The Santero from the Passage Cast a Spell on Me

That morning I left home without much enthusiasm. My mom had asked me to stop by the Mercado de los Remedios to pick up several things for her: hierba de santa María, Florida water, a couple of white candles, and something else she had written down on a folded piece of paper that she slipped into my pocket before I could protest. I already knew the place. It wasn’t the first time I’d run that errand, and I always ended up finishing faster than I expected.

I took the bus that dropped me off near Parque Ibáñez and walked from there to the row of stalls selling all kinds of natural remedies. I found the same woman as always, handed her the list, let her help me pack everything into a cloth bag, and paid without haggling. I could be back home in less than twenty minutes. I picked up the bag, slung it over my shoulder, and headed back toward the park.

But halfway down the central aisle, a middle-aged woman with a carefully practiced smile blocked my path.

“Young man, would you like to have your future read? We have a very good santero from the north. Only twenty pesos for a consultation.”

They’d offered it to me several times before, and I’d always kept walking without much ceremony. But that morning, I don’t know why, I stopped. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was because I’d spent weeks turning the same question over in my head without finding an answer, and I was tired of doing it alone.

I agreed.

***

Before I tell you what happened in that room, I have to explain why I went there. Matías and I had been together for almost two years when this happened. He was one year ahead of me at the university, and we loved each other very much—or at least I believed we did. I thought we were in it for the long haul. I thought all those ridiculous things people think when they fall truly in love for the first time.

Among our mutual friends was Rodrigo, who had always been in love with Matías. I knew it. Matías knew it too, though he never mentioned it. He let it slide with that particular attitude of his, pretending not to notice what he didn’t want to notice.

At first Rodrigo didn’t worry me. He was a nice guy, but he had no particular appeal. His teeth were badly crooked, his smile was careless, and I kept telling myself that Matías would never notice someone like that. It was my way of reassuring myself, and for a while it worked.

Then winter break arrived.

Rodrigo came back with a completely new mouth. I don’t know whether he’d had accelerated orthodontic treatment, gotten veneers, or both. The fact was that he returned to the university with a perfect smile, and suddenly he was someone else. Someone Matías suddenly had a lot more weekend plans with.

I understood then that he’d done it for him. I couldn’t prove it, but I was completely sure. And that certainty settled into a constant unease I didn’t know how to handle.

That was why I was standing in front of that woman in the market, nodding my head.

***

The promoter led me through a side passage to an old building attached to the market. We climbed a narrow staircase to the second floor. She knocked on a door, opened it, gestured for me to go in, and left.

The room was small but not seedy. There was a table, two chairs, a lit candle in the corner, and a painted ceramic skull that made me hesitate for a second before deciding it was decorative. The only window was covered by a burgundy cloth, but there was enough light that I didn’t feel trapped.

The santero was standing there waiting for me.

He was a man in his early forties. Dark-skinned, broad-shouldered, with enormous hands folded over his chest. He wasn’t tall—he barely stood a few inches above me—but he had a presence that took up more space than his size should have allowed. He wore a cream linen shirt with the first two buttons undone. He looked at me with dark, calm eyes, as if he already knew everything I was going to tell him.

“Sit down,” he said.

I obeyed.

He asked me a few general questions: my date of birth, whether I had a partner, whether there was something keeping me up at night. I told him. I said I was with someone, that I loved him, that I thought we were in it for the long haul. That lately I had doubts about whether he was faithful to me. I didn’t go into details about Rodrigo or the orthodontics. There was no need.

The santero shuffled the cards slowly, spread them across the table, and studied them in silence for a while that felt long to me. Then he looked up.

“Your partner loves you,” he said. “I don’t see any betrayal on his part. The friend you’re worried about has no power over him.”

It was exactly what I wanted to hear. And yet I didn’t quite calm down, which is what happens when your mind has already decided to worry about something and refuses to let anyone take that right away from it.

“If you want,” he added, “I can do a little work. To strengthen the bond between you two. A simple prayer, and I’ll give you something to use before you’re with him.”

