The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

brother-and even Doña Panchita!) invited us to his room, where, he said, he had some marijuana left over from the last big party.
    "No time like the present," said Moctezuma.
    Unlike the two rooms occupied by the Rodríguezes, Luscious Skin's room was a model of bare austerity. I didn't see clothes strewn around, I didn't see household things, I didn't see books (Pancho and Moctezuma were poor, but where they lived I'd seen books in the most unexpected places, by Efraín Huerta, Augusto Monterroso, Julio Torri, Alfonso Reyes, the aforementioned Catullus in a translation by Ernesto Cardenal, Jaime Sabines, Max Aub, Andrés Henestrosa), just a thin mattress and a chair-no table-and a nice leather suitcase where he kept his clothes.
    Luscious Skin lived alone, although from remarks that he and the Rodríguez brothers made, I gathered that not long ago a woman (and her son), both pretty tough, had lived there and taken off with most of the furniture when they left.
    For a while we smoked marijuana and surveyed the landscape (which, as I've said, basically consisted of the silhouettes of the hospitals, endless rooftops like the one we were on, and a sky of low clouds moving swiftly toward the south), and then Pancho started to tell the story of his adventures that morning at the Fonts' house and his meeting with me.
    I was questioned about what had happened, this time by all three of them, but they didn't manage to get anything out of me that I hadn't already told Pancho. At some point they started to talk about María. From what I could gather, it seemed as though Luscious Skin and María had been lovers. And that Luscious Skin was banned from the Fonts' house. I wanted to know why. They explained to me that Mrs. Font had walked in on Luscious Skin and María one night as they were screwing in the little house. There was a party going on in the big house, in honor of a Spanish writer who had just come to Mexico, and at a certain point during the party, Mrs. Font wanted to introduce her older daughter-María, that is-to the writer and couldn't find her. So she went looking for her, arm in arm with the Spanish writer. When they got to the little house it was dark and from inside they could hear a noise like blows: loud, rhythmic blows. Mrs. Font surely wasn't thinking (if she'd thought first, said Moctezuma, she would've taken the Spaniard back to the party and come back alone to see what was going on in her daughter's room), but as it was, she didn't think, and she turned on the light. There, to her horror, was María, at the other end of the little house, dressed only in a shirt, her pants down, sucking Luscious Skin's dick as he slapped her on the ass and the cunt.
    "Really hard slaps," said Luscious Skin. "When they turned on the light I saw her ass and it was all red. I actually got scared."
    "But why were you hitting her?" I said angrily, afraid I would blush.
    "Isn't he an innocent. Because she asked for it," said Pancho.
    "I find that hard to believe," I said.
    "Stranger things have happened," said Luscious Skin.
    "It's all because of that French girl Simone Darrieux," said Moctezuma. "I know for a fact that María and Angélica invited her to a feminist meeting and afterward they talked about sex."
    "Who is this Simone?" I asked.
    "A friend of Arturo Belano's."
    "I went up to them. I was like, how's it going, girls, and the little sluts were talking about the Marquis de Sade," said Moctezuma.
    The rest of the story was predictable. María's mother tried to say something, but nothing came out of her mouth. The Spaniard, who, according to Luscious Skin, turned visibly pale at the sight of María's raised and proffered backside, took Mrs. Font's arm with the solicitude reserved for the mentally ill and dragged her back to the party. In the sudden silence that fell over the little house, Luscious Skin could hear them talking in the courtyard, exchanging hurried words, as if the horny Spanish bastard were proposing something