She gazed at the passing fields from the passenger window. I longed to talk to her but the circumstances were hardly appropriate considering the body of the man she’d just killed lay wrapped up behind us in the back of the truck.
I drove along dirt-track lanes away from the main roads, and wondered how much rage must have been bottled up inside her to watch without pity as the man dissolved into nothing. I understood it completely. I had once been where she was now.
‘Over there.’ She pointed with a torn fingernail.
I pulled the truck over to the side of the road between fields of scorched corn. We removed two shovels and began to dig a grave. The ground was arid and stubborn, so it took us an age to burrow a ditch deep enough for spring’s flash floods not to send his body sailing down the valley like a polythene raft.
The man’s features were indistinguishable under the tightly wound plastic. I used all my strength to pull his hulking frame by his ankles from the truck to the ground below. Then I dragged him along the rough terrain before I rolled him into his hole.
Luciana kneeled down to unwind the plastic covering his head. Then suddenly she pulled out a silver pistol from the back of her jeans. I froze as without hesitation she pulled the trigger twice, shooting him first in the left eye and then in the right. I stumbled backwards as my ears rang.
‘It’s a calling card of the gangs,’ she explained. ‘A bullet in each eye means he’s seen something he shouldn’t have and has been punished. If his body is ever found, the police will think he was executed by one of his own.’
I gave an agitated nod as she wound the plastic back around his head and we shovelled dirt upon him. We threw the shovels back in the truck, but when I turned around, she was standing inches away from me. Then she pushed my aching shoulders against the door, pulled my mouth towards hers and kissed me with a passion my body had never experienced. The pain from her nose brushing against my broken one was excruciating and spread across my face, but it was worth the sacrifice to be so close to her.
She loosened my belt buckle, I removed her T-shirt and we winced as our cuts, swelling skin and emerging kaleidoscopes of blue, yellow and purple bruises collided against each other. And when we had finished, we drove back to the bordello as silently as we’d left.
23 July
Each night she crept into my bed, and we’d make love silently. It was always a slow and sensual experience, unlike our first time with the bitter taste of death and lust in our throats. Then, when she’d decided we were done, she’d slip back into her clothes and vanish like nothing had happened.
Luciana and I never spoke of the day she’d killed a man. In fact, we never spoke at all. I wondered if she made love to me out of gratitude, or whether it was a way of controlling me. Her profession meant surrendering herself to men for their money, so by dictating to me when we had sex, there was no doubt who was in charge.
Her reasoning didn’t matter. If sex was the only means by which I could breathe her air and feel her skin against mine, then I was grateful for anything she offered. And as the days progressed to weeks and then to months, she remained in my room a little longer with each visit.
My deepest fear had always been discovering the one I loved was finding love with another. But because Luciana’s profession was to have sex with other men for money, it wasn’t adultery. It was business. I didn’t doubt for a moment that I was her only extracurricular activity. It was the perfect partnership, and the most mutually monogamous relationship I’d ever had.
14 November
I rolled onto my side and faced the door when I heard the handle turn. I smiled and pulled back the bedsheet to invite her in, but she chose to sit in an armchair by the window opposite my bed. She lit a cigarette and began to blow smoke rings.
Finally, following six months of nocturnal liaisons, Luciana cast her die and waited cautiously to see where it might land.
‘My name is Luciana Fiorentino Marcanio,’ she began carefully, ‘and I was born and raised in Italy.’
I propped myself up against the headboard and listened closely.
‘I came to Mexico with my mother after my father tried to have us killed. He was a wealthy but vicious man who abused her, convinced she was having affairs with anyone who paid her attention. He was her only love, but his paranoia and insecurities wouldn’t allow him to believe that. My mother was not strong enough to leave him. She tried her best to please him and win his trust, but when you accuse someone so often, eventually they will give in and prove you right. He drove her into the arms of one of his business colleagues. And eventually my father found out. He paid for her lover to be killed, but not until he’d had him castrated. The first my mother knew of this was when she found his genitals in a gift-wrapped box on her dressing room table.’
I lit up a cigarette of my own and took a long drag. I was captivated by her story.
‘As my sister Caterina and I grew up, he told himself we too would become whores like my mother,’ she continued. ‘He was suspicious of our every move and hired guards to escort us to and from school so we would not mix with boys. But Caterina and our gardener’s son Federico became close – he was probably her only friend apart from me. And when my father saw them talking together, he had Federico beaten so badly the poor boy could never work again. Caterina was inconsolable and blamed herself. When she looked to the future, all she saw was more of the same and she could not live like that. She waited until my father’s birthday before she cut her wrists and died in one of his vineyards. I found her body.’
She paused and glanced down at her feet.
‘Naturally my mother and I were devastated. But it was like someone flicked a switch in her head. She’d already failed one daughter and she wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. So with only our passports and some money our housekeeper gave us from her savings, we ran away and never saw him again.’
Luciana closed her eyes.
‘The man I killed who attacked me . . . he was not the first to have died at my hands. My mother and I fled to London to stay with cousins, and finally life was good. It wasn’t like Italy where we lived in a gilded cage – we had nothing of material value, but we had our freedom. Then my father’s people tracked us down. A man appeared at our apartment and shot my mother’s cousin and her son through their heads. He was going to kill her too, but he didn’t see me in the kitchen behind him. I took a knife and stabbed him in the neck, but not before he pulled the trigger and hit my mother in the leg. I patched her up and we fled, eventually making our way to Mexico, where my father would never think to find us. We began working here, selling our bodies to survive, and over time, it became like any other job.’
‘The man we buried,’ I interrupted, ‘did your father send him too?’
‘No, he was just a monster who couldn’t recognise the monster in me. I have killed twice, and I know you have killed too.’