“How much does it cost?”

“Nothing. I like you.”

I don’t know why I agreed to that too. Maybe because I’d already paid the twenty pesos and felt I had to get more out of the visit. Maybe because I was still thinking about Rodrigo smiling with his new mouth.

“Stand up,” the santero said. “Turn your back to me and close your eyes.”

I got up and obeyed.

***

He began murmuring something. I couldn’t make out the words. He spoke quickly, in a very low voice, like someone reciting a formula he had memorized a long time ago. I felt him pick up an object from the table, cold to the touch, and begin passing it over the nape of my neck, then my shoulders, then all along my back in slow, circular movements that were in no hurry.

I don’t know exactly when it happened.

It wasn’t immediate or sudden. It was like when the temperature in a room rises so slowly that you don’t notice until you’re already sweating. At some point, between one murmur and the next, I realized I was completely aroused.

It wasn’t a confused state. My head wasn’t heavy, and I had no trouble thinking clearly. It was something else: a very specific, very concrete physical urgency. I felt my cock hardening inside my pants, heavy and alive, pushing against the fabric in front, and the pressure in my balls was so intense that I could barely keep still. I didn’t want to run away. I didn’t want to call Matías. I wanted the man behind me.

What the hell was happening to me?

I turned around.

The santero looked at me without the slightest surprise, as if he’d been waiting for me to make that move from the beginning. I reached out and placed my hand on his chest. I felt the warmth of him through the fabric. And he didn’t move back an inch.

“Can I?” I asked, even though I was already doing it.

“Yes,” he said.

***

I knelt in front of him. I slowly unbuckled his belt, without hurrying, with a calmness that didn’t fit what I was feeling inside. I lowered the zipper and opened his pants, slipping my fingers inside the waistband of his navy-blue briefs until I found the firm, hot bulge. His glans emerged as I pulled the fabric down, shiny and wet, and the salty smell of his skin hit me full in the face.

I pulled his boxers down over his thighs and left him free. He had a thick cock, brown like the rest of him, with a prominent vein underneath and a rosy tip already slick. I put it in my mouth without thinking too much, swallowing it as far as my throat would take it. The taste was strong and warm, a little bitter from sweat and skin, and it made me close my eyes as a jolt of pleasure ran through my entire body.

The santero placed one of his enormous hands on my head. He didn’t push me down at first; he simply held me there, firmly, making it clear who was setting the pace. I sucked him, licked the base, then slid my tongue back up his shaft, feeling him grow even harder inside my mouth. He ran his fingers through my hair, pulling it away from my forehead, and with his other hand he undid my pants too.

Cold air brushed the skin of my stomach when he pulled down my boxers and left my cock exposed. He leaned forward slightly, took it in his palm, and rubbed me from top to bottom, slowly, squeezing exactly where I needed it most. A moan escaped me and vibrated around his flesh.

“That’s it, suck,” he murmured. “That’s how I like it.”

I couldn’t answer much with my mouth occupied, but I obeyed him. I sucked his balls one at a time, heavy and tense on my tongue, then went back to the tip, licking the slit where pre-cum was already emerging. The room filled with ragged breathing, the wet sounds of my saliva, and the creak of the chair as he moved it closer.

He stood me up, his big hands gripping my shoulders. He turned me around and pressed me against the metal door. The metal was cold, but I was already burning. He pressed himself against my back, lifting my shirt up over my torso, and bit my neck with restrained violence that made me arch.

“You’re dying for it,” he said in my ear. “Don’t play saint now.”

I bent forward a little when he spread my legs wide with his knee. I heard the sound of a jar or lubricant—I don’t know what he had taken from the table. His fingers touched me first, two, three times, slowly opening me with the patience of a grown man. The contact made me grit my teeth. He was hot and slippery, and he drew a tremor from the base of my spine all the way to my neck.

“Like this?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and hated myself a little for how easily the word came out.

