Man of Darkness (ePub)

'...I was a young peasant that lived in the country, working as a sugar cane harvester for the rich, toiling all day long, seven days a week. Using the machete and scraping knife from a young age, I had developed calluses on my hands and a weather-beaten skin for being constantly in the open all day. However, when the harvest season was over, I had time to attend primary school in the morning. I did my daily country chores in the afternoon and my homework in the evening by the light of an oil lamp in our thatch-roofed hut, for we had no electricity back then. My grandfather, who had immigrated to Argentina from the United States, used to say that education is the ladder that gets us out of the dark, deep ditch of poverty into the light of understanding and social opportunities.

'He was a humble man, too, for he was a gambler, losing his petty fortune he had brought along from America, playing cards in clandestine casinos in Buenos Aires, and later betting on cockfights in Tucuman. He was a good guy, but gambling was his Achilles' heel...

'...But there was one student in particular that made me feel even more self-conscious during the first couple of weeks at the university; she was a beautiful young woman, whose full name was Monica Frias Silva. She belonged to a wealthy local family, also being the great, great granddaughter of a well-known governor of Tucuman, a historical character in the history of that province. Not only did she make me feel even more ill at ease than the other students at the beginning but also made my hormones boil as she kindled my sexual desire from the very first day when she sat right beside me.

'When she arrived that morning, the histology class had already started fifteen minutes before. Having greeted the professor and apologized for the delay, she turned her head sideways, spotting the only student desk available at that moment in the classroom, which was the one right by my side. Then she headed toward where I was, prancing into the classroom, swaying her hips as she approached, with her big breasts jiggling under the fabric of her blue blouse. I could smell her soft, fruity perfume as she sat down, creating a fine draft of air that filled my nostrils.

"Oh, you're taking notes of everything the professor is saying. Great! Can I borrow your notebook later?" she said, leaning sideways over my desk and looking down at my jottings.

"Yes, of course," I said, glancing sidelong, blushing, feeling eclipsed and thinking she was a star too hot to be seated next to a humble asteroid like me...'

Man of Darkness is set in the 1970s, in Argentina, amid the ideological political chaos of that time. A young peasant worker moves down to the city looking for better opportunities, ending up in a shanty town. There, his uncle gets him a ghastly odd job that almost nobody would accept, but he does because that was the only way to save money and broaden his future horizon. To get out of the squalor of poverty, he enrolls at the school of medicine of the local university. There, he meets the girl of his dreams, who belongs to the upper class. He is extremely handsome but shy. However, his shyness is compensated by her poise and self-confidence. Although she becomes his Walkyrie, it will not be that easy as a lot of strange and difficult problems crop up, aside from the fact that there is something wrong with his mind that will give the story sudden twists...