The girls and boys who work the cafés and bars and tourist shops are just that, girls and boys, some of them having barely entered their teens.
The passersby in the city squares, the people who populate the tables of outdoor cafés, the tourists snapping pictures of statues are all in their teens or twenties, young and good-looking and disposed to laugh. The girls are beautiful, their hair long and shiny and their skin smooth and their bodies firm and tall, and all the boys are handsome and svelte and strong.
On the city’s underground train, young people pile into the cars like college kids on a dare, and they don’t mind at the height of rush hour that they must press their bodies into each other. Oftentimes a girl getting on the train alone at one stop might get off at another stop with a boy on her arm.
Coupling is encouraged and common.
One night, a foreigner comes into the city on his way to another city, and seeing and feeling the sensuality in the air, he decides to stay the night in one of the downtown hotels.
The nightlife there is unbelievable. People dress up in sexy clothes and they drink and laugh, and the foreign man has to push through the town square like he’s walking through a rock concert, hoping to make a connection, to meet someone.
But he doesn’t speak the language, and the first night he has no luck.
The next day, however, on the subway, the foreigner gets on the train. There are no seats left, so he holds onto the bar above his head. The train jiggles him around like a puppet. He sees a girl sitting across from him. She has long red hair and gray eyes, and when she sees the foreigner jiggling with the train, she smiles.
This could be the one, he thinks, and he smiles back.
She bites her young, plump lips, and she practically bats her eyelashes at him, like a girl flirting in a cartoon. He knows he has found her.
The foreigner now notices that there is a boy sitting next to her, talking to her, but she cannot seem to take her eyes off the foreigner. She ignores the boy. The foreigner wants to talk to her before the next stop, for any stop could be hers, and if the doors slide open and she steps out into the bustle of the city, he might lose her forever. He has no time to gamble with fate. He knows this.
The boy sitting next to the girl touches the back of her neck, but she pushes him away and continues to give her eyes to the foreigner. Her face is soft and warm.
He acts.
He walks toward the girl, stumbles with the movement of the car, and she perks up. The boy next to her is clueless, only seems to notice the girl.
When the foreigner reaches the pretty girl, she elbows the boy to get away.
She admonishes the boy in her language. The boy looks up at the foreigner and stands up. He says in the foreigner’s language, Please, sir. Take my seat. You must sit.
The girl is looking at the boy, and she smiles at him, proud at him for giving his seat to the old man.