payment, he tried to look them in the eyes, but ended up looking at the floor.

With Camila it was different from the start. She arrived wearing a heavy red coat, with dull gold buttons, and Bruno felt as if half a nation were crossing the threshold of his house. The coat was intimidating and the color was harsh on the eyes, and that, for some reason, intensified the boy’s budding crush: the kind of attraction that made him feel a little clumsy and a little sad. Besides, dressed like that there was no way to know what Camila’s body was like, which allowed him to look at her with some frequency without feeling guilty.

On Monday, when Doña Remedios received her, she served coffee and cookies in the living room. The girl swept her gaze around. Seeing the parquet floor and the heavy wooden furniture, she felt as if she were inside a giant gingerbread cookie. She liked the paintings of lakes with water lilies, the green stone coffee table, the welcoming creak of the old armchairs. This is very grandmotherly, she thought. She was smiling with a certain condescension, and Bruno thought he understood her.

The three of them began talking almost by formula. Without really knowing how, Bruno’s passion for that far-off country —its literature, its history, its economy, its revolutions— loosened his tongue in front of Camila. The girl listened to him tenderly, though with a happy kind of bewilderment too. His Spanish was far from perfect, but she understood enough to realize that Bruno was a sheltered boy, kind and harmless. She could almost feel how his intellectual interest mixed with the attraction he did not know how to hide. Suddenly she found herself resting her cheek in her hand, raising her eyebrows, pretending to pay attention when she was not, and giving him little signals with her eyes.

On Tuesday night, Camila was finishing arranging the few things she had brought. Since she wanted to be comfortable, she wore only pajama pants and a cheap grayish blouse, fairly tight. Adapting the room to her taste didn’t seem to have cost her any sweat; it merely opened her pores and reddened the skin of her cheeks and shoulders. If anyone was sweating in that house, it was more likely the room.

When Bruno knocked on her door to tell her dinner was ready, she opened it by reflex. He had only known her through the formality of their first meeting, and suddenly finding himself in front of a body he had not expected brought down all his defenses. The pants were modest, as pajamas can be —though to Bruno they immediately made him imagine her tucked up in bed—, but the tight blouse revealed two enormous breasts, heavy, pressing against the fabric as if they wanted to break it. Perhaps they were, he thought involuntarily, the biggest breasts he had ever seen. The reddish tone of her shoulders made him wonder whether her nipples might also be blushing. The different shades of gray in the fabric made it impossible to tell, but for a second, just before regaining his composure, he thought he could make out the shape of those two rigid nipples, thick as thumbs, outlined against the blouse by the cold. His mouth went dry. His cock shifted in his pants without him being able to do anything to stop it, and he had to press his thighs together so it wouldn’t show.

Camila was delighted to have unsettled the boy, but she didn’t show it. She acted as though she noticed nothing and asked him to come in for a moment. She sat at the desk, took out a planner with schedules and addresses, and asked for his help figuring out what transport to take to get from one place to another. Ten minutes passed like that. Bruno had completely forgotten dinner and started asking her about her language and her homeland, while doing everything possible to look her in the eyes. It was obvious he was as uncomfortable as he was fascinated. She answered with a certain weariness, but at the same time threw her shoulders and head back, coquettishly, arching her back so the blouse tightened even more over her chest, tempting him to look at the little neckline where the beginning of those two pale breasts pressed together could be guessed.

—Can I ask you something people have probably asked you a thousand times? —Bruno said at last.

—Just don’t say a kiss —she teased.

The blush spread over his whole body and for a few seconds he couldn’t speak. At last he blurted out what he had meant to say:

—No, no. Of course not. Write something for me in your language.

Camila took a pen from the desk and held his left wrist.

—This is my real name —she told him in a low voice, while drawing signs that crossed his wrist and moved onto the back of his hand.

Because of course Camila was not the girl’s real name, but the one she had chosen when she started studying Spanish. Her family had no ties to this side of the world, but she had fallen in love with the ruins of Palenque when she saw them in an encyclopedia with red and gold covers.

—We’re going there —the girl declared one day, in a long, very nasal language.

—The girl is crazy —her father told her mother, ignoring her.

But she wasn’t crazy. The idea had just lodged itself in her head and would not budge. Her parents disapproved of her taking Spanish classes, but paid for them anyway; they disapproved of her enrolling in the History program, but allowed it anyway; they were horrified when she said she was leaving on exchange to the other side of the ocean.

—What, you don’t remember? I told you I was going to leave —she said, smiling.

So her parents disapproved of her once more. But they still went to the airport to see her off, smiling. Her mother cried and her father kissed her forehead.

I think that if they had managed to take her as a child to those ruins, Camila would never have become obsessed with crossing the world. Because three things set her apart from a very young age: her paleness, the glossy blackness of her eyes, and a delicate need always to defy authority. During the plane ride she noticed how men stared at her red lips. She looked back at them too, sometimes with anger, sometimes with mockery, sometimes with empty eyes, as if she were thinking of something greater than them. The men felt she was reading their souls and averted their gaze; then she smiled inwardly.

