TwelveAbout six blocks away

from the house, Lucía jumped into the front seat.

“Why do we have to go all the way downtown?” said Gabriel.

“Because we won’t run into anyone there. It’s less risky.”

They left the car in the underground parking of Bellas Artes and strolled through the streets of the historic center. They passed the Downtown Hotel. Gabriel wanted to go in, but Lucía feared running into someone she knew. He started looking for a hotel. They went by a colonial building with a sign that said “Hotel Mónaco.”

“Here?” said Gabriel.

Lucía screened the facade.

“I don’t know what kind of a place this is,” she said.

“It’s a hotel.”

“Ok, you check it out,” Lucía grumbled.

Gabriel crossed the big wooden doors and stepped into a cool inner courtyard with tiled floors. A small stone fountain gurgled in the middle of the patio. A stone staircase with wrought iron handrails led to the rooms on the second and third floors. Behind the faded wood counter that served as the reception desk, the price list indicated that a room was twice what Gabriel earned in one day.

“It’s a bit expensive,” said Gabriel.

“How much?”

“Three hundred and sixty pesos.”

“Must be full of fleas,” Lucía mumbled.

“Check it out yourself,” said Gabriel.

“Is it for hookers?” Lucía asked disapprovingly.

“I don’t think so!” Gabriel replied.

He pulled her by the hand into the hotel. Lucía felt relief as she saw two Scandinavian looking hippies coming down the stairs. Gabriel leaned on the counter and asked for a room. Lucía stood petrified with her back to the counter, aiming her nerves at the fountain.

“How many nights?” the manager asked casually, stretching his neck to look for luggage.

“Only for today,” said Gabriel.

“It’s 360 pesos.”

His tone was strictly professional, but Lucía found it judgmental.

“No problem,” Gabriel replied.

“Excuse me, payment is required in advance,” said the man.

“Yes. One moment.”

Gabriel pulled out the last hundred-peso bill he had and continued digging in his pockets as if there still was money to be found in their depths.

“One second, please,” he said.

Lucía pretended to be enthralled by the fountain.

“I don’t have enough,” whispered Gabriel. “I need two hundred and sixty.”

Lucía took out three bills and handed them to him without looking.

The room reeked of Pine Sol. Most of it was occupied by a lumpy queen-sized mattress, blanketed in coarse grey wool. The rest of the furniture consisted of a wooden chair and a rickety armoire with four crooked hangers. The narrow bathroom was covered in white tile and included a half-used roll of cheap toilet paper, two threadbare towels and a tiny bar of Rosa Venus soap. A slit that peered into a dark interior patio provided the very limited amount of natural light. On a drawer next to the bed there was a pitcher of water with two plastic cups and a red rotary phone.

Lucía pulled back the blanket to check if the sheets were clean. They were thin and coarse and had a couple of patches but no hairs or stains. Gabriel let her inspect the room. When she finished her review, Gabriel held her, kissed her, and started unbuttoning her blouse.

“Calm down,” she pushed him away.

“It’s not so bad, Luchita. Come on, relax.”

Lucía had done it in legitimate hotels in Valle de Bravo, Ixtapa, and Acapulco. She had done it one afternoon, paranoid and uncomfortable, in a park with yellowish grass in Bosques de las Lomas, and only once in an average hotel in the Colonia Roma with greenish carpeting and bedspreads with cigarette burns.

“Do you have condoms? Which ones did you buy?”

“Jeez, Lucía, I’m not a fucking virus. I have condoms, okay? They’re all the same. Do you always make your boyfriend bag it up?”

While Gabriel went to the bathroom, Lucía inspected the bed, the floor, and the armoire once more. She peered through the slit of window but there was nothing to see. She sat on the bed and listened to the echo of Gabriel’s urine splashing in the toilet, followed by the sound of flushing water. She thought there was still time to escape but she stayed put. He came towards her and kissed and stroked her without embarrassment, roughness, or clumsiness. He laid her on the bed and got on top of her, and they rolled in bed fully clothed, like awkward teenagers. Little by little they found patches of warm skin until they were in their underwear.

“I don’t understand how it took us so long to get to this point,” she panted.

Lucía watched him undress. His white briefs looked a bit like a diaper. His ribs were sticking out of his torso; his elbows, shoulders, and knees pressed against his skin like a soccer ball straining against the net. His belly was hollow, and his thick black bush contrasted sharply against his lean frame.

