Rent in Hole-Dollars

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

The notice came under the door on a Tuesday, folded twice, with my full name on the outside in the landlord's square handwriting. It said the room was three months behind, one hundred and eighty thousand pesos, and that as of the first of the month the debt no longer belonged to him. It said a name I did not know. It said, in a smaller hand at the bottom, that I should not come to his office about it.

I was twenty one, in my third year of studying restoration, living in one room in La Candelaria with a hot plate and a window that looked into another window. My mother thinks I have a scholarship. I do not have a scholarship. I have a job at a print shop two evenings a week, a talent for spending the money before it arrives, and, as of the first of that month, a debt owned by a man I had never met and could not have picked out of a crowd.

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The man who owned the debt came on Thursday, at four in the afternoon, when the light in that room is at its best and worst. He knocked like somebody who had all day. I opened the door and there was a stocky man in a dark jacket with a briefcase, and behind him, in the stairwell, a younger man leaning on the rail who did not come in. Mateo, I learned later. The driver.

"You are the student," he said. Not a question.

He introduced himself as Angel and came in when I stepped back, which I did without deciding to. On the street they call him the angel of Bogota. I did not know that yet, and it would not have changed my answer. Cardamom and rum. A gold ring. He put the briefcase on my desk, opened it, and there was my paper inside, the original, with Pardo's signature at the bottom like a receipt for a sofa.

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"He sold it at a discount," Angel said. "Pardo does not like tenants with opinions. Which are you?"

I said I was a student.

"That is not what I asked." He sat on the edge of my bed, which is also my sofa, and looked around at the books stacked on the floor, the jar of brushes, the poster of a fresco I have never seen. "One hundred and eighty. You have it?"

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut angel of bogota stories, 18+

"No."

"Then you have a mouth and a body and a young face, and I have an evening." He said it evenly, the way another man might tell you the bus goes to the terminal. "Cash first. You will be filmed. My face is not in it. I lock the door and I leave when I am done. If you say no, I take the paper and I am polite about it and next week it belongs to somebody with worse manners than mine. It is not a threat. It is only true."

I want to be honest about the next part. I did not say yes because I was frightened. I said yes because he was sitting on my bed with his hands loose on his knees, and because the money would mean I could stop avoiding the woman at the bakery, and because some part of me, the part that has always been curious in a way I do not take out in public, had been waiting to be asked.

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"Say it in words," he said.

"Yes. I agree to all of it."

"Good." He took the phone off the gimbal and set it on the shelf among the books, angled at the bed. The red light came on. Then he took off his jacket, folded it, and put it on the chair with the care of a man who has exactly one good jacket.

The video behind this story → uncut angel of bogota stories, 18+

He undressed me first, standing. Trousers down around my ankles, shirt opened, and he went down on his knees in front of me on the bare boards, which I did not expect from a man of his size. He put his mouth on my hip, then lower, and took me in slowly while one hand held the back of my thigh so I could not step away from it. I put both hands on the shelf behind me and looked at the ceiling and the paint I have been meaning to fix for a year.

What the room sounded like

He is good at it in a way that is almost rude, because he does it like a job he has decided to do properly. He pulled off and stood up and turned me around and pressed me face down over the desk, my cheek on a book, and used his fingers first, and I heard myself say something in a voice that was much younger than twenty one. Then the head of him, blunt and thick, and the curve of it going in at an angle that made me arch my back and knock a cup onto the floor.

He stopped. "Yes or no."

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"Yes."

He moved slowly. That is the thing I remember most about the first time: not how big he was, but the patience, the way he would go deep and then wait there, breathing, letting me feel all of it before he moved again. My hands slid on the desk. His hand came around and held my jaw, not hard, just enough that I had to turn my head and let him see my face in the light from the window. There was a camera on the shelf. I had forgotten it.

When I came it was onto the front of the desk and I made a mess of a book I had borrowed from the library. He kept going through it, and after, when I was shaking, he pulled out and finished on my back, which was warm and then cold.

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He was dressed again in under a minute. He put the phone in his pocket and looked at the screen briefly, and something in his face closed, the way a shop closes.

"One hundred and eighty," he said, and counted it onto the desk beside my hand, which was still flat on the wood. "The paper stays with me. You do not owe Pardo anything, and Pardo does not own you. That is worth more than the money, and I want you to notice that I did not say it was free."

I asked whether he would come back.

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He picked up the briefcase. "I am not a landlord," he said. "I do not come back for rent."

That is the whole of the angel of Bogota, I think. He takes what is owed and then he leaves before you can turn it into a story.

At the door he paused, and I thought he would say something else, and he did not. The stairs took him down. I heard the driver say something and the two of them laugh, and then a car, and then the street filled up with the ordinary noise of the afternoon.

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut angel of bogota stories, 18+

I stood naked at the window with the money in my hand and looked into the window across the alley, where a woman was ironing and did not look up. The library book is ruined. I have nineteen days of rent in a drawer and a red light still burning in my head, and I have started, when I cannot sleep, to listen for knocking.