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her breasts, stroke them. He brings his mouth up to drink their sweet milk, imagining it is a nectar that will help him regain his youth, fountain in the midst of agarden of sugar and honey. She lets him come close, fondle, caress and suck her breasts. She is enjoying the older man’s urgent desire. She looks on with amusement at first, then wraps her fingers round his erect penis, giving little taps at the base as if it were the Bersa the lawyer had lent her. When he tires of sucking her, she slides down and starts slowly licking him. She has learned by now not to close her eyes to hide her repulsion, to imagine she is in the arms of Di Caprio, in his room at a five-star hotel and not in this gangster hovel on the outskirts of San Pedro, where she has come to stay, following her instructions.
    â€œKeep going, my love, keep going,” groans the older man, worried he may lose his erection if she becomes distracted, if she stops sucking him so deliciously, stops plunging beneath the flurry of bedcovers that swallow her like quicksands, searching until she finds the survivor that he tries to keep in her mouth, his penis that is stiff but rough on Ana’s tongue and mouth, like the mummified prick of a pharaoh who died two thousand years ago. Miss Bolivia feels as though she has reached the forbidden interior of an Egyptian pyramid. If she manages to get out alive, she will never again do what she is doing now, sucking him with the expertise she learned in the first model school she went to soon after arriving in Buenos Aires, with an agent who had a young, enthusiastic dick who told her yes! that’s how she had to move her ass on the catwalks if she wanted to take over from Naomi Campbell.
    The older man shrieks as if someone were cutting his throat. When there is not much of life left to run, pleasure is this senile yelp from someone who has nothing but his money, if he has any, and the scant, fleeting power allowed him by some boss or other, some gang leader who has left him in charge after making him promise he won’t fuck the blond he is now busy fucking.
    Ana spits the semen into his face. He throws her off, revolted by the watery, bitter juice this crazy girl has insulted him with. She wipes her mouth clean, then runs laughing into the bathroom. She locks the door behind her and studies herself in the mirror. The older man’s cursesreach her like the sound of a distant pack of dogs, something she got used to hearing in the desolate towns she visited as queen. It is the music—as bitter as the man’s semen—that accompanied those winter nights when she shivered with cold and hunger at the start of her lengthy flight from Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Back in those days she dreamt of reaching Argentina and its capital, Buenos Aires, the Paris of South America, the city without indians where, if you are not careful—or so they told her—even the taxi drivers speak French.
    They lied to you, Ana tells Miss Bolivia in the mirror, which is like a visitors’ room in a prison where she is the prisoner and Miss Bolivia has come to visit her, to bring her news of the outside world. They had no idea what they were talking about, she tells her, Buenos Aires is as overrun by indians as any ruined city in Bolivia or Peru.
    The man starts beating on the bathroom door, at first with gentle taps, a crescendo with the palm of his hand, then his fists, finally vibrato, kicking like a horse who has eaten too much oats and marihuana salad. “Open up you bitch”—bang! bang! like someone being stoned alive, bang! thump! bang!—“you asshole bitch, open this door or else!” The same blows, the same fury she had met when she was locked in the dairy of the German farmer who had taken her in only to force her to grow up shutting her eyes in the darkness. “Open up, I’m shitting myself,” she hears from the other side of the bathroom door. It is as though oral sex has