She held very still while he put on the condom, torn between the panic of the consequences of what was about to happen and the urge to get him inside her; anticipating that miraculous feeling when he found the opening in her flesh by himself. Gabriel could not cease to marvel at having her tangled beneath his body, and at being the reason why her hair was sprawled on the pillow like a web of black silk. He stuck his nostrils and his tongue in her armpits, acrid with sweat and perfume, he tasted the salty nectar of her cunt and the taste of clean soap on her skin. Lucía fucked without inhibition, bouncing violently on the bed, despite, or perhaps because the sheets were coarse. She was turned on by the fact that she was in that dingy hotel without anyone’s knowledge. She started touching herself and moaning louder. Gabriel matched the urgent rhythm of her breath until she exploded with a fearsome howl.

“Yes, come Gabriel, come inside me.”

Gabriel swayed on top of her, whimpering and trembling until he collapsed, exhausted.

He hugged her and covered her in tender kisses.

“Mi princesa caramelo—My princess made of caramel.”

Lucía replied with a long kiss. What could she answer? “My chocolate chauffeur”?

“Did you like it?” she asked.

Who doesn’t?, he thought.

“Did you like it?” he asked.

“Of course... I loved it!” She looked at him soberly and added, “I like you a lot, Gabriel.”

“I like you too.”

They remained braided together for a long time, nuzzling in the vapor of their sleepy bodies.

Lucía had left her bracelets and earrings at home. She had not brought her handbag or her credit cards. She had divided the money between the two front pockets of her jeans, just in case. After they left the hotel, she walked down the streets holding on to Gabriel for dear life, looking back on every corner, trying to identify possible kidnappers or policemen looking for their wages. Men stared at her ravenously or bumped into her on purpose to cop a feel.

They ran into the Zócalo, which she remembered visiting when she was a little girl to see the Christmas decorations. She had glimpsed it from the car one night her daddy took her and Adolfo, in their pajamas, to see the holiday lights in Alameda Park. In the afternoon light, the enormous plaza was somewhere between majestic, as they said on TV, and derelict. The portraits of national heroes made of colored lightbulbs still hung at each of its corners, commemorating the Independence holidays. A group of young men in loincloths and feathered headdresses performed an indigenous dance with flutes, conchs, and pre-Hispanic drums. Beggars posted at the cathedral’s entrance whimpered with pathetic voices, while native peoples, teachers, workers, and professional protesters, all camped under indignant handmade signs they had hung from the cathedral fence.

Lucía imagined herself going to confession inside the cathedral, the only church outside of the Basilica of Guadalupe and St. Peter in Rome large enough to accommodate her countless and monumental sins. “I have just fornicated,” she imagined gleefully whispering to the priest, “with the driver who works in my house, behind my boyfriend’s back. I am a world-class sinner, father. Your rosaries can do nothing for me.”

“Aren’t you starving, mi reina? ” said Gabriel.

“Where can we eat?”

“You tell me.”

“Let me find out what’s around.”

Lucía was not very familiar with the Centro, besides the Downtown Hotel which Ricardo liked and to which she could not take Gabriel. She remembered the Sanborn’s de los Azulejos. She thought Gabriel was a bit alarmed by that suggestion.

“Don’t worry, I’m buying,” she told him.

Inside the grand covered courtyard of the restaurant, Lucía felt that everyone was gaping at them, including the waitress dressed in a long, pleated paper skirt with colored stripes. Gabriel looked at the menu. The prices were shocking.

“Order whatever you want,” Lucía said.

“Well then: a Tlalpeño broth, some enchiladas, sopecitos, one steak Tampiqueña, a banana split and a pecan milkshake.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Lucía.

“Didn’t you say, ‘everything you want’?”

Gabriel ordered a tortilla soup and a steak Tampiqueña; Lucía, Swiss enchiladas.

“Imagine,” said Lucía, “this was the house of a viceroy.”

“Relatives of yours, my love?”

“Seriously, we aren’t that rich.”

Gabriel burst out laughing.

“I swear,” protested Lucía.

They left Sanborn’s feeling satisfied and drowsy. It seemed to Lucía as if she had gone on a trip abroad, as if she was visiting an exotic and distant continent, like India or Africa.