ABSTRACT
Andalusian writer Juan Bonilla (b. 1966) surprised the Spanish literary world in 2003 with a cynical portrayal of human sexual trafficking in a globalized market in his neopicaresque novel, Los príncipes nubios (The Nubian Prince), in which the first-person narrator, Moisés Froissard Calderón, “hunts” for prospective sex workers among the exhausted, hungry, clandestine male and female immigrants washed ashore along the European Mediterranean coast. 2 Moisés chooses the most beautiful, healthiest immigrants and convinces them—by promising to fix their residency papers and to reward them with lives of luxury—to work for a few years for the high-end prostitution ring “Club Olimpo,” which caters to rich, capricious international clients and charges exorbitant fees for the sexual services of carefully groomed, perfectly trained, sometimes surgically enhanced prostitutes. Moisés agrees to work as a “hunter” (or “scout”) for the club by convincing himself that his task will “save lives”:
You may well be wondering what sort of work I did, what I mean by “saving lives.” Well, I wasn’t saving people the way firemen or lifeguards do; all they really save are bodies. […] My job was to seek beauty, to plunge my hands into the world’s muck and bring up pearls. I cleaned those pearls, made them presentable, prepared them to acquire the value that was rightfully theirs. I traveled to places where poverty had hidden these treasures; I searched them out with infinite patience and rescued them. That’s what I mean by saving lives. (3–4) 3
