La Tarantula died at the bullfight when her lover, El Gallo, was gored to his death. That is to say, her body still remained alive but her soul had died. She did not rush down to the infirmary where they carried the beloved body of the gored matador. She did not even attend his funeral. She did not want to see him in death. It was in life that she had last seen him, robust lusty life, redolent with the bloom of youth. That would be the memory of him that she would always carry with her.
Before this, she had laughed at the insidious rumours regarding her evil malignant influence over those who loved her. Now, her attitude toward herself had changed. She was ill-starred. Any who came into contact with her were doomed to death. Even the Miura bull was fated to die because of his contacts with her. She was poison to man.
But she continued to dance. In all of the cafes of Spain she danced.
Previously, there had been always a wild abandonment in her dancing.
Never had there been a hint of sadness. But now, she danced as though the sorrows of the world had been heaped onto her shoulders. The music she chose to dance to was always the sad, sombre type of the malagueha. But despite the melancholy of her dancing, she stirred the imaginations of those who watched her dance. The rhythm of her sensuous body attracted the lewd eyes of the men. They still camped at her feet begging her favours of her, willing to lay down everything, including life, for but one night in her arms.
But she lived for her dancing only. For in her dance she would imagine that there was only one person in the room, El Gallo, and that her movements, her actions, her desire as expressed in the posed attitudes and the muscle contortions were for him and for him only.
Over the entire breadth of the land she travelled, keeping herself from man, yet stirring them for her so that she was forced to keep moving from city to city in order to escape the advances of some hot-blooded male who was unable to control his sanity any longer.
That was how she found herself in a Moorish cafe about a year after her affair with El Gallo. Even into Africa, into Tangier, her fame as a dancer had penetrated. At first, she had turned down the offers to leave Spain. But, in time, when the men became too importune, and after she had crossed and recrossed the country, even having gone into Portugal, she decided to make the boat trip from Gibraltar to Tangier to fill an engagement at the Moorish Cafe, near the Soko Chico section.
The place she danced in was a long room with immense rafters on the ceiling. Matting carpeted the floors. Benches ranged around one side of the room. Chairs and tables filled the centre. A greater part of the floor, two-thirds of it, was occupied by sitting figures, musicians, about fifteen of them, seated cross-legged, their slippers removed, darkskinned men with white burnouses, filled the room. Here, there were no white visitors. This was a native place kept exclusively for natives. That was why the management had gone to the expense of hiring Spanish dancers. Their own dances had lost their savour by constant repetition.
For the while, these musicians danced and sang Arabian love songs.
During the intermissions, the men smoked long pipes and drank thick syrupy coffee from tiny cups.
Suddenly, the musicians struck up a song that was entirely foreign to the tunes they had previously played. The men in the audience sat up and took notice. For the music was a slow Spanish malaguena such as they had heard, some of them, across the water in Cadiz and other parts of Spain. The gypsy girl, La Tarantula, they knew was going to dance next.
She issued from a froth of curtained veils to one side of the room. Her eyes seemed to be deep expressionless pools of brackish green water.
Her gaze was still a million miles away, harking back to a time a thousand years ago, it seemed. Only her body was there dancing for them. Her mind was dead.
Slowly the music from the guitars and the mandolins took on a rising tempo. The tomtoms beat a heartbeat rhythm, enchanting the senses of the onlookers, hypnotizing their steady stares at the new gypsy dancer.
Gradually, the steady monotonous rhythm insinuated itself into their consciousness so that they forgot the time of the present and knew only that time had flowed by them and that Nirvana itself was encircling them.
Their eyes followed every movement of La Tarantula's body. Snakelike it swayed in front of them and entranced their senses. Like the flowing of fluescent waters, her body wove itself into a series of convulsions, an invitation sometimes suggesting itself in her body's grimaces, a repulsion always in the background. And as the movements of her body varied, so varied the masks on her face, changing when her body suggested unholy lust and then, in the next second, adjusting its features into a mask of utter virginal simplicity, as the body took on those attributes.
On and on she danced, her flowing arms and legs and muscles seemingly carrying her along on air currents. The music, once risen to a quick tempo, had subsided once more into the slow measures of its opening chords. The strings sobbed melancholy tears. The tomtoms beat out the rhythm of a dying heart. The castanets clacked dismal sounds. Slowly, slowly, her body subsided into a slow weaving of her torso, gradually sinking to the floor in spasms until, as the music died out into almost soundless notes, her poor tired body was inert on the floor.
