Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

XLVIII. In The Bullʼs Horns

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The painting smirked down at Oro and his lovely hostess Ruth Tudor.

With an abstract eye, it showcased strips of beaded sand swirling around El Coliseo de los Matadores with a thunderous hunger. The thick, forested Chilean shadow of power swallowed the edges of the painting – dipped in aching gold hues – and in the bloodthirsty chaos, wooly clouds overhead oozed and billowed across the sky, blanketing the sun and the sands in patches of topaz yellow and glossy red. People shrieked at the bottom of the painting, whipped to submission, bullets tearing through their bodies and laminating their bodies with a wavy illusion. The strokes of the painting were precise, priceless, imagery entombed by the artistʼs brush.

    The prisoners of Pinochetʼs cannibalistic cravings, of his sadistic mind, they surrendered to the heat in the portrait, and as Ruth and Oro took in the portrait, they took in waves. Strips of murky, cherry red, water settling on top of the waves. Waves that were foamy, with their mouths watering in anticipation as they sunk into the bodies of the prisoners and devoured their entrails with a sharpness.

Ruth Tudor frowned and drank her Belizean rum.

"What an ugly f*cking painting," she said simply.

The painting smirked down at Oro and Ruth, and it captivated their ruthlessness, their cruelty. Like sharks craved blood, Oro craved renaissance; a dawning of a golden age. Stability in all the cradles of power, of wealth, of every dark and foul thing that made a poor man a king.

The crownelands were all he ever dreamed of as a boy, a dream he was married to, a dream he sewed together with a three-pronged beard made of golden Brazilian hair dye and stitched from teeth gilded in Chilean zinc. He had refined tastes, luxurious tastes, and Ruth Tudor...she spat on them. With ruthless eyes fashioned from serpentʼs teeth, Cuban features that baked in the Chilean sun, and a monopolized beauty that was chalk full of ethereal makeup and bloodied lips. His jealously consumed him, and her fire gutted him alive.

"Excuse me?"

"The painting youʼre trying to woo me with. Itʼs a sh*t painting – like the one a hyper-masculinized b*stard gives his dime-store mistress. Manʼs motivation to win; do you think I give a f*ck?"

"And what are you? Pinochetʼs mistress?"

Oro leaned back, lips drunk off the sensation of his bourbon, and Ruth toasted to it with a drunken fervor of her own, snorting.

"Iʼm the matador, cabrón. You would be wise to remember that next time you try to gold-dig your way to fame and fortune with a sh*t painting."

She downed the rum in one go, laughing menacingly. 

"Whatʼs your name?"

"Oro."

"And where are you from...Oro?"

"São Luís. Near the Ring of Fire."

"São Luís. One of Escobarʼs sicarios?"

"Yes."

"The one that helped auction virgins to Portuguese pornographers and American tourists. That Oro? The p*mp?"

Oro grinned a snakeʼs smile, his cat-like pupils grinning too.

"I suppose so."

Ruth drank her Belizean rum.

And Oro drank from the holy grail. The luxurious warmth of it all, the foaming thunder inside the bubbling glass, the fury inside it as gold as lightning, the exquisiteness of its taste. He imbibed, indulged, his wildest fantasies, his most inebriated fantasies. A drunken ship sailing through a sea of dark impulse and wry cynicism and sharp, predatory eyes. Oro drank, drank with the thirst of a thousand sailors, drank with the entitled of a Peruvian wineseller, drank as the painting smirked at him with curled lips painted in red lipstick, drank with muffled inspiration, drank...