Fifty Thousand for a Public Throat

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

The scale had been lying to me since Thursday. Not much. Two hundred grams on a kilo, sometimes three, which does not sound like anything until you are selling mangoes at four thousand a kilo and a woman with a basket tells you, loudly, in front of everybody, that you are a thief.

I am twenty two. I have had that stall in the market off Suba for two years, since I left school, and I sell fruit: mango, lulo, granadilla, whatever my uncle brings in from the finca on Tuesdays. A new scale costs one hundred and ninety thousand. I had thirty one thousand in a coffee tin, a landlord who wanted his money on the fifteenth, and, though I did not know it yet, a man with a briefcase who was willing to make up the difference in a way I had not thought of.

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By Saturday I had lost four customers to the scale and one to a rumour, and I was standing behind the crates at eleven in the morning with my shirt open because of the heat, arguing with a woman about two hundred grams, when a man in a dark jacket put a bag of mangoes on the counter.

"Two kilos," he said.

I weighed them. The needle went past two and stopped. I looked at the scale and then at him and said, without thinking, "It is a little heavy. The scale is broken. You should take the small ones."

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He looked at me for a moment. Late thirties, heavy in the shoulders, gold ring, and the smell of cardamom and rum in a place that smelled of fruit and drains. There was a black case at his feet with a phone mounted on it.

"You are the only man in this market who has told me he was cheating me," he said. "What is your name?"

I told him. He paid for the mangoes and did not take them. Then he said, quietly, in a voice meant for me and not for the woman behind me, "Fifty thousand pesos for twenty minutes. In the back. I will be filmed and you will not be seen by anybody who matters. Yes or no, and either answer is fine."

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I have heard the name they give him. The angel of Bogota, they call him, and in this market that name is said the way you say the name of a dog that has bitten someone. I did not know it was him. I knew what the money was and I knew that my scale was broken and that the fifteenth was six days away.

"Twenty minutes," I said.

"Twenty. And the two kilos of mangoes are yours, I do not carry fruit."

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Behind the crates

The back of the stall is a space about the size of a bed, with a canvas curtain and my uncle's old radio and the crates stacked three high. I pulled the shutter down to the level of my chest so the light came in under it and the market went on outside, feet and voices and a man calling prices. He put the case on a crate and turned the phone towards me, and the little red light came on.

"Twenty minutes," he said again, and took off his jacket, folded it, and put it on the cleanest crate.

He sat down on the stack of boxes and pulled me between his knees and undid my trousers, and I stood there with my hands on his shoulders while he got them down and then took me in his mouth, unhurried, one hand flat on my stomach to keep me in place. Outside a woman asked the price of lulo. I put my fist against my mouth.

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He stopped when I was close, which I have since decided is a habit of his, and stood up and took himself out. Thick, uncut, curved up towards his belly, and I looked at it and then at him and he said, "Yes. That is what fifty thousand buys."

I got on my knees on a folded sack. There is not much room and I had to lean back against the crates and take him at an angle, and he put one hand on the back of my head and let me work. He tastes of salt and rum and he does not make much noise, just the breathing, and once, when I took him deep and had to pull back coughing, he wiped my chin with his thumb and said something quiet in Spanish that I did not catch.

Then he pulled me up and turned me round and bent me over the crates with my chest on the wood and my cheek on a sack of granadilla, and used his fingers, wet from a bottle in the case, and I heard myself say a word I do not usually say out loud. The shutter was at my chest. Anybody walking past could have looked under it and seen my feet and his.

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He pushed in and the crates shifted under me and he caught me with an arm around my waist so I would not go over. Slow. That is the thing nobody warns you about with a man like that. Not rough. Slow, and deep, and the curve of him finding the one place that makes your legs give out, and staying there, and moving in it until you are making a sound on every breath and do not care who is outside.

I came on the side of a crate with his hand over my mouth. He kept going for another minute, then pulled out and finished on my back, and stood there breathing with one hand on the canvas.

He looked at his watch. "Nineteen minutes," he said. "I owe you a minute."

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He counted fifty thousand onto the crate, and then another fifty on top of it. "For the film," he said. "I did not say it earlier and I do not like to surprise people with money. Buy a scale."

At the shutter he stopped and looked back at me, still bent over the crates with my trousers round one ankle.

"One more thing," he said. "The woman who called you a thief. She was shorting you on the lulo. I watched her do it twice."

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Then he was gone, and the market came back all at once, and I stood up and pulled the shutter to the top and sold four kilos of mangoes to a man who did not ask about the weight.

On Monday there was a new scale on my counter. Nobody brought it. It is the good kind, the kind that costs more than one hundred and ninety, and it has never once been wrong, and I have not been able to decide whether that makes me a man who was paid or a man who is owed. In this market they say the angel of Bogota always leaves something behind. Usually it is a bill. Mine was a scale.