For a full minute, all was quiet. Then the applause broke out in the audience. The Moors applauded wildly. The native guides who frequented the place when business was bad promised themselves that they would bring their next foreigners here for the gypsy dancer. In one corner of the room, his head almost completely immersed in the white burnouse of a native, a dark-skinned Berber was watching the proceedings. His beady eyes glittered at the sight of the gypsy body.
His tongue laved his dry lips. Clapping his hands together, he summoned the waiter, and gave him a curt order. Then he settled himself deeper into his chair and continued to stare at the gypsy girl.
His eyes closed until they were mere slits. The muscles in his chin worked like mad.
La Tarantula lay on the floor breathing heavily from exhaustion.
Tensely, her body awaited the opening strains of the next dance. This was to be the most sensational dance she had ever done. It was going to be danced with another gypsy dancer, La Niobe, a girl whom she had picked up in the Triana gypsy settlement and whom she had been teaching for the past year. It was only because of her interest in this young girl of seventeen that she had been able to keep herself alive.
All year they had been rehearsing this one dance. It was going to be the climax of her entire dancing career. Nobody had ever seen it before. Even the musicians had played their music without ever having seen the actual dance. Now, La Tarantula awaited the opening chords that would start them off. A tense air of excitement crept over the place. Word had gone around that La Tarantula was going to introduce a new and sensational dance. All eyes were glued to her figure on the floor. The lights were all turned off with the exception of one that spotlighted the recumbent figure on the stage.
The man in the white burnouse still stared out of his narrowed eye slits and laved his lips with his tongue.
The music began. First one instrument essayed a few hesitant notes, as though distantly, dimly. Gradually it became louder. Then the other instruments came chiming in, each adding a new colour to the music.
And the sum total of it all was a strangely barbaric chant that was not barbaric. Something of the barbaric masculine was missing from it. But in its place was the barbarism of women, the sweet effulgent love music that women love.
Through the veil of curtains floated the figure of La Niobe. A gasp went through the men when they saw that she was entirely nude. Her young girlish figure stood out like a piece of vivified alabaster. As she
stepped cautiously, softly into the light, her tiny breasts jiggled sensuously so that more than one old man in the audience sucked the breath through his teeth with the bitterness of impotency. Hesitantly she danced around the figure of La Tarantula on the floor, wondering why she was there. Then, as the music took on tempo, she became more sure of herself. Taking a drape of La Tarantula's in her hand, she lifted it away from the tired body. One breast of the dancer rolled free, its flesh quivering as it fell away from the confines of the cloth. Again the young girl lifted another drape away from La Tarantula's body. The other breast rolled free, shaking gelatinously with freedom. The girl allowed the two drapes to flutter softly to the floor.
Piece after piece the girl lifted away from La Tarantula until it became quite obvious to the spectators that the gypsy dancer was now as naked as her dancing partner. At this point the soft sad music took a turn. It became more animated. Life crept into it like the warmth of the morning sun into a cold room. A quiver went through her. Her arms moved slightly. Then her legs moved. And then her head. Soon, every part of her was moving, weaving and twisting as she sat seated on her haunches. And, around her, her young protegee danced gracefully, pleading with her as it were to enter into the spirit of the dance with her. Soon, La Tarantula had arisen from her sitting position and was dancing with La Niobe. But this was an entirely different dance than had ever been performed before. Now, instead of interpreting in her dance the sexual act with man, she was doing the same for woman.
Round and round her hips rolled as though she were inviting the hairy cunny part of the young girl, La Niobe, to come closer so that she could rub her own hot cunt into it. Hotter and hotter the music became. Their eyes rolled. Their fingers twitched Closer and closer their bodies approached each other, the naked flesh gleaming in the lone light. A mad, bad note took hold of the music. Strange, esoteric rites were suggested by it. The weeping wailing of disembowelled ghosts crept into it.
