Libertine Love Songs, A Collection of Poesy, Prosody, and Prose Read online

CHAPTER FIVE

  “LAY ME DOWN, DOWN, DOWN; LAY ME DOWN SO LOW”

  Yet and only so, dusk in the tropical sultriness brings an intoxication, even to those in sobriety, as the mingling of the low and the high, the fallen and the yet to be up risen; such is life in Merida, Yucatan.

  She had been a proud and stately woman, regaling in her station. Her lofty position in society had come to her by marriage to an energetic man well connected socially, commercially, and politically. During the years they were married, he parlayed a comfortable inheritance into considerable wealth. He had manufacturing concerns, an import and export brokerage, warehouses and other real estate for personal use as well as investment, and liquid capital in the form of currencies, stocks and bonds.

  As wife of such a very important, well-heeled, ‘gentil’ entrepreneur, she had privilege to indulge in opulence and ostentation. The queen of great wealth, she vaulted herself above ordinary people while ingratiating herself to anyone she took to be socially prominent. The outcome of her methods proved counterproductive. Everyone regarded her as hard, insensitive, inflexible, and overbearing.

  She presumed more for herself than her talents and character should have allowed. Her affectation aside, everyone knew her background. The only notable accomplishment in her life was that she had married favorably. To those of the higher social class she was nothing but a ‘poser’ and a pretender who had overstepped her rightful social niche. She was crude, vulgar, and devoid of social grace and charm. Her ambition to belong to the ‘clase social’ had been thwarted and stalled from the very beginning. She found herself ostracized by the very ones she sought so ardently to join!

  True, her lineage and her upbringing were not of the ‘clase social.’ rather, she was born to the lower strata. Her father, a second generation Lebanese Christian, had been a hard drinker and a dedicated philanderer. He was a Philistine. He was ignorant, uncultured, and indifferent to the finer things in life, but with the looks of Rudolf Valentino.

  Her mother’s family was mestizos of Canary Island Spaniards and indigenous Mayan Indian stock. The mother, simple and decent, had been taken in by the father’s roughish charm. To the chagrin of her parents, she was receptive to his advances and they married under protest of her family who could see the problems that would come to her, the foolish bride of a ‘mujeriego’ like ‘Ernesto Umberto Aguilar y Castillo!’

  The family of Welina Solis de Aguilar was landed peons. Thrift and good luck had brought them thirty acres on which they built an old-style hacienda. The surrounding land had been divided into residential and commercial lots. One hundred years ago the house and land had been out beyond the city limits and the outskirts of settlement, outside the ancient city gates on the highway to Chichen-Itza and Valladolid.

  The pueblo of Merida, Yucatan had metamorphosed from a provincial backwater of Spanish colonialism to the thriving commercial center for the entire Yucatan peninsula with half million citizens. The growth had engulfed the outlying districts and the hacienda now stood in the center of a teeming business district in the “barrio” of Chen-Bech adjacent to the highway running east and west and connecting the small Indian villages and archeological curiosities scattered throughout the countryside. This road had been traveled for thousands of years. This was the way to go from that great ceremonial center of the Mayan/Aztec confederation of Chichen-Itza to the equally spectacular city-state of Ti-Hoo. Ti-Hoo had been razed by the rapacious Spaniards. The still extant temples and palaces of the priests and nobility at the beginning of the intrusion were torn down to the foundations and stones and the ornate fixtures were then used to erect and embellish the Cathedral, the Palacio and all the other majestic architecture of colonial Merida. The Spanish conquest, destruction, and reconstruction in the peninsula is dated 1547. Though preserved in memory and name by the ones who still carry on the Mayan ways and language even to the present day, Ti-Hoo is gone and forgotten by everyone else who only recognize the place as Merida the 'white city' of the Yucatan known throughout the hemisphere as a place of charm and romance.

  Welina’s family was of the landed working class. They had property and some money in the bank. Welina was common though respectable. Umberto was a rogue, a ruffian, and a libertine.

