The Candy Giveaway That Sparked the Electoral Orgy
I had waited forty years to experience an election from the inside, and at last this Sunday it was my turn. Two municipal officers showed up at my house weeks earlier, with the resulting alarm of my wife, just to deliver the notice: chance had chosen me to be chair of the polling station. I took it as an honor. I’ve spent my whole life with literary aspirations bottled up, so I thought the day would give me material for some contest story now that retirement leaves me free time.
I took notes hour by hour in the long dead stretches of the vote, saving them on my phone as a draft for my future work. But nothing turned out as I expected. In fact, everything turned out the opposite way, to the point that what was going to be titled “election day” deserves another name now, one I don’t dare write here. I’ve cut almost all of the morning, bland and tedious, to keep the juicy part.
Let it be clear: I am only transcribing what I lived.
***
8:45. The polling station was set up. I, chair; my two tellers, two women I could represent with the vowels “O” and “I.” The first, Renata, a high school teacher, a fifty-something woman, single and generously built, round and solid as that “O.” The second, Carla, an administrative clerk in her early thirties, devoted to aerobics and green diets, thin and straight as an “I.”
9:12. The party agents came by to introduce themselves and make it clear they were watching us. Only four: two men and two women covering the entire ideological spectrum. At one end, a man with prominent biceps and an intense though somewhat dulled gaze. At the other, a girl with long dreadlocks, worn sandals, faded jeans, and a navel piercing peeking out beneath her knotted shirt. In between, a woman in her forties with glasses and Asian features, short and nervous, and a man with a generous belly and a receding hairline who laughed a little too much at every voter.
The civil servant was a young man with an intellectual air and an impeccable suit, as if he had come straight out of a business school. I had already classified him in advance: too neat to trust.
(I’ll skip the thirty-two notes from the morning here. Nothing worth salvaging.)
***
14:35. It was my turn to go eat. We were at twenty-two percent turnout, which was not bad at all given the heat and how soporific the choices were. When I came back and sat down, a gentleman in outlandish but elegant dress burst into the room. He identified himself, wanted to vote, and couldn’t because he was not on the register. Far from getting upset, he smiled and began handing out, one by one, to everyone present — my tellers, the agents, the civil servant, and me — handfuls of colored candy.
There were smiles even at the far ends. We unwrapped the sweets and ate a few. Carla asked whether we should take a handful to the guards at the door. I decided not to; it was the first order I gave under my authority. I didn’t like those two sour-faced municipal cops. Let them choke on it.
15:40. The candy was an unexpected success. No one could stop. Each of us had already had five or six; Renata, the teacher, twice that many, as far as I could count.
18:54. I had gone half an hour without anyone coming in. The candy had run out and we started taking turns going out to drink water and get rid of it. While urinating I noticed an inexplicable tumescence. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. To my misfortune, that had ceased to be normal a long time ago.
19:28. As closing time approached, a few stragglers arrived to exercise their right. The last chance to join the great democracy party.
But inside the room things were subtly changing. The musclebound man at one end kept cracking jokes at the woman with glasses, and she laughed as if her life depended on it. She had unbuttoned two buttons of her blouse and now we were all looking at a more than notable cleavage. Renata left her post to go out to smoke at the door with the young civil servant, who rolled his own tobacco, blond and branded. I could see her through the window, and her rounded figure suddenly struck me as sculptural, curvy, desirable.
My attention, however, kept fixing on Carla. She had taken off her shirt to reveal a pink Zumba top that wrapped around a pair of small, firm breasts, her nipples outlined beneath the fabric. She had put her feet on the table, next to the ballot box, and kept telling me increasingly dirty jokes, laughing for no reason. I felt the urge to take off my jacket, loosen my tie, and adjust my trousers to hide the erection that had been bothering me for some time. In the exercise of my powers, I carried out my desire.
To my surprise, the fat man in the middle was showing sudden interest in the dreadlocked girl’s piercing. He leaned in and even touched it with admiration. She laughed, had taken off her sandals, and rested one bare foot on the bench and the other on her unexpected admirer’s thick thigh.
