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Quent Cordair

The Seduction of Santi Banesh

First published by The Atlantean Press, 1994.

"Welcome to America!" the limo driver beamed. Lalek was a fellow countryman who had come to the States six years ago to attend college and now made his living driving between the airport and the city. He had made enough money to buy the sleek, black limousine and expected to finance a second car within a year; soon he would be running a small fleet. That his motherland could still track him down had somewhat concerned him, but the prospect of playing tour guide to a fellow countryman, and a high government official at that, was irresistible. The three other family members had been entirely unexpected, and the sight of the lovely girl from home unsettled him nearly as much as the new surroundings had affected her. He straightened his cap and became the world's best chauffeur, insisting that they not raise a finger to assist with the luggage or open their own doors. The servility only further irritated Rakeel who ordinarily thrived on such. He wanted it from an American.

Santi thought the young man charming in his cap, jacket and bow tie. The car was splendid, as luxurious as anything at home, and he would be chauffeuring her around like a princess. When he asked if she would like her handbag put in the trunk with the rest of the luggage, she knew he expected no such thing. The words and penetrating eyes meant something else entirely, and she didn't mind.

The limo whisked them from the airport and into the traffic of the ten-lane freeway heading north, Lalek swiftly maneuvering into the center lane. Rakeel whispered to his wife that she looked foolish clinging to the door handle. She folded her hands rigidly in her lap.

The sun had burned off the morning fog. The traffic had dried the road. Andjani had already decided that someday he would have a red car without a roof, with a white leather interior, just like the one in the far left lane with the silver emblem on the front that looked like a three-pronged steering wheel. The driver was a young woman in sunglasses. As the car passed, Santi marvelled at the blond hair flying in the wind.

Lalek watched the blond till she was out of sight, nearly sideswiping a truck beside them. "It's a decadent country, Minister Banesh, and it's going downhill fast, the way of Rome, India, England, Spain, France—all of the once-great empires. Pride, greed and lasciviousness bring them all down in the end. Far better to be an obedient and humble people like we are." He glanced at Santi through the rearview mirror. She quickly turned her head to watch the cars.

The freeway was a gleaming metal rainbow of color. And it was going somewhere, the same somewhere she was going, but those people, they all knew what was ahead. Their determined faces both excited and frightened her. She looked around. She was in the middle of a white-water river with a mile-a-minute current. There could be no stopping. The hunger was making her dizzy and weak, and her fingers went again to the amulet. Her feet reached for something, anything ahead of her against which to push, but there was nothing within reach in the back of the black limousine. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the leather, wondering how Lalek would look naked.

Andjani tugged at her sleeve. They were rounding a turn in the freeway, over the top of a hill, and there before them lay the city, sweeping from west to east, across the hills and down to the bay. The vast, intricate spread of interconnected pinnacles, domes, parapets, grand halls and gardens was nothing less than a fairy-tale palace. Tufts of fog lingered at the edge of the water where the Bay Bridge arched out and over to a little island of green, and leapt away again into the eastern haze. The sunlight had gathered on the greenhouse roof of a slender hilltop apartment tower, which scattered it out in sunbursts through the remaining morning mists. The vision was wrapped in ribbons and bows of highway, one end of which swept out to them to flow beneath the wheels of the car. Santi laughed aloud.

Her father glared at her and her mother stared as if, right before her eyes, her daughter had turned into a toad. Rakeel apologized to Lakel and, to Santi's chagrin, revealed that she was in the third day of the Fast, implying that she wasn't to be held entirely accountable for her state of mind.

"Well, you've picked the perfect time to visit San Francisco then. Did you know that this city has more restaurants per capita than any other in America? These people are slaves to their stomachs. It's nothing but a sprawling brothel of materialism and carnality. Your daughter will be the purest of the pure—a mountain shrine should be built to her—once she withstands the temptations of—" he couldn't possibly have thought it— "of the many restaurants here." But he had thought it, the course of action having arrived complete in his mind. Yes, there were far more tempting things in this sinful city than its eating establishments—and there was the other way, the better way, to break the Fast of Virgins. His eyes dimmed in anticipation. Ripe figs were meant to be eaten.

The city grew around her, first softly tugging, then sweeping her forward, drawing her in with a steady, incessant offering of sight and sound. She was descending into its gray, throbbing veins, the pulse forcing her rhythmically towards its organs.

There was a hotel near Union Square where they stopped and left their luggage in a room. After a moment of freshening up, Rakeel took a cab to his meeting, and the others were back in the limousine before Santi had time to catch her breath. It was nearly noon. They drove down to Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39, where Sumi and Andjani ate lunch while Santi wandered in and out of the cornucopia of shops. Lalek followed at a discreet distance. The wealth of clothing enveloped and cradled her. The jewelry was laid out and waiting. In the middle of a shop of stuffed animals, she turned in a slow circle, imagining it was her bedroom. She touched her nose to the nose of a life-sized gorilla, and whispered baby talk in the ear of teddy bear while holding it to her cheek. In middle of the pier she stood and watched the people who had come from every corner of the planet. One couldn't distinguish by race or dress the people of the city from the tourists; but the tourists all carried a disoriented look with them, and the people of the city looked at home. Yes—that was it. She'd never seen that look before, not even in her own country. Especially there. These people belonged here, on this earth, in this country, in this city. And it belonged to them.