  Welina and Umberto married and had two daughters. The couple endured each other for a few years, then separated and divorced. The children were left fatherless and with bleak prospects for the future. Edid, the eldest by two years, did not like school. Even less than studying did she like to work. Lazy and dim-witted, she was destined for a life of mediocrity if not for one fortunate condition. The blending of the bloodlines had given them in a fetching, an exotic physiology. The two girls were ‘guapisimas’! They commanded the attention and the admiration of all.

  The girls were fifteen and seventeen year old Mexican beauties who had their choice of all the eligible bachelors around town. The two of them were so pretty that they might pick and choose as they pleased.

  Edid took her time. Romantic love was not why she picked this boy or another to spend time with. Neither did good looks and charm mean anything special in her estimations.

  Edid was ambitious and calculating from birth. She used feminine grace and animal magnetism, the wiles of her sex and succeeded in attracting a suitor who promised her the world and more and who had the ability to deliver.

  Everything pointed to disaster. One could cite precedents of star-crossed affairs when guileless boys married low-class girls. These marriages always turned out bad. Everyone told him watch out! But he did not care. He was blinded by sexual passion. After an indecently brief courtship, he proposed. She hastily said yes.

  The barrio looked to the pending nuptials as a good break for Edid and her family and the barrio’s dwellers hoped to share in the luck. They figured Edid would remember her humble upbringing and be pleased to show them the graces of society. They would get to mix and mingle with the social elite of Merida. Putting on airs and pretending to be more than appearances, this is the way the lower classes mollify stifled dreams.

  These people knew the integration of high and low society was taboo and not tolerated by the rich people who never accepted anyone not born to privilege. But, what the hell! Edid does have her charms and he’s got the money to keep her in check! To cast things in a positive light, the people in the barrio gossiped and speculated on the effect a barrio girl getting married to a rich dude would have. Some envisioned big parties. Others had their eye on jobs in the warehouses and factories of the groom who would see the need to be a benefactor to their little corner of the world. This was the mood in Chen-Bech in the days and weeks leading up to the wedding day. Everyone, neighbors and kinsfolk, congratulated the girl and sincerely wished her well.

  Edid, as was her custom, thought only of herself. She was pleased and self-satisfied to be escaping from the squalor. She wanted a clean break. She did not want anything or anybody coming across the class barrier to remind her of Chen-Bech. She was the girl picked from the crowd! She deserved all the glory! She ridiculed and scorned all the people she knew. Gratitude and charity were not in her nature. Little people be damned!

  She invited neither friends nor family to the nuptials and parties. Her new life was not to be compromised by common trash! After the wedding, she deigned never to go across town, from the Colonia Aleman, the rich side of town, to filthy Chen-Bech. When rarely she did go there to see her mother and sister, she displayed such hauteur that she left very bad feelings etched into the hearts of the common people.

  Her hauteur festered like cancer. She was mean to her domestics, those born into humble stations to attend the whims of the social classes. She vented her disgusts in fine restaurants and posh clubs. The sales girls in salons and boutiques feared her sharp words. She upbraided and ridiculed everyone.

  Her husband, the one she owed appreciation and respect, was thinking, ‘What a bitch! She wanted complete control in the marriage. She staged embarrassing situations causing him to
lose face. She used her sensuality to hammer home his vulnerability that she more easily corner and pin him. With hooks securely in place, she gloated in her power over him. She labored at being ‘la reina de las putas’, queen of the bitches! Her campaign for control was calculated and skillfully put into effect. He was a hopeless ‘miserable’ and a ‘pobre infeliz.’ he woke up one morning to see that he was mired in a world of woe.

  He felt diminished and inadequate. She was fickle and disloyal and her tirades sapped his strength. She involved herself in a series of imbroglios always plotting and scheming against someone. He had to listen to her as she belittled and berated him non-stop saying he was a little man.

  Vindictive to the extreme, she set out to humiliate her enemies. Any slight or presumption, real or imaginary, infuriated her. Irrational, she defended her intrigues as just. Anyone she caused to suffer deserved the pain. She expected that he agree with her.

