The Peacock Emporium(49)

“Mama—”

“Please!”

She heard the certainty in his silence, and when she next spoke her voice held an edge of bitterness. She blinked against the tears. “All I wanted was to watch you succeed, get married, look after your children. And now you don’t just deny me this, you would deny me yourself!”

Their impending separation made him generous. He knelt and held her hand, her jeweled rings cold against his skin. “I will come back. I thought you might see this as an opportunity for me.”

She frowned at him, pushed his hair back from his eyes. “You are so cold, Ale. So unfeeling. Can’t you see that you’re breaking my heart?”

Alejandro was unable, as ever, to answer his mother’s forceful logic. “Be glad for me, Mama.”

“How can I be glad for you when I am grieving for myself?”

And that is why I am escaping from you, he said silently. Because all I have ever known from you is grieving. Because my head is full of it, always has been. And this way, finally, I might get a little peace. “We’ll talk later. I have to go out now.” He smiled, the patient, detached smile he reserved for his mother, and left her, with a kiss to her brow, sobbing quietly in the arms of her maid.



* * *



—

Considering that their sole purpose was to facilitate sexual excess and impropriety, the Venus Love Hotel, like other such establishments, was excessively bound up in rules and regulations. While any number of sexual aids might be ordered along with the room-service menu, and any kind of debauched proclivity catered for on the many adult videos available for private hire, the hotel was curiously prudish when it came to maintaining its code of conduct, its air of respectability. The building had the sober fa?ade of a private house. Neither man nor woman was allowed to wait in a room alone, despite the inconvenience caused to illicit couples forced to rendezvous in nearby cafés, not so safe from prying eyes. A smoked-glass screen at reception meant that neither receptionist nor visitor could accurately gauge the identity of the other.

Except that one particular customer was known to the man behind the screen and had paid him generously on more than one occasion to ensure discretion. This customer had appeared in the gossip magazines enough times to be recognizable even from behind the twin barriers of smoked glass and sunglasses.

This meant that, with only a nod to the silhouette before him, Alejandro was able to skip up the stairs two or three at a time and, at the appointed hour, knock on the discreetly numbered door that had been a private haven two or three times a week for almost eighteen months.

“Ale?” Never anything romantic. Never anything like amor. He preferred it like that.

“It’s me.”

Eduardo Guichane was one of Argentina’s highest paid television hosts. On his chat show, which aired several times a week, he was flanked by several near-naked South American girls who made frequent, badly scripted references to his legendary sexual appetite. He was tall, immaculately dressed, and prided himself on a physique seemingly unchanged since his years of playing professional football. Argentina’s favorite gossip magazine—Gente—repeatedly featured “stolen” pictures of him squiring some young woman who was not Sofia Guichane, or speculating as to whether, as was the case with his previous wives, he was being unfaithful to the former Miss Venezuela finalist. All planted by his publicist. “All lies,” Sofia would mutter bitterly, lighting one of her omnipresent cigarettes. Eduardo had the libido of an armchair. Although his most frequent excuse had been exhaustion, she was wondering if his interests didn’t lie in other directions.

“Boys?” said Alejandro cautiously.

“No! Boys I could cope with.” Sofia blew smoke at the ceiling. “I am afraid he is more interested in golf.”

They had met at his father’s surgery on a day after rioting when Alejandro had come, at his mother’s request, to check that his father had made it to work safely. Sofia was on one of several visits. Having been celibate for four of the six years of her marriage, she had labored under the belief that a smaller, higher backside and several inches off her thighs might reignite her husband’s passion. (“What a waste of American dollars that was,” she said afterward.) Alejandro, struck by her beauty and by the shining dissatisfaction in her face, had found himself staring, and then, upon leaving, thought no more of her. But she had bumped into him in the foyer downstairs where, staring at him with the same curious hunger, she announced that she never normally did this sort of thing, then scribbled her number on a card and thrust it at him.

Three days later they met at the Fenix, a spectacularly lascivious love hotel, where intricate prints of the Kama Sutra decorated the walls, and beds vibrated at will. Her mention of their meeting-place had left him in no doubt as to her intention, and they had come together almost wordlessly, in a frenzied coupling that had left Alejandro dazed for almost a week afterward.

Their meetings had gradually achieved a pattern. She would swear that they could not meet again, that Eduardo suspected something, had been quizzing her, that she had only got away with it by the skin of her teeth. Then, as he sat beside her, comforted her, told her he understood, she would weep, ask why she, as a young woman, should have to endure a sexless marriage, a life free of passion, when she was not even thirty. (Both were aware that this was not strictly true—the age at least—but Alejandro knew better than to interrupt.) And then, as he comforted her again, agreed that it was unfair, that she was too beautiful, too passionate to grow stale and dry like an old fig, she would hold his face and announce that he was so handsome, so kind, the only man who had ever understood her. And then they would make love (although that always sounded too gentle for what it really was). Afterward, smoking furiously, she would pull away and tell him that this really was it. The risks were too high. Alejandro would have to understand.