The day she wrote her real name on Bruno’s wrist, he looked her in the eyes and felt exactly that: emptiness. Then Camila winked at him and they both went downstairs to dinner.

On Wednesday more students arrived for the semester that was about to begin, but Bruno didn’t even stay to greet them with coffee and cookies. He locked himself in his room with the light off and his arm over his eyes, silently repeating Camila’s real name. That night he also slipped his hand into his pants, pressing his hard cock against his stomach, imagining those two breasts squeezed inside the gray blouse. He came quickly, with his mouth closed so they wouldn’t hear him, and still the hunger didn’t leave him.

***

On Thursday, while Bruno cooked beside his grandmother, a sharp, furious scream came from the girl’s room. The boy looked at Doña Remedios with anxious eyes.

—Go see what’s wrong with the little girl —his grandmother told him—. Knock on the door and ask if everything’s all right. If everything’s all right, I want you right back here in thirty seconds.

No sooner had he heard her than Bruno ran, climbed the stairs, took a breath and felt his chest vibrating with nerves. He closed his eyes to calm himself and knocked on the door with his knuckles, four soft taps.

—Camila, it’s Bruno. Is everything okay?

—Not okay —she said.

—What happened? —he insisted, noticing that his voice sounded more worried than he would have liked.

—Cold! —Camila shouted from the other side.

He heard her searching for more precise words, babbling something. Then she opened the door and pulled him inside.

Camila was wearing only a towel tied over her chest. Being slim, it was obvious how prominent her breasts were by the way the towel hung loosely, swaying around her body like a ghost. The lower edge was so high it barely covered the tops of her thighs, and for a second Bruno thought he could make out, in the gap between her legs, the dark shadow of thick pubic hair.

Bruno needed enormous composure not to stand there with his mouth hanging open. In a flash of common sense he decided he had to look for just one second, that he had to see her very briefly so he would never forget her. During that instant he made a point of memorizing her bare shoulders, open and almost pointy; her pale, pearly skin, like a sheet of paper in the sun; her black, slanted but large eyes; the slender thighs that could be guessed beneath the towel; and those hidden breasts which, however, from the volume pushing the fabric forward and from the way the towel surrendered to that soft flesh, were without a doubt the biggest breasts he had ever seen in his whole life.

—Did the water in your bathroom come out cold? There must be a problem with the boiler… Um… It’s not a windy day, so the gas probably ran out. What do we do? We could get a tank, but if you’re in a hurry, maybe I’d better heat some water so you can wash with a basin.

At that moment Bruno swallowed. Throughout his halting speech he had tried not to think about Camila’s body, but at that last sentence he couldn’t help imagining her as a statue of Aphrodite, bending down to take water from a basin and letting it run over her naked back. In his mind he saw her round ass raised up and the slit of her cunt opening between her thighs with water streaming down there. Only then did he blush fully, and he felt his cock starting to swell uncontrollably inside his pants.

During the half minute he spoke, Camila kept thinking about her bath. She tried to follow, in her mind, the solutions he was offering her in Spanish. Now she finally understood what was happening. She didn’t quite understand why the idea of the basin turned her on —in fact, she wasn’t entirely sure she knew what a basin was—, but it was clear that Bruno was thinking about her. About her towel. About what was beneath the towel.

—Bruno, Bruno —she said, stumbling over the syllables—. I know what you have. It’s okay. You don’t need to be nervous all the time around me. I’m just a person.

As she said it, she took his hand firmly, more like a politician than a friend. Then she let it go and brought her own hand to the hem that held the towel in place.

—I think if you see me, you’ll realize there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Then she let the towel drop. The fabric fell to the floor with a soft sound, like surrender, and all of her was suddenly naked a step away from him. Bruno averted his eyes by instinct, but she took his chin firmly. Since he still had his eyes tightly shut, Camila kept talking:

—I don’t know if it’s a cultural difference —she lied—. I think bodies are just bodies. It’s nothing sexual. Think of it as something didactic, boy. You’re not a child anymore and you can’t spend your life being afraid of women.

Bruno was a shy person, but above all he was a reasonable person. And what Camila was saying seemed reasonable to him. It was true that his fear of the women he was attracted to was not normal. The sensible thing was to fight it, right? And there was a girl there noble and open enough to help him.

He opened his eyes. He had only a few seconds to look, but it was enough. Camila’s waist was small and slender; her thighs, on the other hand, were strong, two pale columns meeting in the center. Perhaps her ass was too. But that chest. Two enormous breasts, lifted, round and pale, so large they hung a little under their own weight but stayed firm, two white flesh balloons crossed by barely visible blue veins beneath the skin. Reddened by the cold where the breasts began to blend into the sternum. And in the center of each one, an enormous nipple, raised like a hill, the size and thickness of a thumb tip, a dark brown color loaded with hypnosis, wrinkled, hardened, pointing straight at his face. The areola around it was broad, with tiny bumps standing up from the cold. Bruno thought that if he stretched out his tongue, he could reach them. He lowered his gaze another inch and found the flat stomach, the small navel, and below that a thick triangle of black hair, as black as the hair on her head, covering her sex without quite hiding it: below, the soft bulge of the mons veneris could be made out, and between her pressed thighs, the pink line of closed lips.