Soon, the pair of quivering naked bodies were almost together. Their bodies shook. Their shoulders shook. And as they shook the nipples of their breasts touched each other as they swung from side to side. The contact made them stand up stiffly. Closer and closer the breasts closed in with each other. And the bodies were soon touching. Soon, with all the fervour of a love bout, of a perfect manfuck, they were rubbing their cunts together with a series of moans and ahs and ohs that seemed to have found life in an overwhelming passion. Faster and faster they whirled their abdomens, rubbing each other's pubic sections so that it seemed that sparks were made by the friction. When it seemed that they could stand the contacts no longer, they suddenly seized hold of each other tightly around each other's waist and danced together, whirling their buttocks now, kissing each other on all parts of their bodies, moaning and weeping. The music wailed on. The dance continued. With one heart deep scream from La Tarantula, the pair fell to the ground still in each other's embrace. There they licked at each other's breasts and, when they could contain themselves no longer, reversed their positions so that La Tarantula's head was between the legs of La Niobe and vice versa. Then, timed to the beat of the music, they sent their heads and their tongues bobbing into the hot cuntboxes of each other's hotspots, wrapping the tips of their tongues around the stiffening clitorises of their cunnies.
The music rose to a higher pitch. Their bodies were soon in the throes of a double orgasm. Their heads still bobbed between their legs. The young girl La Niobe was the first to experience her orgasm. She let out a scream as though she were suffering the most severe tortures. Her thighs trembled. Her eyes popped. Her fingers clutched the hair of her partner. At the same moment, La Tarantula felt herself give way. And she, too, came, inundating the face of La Niobe with a sweet delicious flood of fluid. They quivered, they panted, they shook in passion. And, all the while, the sensuous music throbbed on, accentuating their movements so that they took on the grotesqueness of puppets.
The men in the audience became restless. Some had reached into the folds of their trousers and were tugging at their arisen members.
Others could just about keep themselves from leaping onto the dais to separate the two women and show them that they were made for the pleasure of man and not woman. But, in his corner, the dark-skinned Berber stared at the proceedings with his half-closed eyes and smiled enigmatically to himself.
The music stopped almost as abruptly as it had begun. The two women lay together on the stage in each other's embrace, resting from their labours. At the same time, an immense veil floated down from the ceiling covering their naked bodies. Then the lights were completely extinguished. A moment later, when they were turned on, the stage was seen to be bare of the two women and, in their places, were the musicians about to sing and play love songs.
A deafening thunder of applause greeted the lights. And the clapping continued. But neither of the women returned to the stage. For that matter, neither of them ever returned to the stage. Almost as if by magic, the young girl was whisked away by a group of sinister coffeecollared individuals in burnouses. La Tarantula was seized as she stepped into her room. A gag was placed around her mouth. Then she felt herself being carried downstairs. Exhausted from her dancing, she lost consciousness. When she came to, she found herself resting on a divan in an immense, richly furnished room. With the exception of a filmy diaphanous gown, she was naked. As she opened her eyes, she saw seated across from her a darkened, narrow-eye-slitted Arabian.
"You are awake!" he said.
She nodded her head. Instantly he clapped his hands together and a number of Negroes appeared, bearing trays of choice steaming viands and wines. They dined. When La Tarantula was satisfied, she asked the Arabian the reason for her being seized so summarily. Dryly, the Arabian said, "Need I tell you why I want you?" His eyes roamed over her body and caressed her breasts and the hair-rimmed cunt barely visible through the filmy gown.
Again, the Arabian clapped his hands. This time, the Negroes brought in two pipes. "Hasheesh!" the Arabian explained, as he tendered one of
the pipes to La Tarantula. She accepted it hesitantly. "Do not be afraid," he said. "It will give you strange but pleasant dreams!"
"But why must I smoke hasheesh?" she asked.
"Because I would fuck you!" the Arabian answered.
"But why the hasheesh?" she continued.
As if in reply, the Arab turned the flap of his gown aside and uncovered the region of his penis. There, nestling in a wad of hair, La Tarantula saw the cock of a boy of ten, like a little worm, seemingly inadequate for intercourse even with a rabbit.
As though he read the puzzling question in her features, the Arab explained. "Hasheesh gives you dreams of exaggeration. Everything around you takes on an enormous stature."
La Tarantula needed no more explanation. Taking the preferred lighted pipe, she inserted the stem into her mouth as she lay reclining on her elbow on a mattress of soft pillows on the divan. Taking in one deep puff of the smoke, she inhaled deeply, allowing the acrid fumes to sink into her lungs, almost choking from it. Seated across the room she saw the Arabian preparing his own pipe, stuffing the tiny bowl of his pipe with the fine golden greenish-tinged power called bhang but known as hasheesh. "I shall smoke only one pipe for company with you," he said, "after that, I shall drink it in my coffee for smoking it has no effect on me!"
Lying on her elbow, La Tarantula felt an hilarious laugh running through her body. Something about what the Arabian had said sounded uproariously funny. And she gave vent to a loud laugh which subsided into a series of giggles.