***
20:00. No one was thinking about votes or ballot boxes anymore. Only I realized that the police would come to announce the end of the day. I got ahead of them, went to the door, muttered some excuse about the start of counting, locked it, and went back into the room.
Things had gone completely off the rails. Renata and the civil servant were rolling around on the mats. I had not noted that the polling station was set up in the school gym. Now I saw the teacher naked and I had to revise my first impression: she was magnificent. The young man was burying himself in that feast of mature flesh. I saw his sex opening and closing with the sway, and the young man’s thin, elegant cock searching for entry. First she was on top, then he was. Intercourse was now a fact.
They’ve voted, I thought, and laughed to myself.
The musclebound man kept his erection, and the woman with glasses climbed naked onto his hips. They fit well together. An unlikely union between two extremes that in any other context would never have spoken to each other, now materialized in that rhythmic, shameless pumping on the mat.
I also watched, astonished, as the fat man lost all restraint with the girl with dreadlocks. It mattered little that she displayed a bush the fashion world had been forbidding for years, or that two rings pierced her large, dark nipples. The sight of that untamed cunt had unsettled him, just as it had me, an old nostalgic for other times who had never quite adjusted to shaved fashions.
Though I must admit Carla, my other teller, was more than seductive: completely naked, legs spread on the table, leaning back against the ballot box with a languor that left no room for doubt. I overcame my laziness and prejudices and knelt to eat her with a teenager’s hunger, my tongue tracing slow circles while she buried her fingers in my hair and arched her back.
***
21:00. The guards were banging on the door and we paid them no mind. We ran naked through the polling school like deranged children, chasing one another laughing through the hallways. I managed to catch the dreadlocked girl and knelt again at her feet, this time to smell, caress, and kiss that tangled mass of curls, the rebellious clit, while I worked her with three fingers as if I wanted to recover all at once the youth that had slipped through my hands.
Carla got down on all fours and let the muscleman mount her from behind, both of them panting like animals. Renata had knocked over the table of ballot papers, which were flying around the room in joyful uproar, and now she was stroking the fat man’s cock upright with the skill of an expert. The woman with glasses — who up close, now that I looked properly, was not Asian but Andean, and whose name was Lucía — was instructing the young civil servant in the basics of sixty-nine, with very willing participation from him.
We were eight intertwined, sweaty bodies, laughing at nothing and everything, completely oblivious to the ballot boxes, the parties, and the four decades of protocol I had revered that very morning.
***
22:06. Through a crack I saw that the entire urban police force, with five vehicles, other police units from different forces, a fire brigade, the justice of the peace, and a small crowd of neighbors had gathered in front of the door. Among them I recognized — oh dear — my wife and several relatives. They were threatening to break it down, no matter how much I urged them not to, invoking my supreme authority as chair of the polling station.
23:40. It was all useless. The authorities stormed in furiously and found the place in chaos. They covered us with blankets, unnecessary in the heat, picked up the fallen ballot box and the scattered ballots that made any attempt at counting impossible, and escorted the eight of us, indignant, to the precinct station. When we got there we ran into another thirty or so polling-station members, agents, and civil servants from the city in the same situation: naked or half-dressed, sweaty and happy. A strong smell of sex hung in the municipal offices. Apparently, the man with the candy had crossed the entire district, leaving his disturbing little gift hither and yon and sabotaging, in sweet and carnal fashion, the election.
***
Today. The terrible experience passed, and there were no sanctions, in view of the evidence of the sabotage, orchestrated — as was later learned — by an anarchist expert in substances. Nothing reached the press or the networks; democratic stability had to be preserved. My innocence in the affair was proven, and my wife was understanding, more than I deserved.
In fact, tonight, at dinner time, I found a little bag of the same brand of candy on the table. I don’t know who left it there. And I don’t know, honestly, whether I’m going to have the willpower not to open it.