Bruno was already aware that his crotch was beginning to get in the way. Now he had a visible erection he couldn’t possibly hide. His cock had become so hard it pushed his pants upward into an obvious tent, and the swollen tip could even be seen outlined against the fabric. Camila lowered her eyes, saw it, and laughed, playfully. She snatched up the towel from the floor and said:

—What a pervert you turned out to be! What is your grandmother going to say?

Bruno put on a sad face and tried to leave. Camila, guilty, called him back and even had to take his hand to keep him from going out.

—I was joking. It’s not against you —she confessed, with tender eyes.

Then she came closer until she was very near his face. She had the towel pulled only loosely around her body, and her bare breast was slipping out at the sides. She pressed her two rigid nipples against his shirt. Bruno felt them, hot and hard, digging into his chest through the fabric. She ran a hand over the back of his neck, tugged his hair a little, and with the other slowly lowered it until she found the tent in his pants. She squeezed his cock over the fabric, once, firmly, weighing it as if measuring something. Bruno let out a short gasp he couldn’t contain.

—Look how hard it is, boy —she whispered in his ear, laughing softly—. All for me.

Then she stuck out her tongue and licked him, slowly, from his chin to his lips, once, with the tip thoroughly wet, leaving a warm trail of saliva that reached the corner of his mouth. Before pulling away she bit his lower lip with her teeth, just a little, and let it go with a tug. She also let go of his cock, stepped back, smiled, and let him go, completely confused, with his cock throbbing inside his pants and a drop of her saliva still shining on his mouth.

Camila bathed with a basin, and in the process found out what that was. Of course, she didn’t tell Doña Remedios anything about her grandson’s perversity. That night, locked in his room and still repeating the girl’s real name, Bruno masturbated as if he wanted to empty himself of the whole week.

He lay on his back on top of the coverlet, pulled his pants down to his knees, and stayed for a moment looking at his cock, stiff, swollen, pointing at the ceiling, with the thick vein pulsing along the shaft and the tip already wet with a transparent thread that glistened on the glans. He spat on his hand, wrapped his fingers around his cock, and began to move it slowly, up and down, squeezing hard each time he reached the corona. He closed his eyes.

He saw her again, standing in front of him, naked. He saw her breasts hanging heavy, the brown nipples pointing at him, and imagined sucking them one by one, taking the whole nipple into his mouth, nibbling them. He imagined Camila arching her back and whispering in her nasal language things he didn’t understand but that made him squeeze his fingers tighter around his cock. He sped up. He ran his thumb over the tip, collected the drop of precome, and smeared it over the whole glans, and kept pulling on it with his hand clenched tight, with a wet sound filling the dark room.

Then he imagined her on her knees in front of him. He imagined Camila’s pale hands opening his pants, taking out his cock and weighing it as she had weighed it a few hours earlier over his clothes, but now skin to skin. He saw her red lips part and descend, imagined the heat of that mouth enveloping his glans, the tongue circling the corona, and even thought he could feel the slight pressure of teeth as they slid down. He imagined Camila sucking him slowly, looking up at him with those empty black eyes, with a thread of saliva running from the corner of her mouth and dripping between her breasts. He imagined finishing inside that mouth and her swallowing the semen without taking her eyes off him. His hand moved faster. A moan slipped out of him that he muffled by biting his free arm.

Then he imagined her face-down, on all fours, on the same bed he was in. He saw her pale ass lifted up, her thighs spread, and between the cheeks the slit of her pink cunt, wet, with black hair stuck to it from the moisture. He imagined driving into her in one thrust, all the way in, and feeling how Camila’s cunt clamped around his cock. He imagined fucking her like that, holding her by the small waist, seeing how her enormous breasts hung beneath her and swayed with every thrust. He imagined spanking that pale ass until it turned red, yanking her black hair, hearing her scream in her strange language. He imagined Camila taking one hand to her clit and rubbing it while he penetrated her, and then squeezing her own cunt around his cock with her fingers, smothering him inside, until she too came with a sharp, furious cry like the one she had let out in the morning when the water was cold.

Bruno couldn’t take it anymore. He jerked his cock with both hands, one on the shaft and the other squeezing his balls, and felt the orgasm rising from the depths of his belly. His thighs tensed, his back arched, and he exploded. The first jet of semen shot out with such force it hit his chin, warm and thick. The second landed on his chest. The third, the fourth, the fifth accumulated over his stomach in a white, sticky puddle while he kept squeezing and releasing his cock, milking it to the last drop. His whole body trembled. He was left panting, mouth open, his hand still wrapped around the member that now throbbed slowly, and his chest stained with his own come.

He wiped himself with the sheet. Once more, in a whisper, he repeated Camila’s real name. His cock, half soft, half hard, still refused to go down. He was still thinking about that brown nipple and that red mouth when he realized it was getting hard again. He spat on his hand once more and started again, this time slower, determined to make it last. He came a second time before falling asleep, with his hand still on his cock and the taste of Camila’s saliva still in his mouth.