Most of the time, a book can help me overcome the one and a half hour tedious waiting time before arriving to my sweet sweet home in the ass-end of the world (as you should know I live in the outskirts of my dear gray city, Lima). Anyway I am not the average untrusting limeño that has a serious paranoia issue of getting mugged, kidnapped or raped. Instead, I am more of the daily socialite that enables conversations with complete strangers just to kill off the boredom of the trip. I chat most of the time with foreigners, since it’s easier to approach them. Especially if they are Europeans, since they don’t have the usual Peruvian post-traumatic stress disorder with total strangers.
While I’m trying to stretch my legs, which is nearly impossible due to the awful short distance that the friggin’ wanker of the bus seat arranger measured to have more passengers in his damn vehicle by not caring one bit about the comfortability of them, I suddenly hear a chit-chat right on the line of seats behind me. It’s a couple. There shouldn’t be anything extraordinary about them, most of the passengers, if they’re not checking their Facebook status or pounding their eardrums with torture loud music screaming through their earbuds, are normally having a chat with a friend that’s either sitting or standing next to them. But what’s really dragging my attention to them, I mean the talking couple, is the fact that they are speaking in no other language than that of Shakespeare… that is English.
I wheel back to them and get a quick glimpse of their faces, then immediately return to my original sitting position. Both of them are dark-skinned just like me and have a strong latino accent. They are Peruvians, no doubt about that. The gentleman is in his mid-fifties and wears a yellow shirt with a gray wool jacket. I couldn’t help noticing that as a desperate effort to keep himself younger, he had his head shaved off in a Walter White Breaking Bad rebel style. His female partner is quite fresh and young, if compared with him. Dyed auburn hair, fine facial features, a little pointy nose, but some wrinkles on her forehead tell me that she must be in her late thirties. She can’t be older than thirty eight, definitely under thirty eight.
MUAK!
They start savoring each other’s lips with sheer enthusiasm that the licking, sucking and playful biting can be effortlessly heard by the entire bus.
So this guy starts teasing her by throwing her the usual commonplace compliments like «You’re pretty, I like your eyes, I love your breath, me encantan tus…
– No, no, no ,no!!! Switch to English! – hisses desperately the lady while trying pathetically to preserve their privacy, if not intimacy from the non-anglo speakers of the bus.
A resigned – oh, right. ok, ok, ok – is followed by her lover.
Their words get progressively more gritty as their sexual tension arises and the conversations themes evolve from the cheesy «I love you» to the «Kiss my hot lips you horny stud.» All develops into a ludicrous 90’s porn movie dialogue.
The guy sitting next to me, an office clerk also in his thirties, glances at me with a smile that shares equal complicity. He-knows-that-I-know-that-he-knows-that we both know English at a decent level to understand what’s going on behind us.
They continue to heat up the spoken foreplay replacing the sweet and innocent words with more kinky terms and sexual innuendo. Including also the words cat, rooster, Richard and donkey in their conversation, which of course are synonyms of pussy, cock, dick and ass (look up in the dictionary if you think of them as bad words… believe me, they aren’t). I can almost feel the steam of their boiling bodies and lurking passions.
Suddenly I can’t help it anymore.
I madly burst into laughter along with Mr.Clerk-that’s-sitting-next-to-me. I laugh so hard that my tears run down my cheeks and sparkle over my jeans.
I turn back to them and say with the most brit accent I can come up to:
– I’m sorry but I couldn’t stop myself from hearing you guys. Are you recruiting English speaking bus passengers for a threesome or what? – Then I add – You guys are soooo BUSTED!
They both violently blush like canned cherries and stare in shock at me as if they were caught with their pants down. The girl immediately looks straight away while the Walter lookin’ baldie takes a second or two before coming back to his senses and doing the same thing.
After a few bus stops they stand up and leave… quietly. Luckily for them, we will never see each other’s faces again; although I could use some damn good laughs in my every day bus rides
My advice to all English speakers in Latin America: Don’t take for granted that all other latinos don’t get what you’re saying in English. Believe me, some of us do. Try another language if you want to have a «hot» talk, like Dutch, Romanian, German……. dunno, Kechua! Or maybe try the most romantic tongue of all: FRENCH. But please, not English. Leave Shakespeare alone.