The Arabian watched her through guarded narrow eyes and nodded his head. He knew that this was the effect of the first stage of hasheesh smoking. Soon she would be holding her sides with laughter, roaring at any chance remark that he might make, imagining that every word he spoke was marvellously humorous. But La Tarantula was laughing at something else besides what she thought was the Arabian's wit. She was laughing because she wondered what the poor fellow was going to do with that little, up-up thing he called his cock. And, as she tried to imagine it being inserted into her cunt, she knew that it would be lost in her hole like a needle in a haystack.
Deeper and deeper she puffed the fumes of the pipe. And with each puff, she seemed to feel that her body was shrinking up within her and that her surroundings were gradually taking on the proportions of a giant's room. A plant in one corner seemed to appear like an enormous swaying palm tree. A tinkling fountain in the patio that she could just about glimpse through Moorish archways in the other room was a gigantic display of waterworks thrusting an immense needle of water into a great spray from which there roared the sound of a Niagara waterfall. Outside, a horse and cart jogged over the cobblestones on the street. But what she heard was a mighty rumble of thunder reverberating in a chasm of infinity, sounding and resounding through measureless mountain passes. In another room, a musician was playing a violin. But, although the strings had been muted, the resultant music to La Tarantula was like the music of the spheres sounding in majestic diapason from planet to planet, heavenly music swelling in mighty chords that could be heard a million miles away as from an orchestra of ten million instruments and a whole world of singers.
Then she looked down at what had once been a tiny worm of a prick between the legs of the Arabian. What she now saw was the bulking cock of a Don Juan, the balls of an El Gallo, the rampant galloping cock of a true fuckman. Immediately, her fingers shook nervously for contact with the great big thing.
Her cunt quivered for cuntact. Her ass shook for cantact. Her lips quavered for kintact. Her soul longed for kentact. Everything about her ached to have that overcharged battery of sexual dynamite exploding within her. She moaned. She sighed. She extended her arms to his cock beckoning for him to come to her hastily before it might diminish in size.
Tenderly, she took the seemingly enormous prick into her hands and stroked its length with her fingers. Under the massage, the thing seemed to take on added stature. For, with a series of spurts it grew larger and larger so that La Tarantula became riggish with the desire to have the thing already in her and poking her vitals about madly.
Slowly, the Arabian adjusted himself over the tremulous body of the olive-skinned gypsy girl lying outstretched on the divan. Through the diaphanous gown he saw the brown triangle of hair at her cleft.
Reverently, he lifted the gossamer away, gradually bringing to view the unadorned beauty of her cunt. When he spread her legs wide and saw the gaping hole awaiting the entrance of his boyish worm of a cock, he fervently hoped that the results of the hasheesh would suffice for him to complete the fuck. Otherwise, she would come to her senses and realize that, instead of a huge mastodon of a prick in her there was only the undeveloped penis of a child. It did not take him very long to insert his stiffened fingersize prick into her. But as he did so, he managed to keep his index finger alongside of it so as to stiffen it all the more and to give it the feeling of more body. And as he guided it into the receptive hot hole, he allowed his finger to brush up against the button that stood sentinel over her cunny, and thus give the sensation that it was his prick that was fucking her and not his finger.
But La Tarantula was unaware of the deception that was taking place in her avaricious cunny. The effects of the drug still had a firm hold of her senses. She still imagined the violin playing was music of the spheres. She still imagined that the cock within her was an oversized behemoth of a veritable Gargantua filling every inch of her cunt with its expansive magnitude and almost bursting her bottom in its monstrous plunges into her.
At times she imagined that she was unable to stand the pressure of the fuck any longer. The insistent cock pushed into her again and again and she felt certain that it was tearing away the delicate tissues that lined her quim. What an immense thing this Arabian had, she thought.
Never before had there been such a prick up inside of her. Never before had her bottom been so distended with live active cock. Back and forth she felt the monster shoot it into her and with each movement her body seemed to fill out with its bulk.
She didn't know how long this went on.
Time became non-existent to her. All she knew was that fucking her, pistoning her, burgeoning inside her, there was a prick, a man's prick, a prick such as the world had never before imagined could have existed.
But the wonderful thing about it all was that that marvellous prick was inside of her at that very minute. And that, in a few seconds, it would bring her to an orgasm.
