Manta, September 17, 2018
A taxi skirts the coast. On board Alberto and Carlos, new friends from Venezuela who work in a fish factory in Manta.
The white lights of the oil tankers glitter offshore. One crosses the outskirts, one paces the boulevards of dust.
At the entrance to the club one must show a white paw. The bouncer stares me down, takes a photo of my passport, asks to see the friends’ cédulas. At last one penetrates the lair. At the back is a stripping stage facing a parterre of men with serious faces, in conclave with bottles of Pilsner and Club Verde. A girl comes down onto the stage by a sort of elevator. She begins her number, peels off the lace and the synthetic silks. She is strong, squeezes the pole between her muscled thighs, hangs from it like a trapeze artist. A guy holds out bills that she wedges into her boots. She looks him straight in the eyes, points a finger toward the south, on her lips one can read the word:
– ¡Mira!
All at once she throws herself to the floor and does the splits, splays her hairless sex under the customer’s nose.
Around the room are numbered doors, some shut, others ajar. Half-naked girls sigh in the doorframes. On the left hand is a woman in glasses, enormous buttocks, shot full of silicone. Her neighbour a giantess, back broad and muscled, six foot four at least: she towers over us. On the right hand a merchant of love in a low-cut negligee: she displays the round hard curve of her fake breasts. When a girl has finished her number, she frames herself in one of the doors and waits for customers. You’d think it was the red light of a port city, and that we were, we men, grimy and soaked sailors.
– ¿Cuanto cuesta? I ask my friends.
“Diez dolares por diez minutos,” answers Alberto, who goes from one girl to the next, glues his breath to their faces, talks with them. He is negotiating a trick for me, with the girl in glasses:
– A ella le gusta el gringo.
Thanks Alberto, not tonight!
Him neither. He doesn’t have enough money. He’ll make do with drinking beer. He is thirty-nine, handsome mug, athlete’s build. He comes from the sierra venezolana. He has a good job at the factory: head of exports. He ships containers full of fish to China. Carlos, twenty-two, black hair, all smiles, chaotic teeth, at the factory he guts the fish. He’s Alberto’s adoptive son! They get an eyeful of the dancers together. Father-son outing, as they say. No one drools as much as Carlos. He swoons before the girls, especially these ones parading on the stage now: young, slender bodies, elastic skins, small breasts. He can’t hold himself anymore, Carlos.
The loudspeakers keep disgorging the same Latin music at a hurried beat. At the next table trans women have settled in, who eye us from the corner of the eye. The men at the other tables burp their beer and rummage their pockets. A customer comes out of door number 13 adjusting his pants. In the fumes of alcohol, Alberto confides in me, tells me of his sorrow. A year and a half he hasn’t been back to Venezuela. A year and a half without seeing his esposa and his hijas!
– En mi corazón estoy muy triste.
His face so close to mine, I breathe his breath, his exhalation, his tristeza too.
Around us the world liquefies and pours out: the beers and the musics, the neons and the dollars, the sexes and the hands, everything spills like drool over the fishy bodies.