  She made enemies! More than a few secretly connived and plotted to bring her down. When the ongoing skirmishes went against her, with quandaries and vexations galore, she would get flustered by the heat of the action. Her self-pity was laughable. She blamed her husband for her problems. She insisted that if he were a good husband, protective and supportive, the hounds nipping at her would not dare!

  She even accused him of acquiescence. She told him it was his fault. He liked to see her put down because he was jealous of her! Everyone hated her because she was beautiful! The world is a cruel and jealous pit filled with small-minded haters living in lousy shacks with filthy toilets! She told herself she would show them! She carried on spiteful and mean.

  After a few years of this, her husband took no pleasure in his beautiful wife. She belittled him and put him down in public. He harbored secret thoughts and carried on soliloquies in which he would be the one who faulted her. He would tell her what he thought of her. He would wish that he had never been so blind and stupid to marry a common tramp from the barrio. His wife was a common barrio tramp and she did not even take care of their children.

  They had two daughters. They were little things but it was obvious they were neglected. The little girls were ill kept. The rumor was that she would go out and the children would be alone for hours and hours, sometimes, to the next day. When daddy was away on business, mommy was making the rounds partying and getting drunk.

  She foisted her maternal duties off on whomever she could. She loathed any associations to motherhood. She went out into the night seeking excitement. She liked going to the hottest nightspots and to risqué ‘teatros’ where the entertainment might include provocative stage presentations of sexual behavior. Her social set, those she really got into and most enjoyed being around, were of the leisure classes of old money and proud lineage. She bragged about her friends who descended from los conquistadores! She even hung out with the house of Montejo!

  One of her best friends was Raphael Montejo whose antecedent was the legendary Capitan Montejo, master of the servile Mayab. It was at his instigation that the Mayan temple was torn down and a Catholic church was put on the same ground and adding insult to injury using the limestone of the temple to build the church. Her friends were degenerates of extreme wealth. Their wealth afforded a modicum of respectability. Hanging out with them made her feel great.

  With them she was in her element. She was a kindred soul. She liked to parade her association with Merida’s richest, most ancient and noble sons making sure her husband and his mother could see her with them and know she had beaten them at their own game of snobbish condescension. Yes, she had gotten back at them! They were bourgeois simpletons who would not trap her with their rules and conventions. She relished in the pretense of her superiority. She and her friends really had it together!

  She loved to travel to Mexico City and on trips to Miami and even across the Atlantic to Barcelona, Madrid, and Rome. She would come back with tales of high adventure. She would be loaded down with expensive foreign goods only rich people can afford. She loved to spend her husband’s money.

  She was the subject of insidious gossip. It bothered her not one bit. That she cuckolded her husband only made her feel like she really was a special person, a great beauty. Everyone wanted to have her but she could only be had by a chosen few! Only the richest and most powerful could have her.

  It was common knowledge that she kept a string of sycophantic paramours to pump up her ego. Being the center of attention, she played the role of a femme fatal. She imagined herself as a cross between Mae West and Betty Boop. She was not really that in to sex per se. What really got her off was narcissistic display for voyeurs and playboys.

  All the gossip proved people were taking notice and she was pleased by all the talk. Though most of the talk was on her whorish ways, she felt she was above it all. The gossipers were self-righteous and hypocritical ’little people.’ the put downs and the trash talk came from nasty-minded old ladies. It was not her problem they were fat, ugly, and dumb. She took great pride in being noticed even when the comments about her were negative. She figured she was above the fray.

  Yet, all the while, as the several years of these melodramas marched on, the security of her perch above the fray was being inexorably undermined. The meanness of her ways and her scandalous behavior weighed against her and looming ahead unnoticed was the certainty of a fall. All this tedious and aggrieving conduct had silently and subjectively brought her to a rupture in the structure of her life. Her husband wanted to get rid of her and soon. She was in for a rude comeuppance. The diffident, pliable, and so-easy-to-get-over- on husband was not pleased with her as a wife. Nor had he found cuckoldry funny.

  He did that which he proceeded to do in his usual perfunctory style. And, even though he had cause, his motives were not laced with revenge. Rather, it was just the proper thing to do. Cutting her loose and being freed from her was simply good policy. It was not spitefulness. It was just the thing to do.

  He had planned every detail even to the girls who had been sent to private academies in Miami, Florida. The girls were securely out of the way which led to the next step. He petitioned for divorce. The decree cited adultery and abandonment of the home. She was completely taken aback by the summons to appear in divorce court. Being unprepared, her defense was meager and ineffective. She murmured about conjugal property and deferential attitudes afforded women.

  The gentleman and his lawyers got a private hearing with the judge and the terms were set up and put into effect as a matter of course and she had no recourse as the rubberstamp had already sealed her fate before she even spoke a word.

  When she realized what had gone down, she tried to get a better settlement. She went to her wealthy and influential friends. Going back ten, fifteen years she had raved about how tight they were, that she knew she could count on these dudes! Now, at this critical time, no one lifted a finger to help, no good advice, no gestures of sympathy.

  The support and political cronyism that might have had some favorable bearing on the outcome was not there. Raul Montejo and the others whose favor she had courted, those friends and lovers had grown tired of her.

  Once the blossom began to fade she was exposed as the common ‘morena’ from the barrio; the truth of the matter, no one can long endure a contentious woman!

  The court determined she would have her personal possessions. All the finery, designer apparel, jewelry, furnishings, all she accumulated in fifteen years of profligacy and wasteful expenditure of precious cash, she would be able to carry with her when she left.

  She had no right to claim any of the financial assets or properties of her husband. Even though he was not obligated to do so, he, not being a vengeful person, gave her a cash settlement and bid her farewell. She would not be given any more money in the days and months to come. This really upset her.

  She sang her song of lamentation to anyone who would listen. She told them how she gave the very best she could give to her husband and daughters. Everyone knew it was a lie! She blasted them s
aying those years she had been at her most beautiful and now she was getting a little aged, they abandoned her! Those ingrates!

  How was she to live? How miserable life could be! Her future was really bleak. How tragic! What would become of her? Was there no help or hope for a woman forsaken, cast off, jilted, unloved? What was to become of her?

  She went to live with her mother in Chen-Bech. It was quite a procession when she went through the heart of Merida from the fashionable and upscale residence in the Colonia Aleman where she had lived as a queen to her mother’s two room hovel in shanty town. She moved all her things into the shanty where Welina and Eubelio, common-law husband and wife, lived their simple lives. The old couple lived poor yet proud and happy enough.

  Welina had taken up with Eubelio after her marriage to Umberto Aguilar ended. He was fifteen years older than Welina and they shacked up together for convenience and because they both liked to drink liquor and beer. Now in his eighty’s, a retired merchant marine, he was quiet as a church mouse, even talking in signs and gestures rather than saying something that might get him a scolding from Welina. It was a sign of their innate goodness they never considered saying no to the daughter. She was welcome.

  Now, the three of them slept, all in the front room. Hammocks were strung up at night and taken down by day so they could move around. All the space was taken. Cardboard boxes and plastic bags were stacked along walls and stuffed into every nook and cranny. This was how low Edid had sunk. She felt humiliated.

  All the people were shocked and surprised seeing Edid back living with her mother. They did not like her. Still, they felt bad for her seeing her fall from high society. Secretly, they were satisfied seeing she got what she had coming. She had really been out of line with her conceit for so many years and they talked about her and everybody said that life has a way of making things even out, mixing the bad with the good. There was a lesson there! Everyone should take this as a lesson!

  She had taken to walking the streets alone. She was always muttering to herself. She would blurt out an epithet, and then continue saying nonsense. She seemed dissociated from her surroundings always wearing an abstracted look on her face. Everyone agreed she was losing her mind.

  Afternoons were spent drinking. This had been her routine for weeks and months. She walked around aimlessly all morning and got drunk all afternoon.

  Having already squandered the cash she had received in the divorce settlement, she was resigned to drinking on borrowed money. She would gladly have turned tricks for her booze if the miscreants she caroused with but had money to pay her! So, it was catch as catch can! Live for today! Eat, drink, be miserable, and then die!

  On this fine day, month of May, she went to her customary cantina to drink and hang out. Those in the place with her were the typical lot of drunkards, perverts, and thieves. The place is in a low class neighborhood, wretched even by Chen-Bech standards, catering to the tastes and serving delight to society’s most undelightful. These most poor and miserable creatures share destinies, getting drunk, telling jokes, staying cool and out of sight.

  The regular crew and Edid shared a bottle of rum chased by coke and beer. When the money got low, they switched to pulque offered by the proprietor on credit until next week. All drink to drunkenness.

  She is one of the several; boys, men, and an occasional whore sharing their days in this way. Even though it is full daylight, everyone is rip roaring drunk. This is how she has been for days. Edid has become a habitual drunk and is steadily losing her mind.

  She is a study in contrasts. The surroundings and her drunkenness are not in synch with her bearing and her stylish clothes. Her style, clothes, shoes, and jewelry are elegant. The men around her are tawdry, indolent, and uncultured. They are dressed in tatters.

  The men and boys hoot and holler at her as she tries to get up from the table. She is restrained and cannot get up because one guy has his hand up her dress. He fingered the moist hollow between her thighs. Another has pulled at the collar of her blouse to cop a feel. Her breasts were exposed for all to see. All her drinking buddies are hooting and hollering like obscene children; dangerous and obscene children.

  She lurched to her feet and broke free. Disheveled, breasts and thighs naked, she stumbled out into the street. She wanted to go home. She only has to go a few short blocks down the dirt road that passed in front of her mother’s house. She had to get out and away from that acrid, smelly, vermin infested den of mongrels!

  Drunk, she cannot go on even one step more. She fell down. She fell and lay alongside the dirt road, unconscious.

  A broken and idiotic neighborhood cripple boy happened along making his rounds. This cripple boy saw her all in a heap and senseless. He ran off to get Edid’s mother and sister. He went straight to the hacienda to get Magdalena and Don Antonio.

  When he got there, shuffling and limping along, he explained himself best he could. Pantomime and inarticulate stammering effectively give the alert and the people came running to see what was going on. As they ran down narrow pathways to the unpaved road the few blocks from hacienda to where she lay, they wondered aloud among themselves. An accident? Robbery? Mugging? Sexual assault? The urgency and willingness to rush to Edid to render aid was more from curiosity than any real concern for the fallen woman. Nobody liked her anyway.

  “There she is!” She was over in the weeds and rocks. She was motionless and all in a heap. As they gathered around her, she stirred. Her drunkenness was obvious! Coming to, Edid recognized the pompous and self-righteous attitudes that stamped the minds of her kin. Knowing them for who they were, she feigned a little show by holding her hands to her head as she is lifted to her feet.

  The ragtag, idiot cripple boy now stepped into the role he was born to play. He assumed the persona of a knight gallant outfitted in shining armor, protector of fair damsels in distress. He delivered his charge to her feet. With pomp and dignity they walked arm in arm toward sanctuary. They were going back to the old hacienda. Welina had lived here with her daughters after her marriage breakup. This had been the only place they called home. The grand, old-style hacienda; built early 19th century, had spacious rooms, twelve feet high ceilings, two feet thick block and mortar walls, and an expansive courtyard that connected the house to outbuildings and the cultivated fields beyond.

  The property in its present state was reduced to an area of two city blocks as the outlying terrain was sold off piece by piece to developers. Welina, mother of Edid and Magdalena, had always lived there. Calculatedly, Don Antonio assumed proprietorship and Welina was shunted to a shanty three blocks away. Welina lived there with Eubelio and now, Edid also lived there sharing her and Eubelio’s primitive home.

