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eBook Category: Romance
eBook Description: Corruption. Passion. Prostitution. When philanderers Francis and Sasha meet Leonor and Ilse in Spain they realize they are in for the thrills of their lives. The women seduce these men into their Spanish life, and they provocatively entertain each other to heat up the air and cause an epidemic of Spanish Fever.

eBook Publisher: e-reads, Published: 1963
Fictionwise Release Date: December 2001

1 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [696 KB], eReader (PDB) [231 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [229 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [200 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [244 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [266 KB], hiebook (KML) [526 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [268 KB], iSilo (PDB) [187 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [235 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [282 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [305 KB]
Words: 65263
Reading time: 186-261 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

The road bent sharply to the left. If they followed the tortuous curve from the inside, the car would veer over the corroded wooden posts, which vaguely resembled decorative but useless toothpicks, and they would plunge to their death, hundreds of feet below in the cool, glistening Mediterranean. The Spanish concept of road safety permitted accidents only at the cost of one's life. Whenever Francis drove with Ilse, he wasn't quite sure if he was a passenger or a victim. Apart from this ambiguity of status, he had a pathological aversion to her car. It cropped up in his dreams as a squat frog with pointed teeth, an instrument uncompromisingly diabolical. Something seemed always out of balance in the machine. As they took the curve, the car's defect finally dawned on him--the engine should have been in front. Francis immediately converted his insight into a practicable human deformity, which for him nearly always involved a sexual counterpart. Yes, the damned car was like a girl with her ass in the wrong place.

Ilse blew the horn to warn cars beyond the curve. She breathed heavily, but without tension, and made a sharp clicking noise with her tongue. Her body pulsated with irrational pleasure; she adored driving, and the scenery along the road to Sitges was "spiritually elevating". Francis noticed that her cheeks were inflated again, and she was about to start her dreadful clicking; her fat lips seemed to be attached to an invisible air-pump. She turned her head to smile at him and he cowered like a dog.

"Christ, you're a maniac--you'll kill us all with your driving."

"Nothing to worry, my dears," Ilse replied. She beamed with a kind of cherubic imbecility that he felt was unforgivable in a grown woman, and spoke a broken internationalese that disgusted him almost as much as her driving. Lately, she was plural crazy.

"You really are a silly fool, and if you kill a young man in his prime, God knows what will happen to you in the after-life. I should have come by train," he said disdainfully.

"But you don't like the animals' smells."

"If it's not one thing with me it's another. I suppose the stink on the train is worse than death with you," he said.

Ilse brought a heavy, guttural guffaw from her bowels. Francis gave a deep melancholy sigh, glanced at Ilse, and began to pick his nose circumspectly.

Gretchen Erzberger, sitting up front next to Ilse, in what he called the death seat, moaned like a despondent wolf and stretched out her incredibly long arms until they hit the top of the aborted roof. She had snored tunelessly for the last hour, and her legs, like a pair of sleeping cobras, were wound around the gear-lever.

Francis made one of his rare efforts to be pleasant.

"Did you have a nice sleep?" he asked.

Gretchen tried to unravel her hairy legs.

"I got cramps on my feet," she said, in her recently perfected English. Ilse had been giving her an "Anglitch" lesson every day. As a house-guest, Francis had a moral responsibility to attend these daily proceedings. Ilse assured him that Gretchen felt increased confidence when he was present. Recently, he had absented himself from these sessions; her continuous, nearly hundred-hour-war with English syntax was hardening his stool.

"Ach, Gretchen, you won't learn." Ilse chided her with school-marmish pedantry. "You should say, 'I got cramps in my legs'."

It was too much for Francis. He groaned, but indifference overruled his sensitivity to barbarism, and he did not bother to correct them. Besides, he was hungry; and Gretchen's progress, or for that matter Ilse's, was of no concern to him.

For Gretchen he felt a particular, carefully defined antipathy. They had recently danced the Samba together, and in an enthusiastic but unintentional leap, she had kicked him in the groin. Francis bore his cornada with the same tragic indifference as Manolete, but he could not forgive the bull.

"We'll soon be in Sitges, and then you'll have the best paella in Spain," said Ilse.

"It makes my mouth waters," Gretchen said, chomping her lips.

"Must you make those horrible noises?" Francis pleaded.

"No, it is not noisy." Gretchen bellowed amicably.

He ignored her. The girls commenced singing German folk songs. Francis closed his marine-blue eyes and fell into a deep infantile slumber. At first he didn't dream, but just some minutes before they reached Sitges, and after the girls had exhausted their slim repertoire of Schubert Lieders, Francis's recent nocturnal activities in Barcelona's low dives began to maul his subconscious.

