The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [221]
“He was disappointed. Now I know why, but that night I didn’t. I was slender, very thin, and he liked full-bodied women with prominent breasts and hips. Voluptuous women. A typically tropical taste. He even must have thought about sending this skeleton back to Ciudad Trujillo. Do you know why he didn’t? Because the idea of breaking a virgin’s cherry excites men.”
Aunt Adelina moans. Her wrinkled fist raised, her mouth half opened in an expression of horror and censure, she implores her, grimacing, but does not manage to say a word.
“Forgive my frankness, Aunt Adelina. It’s something he said, later. I’m quoting him exactly, I swear: ‘Breaking a virgin’s cherry excites men. Petán, that animal Petán, gets more excited breaking them with his finger.’”
He would say it afterward, when he had lost control and his mouth was vomiting disjointed phrases, sighs, curses, discharges of excrement to ease his bitterness. Now, he still behaved with studied correctness. He did not offer her what he was drinking, Carlos I might burn the insides of a girl so young. He would give her a glass of sweet sherry. He served her himself and made a toast, clinking glasses. Though she barely wet her lips, Urania felt something flame in her throat. Did she try to smile? Did she remain serious, showing her panic?
“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging. “We were close together on that sofa. The glass of sherry was trembling in my hand.”
“I don’t eat little girls,” Trujillo said with a smile, taking her glass and placing it on a table. “Are you always so quiet or is it only now, beautiful?”
“He called me beautiful, something that Manuel Alfonso had called me too. Not Urania, Uranita, girl. Beautiful. It was a game the two of them were playing.”
“Do you like to dance? Sure you do, like all the girls your age,” said Trujillo. “I like to, a lot. I’m a good dancer, though I don’t have time to go to dances. Come on, let’s dance.”
He stood up and Urania did too. She felt his strong body, his somewhat protruding belly rubbing against her stomach, his cognac breath, the warm hand holding her waist. She thought she was going to faint. Lucho Gatica wasn’t singing “Bésame Mucho” now, but “Alma Mía.”
“He really did dance very well. He had a good ear, and he moved like a young man. I was the one who lost the beat. We danced two boleros, and a guaracha by Toña la Negra. Merengues too. He said they danced the merengue in clubs and decent homes now thanks to him. Before, there had been prejudices, and respectable people said it was music for blacks and Indians. I don’t know who was changing the records. When the last merengue ended, he kissed me on the neck. A light kiss that gave me gooseflesh.”
Holding her by the hand, their fingers intertwined, he walked her back to the sofa and sat down very close to her. He examined her, amused, as he breathed in and drank his cognac. He seemed serene and content.
“Are you always a sphinx? No, no. It must be that you have too much respect for me.” Trujillo smiled. “I like beautiful girls who are discreet, who let themselves be admired. Indifferent goddesses. I’m going to recite a poem, it was written for you.”
“He recited a poem by Pablo Neruda. Into my ear, brushing my ear, my hair, with his lips and his little mustache: ‘I like it when you’re quiet, it’s as if you weren’t here; as if your eyes had flown away, as if a kiss had closed your mouth.’ When he came to ‘mouth,’ his hand moved to my face and he kissed me on the lips. That night I did so many things for the first time: I drank sherry, wore Mama’s jewelry, danced with an old man of seventy, and received my first kiss on the mouth.”
She had gone to parties with boys and danced, but a boy had kissed her only once, on the cheek, at a birthday party in the mansion of the Vicini family, at the intersection of Máximo Gómez and Avenida George Washington. His name was Casimiro Sáenz, the son of a diplomat. He asked her to dance, and