Don Luis De V
La Tarantula an Erotic Tale of Spain
CHAPTER ONE
The Tarantula is a poisonous spider.
It spins no web as a snare but catches its prey because it is fleet of foot.
Its home in the ground is lined with silk. Remember these things.
It is told in the villages that one who is bitten by this dreaded scourge falls to the floor as one dead. And only by the skilful use of magic can he be brought out of his deathlike trance. For then the subtle strains of music excite an overpowering desire in him to dance, until he falls to the floor bathed in profuse perspiration but secure in the knowledge that he has been rid of the envenomed virulence. City doctors from Madrid and Seville, they scoff at this statement. But the old men of the village who sit in the square after a siesta, in the sun, and soak in God's sunshine, they know far more about the bite of the Tarantula than do the august and revered doctors. For they have lived long. They know life. They know, too, of the human tarantulas that have infested our dear somnolent Spain.
They know of her whom men call La Tarantula.
And as these old men of the village soak the suffusing beneficence of the sun into their bewrinkled faces, they talk through their beards of the woman whom they knew in their youth as La Tarantula.
She, too, caught her prey because she was fleet of foot. For she was the most agile gypsy dancer in all of Spain. Like her dreaded namesake, she lined her home with silks and satins and varicoloured laces and shawls, there to ensnare her men in the oldest trap in the world, her vagina, her cunt, offering to her victims the million-pleasured joys of its throbbing, pulsating essences but insidiously marking them with the death's head.
For it is recorded that, of all the lovers that La Tarantula harboured to her bosom, not one there was who died a natural death, not one there was who in his deathbed was able to smile sweetly up to the ceiling and receive the prayers of his loved ones gathered around him. All of them died violent deaths, as men should die, by the sword, by the fire and by the beast.
La Tarantula was ill-starred.
She was born in Triana, the gypsy settlement, across the Guadalquivir in Seville. It was in this section of the city that the notorious Carmen worked in the cigarette factories for which that part of town is famous.