When anyone first looked at Esmeralda Verde, she shimmered such that the observer would need to blink. As the viewer's eyes cleared, so did the perception crystalize. Always she was seen as most appealing. Whether tall or short, younger or older, slim or voluptuous, her aspect was unique to the beholder, but even among a horde of witnesses, there was never an argument: Each could only ever describe her as 'beautiful'.
Across cultures and continents, Esmeralda's universal attractiveness was possibly the least of her many powers, but it was a well-used tool. As she traveled widely, the ageless sorceress was like a goddess to her fawning subjugated toys until she released them and moved on. Her current lackey, an albino dwarf named Principe Argot, had preceded her to Quito, Ecuador and secured for her there an invitation to bedazzle the local high society with illusion, slight-of-hand, or such pedestrian stage magic as she should conjure at their Carnival Masque Ball on Tuesday, February 9, 1937. Now, as she scanned the elegantly costumed elite in and around the top floor terrace of the Hotel Plaza Grande, she thrilled to see so many prospective new playthings.
Fifteen metres away, at a table in the main bar, Germán and Isabella Vásquez chatted the way only long-married couples still much in love do. As he signaled a waiter to bring them their second champagne bottle, he nodded toward the dancing throng and suggested, "The kids are out there somewhere having fun, Bella, shall we join them before the band breaks and the magician begins?" He looked lustily past her sapphire-and-diamond pendant to her blue sheath's plunging escote and added, "Maybe they will play a tango."
Isabella flushed the same as she had twenty years earlier when she first met Germán, to whom she had already been formally affianced by her parents for over two years since her twelfth birthday. Nine years her senior, he was a dashing young cosmopolitan man just returned home from completing his studies in Seville. While they danced at her quinceañera which, not coincidentally, was also their wedding party, he had confided, "Things are not so good in Spain. They remain neutral, but I am glad to be with you, here." Dipping her low, then snapping her back upright with dizzying speed, he had growled liquidly, "You will find I am a lover, not a fighter!" The passion he ignited in her at that moment had never quelled.
"SÃ, vamos a bailar," Isabella breezed with a loving smile as she set down her empty glass. When he had pulled out her chair and she was standing beside her husband, she put aside all thoughts of her unprotected vulnerability. Melting against his tuxedo, she snaked her right arm around his waist and whispered, "Am I as desirable as when I was but a girl?"
Germán, stealthing his left hand between her upper arm and ribcage, burrowed behind her backless dress's shoulder strap. As he cupped her mature breast's smooth naked skin and tweaked its fat nipple, he gently chastised, "Don't be a prick-tease, Bella. You are more desirable to me every day, but I have a calendar, also. I know I must wait another ten days before I may come into your parlor."
Isabella sucked in a short sharp breath as a racing thrill shot from her heart to her womb. Swallowing the sudden lump in her tight throat, she murmured, "My house has more than one door, you know. We may be cautious and still celebrate." She craned her neck and kissed him sweetly as she asked, rhetorically, "¿SÃ, mi cariño?"
"El alcalde keeps a room permanently rented here," Germán replied huskily, sotto voce. "Perhaps, if you feigned some woman-trouble or other, I could persuade him to give me the key..."
Isabella patted Germán's cheek lightly and shook her head, "No, my love, it is better that we wait until we are home in our own bed. Besides, we have looked forward to the famous illusionist that Doña Escobar has imported from Trinidad to entertain us. Let's have our dance and see the show!"
While their folks were threading their way to the dance floor, twenty-year-old Alejandro Vásquez crutched his hands under his trembling sister's armpits and hauled her from her knees to her feet between two potted palms in a very dark corner. Pulling up the eighteen-year-old's strapless gown's top, he squeezed her tits back into place behind its satin-lined underwired cups, and praised, "Eso fue muy bueno, mijita... I am proud of you. Did your light-headedness clear up? I also know another treatment..."
Cumandá Vásquez nodded and clung to her big brother's biceps as she continued to lean on him for support. Not even in her wildest and most emotional moments, when she was masturbating alone in her bed, had she ever imagined herself doing for him what she had just done. As she tongued a small gob of his spunk from her mouth's corner to her cheek and then swallowed, she thought confusedly, "It was wrong. I ought to be ashamed, but it was wonderful, too!" Not knowing what else she could or should say, she answered aloud in a hoarse whisper, "SÃ. Me siento mejor... but, I am a little tired. Will you walk me back to our table, 'Jandro?"
By the time the sated siblings returned to the bar, the orchestra had quit playing and Doña Escobar was near the bandstand, microphone in hand. "Damas y caballeros," she began. "May I present tonight's entertainment? Fresh from her triumphant tour of The Caribbean, we have engaged Esmeralda Verde, known on five continents as 'La Hechicera', to amaze you!"
