It was safe to say that no one was more eagerly anticipating Fernando’s ascent to manhood than Juan Francisco. The summer before Fernando was slated to go abroad to university, the senator was walking on air.

For months he’d been planning a grand, bacchanal tour for the two of them and delighting himself with the fantasy of it—he and Fernando, a pair of boisterous Don Juans, roving about the countryside far away from María Luisa’s reproving eye. Horseback riding along the rivera where the bawdy peasant girls did their washing and fetching. Gambling on cock fights and getting into fistfights themselves. Fishing and birding by day. Feasting, drinking and whoring to their hearts’ content by night.

For his own part Fernando had been dreading the prospect of having no reprieve from his father’s obnoxious company for weeks on end.

An unlikely—or rather, unknowing—ally came to him in the form of María Luisa herself. Though Juan Francisco had kept his plans under wraps to prevent her from spoiling the fun, it was sloppily done. He couldn’t stop himself from dropping gloating hints on occasion, though perhaps even without these obvious clues, María Luisa could have uncovered his designs easily enough.

Shortly before the planned departure date, she announced loftily at breakfast that she had, after much trouble and no small expense, finally succeeded in tracking down the location of Carmencita’s mysterious place of origin—a remote, rural town at the edge of the Amazon.

“The name of the place is Cortez,” María Luisa said to Fernando with a faint curl of lip, as though she’d detected something distasteful in the vicinity. It was a look of hers with which he was much familiar. “From what I understand, your maternal grandmother still resides there. As she’s well-advanced in age, I think it prudent that you should travel to visit her this summer before going off to university—in lieu of whatever other plans you may have made.”

Her icy glance flicked across the table toward his father, who seemed suddenly much absorbed with the grapefruit he was mangling. Her eyes returned to Fernando with an edge. Her smile was just as flinty.

“One should know from what sort of stock he descends. This may well be your last opportunity for it.”

Fernando didn’t object to this notion. He didn’t even think to object to it. The proposal genuinely intrigued him. He yearned to know more about his elusive mother, the memory of whom even now seemed to escape him. The Amazon… His spine prickled with a primal thrill of adventure at the thought.

Juan Francisco pushed the grapefruit away from him with a dejected sigh. He was devastated, but he didn’t protest his wife’s proposal either. Certainly not with the way her grey eyes were boring into him from across the breakfast table, daring him to speak at his own peril.

He slumped miserably in his seat. He had no ground to stand upon against her, as he never did. Her sheer glance castigated him—and left him vaguely awed that he was so. If not love, he felt for her a sort of fearful reverence. So he held his tongue even as his libertine dreams were dashed to pieces before his despairing eyes.

And so that evening Fernando packed his bag—not for an excursion into his father’s dream-world of unfettered debauchery, but for a journey into a wilderness of another sort.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy