The frowning official looked at her above the photo of his wife, a vain devotee, and a pair of children, tyrants growing up to be cynics. He coughed, lit a cigarette, and offered it to Fanny. My aunt uncrossed her legs, pulled her skirt up (she wore no panties), and introduced the cigarette into her small sex with its pink lips. That way, with her thighs spread, she showed that she knew how to smoke through there, exhaling spirals of smoke. Meanwhile, as if that circus act were the most natural thing in the world, she proposed an amorous relationship to the functionary in exchange for a spacious house where she could carry on her business, that is, a luxury bordello.
The man went crazy. With febrile enthusiasm, he fell on his knees between those alabaster legs and kissed her sex so hastily that he swallowed the cigarette. After half a dozen rapid, nervous assaults, he agreed to everything — but only if she swore absolute fidelity to him. Fanny, who said her name was Princess Rahula and showed, as proof of her blue blood, the black beauty mark she had on her forehead, accepted the killer imposed on her as a guard dog, so that at night, with his pistol in his belt, he would sleep under her bed.
That sacrifice was worthwhile. She created a decent bordello, which had a sublime success. Her ideas were original. Instead of demanding a mansion in a well-to-do neighborhood, which would end up generating scandals among its sanctimonious neighbors, she asked for all the little houses along a passage off seedy Bulnes Street, always full of atrocious whores. The men who ventured into that territory came out with their lapels destroyed by the avid tugging of the women trying to seduce them, all ugly, drunk, and falling apart. Politicians, important businessmen, famous men, aristocrats. To each one she offered a complete apartment supplied with a salon, bar, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a garage from which they could enter the house. That way, no busybody could see the client get out of his car, and discretion was absolute.
My aunt had her ideas about masculine sexuality: a man who hires a whore is not, deep inside, looking for sex, but tenderness. More than a woman, he wants a confessor. She scoured all of Santiago looking for twenty expert women between the ages of fifty and fifty-five. She chose, if not the most beautiful — after all, so many years of prostitution, alcohol, abortions, and pimps took their toll — then at least the most dignified. She gave them severe looking outfits, hairdos like ladies, and discreet makeup. She taught them how to speak delicately and to erase lasciviousness from their faces, to exchange it for the expression of tender mothers.
“Sexually speaking, you know everything but about maternal caresses, you know nothing. Learn to touch the clients as if they were your own sons. At the beginning, during initial contact, if you arouse their antipathies (they perhaps hold deep anger against the author of their days because of a bad birth or a lack of milk and care or who knows what, some wish left unfulfilled), it doesn’t matter. Go to them so they can reject you. Let them love those enemy hands, and let them begin to massage. The first thing you must respect are defenses. And as if you were all Virgin Marys, caress them inch by inch, right down to the heart, with extreme delicacy and total attention, dissolving the tiniest contractions, one muscle after the other, giving firm support to each area, so that the client never gets the impression that any part is overlooked, no matter how small. To massage in that style, you should breathe regularly, with absolute calm; you must revere; be an empty receptacle, with nothing to request, nothing to impose, a simple refuge, not an invader, an infinite and eternal company, discreet, ready to become invisible at the slightest movement of rejection. If you give in with love, it is God who will touch the other through you. If you don’t give your hands to God, they can’t really touch. If the mother is not divine, she is not a mother.”
Prepared in that way, those women knew how to use sweet voices; to bathe the politicians, singing them lullabies; to powder them with talcum; to take them in their arms; to squeeze an ear between their breasts and hold them there for hours, submerged in the rhythm of the heart; at the end, when they were stretched out on their backs in bed, with no defense, to caress their sex in such a vigorous fashion, from scrotum to glans, that they would emerge from their mental stupor transformed into dragons. They possessed those old ladies, who on all fours, made obscene squeals, spoke phrases of a diabolical lasciviousness, and led the men to an indecent pleasure bordering on madness. Then they would accept the lash that the temptress would pull out from under the pillow when she sensed they were reaching an orgasm. They would spurt the final discharge under a rain of blows.
Afterwards, they would pay considerable amounts of cash. Fanny’s success was so great that the clients had to sign up two months ahead of time to get a date. When it was a matter of a party involving several men, Fanny would offer the rear apartment, which was three times larger than the others, decorated in French style. Gorged with champagne, cocaine, and women, they would demand the eccentricity of the house, as a challenge, in order to prove who was more macho. My aunt brought three nandus, Argentine ostriches, to the patio. The gentlemen, standing on top of a hassock, laughing their heads off and making obscene faces, would possess the birds.
Princess Rahula had to live in a setting worthy of her rank. She had her rooms decorated in maharaja style, with shiny curtains, columns being born from thick lotus flowers, immense cushions, Buddhas, Ganeshas, Shivas, offerings of rice pudding, candles instead of electric lights, and incense that stank of patchouli. She would wear a turban; a long, sleeveless vest; baggy trousers; and slippers whose toes pointed up — all of it in velvet, cloth-of-gold, and transparent silk. Besides, the Minister, as payment for her absolute fidelity, covered her with jewels. Fanny was taking discreet steps in order to be introduced to the president of the republic, when suddenly her periods stopped. To give birth at seventeen did not trouble her a great deal. Her protector tripled her salary, because her breasts that promised milk and her protruding belly made her even more attractive.
Fanny discovered she could meditate crossing her legs, just as her Buddhas did it. In that position, one day at dawn, resting after having scrupulously noted the earnings and expenditures of the day, she heard a telepathic message from the fetus: “Remember me? The last time we saw each other was in Russia, and you were a little girl. I introduced myself as a cobra trainer. I told you that in a previous life, where I had been your father, a king, you were named—”
“Rahula! That’s true. Now I realize I never forgot you.”
“We share a long history. In even more remote lives, you have been my father, my mother, my brother, my sister, my wife, my lover, my teacher. We have passed through almost all the forms of the realization of love. Now we have nothing more to do in this world. In the next transformation, we shall be one entity. Our souls, finally amalgamated, will help in the gestation of a new Universe, one more conscious than this one. The only thing I haven’t been for you is a stillborn child, present in your spirit all the days you have left of life. It will be the greater love, the love of the frustrated mother whose breasts drip milk without a precious mouth to suck them; with hands like the eye sockets of the blind, holding an absent body; a trunk grown old without seeing the branches grow; a heart weeping for a child with no name, no body, no age, no presence; pure promise; a never-sprouted seed; a mute road where known and beloved footsteps will never echo. That great love will unite us definitively. Later, the happiness of not having the limitations of flesh and the ecstasy of transparency. For having been faithful for so many centuries, we deserve to be the architects of new worlds.”