  Magdalena had never left Merida and its environs other than day trips to Progreso, Campeche, or Quintana Roo. She had married one of the local crazy boys when still a girl of sixteen. As widely reported, Edid married above her station and Magdalena married beneath herself. For some implausible reason she hooked up with Don Antonio Salazar. Magdalena was a gentle and beautiful girl. Don Antonio was short and fat and mean spirited.

  His fore bearers had come up to the peninsula from the southern river lowlands of Belize and Guatemala. His people were Lacondons. Mayan in name, they had none of the Mayan ways. They spent all their time floating around in their canoes, fishing and hunting monkey heads to shrink. Lacondons are more warlike than other Mayan groups. They were rumored to have been cannibalistic. Don Antonio was true to his race. He was a vicious and a sadistic dude.

  During the early years of marriage he was a cop. He belonged to the judicial federal. The federal police are a bunch of mean guys. Everyone hates them. His reputation as a cop was based on his policing the mongrel dogs and stray cats in the neighborhood. He dedicated lots of his time to hanging mongrel dogs and stray cats in trees and then using them for target practice.

  Something happened to cost him his job. Maybe he bullied and roughed up the wrong person. He lost his cop job for which he was
temperamentally so well suited. He looked around for something to do. Seeing everyone wearing shoes, he became a vendor of his own product. He specialized in cheap and tacky-looking shoes of his own design for the poor Indian women with thick ankles and absolutely no fashion sense. His industry barely turned a profit.

  Magdalena was the worker bee of the two. She had a thriving business. She kept chickens in the back yard. Getting up before the chickens, she slaughtered them to sell in the Chen-Bech market. Without his wife helping him, Antonio would never have been able to make a living.

  The two of them spent most all day, every day in the market. He would tinker and nap. She would work like a Turk. She hardly allowed any time for any activity other than daily prayer meetings with a Holy Roller evangelical Catholic sect. That stuff was all she ever talked about: healing by laying on of hands, speaking in tongues, prophesy and apparitions and the end days. She was an engaging person and though her conversation would be tinged with fanaticism, her heart was good and she meant well.

  Though she was charitably disposed in a general sense to saint and sinner, like everyone else she had deep resentments toward her sister. These resentments contributed to her judgmental, self-righteous, and sanctimonious attitude. She was excessively critical of the wanton conduct and lavish lifestyle of her older sister. She was constantly harping on the same things over and over again. She based her moralizing on ethics and religious doctrine.

  Her unbalanced intolerance concerning the character defects of her older sister verged on pathological self-righteous and her preachy ways seemed hypocritical when juxtaposed with Don Antonio’s brutish behavior as when her husband had bullied and intimidated his mother-in-law until she left the ancestral home.

  The property, once an estate outside the city gates of Merida, was now dead center of the thriving and teeming commercial and cultural capital of the mythic Mexican state of Yucatan. The property, houses, gardens and courtyards, a compound extending over two city blocks, was worth a lot of money. Don Antonio, a vulgar, cruel, and selfish little man, was given to boast, “Mine! All this property is mine.” He loved to tell the world how important he was though he earned just enough for a pot to piss in.

  Toward la Casa Salazar tramped, stumbled, staggered, and swayed a lonely and embittered middle aged woman with her knight gallant, a little cripple who was straining under her weight trying to keep her on her feet and going in the right direction. Stumbling into the wall and nearly falling, his pathetic little withered leg flapped at every step.

  A look of bewilderment was on his face. Bewilderment was conjoined with pride in doing the right thing! He knew he was the hero in the affair. Rapture and entrancement animated his comically unhandsome face. He felt truly inspired and knew without doubt he was making a great show.

  Somehow, the witnesses to this mythical pageant of valor just didn’t get it! They were witnesses to divine afflatus but could not see what was happening right before them. An idiot cripple boy had been transfixed and transformed into a godly hero! Right before their eyes, a man-god confronted and overcame his destiny as an insignificant cretin and outcast from society to be the one to salvage hope and love but they did not see it!

  They saw him as they had always seen him. They saw him as Lecho, the neighborhood cripple and village idiot. This was what he was and would always be to them. Lecho! Lecho! Lecho! Poor bastard!