He was drinking absinthe in some bodega near the Ramblas; the air in the place stank from piss and some cheap black tobacco that smelled like burning toe-nails. Even in his dream, he heard the deafening noise from the streets. Lottery-sellers, fruit-pedlars, flamenco-musicians, and whores were hawking their wares, in loud nerve-rending shrieks. There was such a tumultuous din that his brain resisted the force of five absinthes. Caterwauling shouts reverberated through the sultry, humid, night air. And then with a suddenness that seemed to him quite miraculous--as though the howling, termagant night had brought forth from its throbbing womb a kind of symbolic messenger--a young buxom girl, wearing a cheap print dress, torn under the armpit, came forward flashing a hopeful, expectant smile at him. For no apparent reason, save possibly an accidental, mindless, drunken gesture, he motioned her over. The girl, with that professional rapidity of the sneak-thief, seized an empty stool, dragged it next to him and hurled her solid rump on it.

She immediately ordered a drink.

"Estranjero?" she asked.

Francis agreed blindly. The girl brought the drink she had been served to her lips, and almost in the same motion turned her fantastically svelte body towards him, revealing a sliver of gleaming, oily flesh.

"Tú me quieres?" she said, wrapping her arms round her breasts. "Dos cientas pesetas." She took two mottled hundred-peseta notes out of a large handbag in order to show him the price. Francis nodded in agreement. The girl supported him as he slid off the bar stool. He flung a few greasy notes at the barman, and they left.

It was while they were walking along the Ramblas searching for a taxi, that the absinthe began to affect him. He was seized with giddiness and he began to laugh uncontrollably, with idiotic shrillness. His high spirits made an impact on the girl; she joined him, laughing without reason or purpose in a rambunctious burst of Spanish good-humour. They laughed together till tears began to roll down their cheeks. Passers-by stopped to gaze at them, and some were infected with their senseless mirth and also entered into the laugh orgy. A fit of heavy coughing cut Francis's drunken laughter off.

When he had gathered the torn strands of his mind, he managed to capture a taxi. The girl rattled off some flippant Spanish, and the driver and she giggled lasciviously before driving away.

The hotel they were going to was called La Finca Negra; it had a vaguely familiar ring. Then Francis recalled. He had been there before with someone else--the rooms were equipped with mirrors. After a long, circuitous, drive they arrived.

He over-tipped the taxi-driver.

La Finca Negra looked like a ceramic privy. The carpets in the hallway were torn and stained, and the place had a thoroughly foul atmosphere that would have repelled him if he had been sober. The bellhop, a man somewhere in his seventies, took them up in the creepy, squeaking lift, Francis gave him some money for the room. Then the old man scooped out some towels from a linen basket and handed them to the girl. She took Francis's hand and led him to a room at the end of the corridor.

The room was an airless box that faced a blind alley. It was decorated with floral wallpaper and had mirrors in strategic locations. The odour of sweating bodies commingled with dulcet, cheap Spanish perfume hung over the room and made him slightly sick.

He had a moment of brief, astonished recognition in his dream, and he shrank back deeper into the car seat. He had reached the moment of crisis.

The trouble began in the room after he had forked over his two hundred pesetas, and the girl, who called herself Merche or something equally unlikely, did a slow strip-tease that struck him as cool and automatic. It reminded him of the cadaverous old hags who used to perform for his medical-school class in return for free treatment. He half-expected her to reveal a mass of scar tissue on her abdomen that was slowly healing after God knows how many operations. She did, however, have two scars, dear Merche; a hairline appendix scar that looked like a fading smile, and a deep gash-like affair where she had had a Caesarean section.

For some reason, notwithstanding the scars, Francis had lost his appetite. His knowledge of Spanish was limited to the usual pleasantries lyrical phrase books implant in the minds of three-day tourists. He made a heroic effort to explain his position.

"No puedo." He fished out a pocket dictionary that he studied every night and looked up a whole string of useless words: sex, desire, erection, impotence, Freudian. He fought his drunkenness and attempted to give Merche a psychological explanation for his refusal to make love to her. He would have been happy to tell her--if she spoke English--that Caesarian scars gave him goose-flesh, that she was sweating like a stallion after seven furlongs, that he was partial to blondes with small breasts, that his brain was reeling from the absinthe, and that finally and ultimately, he had spent the previous night at a brothel near Sarria where a covey of sybaritic whores had done his bidding for nearly three hours, with the same kind of reflexive action as a herd of cows waylaying an unsuspecting bull on a deserted lea. Merche, unquestionably, would have appreciated this complex set of reasons, but Francis could have hardly translated them.

While she washed herself on the bidet, all he could conjure up was the useless phraseology of a retarded tourist.

Was the train full? Does the room have a bath? Do you have steak on the menu? Yes, the room is pleasant. No, I do not have thirst. I want to change money in the bank. He settled for I have not hunger. Unimaginative, perhaps bald, even categorical, but this was the metaphor he used as a justification for turning Merche down.

As she smilingly sponged the hardy seat of her business enterprise on the sparkling bidet, Merche was in perfect obtuse accord with him. No, she had not hunger either. The fleet was in port, and some absurd sailor had stuffed her with an enormous lobster at dinner. No the bitch wasn't hungry--not in the least!

