Argentine poetic realism inculcated with a literary, almost-Russian weariness with life. El Negro and Mabel live in a poor, filthy suburb of a Latin-American city where no one has any business being. El Negro forces Mabel to be a prostitute, but she resists. Even after he has had to kill an aggressive customer, he still keeps giving Mabel to other men. Mabel seeks help from ‘the Man who talks of God’. El Negro meets another street girl and tries, in the face of Mabel’s fury, to get both girls to work for him. Mabel winks into a kind of religious dementia. El Negro gets put in jail where he expresses his surprise that ‘the Man who talks of God’ does manage to get both girls to work for him. Gonzales: ‘El Negro and Mable choose the path of evil because they do not recognise the possibility of choosing between good and evil. City of God is the story of a piece of scorched earth.’
