Episode 07: Twenty Thousand in Small Bills

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

Episode 07 is the one with the counting scene, and the counting scene is four minutes long, and the guide has never once recommended skipping it. It is the Angel of Bogota episode about money, which is saying something. A street vendor, a broken scale, a man with a briefcase who buys everything on the cart and pays in notes so small that the counting becomes its own kind of foreplay. The Angel of Bogota episodes are usually about what happens after the money. This one is about the money itself.

Wilmer is twenty-nine and sells mangoes, limes, and the small sour passion fruit called curuba from a cart outside the market at Paloquemao. He has had the cart for six years. He has had the scale for four, and for the last three months the scale has been lying to him: it reads two hundred grams heavy on a good day and four hundred on a bad one, and he knows it, and he has not had the forty thousand pesos to replace it, and so every week some woman with a bag tells him he is a thief and every week he apologises and gives her an extra lime.

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By eight at night he has sold almost nothing. The cart is still three quarters full. His back hurts. He is eating a mango he cannot afford to eat and watching the market shut down around him.

The man comes out of the side street at twenty past eight. Stocky, unhurried, dark jacket, a black briefcase in one hand and a phone on a small gimbal in the other. He stops in front of the cart and looks at the fruit for a long moment, and Wilmer straightens up and puts on the voice.

"Mango, senor. Very sweet today. Curuba, limes, all fresh."

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"How much for all of it?"

"All of it?"

"The cart. Everything on it."

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Wilmer laughs, because it is a joke, and then stops laughing, because the man is not joking. He does the sum in his head twice and gets two different answers and then says, "Two hundred and forty thousand. But the scale is bad, so I do not know exactly."

"I know the scale is bad. I have been watching you weigh for two weeks." The man sets the briefcase on an upturned crate. "Two hundred and forty. In small notes. It will take a while to count."

It takes a very long time. The man opens the briefcase and takes out a brick of notes held with a rubber band, and then he starts laying them on the crate one at a time: two thousand, two thousand, five thousand, two thousand. Wilmer stands there with his mango and watches a man he does not know count out two hundred and forty thousand pesos in the smallest notes either of them has ever seen, and something about the slowness of it, the deliberateness, the way the man's hands move and his eyes come up every so often to check that Wilmer is watching, makes the back of Wilmer's neck hot.

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"That is two hundred and forty," the man says at last. "Count it."

Wilmer counts it. It takes him three minutes and he is aware of the man's attention on him the whole time, patient, unhurried, like a hand resting on the back of his neck.

"Now," the man says. "The cart is mine. The fruit is mine. What are you going to do with the rest of your night?"

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"Go home. Sleep. Buy a scale tomorrow." Wilmer's voice is not quite steady.

"I will give you three hundred thousand more for the rest of it. The camera. My face stays out. You say stop and it is over and the money is still yours." The man turns the phone slightly. "You have been looked at badly all week. I am offering to look at you properly."

Wilmer looks at the money on the crate and at his cart, which is now somebody else's cart, and at the man's hands, which have not moved.

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"Where," he says.

"Behind the stall. There is a room."

There is a room behind the stall, with crates stacked to the ceiling and a bare bulb and a wooden table with a ledger on it. The man moves a stack of crates and sets the phone on the table, and Wilmer stands in the middle of the room with his hands hanging and does not know where to put them.

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"Take off your shirt," the man says. "You do not have to talk. You have been talking to people all day."

Wilmer takes off his shirt. It is a relief not to talk. The man comes close and puts one hand flat on his chest and holds it there, and Wilmer's eyes close.

"You are strong," the man says. "You lift crates all day. That is why your back hurts."

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"Yes."

"Turn around."

The man slides the bolt on the side door first, without being asked, and then his hands find the knots in his shoulders and work them, and Wilmer makes a sound that is not quite a groan and the man says, "There," and keeps going, thumbs into the muscle, until Wilmer's head has dropped forward and his whole weight is leaning back into it.

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"Now the rest," the man says.

Wilmer undresses the rest of the way and the man turns him and looks at him, and then his mouth is on Wilmer's and his hand is on the back of Wilmer's thigh, and the crates are hard against Wilmer's back. The man's belt comes open. He is thick and heavy and curved, and he puts Wilmer's hand on it and Wilmer's fingers do not meet around it.

"On the table," the man says. "Face down. It is not a bed but it will do."

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The wood is rough and old and smells of fruit. Wilmer lies across it with his cheek on the ledger and the man stands behind him, and the lubricant is cold and the first finger makes him clench and then let go, and the man waits, and then two, and then three, and the bulb is very bright through Wilmer's closed eyelids.

"Say it when you want it."

"I want it."

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"Say it properly."

"Please. Please, senor. I want it."

He is slow and he is thorough and the table takes his weight and creaks, and Wilmer's hands slide across the ledger and knock it to the floor. The man's rhythm never changes, never hurries, and it goes on so long that Wilmer stops being able to tell how long it has been. Somewhere on the other side of the wall the market is closing, gates going down, a man shouting a name.

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Afterwards Wilmer stays on the table. The man wipes his hands on a handkerchief, dresses, and counts three hundred thousand pesos onto the wood beside Wilmer's shoulder.

"Buy the scale," he says. "A good one. Not the cheap one."

"Why do you care if my scale is good?"

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The man picks up the briefcase and the phone. "Because I will come back and buy fruit," he says, "and I do not like being cheated."

He is gone through the side door before Wilmer can sit up. Wilmer lies there a moment more with his cheek on the wood and the money beside his head, and then he laughs, once, into the empty room, and goes to find his trousers.

The trailer stops here. The episode does not.

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