The men sitting at the café formed a motley crew. They had come together on the covered terrace of the Café Viggos between the Plaza Del Mar and the yacht basin of the ancient harbor fishing village of Puerto de Mazarrón on Spain's Mediterranean coast. They were widely disparate in profession and age. They had been coming together here for an hour after work for years to watch the sun set over the water and to drink beer, wine, or brandy, according to their taste.
The only foreigner among them, the late forties English ex-patriot, Howard Harden, was the most recent arrival. It was an anomaly that he was accepted in this close-knit group who decried the
guiris
, the foreign tourists, who passed by, but that he had been accepted. He, as the owner of the ex-patriot weekly newspaper published out of a small, three-story building across the Plaza Del Mar from the café, was the one who brought the group the latest news to give them something to talk about rather than the phenomenon that brought them all together and held them like glue. Perhaps it was because he'd lived in Spain nearly his entire life and spoke Spanish fluently that made him acceptable. But maybe also it was because he was bitten by the same affliction as the others.
What had brought them all to this particular café was that one of the original members of the group, the mid-fifties Gervaso Ortega, owned the café and was generous with his servings for what little money they were able to spend. None of the men was wealthy. The two youngest, in their early twenties and both beautiful and well-formed, if forlorn-aspected youths, were Lonzo Alvarez, a mailman, and Santos Diaz, a hospital orderly. Older and more morose than any of them was Esteban Ramos, once a famous Flamenco guitarist in the region, but having suffered a tragic love loss that had dipped him into despair and had silenced his guitar and made him a virtual ward of the café owner, Ortega, until he would recover and return to bringing nighttime business to the café.
What held this group together more than anything else, though, was their love for other men. They all were or had been in love and in affairs with other men. This common bond was never spoken between them and they would have expressed disbelief in public if they were in hearing when it was attributed to another of them, but they all knew, accepted, and hung together in their frustration and the memory of what had been and lost or that could not fully be.
Howard Harden had loved a fellow newspaper man in Cartagena when working on an English-language weekly there. Both men had been married and had families at the time, but that hadn't prevented them falling into each other's arms. It had prevented them from continuing their relationship, though, with both of them leaving their families, but for separate locations. Harden didn't even know where his former lover had gone. In coming to the Mediterranean seaside village of Puerto de Mazarrón, he had not given up his seeking for young men who would top him, but he didn't indulge often and when he did it was somewhere away from Puerto de Mazarrón and with professional rent-boys, usually muscular thuggish dockworkers who would treat him rough and punish him for what he saw as having been his sinful life.
Esteban Ramos's mistake had been falling in love with a notable Flamenco dancer he accompanied on the guitar on the Costa del Sol, who had left him behind when Seville beckoned. The story of the rest was more complex and entangled. Gervaso Ortega pined for the submissive hospital orderly Santos Diaz, while the mailman—and occasional rent-boy for men to make ends meet—Lonzo Alvarez, pined for Gervaso Ortega. Ortega had once accorded himself of Alvarez's sexual services but had met and been smitten by Diaz soon thereafter. Nothing came of his pursuit of Diaz, who fancied younger sailors, but Alvarez lost his heart to the well-endowed Ortega. The young men, of course, were aware of the conundrum and stuck the knives in each other over it when they were able, but Ortega seemed oblivious to his position in the triangle.
It had been Alvarez who had brought Harden into the group. When he'd first arrived and was establishing his newspaper, Harden picked Alvarez up in a bar where they had both become nearly passed out drunk. Alvarez had awakened in Harden's third-floor bedroom in the newspaper building to the discovery that nothing had happened between them. They were both submissive and had gone to the bar in the mistaken belief they could find a fit. As they drank themselves under the table, they spent so much time trying to determine if they were fit, that they mistakenly thought they were. They commiserated about their mistake with each other over breakfast and the newspaper publisher was brought into the men's group at the Café Viggos.
One of the customs of the group was to look down into the plaza in the early second hour of their daily vigil, when topics of conversation were waning, to observe the arrival there of the daily bus from Grenada to let off and take on passengers in its routine trek on toward Cartagena. They would watch to see who had arrived and would speculate on what the travelers were here for. A half hour after that the bus from Cartagena, headed for Seville, would stop in the plaza to discharge and take on passengers, and the game of assessment of those coming off the bus here from Cartagena would start all over again.
"Just another
guiri
—a foreign tourist," Santos Diaz said dismissively on an early evening that was momentous, although none of them would realize that immediately. He had spied a tall, achingly handsome and well-built blond man descend from the bus from Grenada, carrying a duffel bag and a guitar case and look around the plaza.
"Not just a
guiri
, I think," Howard Harden said, with a low whistle. He's a beautiful young man—a man's man. This was as close as any of them got to declaring their affinities, but all of the men at the table took a closer look at the new arrival.
"Yes, he does look divine," Lonzo Alvarez said, which right there and then, backing up his original assessment, set Diaz against the young man wearing a loose white-cotton shirt, tight jeans, and cowboy boots—and wearing them quite well. The young, tanned, fair-haired man with the face of a movie star was broad shouldered and chested, but with a narrow waist. In other circumstances, Diaz would melt to him. But, since Alvarez, was inclined in that direction, Diaz wasn't.
"More of
El Extranjero Rubio
," Howard Harden declared—The Blond Foreigner. A lot of the foreign tourists who alighted here—mostly German—were Nordic blonds. This one didn't quite fit that bill, while still be a sunny blond. "He looks to be English." And thus it was that Martin Warren became
El Extranjero Rubio
, or ER, for short, during his time in Puerto de Mazarrón. "What do you think, Esteban?"
Esteban turned from his inward thoughts and said, "He's carrying a guitar case. I hope he doesn't fancy himself a Flamenco. He is, after all, just another
guiri
."
"But the young man himself, Esteban?"
"The young man is a blond god," the Flamenco guitarist uttered.
"Well, if he does play the Spanish guitar," Gervaso Ortega, who was standing by the table having served another round of drinks, "he can play here in the evening. He is a handsome man and would bring me business—unless, of course, you wish to pay your way by taking up the guitar here again, Esteban."