  They got to the door of the house and went in. They crossed over from the salon and went into the adjacent bedroom. Edid lurched for the bed with her arms around Lecho’s frail body. She pulled him into bed and on top of her. This haughty and desirable lady of means and taste had Lecho in love’s embrace. She and her crippled knight were holding on to each other, face to face, breast to breast, and belly to belly. His phallus had entered the vulva. Their lips were touching. Impassioned and swooning, her legs were hiked up and spread wide open.

  This boy looked like a child although he was a man. He had never done something like this before. He was simply amazed! His good eye darted about the room. He could see all the faces looking at him. He was thinking, not in words but in an instinctual way, “Is this so? Is this really happening?”

  Yes, dear one. It is so. It is really happening. A handsome, voluptuous woman is holding and rocking you dearly and gently in her arms!

  Her legs snaked around his hips. Her dress was up around her waist. Her legs and hips, all her femininity, was open. She writhed and undulated. She took him inside her. As she hunched in unconscious passion, he came.

  Yes, dear one! It is truly so. These words sounded huskily from an impassioned female throat: “Mi amor, te quiero, mi amor.”

  Don Antonio, Magdalena, their children, and the neighbors who heard the commotion and came to see what was going on; all gave witness. No one could believe it! Right before their very eyes! No one could believe it!

  After the initial surprised silence, everyone was laughing uncontrollably. This was the most hilarious thing any of them had ever seen! All they ever thought was funny was nothing compared to this! Lecho getting it on! The funniest thing ever! Lecho and Edid! “Ha ha!”

  The lovemaking on the bed in the middle of the room, in the center of a teeming tropical city, on the North American continent, on the planet earth, in the solar system, on one of many spiraling arms of the Milky Way galaxy, a universe among billions of universes; this act of copulation, funny to them, was so much more than a joke. This was union of two souls for a sacred purpose.

  The hero and his beloved were engaged in a divine ritual designed to sanctify and to consecrate the world. Here in the very center of god’s creation, at the heart of existence, two souls offering themselves in the supreme sacrifice of personal interests for the greater good. Their offering brought to fulfillment the earth’s commitment of two beings in sexual congress to enact the rhapsody of all time . . . As Lecho and Edid were joined, their union depicted the coming together of our parents, Adam and Eve, chosen seminaries of the human race. Their being together like this was to work the magical and spiritual spell of human love.

  As precious, delicate crystal broken to pieces, the magical and spiritual spell of human love was smashed to pieces. Spirit was chained. The flight of two souls launched to heaven aborted to stay earthbound. An oath of severity was blasphemed. A few harsh and cynical words from the mouth of Don Antonio were all it took to rid the air of the perfumed smell of the magical and spiritual spell of human love.

  The spell was broken. Judgment had been rendered. Don Antonio blasted and bellowed these words: “Basta! Enough! Take that drunken slut out of here! In the name of decency, enough is enough!”

  But the joy? You must not interfere! Break the spell and all is lost. Remember the tears and the pain of love and love lost! There is hope for redemption through healing love! The feeling! What about that feeling? A love so pure has to be set free! Love will make things better! Just give it a chance!

  The moment is gone. The promise of the moment is lost. Only a fading memory lingers in the soul of the world; a memory and the faint aroma, strange and seductive, of the perfumed smell of the magical and spiritual spell of human love. The smell shall not fade but is to maintain its body forever in simple hearts and in the soul of the world. The world’s soul is so weary and worn out! Our wreck of a world needs love. The world needs to love; to be loved! Yet love is taken away! “Don’t take it! Give love back to us! Give it back!”

  It is too late for these lovers. That boy and that bitch! No way! Some things are plausible. Some things can never be. Leave it to crazy dreamers! It is not meant to be.

  The sun is going down.

  Yet and only so, dusk in the tropical sultriness brings an intoxication, even to those in sobriety, as the mingling of the low and the high, the fallen and the yet to be up risen; such is life in Merida, Yucatan.