She walked with Lalek back to the restaurant where they had left Sumi and Andjani. The smell of freshly baked sourdough bread and hot New England clam chowder tried to fill the vacuum of her body. From the open window of a candy shop a thick, sweet odor of rich chocolate reached out, and the sidewalk nearly slipped from under her.

In the limousine again, they drove south to the Navy yards and walked down a dock between the looming cold grays of a destroyer and a battleship. Above, the raised rows of massive guns promised to protect with pitiless raw power. Andjani reached out to try to touch the side of the destroyer and nearly fell in the bay, causing his mother to shriek.

They parked beneath the Embarcadero Center, where in an arcade, the children played a virtual-reality gunfighter game. The shops here were a step up from those on the more touristy pier. This was where the people working in the towers above spent their money. The place smelled of money. Selective money. Santi's fingers caressed the crystal bottles of magical liquid on a perfume counter. A salesgirl sprayed a breath of a deliciously erotic scent on her arm, and Santi twirled around, imagining herself dressed in a bright-blue party dress which was being modeled for her by an aloof mannequin. She couldn't fathom the quantities, the rack-after-rack, row-after-row quantities of variety and styles. She found three stores that sold only shoes. Imagine, only shoes.

Sumi spent all her time trying to reel in her children, first Andjani, then Santi, but once she found Santi, Andjani would be gone again. The place was full of seductive demons—she could feel it—and she openly frowned upon the whores behind the counters, with their bare arms, face paint and uncovered heads. She felt terribly homesick and couldn't wait until the day was over. The best she could do for now was to protect the children as well as she was able.

The next stop was Coit Tower, where they climbed to the top to look out over the city. A fleet of yachts were racing past Alcatraz Island. Then it was on to the Golden Gate Bridge. They crossed it, came back and circled down to Fort Point. Above them now the bridge's naked red-orange skeleton towered, a pencil-drawn equation of triangles and arches. The afternoon breeze kicked up the waves against the rocks below. Then it was back up into the city, and up three blocks of the steepest grade imaginable, the limo's engine whining. The cars parked straight into the curb looked as though they were about to topple and roll down the hill. At the top Lalek turned, went one block, and turned back down a street even steeper than the one they had come up. On the flat intersections of the cross streets, he stepped on the gas, giving his passengers a moment of weightlessness before the car's nose dove down the next block. Sumi was in such a state that she didn't realize her son had insisted the cycle be repeated, until they were on their way down again. Santi laughed like a girl on a swing.

The Golden Gate Park soothed her with its cool forests, smoothly stretched lawns and geometrical gardens. There was no time for the museums, but she begged to stop at the merry-go-round, where she rode a fierce dragon while Andjani shot at Indians from atop his trusty steed. At a vendor's stand nearby, Lalek bought a Coke and a large soft pretzel with mustard on it for Andjani. Santi watched a young father walk by with triplet boys in tow, all dressed in identical designer clothes.

They headed west to the ocean, past the Cliff House, then south along the beach and over Devil's Slide, an avalanche threatening on the left and a plunge to the ocean on the right. Then back into the city, past the zoo and through the Haight-Ashbury district, where the storefronts were decorated in black, blue and voodoo, and the inhabitants paraded a bohemian sideshow of tattoos, hair art and pierced bodies. One young woman stuck out her tongue at a friend to reveal six earrings stuck through it. Sumi nearly fainted and the children squealed their language's equivalent of "Gross!" while Lalek laughed and laughed.

They were window shopping at Union Square, a block of open green grass and walks surrounded by some of the best and most expensive stores on the Northern California coast. Just as Santi had calculated that the price of the feminine black business suit in a display window would cost three months of her father's salary, and would be quite impossible for anyone to buy, a woman walked out of the store wearing the very thing.

Andjani was spellbound as he examined the wonders of a three-story toy store. A Spanish galleon was a pitiful comparison.

On the square, Santi noticed a curious grouping of people whose attention seemed focused around someone in their midst, like worker bees buzzing around their queen. She crossed the street to get a closer look. It was a high-fashion model, going through her paces on a photo shoot, with only the city as her backdrop. She was the most confident, beautiful and happy person Santi had ever seen. The woman turned and strode towards the camera, then walked away again. She stopped in the middle of the square and raised her eyes to the tops of the buildings. The next exposures were burned on the screen of Santi's memory, and she knew then that, someday, she too would be a model. On one heel, with uplifted arms and outstretched fingers, the woman spun all the way around, touching the whole of San Francisco. Santi had seen the look in the eyes once before, through a neighbor's bedroom window.

Andjani dragged them into a sporting goods store and determined that what he wanted was an oversized San Francisco Giants sweatshirt and a pair of heavily padded, high-top Nike basketball shoes. He had smuggled his entire savings, a considerable sum, into the country with him, and unbeknownst to his mother, had at some point during the day persuaded Lalek to trade him the equivalent in U.S. dollars. He was already trying on the shoes, and Santi couldn't help but giggling over how huge they looked, stuck on the ends of his little legs. But Andjani wanted both the shoes and the sweatshirt. He marched proudly to the counter with his prizes. It was then that his mother realized that he actually had money, and once she had discovered it was his own, she refused to allow him to spend it on such frivolities, which he couldn't possibly wear at home anyway. And they would have cost nearly every cent he had. Andjani's bottom lip quivered and his eyes glistened, but he swallowed the tears, lifted his chin and carefully replaced the merchandise on the shelf. He followed his mother out of the store like an innocent man being led to the gallows. For the remainder of the afternoon, he was lost in an eight-year-old's thoughtful melancholy.