A Little Story

I found this little story funny the other day. I was in the library at Santa Cruz (which means I was in the room with two book shelves of books that also serves as the director´s office, the storage room, my and a number of teacher´s lunch room, and at times the movie viewing room since the tv´s stand does not have four function wheels) and decided it would be a good idea to pick up the Mario Vargas Llosa book they have to get in a little Peruvian reading.

Little did I know that this book, called ¨Eulogia de la madastra,¨ was his foray into erotic fiction. The story was about a mother-in-law who ends up having sexual relations with her husband´s pre-teen son. Additionally, random chapters go into the fantasies of this husband and wife pair - covering everything from ancient royalty (a particularly wierd chapter in which the king bets his right hand man that his wife´s but is better than any of the man´s slaves) to abstract art on the wall. So, anyway, it was a quite bizarre read and I felt a little awkward walking around in public and reading from it (it didn´t help that the cover has a picture of a naked women kissing a little cherub angel - which should have been a forewarning I guess).

Well, so here I am, self-conciously reading this book and walking along the side of one the long roads without a sidewalk (and probably the inevitable likelihood that I will be hit by a car or maybe just a motortaxi) and with tons of trash and dust along its edges, when a fellow walker passes by me. All he says to me as he passes is, ¨Hey, Gringo, leyendo la biblia, eh?¨ The man must have thought I was a mormon - which I feel like I get.

This erotic Mario Vargas Llosa book is about the farest thing from the bible that I can imagine, so I had to have a good laugh. Maybe you had to be there though....