Bane of Blood: La Gorgona

III, Part 26

Fernando's neglectful mother may have planted the seed of his attraction. But it was another from his early youth who'd shaped his proclivities.

His first erotic experience had occurred to him in hindsight, when he was still living in the barrio. He had been eight years old, the same age he'd been when his mother had died. Perhaps because of this the encounter had been branded into him all the more deeply.

He'd been playing alone in his bedroom when he'd happened to glance up and see something unexpected. Through the window he'd spied a naked woman, bathing in the apartment building crammed up next to theirs. She'd been fat and mustachioed, but that hadn't mattered to him. He'd stared at her while she'd lathered her voluminous breasts—captivated and strangely discomfited by the sight.

His breath had caught in his chest as he'd stared at her, transfixed. It had felt to him like his guts were knotting up inside. He'd started to feel feverish, light-headed almost, the longer he'd watched this homely neighbor woman soap and knead herself.

He remembered the doughy flop of her teats, the huge brown pucker of her nipples and the bristly black hairs that had fringed them, catching the suds. He'd been pressed so close to the glass of the window by then that the obscuring mist of his breath had been a source of hellish irritation to him.

He'd felt that he was boiling up inside as her shovel-like hands had dug around in the ample folds of her great belly. His fingers had curled twitching against the windowpane with the impotent desire to do the same—to probe in the yielding flesh of this big soft woman, to fill his mouth with pillowy, peaking breast.

He'd had no concept of the act of sex. Only a child's vague inklings, and a tumultuous force of yearning which he understood even less. It was as if he were cursed with a man's passion trapped in the unwitting mind and underdeveloped body of a boy. Hapless to manifest to full conception.

His desire had fumed vainly within him, culminating in the desperate drive to pinch and bite and suck. He had been shaking and sweating with indescribable greed by the time those squarish hands had delved between the thick dimpled thighs, rooting confoundingly in the dewy black bush that had thatched them.

It had been maddening to him, not to know exactly what she'd been doing between her legs, not to see exactly how she was formed between them. Only to watch her blunt hands carding in and out through the dense dark fleecing, forging into depths unknown. As indifferent toward him and his suffering as Mother Nature herself.

The terrible, wracking suspense had overcome young Fernando. He'd passed out, or he'd realized he must have later on, when he found himself lying sprawled and throbbing on the floor. Utterly exhausted and yet still horribly inflamed. He'd lain there basking in the pangs of thwarted passion, perversely relishing the aftertaste of that sublime, exquisite torment.

Fernando had dwelled upon this experience, fetishized it. Nursed himself upon the fetish of it. The more he'd stewed upon it, the more convinced he'd become that the neighbor woman must have known he was watching her. How could she not have known? How could she not have seen him there, plastered to the window a scant distance from her, shaking and staring and panting like a rabid dog?

Rehashing the sordid encounter in his mind, Fernando saw a glimmer of dove-dark eye lighting on him through a thick curling fringe of lash. Half a flitting glance, no more. It was enough. Enough for him to tell himself that she'd seen him and had gone on with her bathing pretending that she hadn't.

As the years wore on, this exhibitionist edge to his first foray into voyeurism aroused Fernando more than anything. Even more enticing to him than her naked body or her groping hands was this spirit of willful, wayward performance she'd put on before his wolfish eyes.