the real prostitute

this is a short story that I wrote as a part of the 826valenciaconversationswiththeworld.blogspot.com workshop.

The day that Juan was hired he was nervous. Cleaning was easy for him, but dealing with the expectations of the rich and famous was like taking a canoe on an ocean voyage. He knew he was bound to see a storm, and that he wouldn’t survive a hurricane.
He’d relaxed during the last few months, and developed a nice rapport with Cecilia. She was an intense and beautiful woman, but she had warmed to his presence quickly and even begun to confide in him. At first his responses were stilted and cautious, but he had spent many nights studying English more diligently than a terrier on a bone. There was a fire burning inside of him, and he fed it with stories.
Juan’s grandmother had been a cuaendra for their village, but she had told Juan that her healing powers weren’t really as great as she made them seem to be. She told him that the true magic was in her stories, because they came from her love for the world. She filled his head every night with tales of Aztec warriors and mighty sorcerers who conjured knowledge from the sun. She raised him after his parents were killed in a worker’s protest outside of Oaxaca.
Her cooking fed his body, and her words nurtured his soul. When he was 12, she’d told him that she would die soon, and that he must leave their tiny village in Mexico when he was gone. She said that he was destined for great things in America, and that as long as he believed in the magic that she’d taught him, he would make it.
His abuela’s funeral was hard for him, but the journey was much harder. It took him six months of walking, hiding in farms, empty buildings, sleeping under trees, and cajoling strangers for food. He offered his grandmother’s stories in trade, or his labor. Most times the people he encountered were hungry for relief from their worries, although at 12 he was the height of a man and could carry a full load.
Juan’s luck continued when he met a young couple who helped him across the border, dying his hair blond and convincing the Homeland Security officer that he was their younger brother. They’d told him that they had lost his birth certificate. The English they’d rehearsed worked perfectly, and got him across the significant line between Tijuana and California.
His new friends took him in, and offered him a bedroom and food in exchange for cleaning their house and helping in odd ways. He was surprised to learn that his new big sister had been a prostitute, and his now big brother the man who loved her. They had gone into business together, and opened a brothel that catered to Hollywood’s elite.
No one questioned the presence of this strong, silent and beautiful boy who seemed large enough to be a man, and he watched and learned from the stories that were told within those walls. He taught himself to remember words he hadn’t known, and to look them up later. He built a vocabulary from those around him, and began to read soon after, with a little help.
Lina, his big sister madam, had educated herself well in the true tradition of a courtesan. She had a master’s degree in political science, although none of her clients knew it. None were admitted into her library in the basement, but Juan had a key to the walnut-encased room filled with books.
By the time Juan left, he had spent six years cleaning, listening, and reading every book in Lina’s library. The pain of his parents death had lingered, and he wanted to know what cause had been so great that they could die and leave him to fend on his own. Most people would not have recognized this love of ideals over children as being so pure, but Juan’s wise and loving abuela had shown him in her stories how people become corrupted by their quest for power. The only antidote for this corruption is love, and sometimes the path of love requires that we give everything we have. Juan knew that his parent’s death for the ideal of equality for the working class should not be in vain, so he read.
All good things must end, and Lina decided it was time to retire. She was only 32, but her and her husband had amassed enough capital to support themselves for the rest of their lives. She was turning her business over to a protégé, and she and her husband were moving to Guatemala to live on a farm and take in orphans produced by the deaths of coal mine workers.
Juan knew that he would miss his acquired family, but decided to stay in Los Angeles. Lina and her husband had helped him to obtain citizenship, and he was mature enough to take care of himself. Although he had gained a wealth of knowledge from his books, he enjoyed cleaning for the active reflection that it allowed. He asked Lina to help him to find a job, and Cecilia seemed to be the perfect fit.
Juan’s discretion and gentle demeanor won her over, and soon she began to ignore her flashy parties and glittering clients to sit home and talk about the world. Cecilia had always felt that she was living a great life, what anyone would envy – and her world was expanding as she learned from Juan.
They spoke of the life in Juan’s village, beautiful in its simplicity and terrible in its poverty. They made music with what they had, art with what they could, and life with what they knew. It was far from idyllic, and Juan recalled it as polluted, dry, and the conditions as miserable. The quiet passion in his voice as they talked of what he felt for his family moved her. She learned from him about what had shaped Mexico, and why economic forces kept most of the world’s population in poverty. She had never thought about the idea that money is fake, that it was a concept itself invented by people to get what they wanted.
Juan listened to her as well. He saw her beauty and the captivating nature of her convincing innocence. He had seen in the brothel how women use their feminine powers to captivate men, but more importantly he saw the weakness of the male ego. Strong women have known since the dawn of time how to use these powers to open the ears of the most influential men, and as Juan watched Cecilia, he saw her potential.
Slowly he began to craft a story of his own, the one that would bring Cecilia into a place to change the world. He saw, with Machiavellian brilliance, how her celebrity could be exploited in the press and to the public. Those bulb-crazy paparazzi would take pictures as long as she was beautiful – or maybe more if she was ugly, but only until they wearied of her. Juan saw in Cecilia the intersection of beauty and a mouthpiece for his words.
That night, watching Cecilia rise from her chair and excuse herself to go to the toilet, he saw the potential of her celebrity and the political possibilities. The public adored her gentle carefree laugh, the way she tossed her hair back without conscious thought, and the casual way she possessed her beauty without fear of loss. Her earnest, curious personality was transparent from every angle that a camera could capture, and her naiveté engendered a protective trust from men and women equally.
Juan saw how he could groom and mold her into a powerful sword of truth. He could wield this weapon to avenge the deaths of his parents. He would strike without mercy at the gods of capitalism who unwittingly had made the tool of their destruction while marketing movies and magazines. Relentless pursuit of capital had created a society that knew no gods, but worshiped movie stars.
Politicians were actors who used their pulpit as a stage to gain power, Juan rationalized, so why not use Cecilia’s pedestal for the same purposes? There was no need to raise fund to gain attention, since Cecilia had to make special disposal arrangements lest ruthless individuals tear through her trash. This craving of the public’s to know her as intimately as possible could be exploited, and Juan saw a path to vengeance unfolding before him. Juan knew it was the words that he would teach her to speak that would change minds, and his glory of his vision blinded him.
On the first day he had walked into her home, his hands had shook, nervous that he and Cecilia wouldn’t get along. Today his hands were steady as he poured wine into her glass, confident in the knowledge of his power. He sat back and sipped wine as his ideas washed over her like a river. He licked his lips, and in his excited ambition he didn’t notice as his magic slipped quietly out the door.