He entered me slowly. I felt the tip pushing, testing, and then a deeper, more brutal pressure as he claimed space between my walls. He wasn’t wearing a condom. I realized it at that moment, but it was already too late for anything except continuing. He held my hip with one hand and lifted my leg with the other, opening me wider, burying himself inside me with a slowness that drove me crazy. Every inch of him filled me with a delicious burn, a tearing that didn’t quite hurt but made me cry with pleasure.

“Look at how you open up for me,” he said in a deep voice against my ear. “Look how nicely my cock goes into you.”

I clung to the door with both hands. I felt his pelvis pounding against me from behind, the weight of his balls against my ass, his firm hand holding me beneath my belly so I wouldn’t slide forward. When he began to move, he did it with exasperating calm. He withdrew just slightly, then drove back in all the way, marking each thrust with a sharp impact that shook my legs. The wood of the door echoed with every blow, and the whole room seemed to breathe to the rhythm of his fucking.

“More,” I begged without thinking.

He chuckled under his breath and obeyed me. He gradually picked up the pace, going deeper, making me feel the head of his cock rubbing against that inner spot that shut down my reason. He held my shoulders and shoved me harder against the door, burying himself almost to the limit. I panted like an animal, mouth open, chest rising and falling in jerks, while the heat of his body surrounded me completely.

Then he released my waist and made me turn around again, this time pushing me toward the table. He placed my hands on the wood and arched my back. He penetrated me from behind again, now faster, with short thrusts that made my knees tremble. The table shook, the candle was still burning in the corner, and some papers scattered across the surface when he grabbed my hair and forced me to look down.

“Tell me you want me to fuck you harder,” he ordered.

“I want you to fuck me harder.”

And he did.

The sound of his hips against my buttocks became rougher, dirtier. A thread of saliva ran down my chin, and my ass was burning from opening and closing so much around his cock. Every thrust squeezed my prostate with brutal precision, and my own thrusts against the hand gripping my cock were bringing me to the edge. The santero leaned over me, bit my shoulder, and spoke in my ear again, telling me to let go, to come whenever I wanted, not to hold back if I couldn’t anymore.

I couldn’t hold back.

I came first, in a burst of pleasure that emptied my head and made me see white for a second. My semen spurted onto the wood and over his fingers, thick and hot, staining everything. He kept thrusting into me several more times, growling softly, until his body tensed behind me. Then he pulled out just a little, gripped his cock in one hand, and came over my buttocks and the base of my back in several thick spurts that ran down my skin mixed with sweat.

We stayed there breathing hard, without moving, pressed against each other. I was trembling from head to toe.

***

Then something went out as quickly as it had flared up.

It wasn’t gradual. It was like cutting the power. The santero had his eyes closed and was breathing slowly. I stood up, adjusted my clothes, and picked up the bag from the corner. I didn’t say anything for a while. Neither did he.

“Thank you,” I said finally, taking the bill from my back pocket.

He shook his head without opening his eyes.

“No need.”

I said goodbye and left.

The promoter was still in the hallway. When she saw me, she smiled with the kind of smile that needs no words to say everything. I went down the stairs without looking at her.

***

Out on the street, while I waited for the bus with the bag clenched between my fingers, my mind began working again. And with it came the questions I’d been silencing for the last hour.

What troubled me most was having been with him without any protection. It was a reckless act I couldn’t undo. I had no symptoms of having been drugged, I didn’t feel confused or as though my memory were blank; I had simply made a very bad decision at a moment when something inside me had decided to take control without consulting me.

Months passed. When the time came to get tested, I went. Everything was negative.

Matías and I ended things anyway, although Rodrigo wasn’t the reason. It was because of other things that aren’t relevant here and that, at the time, didn’t surprise me nearly as much as I thought they would.

I never saw the santero again. I never went back to that passage or that part of the market. The Marcos of that time had no interest in running into him again, and neither does the Marcos of today.

But there are nights when memory brings something back without warning. The big hands. The cream linen shirt with its buttons undone. The cold metal door against my face while he held me upright against it.

I don’t have a better explanation than a spell. I’ve thought about it many times, and I can’t find one that holds up any better.