Sleep, like a stealthy undercover-agent tried to creep over his dull-webbed mind. After she had completed her ablutions--etched in acid in his dream--Merche flung her gleaming, pointilisticly perspired torso upon the crisp white sheets. Francis crooned melodically to the higher deities a supplication of such lisping, thick-tongued bereavement that he imagined the heavens would readily open and admit the two of them.

His Spanish grew more tormented and absurd with each phrase. Merche arose from the bed--a kind of sweating Primavera--with a glowing, sardonic, ready-to-be-submissive look suffusing her high cheekbones and quivering mouth. Would he kiss her? Frantically playing a series of charades, she indicated with all too obvious signs--arms and legs flying akimbo--that she was prepared for anything. Stammering Spanish, his frustration increasing with each fumbling gesture of versatility she demonstrated, Francis grabbed her by the hair and gave her a flying kick. The look of hurt, outraged morality that crept across Merche's wan features almost shocked Francis into waking. Was she a football, she keened wildly, after regaining her customary slouch.

At that moment the screaming began. It seemed at first like a harmless yawn, but when a resounding clatter of shoes and bottles echoed through the delicately made walls of La Finca Negra, Francis knew, even through the jaded drunkenness of absinthe, that he had escaped from Merche.

The piteous wailing ... Now it sounded like singing...

Francis awoke with a start and a rotten taste in his mouth.

The girls were alternating choruses of "Oh Mein Papa."

"We are there," Ilse said joyfully.

Like all resort towns after the season, there was something ghastly about Sitges's deserted streets. A heavy, vapid, sobriety hung over the place that suggested sadness and old age. For Francis, the beauty of any place was a purely temporal impression. He could call upon a memory and derive a certain satisfaction from piecing the strands together, but he realized that only the experience itself counted--the actual living emotion--and that the sum total of a man's life could be measured only by the depth of his plunge into the living moment. Sitges today was like a man past his prime; a man living on a diet of old memories.

A group of local men were sitting in the small plaza along the oceanfront reading newspapers and smoking. Nothing was happening to them, he thought. They were simply waiting for the months to roll by and the start of a new season. They lived for three months every year. A common bond of boredom and indolence held them together. They would probably go off to the bodega for a beer when they got tired of sitting; possibly they would play a game of billiards if they could muster the energy; one or two of them might give the resident whores a play--at off-season rates; one of the men might even go to church--to gossip with the priest.

"You goink svims?" Gretchen asked him.

"No, I still have dysentery," Francis replied sourly.

"Tch, tch, pobre chico," Ilse commiserated with him. She always injected some Spanish into her conversation when emotion was required. She had once tediously explained to him that German was the language of science, and Spanish the language of the heart.

The car came to an abrupt halt, and Francis fell forward. He was glad to get out. The girls decided to have a quick swim before lunch and hurried on to the beach, so he parked himself on a shaded bench. Ilse stopped in the middle of her graceless lope and called out to him.

"Francis, dear, come on the beach--the sun will help your stomach."

"You're mad! The sweats aggravate it."

"Oh, please come, make us a little company." She was about to protest in her insidious, dialectical manner; a long chain of reasons would follow. Rather than argue, he shuffled behind, kicking the sand angrily.

Ilse had a stocky build, thick through the chest, face like a melon, yellow, uneven teeth, and ponderous arms bubbling with complacent fat. She wobbled across the sand in the alarmingly mindless fashion of a low-slung duck. Her interminable deep belly laughs nearly drove him to violence. He was completely convinced that this laughing-bug sprang from a glandular disorder. No one, he reasoned, could laugh at such silly things--after listening to Bach, while playing tennis, during a Bridge game, driving in the car and looking at scenery, and in her sleep--unless the pituitary was not functioning properly. Ilse had once explained: "I am just a happy person." Francis had sneered and said: "Money has the same effect on your nervous system as sex does for most women--you go through life as if it were one long orgasm." Ilse had flushed angrily, but a smile appeared through the consternation. She would not have listened to this much truth from anyone but him. It was love! And when Ilse loved, it was with a systematic joy that nearly verged on insanity.

Gretchen had galloped about fifty yards ahead of them and was undressing, indifferent to the passing traffic. When he came closer, he realized that she had been wearing a swimming-suit under her dress. Her suit, if one could call it that, an electric-blue stream of material, consisted of something like a head-scarf knotted under her crotch, and a thin, gossamer, canary-yellow handkerchief tied round an indefinite, shapeless, mound of flesh that passed for a bosom.

"Turn your head a moment, Francis," Ilse said self-consciously. She was having difficulty catching her breath, and sweat dribbled down her broad furrowed brow. Francis listened to the swish of clothing plop on the ground. When he turned round, he saw undergarments, sweaters, slips, and socks, heaped in an abysmal clump.

"Like it?" Ilse asked. "I bought it two days ago in the Paseo de Gracia."

"Terribly smart." It was an out-size red tent, but he smiled gallantly. She could use it to cover the car when she wasn't on the beach.

"Do you find it attractive?"

"I'm devastated."

"I'll be inside the water," Gretchen said, wiggling her shoes off, and dashing to the sea. Ilse straggled after her, giggling fatuously, like a woman being tickled--a woman in love.