Sure enough, just as she thought of it, she felt the insistent boiling up in her loins. The small of her back ached with a steady pain. She heaved her guts wildly. Her hips she whirled in insane gyrations. Avidly, her lips sought the bewhiskered lips of the Arabian. Crazily, her hands sought his body, sought the secret parts of his body so that she might enjoy every part of him when the climax evidenced itself.
But he, the Arabian, was suffering damnably. Looking down at her, he saw her face crease in the throes of an engulfing passion. Her lips formed themselves succubus-like over his lips. Her tongue roamed around his mouth. Her teeth bit his lips gently. Her hands sought his private parts with trembling fingers. But he was cold. He was unable to work himself up into the same pitch that she was now undergoing. For, though she imagined and felt the man-sized prick in her and reacted physically to it, he knew that he had in her only a boy's-size piddler that diddled around ineffectively in her boiling cunny. A red rage came over him. He must work himself up into the same passionate fervour. If for this one time only, he was going to bring himself to a man-sized passion even though possessing of only a boy's-size prick.
And so, seizing hold of her delicious body, he began to poke his tiny thing into her. Faster and faster he moved his ass. Once the prick fell out. But he managed to work it in again and continued in his strenuous, zealous caperings above her.
Suddenly, he felt her body stiffen under him. He felt the fingers of her hand dig into his flesh. He felt her teeth nip his lips. He felt the hot breath from her nostrils fanning his cheeks as she panted in the apex of passion that was coursing through her. Already the sweat was dripping from his forehead from his untoward exertions. His own breath was coming in deep laboured gasps, but not from the exertion that comes with passion. Rather, it was the exertion that comes with the travail of manual labour. Tiny black spots danced before his eyes.
He felt his heart pumping alarmingly fast in his breast. His pulse raced like a trip hammer. But, despite this, he made an extra supreme effort to bring himself around. And with many puffs and sighs and groans, he worked his belly and his thighs in an entire abandonment of reason.
And when he felt the severe spasms of her orgasm drenching her inner cunt with its pearly fluid, he spurred himself to another great, overweening heave into her cunt. And with this last desperate shove, he thought he detected the faint signs of an oncoming orgasm. But, at that exact moment, something in his heart wrenched itself with a sharp stab inside his breast.
After that, he knew no more, he felt no more. He fell heavily to La Tarantula's chest, a deadweight.
And then he rolled off her to one side of the bed face-downward, where he remained quiet and motionless.
Meanwhile, La Tarantula, who had already experienced the sweet painful pleasures of her orgasm, lay back on her pillow and rested. A coolness, a delicious languor suffused her arms and legs, stole over her entire body with a lush velvety creeping. And, with her eyes closed, she still retained her consciousness, but her thoughts wandered in an immense reverie. Her body which had just been so vitally alive, so dynamically existent, now ceased to exist. Now she was spirit, pure spirit making giant strides across rivulets that were mountain passes on the earth. At times she felt as though she were riding a horse on pillows of billowing clouds crossing immense vistas of space that were timeless, formless and almost ephemeral.
But gradually, she felt the grandeur reduce itself in size. Her feelings grew less ecstatic. The clouds dropped away. She began to descend to earth. The room began to take on the aspects of a room and not a hall.
The tinkle of the fountain became only a tinkle. The violinist's violin played muted music, mournfully, dismally, as only the Orientals can play their minor-chorded music. Infinity became closer and closer until she began to be aware of time.
The awareness of her surroundings struck her like a dull-edged knife.
She opened her eyes and thought that she was coming out of a dream.
But this dream had been different. She remembered nothing of what had transpired. The seconds, the minutes, the hours that had passed were compassed into a period of lost time. It was as if they had never existed. When she turned her eyes and saw the inert figure of the Arabian at her side she gave a startled gasp and drew back away from it. Something in the still stiffness repelled her. And when she finally got up enough courage to extend her fingers to touch the flesh of the man she felt cold dead flesh under her skin, and she recoiled in horror.
La Tarantula had struck again.
In the throes of his passion, the Arabian had passed away with a severe attack of his heart.
In a dark alley of the native quarters of the city, deep in the murky purlieus of the narrow winding streets, the slim young body of La Niobe lay, a smudge of blood spread over the region of her debauched cunt. Wide, cruel tears extended from the top and bottom of the bloodied lips. A hundred men, it seemed, had shoved enormous rapacious pricks into her until, swooning from pain and finally become insensate to all that was happening, the poor girl sank to the dust of the street, bleeding to death.
La Tarantula had struck again.