Lust for sale

>> Adios Muchachos is an adventure in Cuban prostitution

by JULIET WATERS

Alicia, heroine of Adios Muchachos, is a unique kind of Cuban whore. "When Alicia decided to become a bicycle hooker, her mother agreed to sell a ring that had been in the family for five generations. She got $350 for it, and for $280 they bought an English mountain bike, one with wide tires and lots of speeds, on which Alicia launched her hunt for moneyed foreigners."

But two months later, Alicia sells her expensive bike for a heavy old Chinese bike upon which she develops her "lost pedal" routine. She lures home many a limo-riding foreigner who believe they've rescued a sexy art school student from the indignity of falling ass up on the road. With the help of Margarita, her mother, Alicia develops her "tricks for treats" trade, selling sexual favours for goods she can sell on the Cuban black market.

All this changes when she meets Victor King, a Montreal business man who looks like Mel Gibson and who sets Alicia up in his mansion. In its first chapters, Adios Muchachos has a sort of innocent Gigi of Cuba ambience. Will they fall in love? Is Adios Muchachos another Julia Roberts vehicle?

Not without a buzzsaw editing job. Not unless you can imagine Julia starring in a campy X-rated grifters story that unfolds with the sex-farce energy of an early Pedro Almodovar film. And not unless you can imagine Julia grabbing the reigns of power and responding to Victor's "You have no right" with, "I have the right... And the left... And the long one in between and if you value them you'll shut the fuck up and listen."

Adios Muchachos is the first translated work by Uruguayan writer Daniel Chavarria whose passions, according to his bio, are classical literature and whores. His love of whores is impossible to doubt. Apparently he's an academic expert on the origins and evolution of prostitution. But classical literature? Let's just say that a big part of Muchachos's charm is that it isn't held back by lofty literary intentions. Meaning that Chavarria can digress into a page or two of hardcore. Or he can introduce a mega penis faun statue into the plot and it doesn't have to be symbolic.

Chavarria introduces us to a wide range of eccentric characters, multiple-personality transvestites, perverse Dutch artists and businessmen, not to mention the various personae that Alicia develops as she moves from bicycle hooker to high-paid call-girl, to eye-catching accessory to murder.

The balance of power shifts so many times, some readers may start to feel a little queasy. Then there's the porn-fantasy-park décor of Victor's house. Two-way mirrors, video cameras, a living room with a Caribbean green pond underneath transparent tiles. And, of course, the faun statue.

Muchachos is not exactly studded with deep insight into the human condition. It's a quick, cheap, fun read that's entertaining and slyly apolitical. But in the final analysis, it's very much a guy's book. A twisted fantasy that will probably alienate brainy women with paragraphs like:

"His visitor was Carmen, a special blend of European, African, and Asian that Cubans call mullata china. Her features were noble, and as she turned to close the door, the line of her well-sculptured legs suggested that five years and five pounds ago she might have resembled physical perfection. Carmen was about thirty years old--she was no longer perfect, but her imperfection was more than compensated for by her telluric magnetism."

I'll never be a cigar smoker, but that doesn't mean I can't imagine the appeal. In the same way, I'm happy to classify Adios Muchachos as a special blend and leave it at that.

Adios Muchachos by Daniel Chavarria, Akashic books, pb, 245pp, $16.95