Suddenly, an emerald-green smoke-puff popped loudly beside the dowager hostess. The assembly gasped its surprise as faintly acrid wisps disappeared and the witch materialized from no one knew where. To most of the assemblage on the terrace she was moderately tall and svelte. Her ivory skin tone and long blue-black hair were perfectly set off by her chic brilliant green bias-cut satin sheath.
The body-hugging gown's gathered shoulder straps draped sleeveless in a plunging vee. A sequined side-slit split provocatively from its ankle-length hem to the left knee. Every man imagined the dress covered no lingerie at all. Every matron wished to be as slinky.
About her waist Esmeralda wore a wide gold patent leather belt with a crystal buckle. On her right hand, over her shiny green satin opera glove, she sported a twenty-five carat table-cut emerald ring. Resting dramatically in her décolletage, on a long eighteen karat gold chain, an impressive pear-cut forty carat emerald sparkled among diamond chips.
As La Hechicera stepped forward on her high-heeled gold patent leather pumps, her true red glossed lips divided in a gleaming smile. "Muchas gracias, señora," she said pleasantly while she beckoned with her off-hand to a figure in an overlarge three-toed brown-throated sloth costume. Then, immediately, she addressed her audience, "We may think we may believe what we see; that we may discern illusion from truth; that we are sophisticates, protected by science from darker arts. But... is that the case? Judge for yourselves!"
A sparkling bang accompanied a bright-white exploding cloud and the sloth transformed instantly into a thickly-built albino dwarf standing less than one-and-a half metres tall. Again, the patrons' astonishment was apparent, and even more so as, despite his relative bulk, the little man spryly vaulted from the floor beside his mistress to a table-top no one remembered being there before. Now clad in a white boat-neck natural linen long-sleeved pullover shirt, and black duck trousers held up by black leather Y-back suspenders, the peculiar thirty-seven-year-old fellow danced a happy jig. His snowy stockings flashed between his polished black oxfords and his pants cuffs as he clicked his heels in mid-air, then somersaulted back to the floor.
Esmeralda interrupted her assistant's showy entrance with a waggling finger and authoritatively cautioned, "That will be just about enough of that, Principe!" To the stunned gathering, she asked, "Do you believe he was in costume?" She clapped her hands sharply and a dingy puff obscured her, the dwarf and the dowager, but only briefly. As the smoke rose from the terrace to the night sky, a live sloth replaced the rumpled furskin suit laying on the terrace floor and slowly waddled off toward the seated musicians. Its long hard toe-nails clicked irregularly in its ungainly gait while the dwarf stood with his hands on his hips and laughed.
The crowd erupted in applause, if for no other reason than to hide their dismay and pretend that everything they saw could easily be explained. Esmeralda smiled benevolently even as she cunningly searched for the ones she would capture. Returning her attention to Doña Escobar, she passed her left hand across the the widow's face, took away her black domino stick-mask, and then asked sweetly, "What do you recommend husbandless women in Quito do to assuage their yearning hearts?"
Although she was elegantly dressed in an azure silk-and-chiffon ball gown which, except for the cleavage blossoming at its key-hole opening, modestly wrapped her full figure from neck to mid-calf, Doña Escobar felt as if she had been stripped to her merest underclothes by the illusionist's slight movement. Her ears buzzed oddly. Monotonically, the fifty-three-year-old heavy-set hostess answered, "Well, I have never stopped cooking." Seemingly unaware of her surroundings, she cupped her left hand over her skirt and delicately scratched her suddenly itching coño.
"¿Verdademente?" Esmeralda raised her eyebrows and made a mock shocked face to the people nearest her as she pressed, "What dishes interest you the most, señora?"
"Oh, well, I love bananas," replied the mesmerized woman. "I have ways to use them whether they are green and hard, or old, black and wrinkled." Laughter rippled through the audience; increasing the more she spoke. "El alcalde gives me his regularly. He has a very large tree, but he says his wife is allergic and it would be a sin for his fruit simply to waste away." Her hand busily scrubbed her cunt through the blue dress as she continued, "My personal favorite recipe is to steam a firm banana in my humita pot until it is so completely soft that it melts in my mouth!"
Esmeralda chuckled, then guided the quivering dowager from the bandstand to a nearby empty chair. As she sat her down, she savored her first small victory like an appetizer while she said, "Muchas gracias, Doña Escobar. You have certainly given us all something to occupy our thoughts and even our dreams!" She trailed her hand softly over the woman's lined cheek, gave it a gentle departing pinch and then strolled among the clapping dancers toward the main bar. Principe scurried in her wake while the crowd parted like the Red Sea before Moses.