Filming File 47: The Debt of the Open Throat

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

There are two kinds of knocking. The first kind is a neighbour who wants to know if you have salt. The second kind is patient, three knocks and a pause long enough for you to hope, then three more. I lay on my mattress in Chapinero listening to the second kind and understood that my twenty two days were finished.

I am twenty years old and I have not worked since the print shop on the corner closed in March. The man at the door was not the lender I borrowed from. His name is Angel, and he collects for people who are tired of collecting for themselves. He had bought my paper for less than I owed, which he told me straight away, because he says he does not like a boy doing arithmetic in his head while they talk.

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He is late thirties, thick through the chest, and he filled my doorway without trying. Cardamom and cheap rum came off him like he had been standing in a bar all evening and had not minded. There was a gold band on his left hand and a black briefcase in his right, and mounted on the briefcase, on a little gimbal, a phone.

"May I sit," he said. His Spanish is low and slow, from somewhere south, and he drops into English for small jokes. "Sit. We talk like men, no?"

I moved a shirt off the only chair. He sat and looked at the room the way a man looks at a car he is thinking of buying: the water stain, the window that does not shut, the mattress on the floor. Then he opened the case. There were bills in it, banded, and a folder, and the phone already lit.

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"Four hundred and eighty," he said. "With the interest, five hundred and ten. You have it?"

"No."

"No." He nodded slowly, as if I had given a good answer. "Then we make an arrangement. Cash up front, that is my rule, and it is also your luck, because you get paid before I get anything. The door stays locked. The camera may see you. It never sees me. And when I am finished I leave, and you do not follow me downstairs to ask questions I cannot answer. Do you understand all of that?"

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I said I did. My voice came out like I had been shouting at a concert.

"Good. Filming pays extra. Sixty thousand more than the usual, because a face is worth something." He said it without flattery. "You may keep your face in it or turn it to the wall. Most boys turn it."

I asked what the usual was. He told me. It was less than I expected, which is a strange thing to be relieved about, and I said yes before the number had finished landing. He counted the cash onto the table in front of me, sixty thousand on top, and waited while I put it in the drawer with the electricity bill. Then he took the phone off the gimbal, propped it against the kettle, and pressed the screen.

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"Stand there. In the light."

I stood in the light. He came close and undid my shirt himself, button by button, taking his time, and when it was open he put his palm flat on my chest and held it there. His hands were warm and dry. He smelled of cardamom when he leaned in, and rum underneath. He kissed me once, closed mouth, almost polite, then again with his tongue, and I made a sound I did not plan to make.

"You are nervous," he said against my mouth. "That is fine. Nervous boys are honest."

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He took off his jacket and folded it over the chair, which I found funny and could not laugh at. His shirt came off. He is not a gym man; he is a man who carries things. Hair on his chest going grey in one patch. When he undid his trousers I looked, because I had been told, and it was true. Thick, uncut, a hard upward curve like it had been bent by something and kept the shape. The foreskin was pulled back a little already and there was wet at the tip.

"Knees," he said.

I got on my knees on the floor of my own room and he stepped close enough that I had to tilt my head back. I took him in my mouth and the curve made me work for it, because it pushed up against the roof of my mouth and I had to angle my neck to take him deeper. He let me find it. One hand settled on the back of my head, not pushing, just there, the thumb moving a little. Above me the phone was a red dot and a dark lens.

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"Slow," he said. "Nobody is chasing you."

So I went slow. I got him wet and used my hand where my mouth ran out, and I learned the shape of him with my tongue, the ridge under the head, the place where the skin slides. He breathed out through his nose, long, and his fingers tightened in my hair. When I took him to the back of my throat my eyes watered and he pulled out, just enough, and wiped my cheek with his thumb.

"Bed," he said. "On your back. I want the camera to have your face after all."

Watch the uncut tape of this scene → uncut angel of bogota stories, 18+

I lay down. He took a condom out of the briefcase and a small bottle, and he was careful with me in a way that surprised me, one finger and then two, watching my face the whole time. When he came into me it was slow and it was a lot, and the curve did something that made me grip the mattress and swear in a voice that did not sound like mine. He fucked like he talks. Unhurried. He put my knees up and found the angle and stayed in it, and I stopped being able to hold a thought for longer than a few seconds.

The last twenty minutes

I came first, with his hand around me and his mouth open against my neck, and he did not stop while I did it, which nearly took the top of my head off. Then he turned me over and finished with his chest against my back, one arm under me, his breath loud and hot behind my ear. He was quiet when he came. Just a long groan and then stillness, and his weight, and the cardamom.

He got up before I was ready for him to. Washed in the sink. Dressed. He checked the phone, watched a few seconds of it with no expression at all, and put it back on the gimbal.

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"File forty seven," he said. "That is your number. It stays your number." Nobody else in this city has a number like that, and I have met two other boys since who have one, and neither of them would tell me theirs. That is how the angel of Bogota keeps his accounts.

He put the folder on the table, the paper with my name on it, and tore it once across and left the halves there. At the door he stopped and looked back at me still naked on the mattress.

"Next month there is no paper," he said. "But I will come anyway. If you are not home, I will come the month after."

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Then the door, and his steps going down, and the street. I lay there listening to a car start and pull away and I told myself I was glad. The money was in the drawer. The paper was in two pieces.

They call him the angel of Bogota on my street, and I have decided that is a stupid name, because an angel would not have left me lying there working out how many days it was until the end of the month. It is nineteen. I have counted twice.