Best Gay Erotica 2012

FOREIGNERS IN SITGES Shaun Levin

Mauro works in the breakfast room at the hotel I’m staying at for the week. He’s an Argentinean guy with dreadlocks and a bright yellow headscarf. He’s into grunge, so I get extra points for being South African—apparently there’s some famous grunge band from Durban. (What’s grunge? But I don’t ask.) I’m here in Sitges researching a book about a Jewish painter called Mark Gertler. The hotel is on the seafront; you can hear the waves from the balcony.

“Foreigners in Sitges,” Mauro tells me in the evening at the hotel bar. “We stick together. Catalans don’t like us.”

He tells me the bohemian community in Sitges is mainly South American artists and musicians. And, he tells me—Nah! Really?—that this is the gay capital of Spain. I listen to all this because he is beautiful. I am the kind of person who can endure a lot for the sake of beauty: boredom, repetition, torture, you name it. I’ll devise endless questions to demonstrate my fascination, all just to be close to men like Mauro. I’m so caught up in his beauty I can’t tell whether he’s trying to pick me up or just working for his tip. For the next three days, Mauro is on breakfast duty: he is the first man I will see every morning; my first words of the day will be to him.

One evening, Mauro invites me to his gig at Marypili, a lesbian bar on Joan Tarrida. I sit close to the small improvised stage and watch him play and sing—swinging his locks, his headscarf around his neck; the music a mixture of head-banging and Springsteen and it’s sad and young and wild and yes, full of teen spirit—and every now and then he catches my eye and smiles in a way one smiles at admirers, the way he’s probably seen men on screen smile at the women who fall in love with them. I feel vast and disloyal. As if Gabriel isn’t waiting for me at home, as if I hadn’t been having thoughts of him being The One.

Mauro and I get drunk and land up at his place where we have to be quiet because his flatmates have gone to bed and what lands up happening is that after he falls asleep with a joint in his hand, I stroke his stomach, tracing the treasure trail down to his pubes and his cock, and when his cock is hard, I put it in my mouth and suck until he comes and I swallow and he sighs and in just a few seconds he’s breathing slowly, snoring lightly. And I sit there smiling to myself, because it’s been years (twenty-two, to be exact!) since I’ve seduced a straight boy. I watch him sleep, his body unguarded, his stomach exposed, his thick dark pubic hair, his cock soft and plump and shining with spit and his own ejaculate.

I take the circuitous route back to the hotel to increase my chances of picking someone up, which I do, a waiter who lives with his boyfriend and is out for a late-night stroll with their dog. We jerk each other off in an alleyway in the old part of town, our cum dotting the cobblestones.

Straight boys like to show you things. Young straight boys in particular. And of those, the ones without fathers the most. Look what I’ve made, Daddy. Look what I’ve found. The young man teaches the older man about grunge; he’s eager to introduce him to the soundtrack of his life. There is something very close to sublime about the body of a young man almost twenty years younger than you. It’s a new thing I’m discovering, now that I’m at an age where the world is overflowing with grown men much younger than me.

Mauro has come up to my room so he can play me The Banx on his iPod dock. We’re stoned and naked and it’s three in the morning; I can see he’s regretting having said yes. He lies on the bed staring up at the ceiling and I kneel beside him, my head level with his body. He is silent and I am silent; there is nothing to say. I can tell from his eyes, from the way his mouth is shut, that he is beyond caring. The streetlamps cast a dull light onto everything—his skin, the bed linen, the wallpaper—a kind of doughy yellow.

“It’s not going to work,” he says.

“What’s wrong with the way it is?”

“It’s not what I want,” he says, and turns onto his side to look at me, his locks fanning out across the pillow like a kid’s pencil drawing of the sun’s rays.

“Why did you come up?” I say.

“I like being with you,” he says.

“Then why can’t we keep doing this?” I say.

I gather his hair into a sheaf so that his face and neck are exposed.

“You want more than I can give,” he says.

“You have to fuck someone,” I say. “So why not let it be me?”

“I don’t,” Mauro says, and turns back to face the ceiling. “Now stop, please.”

“Okay,” I say. “Can I come and lie next to you?”

He says nothing, but moves over to make room for me on the bed. I tell him about the painter I am writing about, a man who killed himself in his late forties, around the time of his son’s seventh birthday. I tell him he used to come to Sitges with his wife and other writers and painters, that he’d tried to meet Picasso, but Picasso had taken the train back to Barcelona before Gertler had the chance to see him. Eventually we fall asleep, Mauro facing one way, me the other, the edges of our buttocks touching.

In the morning—just three hours sleep!—the sun comes up over the sea and shines onto the bed. The only sound is waves, a metronomic lapping, gently falling and falling and falling. Mauro goes downstairs for breakfast duty and I sit on the edge of the bed and watch the water and the palm trees beyond the balcony’s railings. A man is cycling along the promenade to work. People are walking their dogs along the shore. The sea is calm and silver; the sun so bright the water dazzles. In the distance there’s a dark smudge: a boat? a clump of seaweed? seagulls? the light playing tricks on the water? The landscape is celadon and aquamarine. In the terra-cotta pots on the edge of the balcony, the gerberas are bright yellow. Soon I’ll be back home again; Gabriel will be there to meet me. Mauro will do breakfast and play grunge for the lesbians. From the room next door I can hear what sounds like a couple making early-morning love.