by Unknown
Like the previous night the Spanish Steps were littered with people. Small groups and couples. The lone guitarist, now surrounded by a small crowd. Here and there were boys on their own or in twos or threes. At the bottom he turned left under the pretense of looking at the Keats house, allowing his gaze to wander in the hope of making eye contact.
Directly in front of him two teenagers spoke softly, the taller of the two nodding toward a pair of giggling girls seated a few feet above them. To Meredith’s left, near the bottom, sat a lone handsome youth dressed in brogues, tapered trousers, and a red pullover. The writer walked toward him.
“Buona sera,” Meredith said as he sat beside him. The boy—no older than seventeen, he judged—nodded.
“Do you speak English?” The boy nodded. “Perhaps you can help me,” he continued slowly. “This is my first time in Rome. Can you recommend a good nightclub?” The boy did not turn to face him for several seconds, then looked in his direction. Above them the guitarist started murdering Ticket to Ride.
“There are some.” He spoke softly, trying to enunciate correctly.
“Something to suit a man my age,” he said, holding eye contact with the boy longer than was polite. He lit a cigarette.
“There is a place. Not a nightclub.”
Meredith waited for him to continue but the boy was not forthcoming.
“Would you show me where? Is it far?”
The boy remained silent, then: “Pardon, I have to meet my girl,” he said crisply, standing. “I have to go.”
The boy began to trot toward the fountain at the base of the Steps. A blonde girl was heading in his direction. She smiled, waved, opened her arms. The boy ran to her. They embraced. Meredith watched them walk away arm in arm.
“Bitch,” he muttered under his breath. The boy was nice looking and had a good mouth. “I bet you’re going to suck his little dick until it’s as dry as a twig,” he added before a coughing spasm cut off his words. He ground out the cigarette.
It was nine o’clock.
The entrance hall of Stazione Termini was largely deserted as Meredith entered the doors opposite the huge clock that hung above the electronic information board. It was 9:27, the display informed him mutely. His feet had started to hurt. It looked like coming here was a bad decision. There was no one around except a Gypsy woman with small child in her arms and a comatose wino sprawled beside the photobooth near track seven. The woman saw him and started in his direction.
As he turned to go, the woman grabbed hold of his left arm, pulling frantically at his jacket. Like other cities the world over, Rome had its underclass. New York had its legion of homeless, London its alcoholics, Paris its migrant work force of Moroccans. Rome, however, was infested with Gypsies such as this wretch clutching at his clothes, beseeching him for money in whatever dialect she spoke.
He jerked away. She continued to claw at him undeterred.
“Get off!”
She paused for a beat, then continued her litany of despair, and his temper erupted.
“Fuck off!” He pushed her away. She stumbled, nearly dropping the child.
With a screech she flew at him, pounding his back with her free arm, her tone now abusive. The child started to cry loudly. Meredith strode toward the nearest exit, but she was persistent and the blows continued to rain down on his back.
He stopped suddenly, stepped to the right, and turned, slapping away her hand, glaring at her, his eyes enflamed with rage.
“I said get the fuck off me, you diseased cunt!”
Like a slap his words silenced the woman for an instant, then she started to coo as she placed her arms protectively around the child, a calm expression of total hatred directed at him. The child was silenced by its mother’s soft sounds and she turned, moving away at a measured pace. He watched her go, unnerved by the sudden outburst. Then the Gypsy stopped, turned again to face him. He took a step back as if pushed by the force of her expression, an expression that went beyond loathing, beyond hate. But there was something there he could not read. A glimmer of fear was apparent, and … revulsion? She began to babble, then spat two words at him.
“Il morto.”
Even with his limited command of Italian he understood.
Dead man.
She spat at her feet, then ran toward the nearest exit, the words hanging in the air.
Dead man.
The frozen moment was broken by a coughing fit that swept up from his gut to constrict his throat, his heart shuddering in response, legs rubbery as gravity increased its pull, making him stumble to the nearest wall for support, the hundred yards elongating as his sense of space expanded, rolled, a wave of nausea hitting his system in a huge spasm. He closed his eyes to halt the roller coaster motion and took a deep breath, counting slowly to ten. He opened them, coughed, and tried to focus, blinking rapidly.
Go. Get out of Rome, his instincts screamed, return to London. To familiar territory. But he would be lonely there, too. Lonely. Lost. As he always had been.
No. No, he would find a kindred spirit to ease the emptiness with, someone with whom he could forget his troubles, albeit temporarily. There was one other place he could try; the porno cinema near the pensione. There he was certain he would find what he was looking for; there among the other lost souls would be a fellow spirit in search of release, of fulfillment.
He forced himself to smile, smile and regain his former optimism. His consciousness pirouetted with the slapstick grace of a clown. It worked. A ray of optimistic sunlight penetrated the storm clouds of depression that approached, breaking the darkness up into jagged shards as he pulled the bottle from his bag, and his internal horizon lightened further as he took a deep pull, coughing as the Scotch caught at the back of his throat. He needed to sit down. The cafe where the Dachau woman served was opposite, its light an island in the darkness pushing against the glass wall of the exit. He lurched away on shaky legs. He had to keep it together. One step at a time. He negotiated the revolving door and made it over the tram tracks to the cafe without falling flat on his face.
The bar that dominated the room was long and thin like the woman who served behind it. She stood looking down at the wood, a ghost of a time not so long past, her thinness painful to observe. The Dachau woman. What, he questioned, had caused her to resemble a victim of the final solution? She was white as a sheet, her cheeks deprived of the faintest hint of pink, her eyes the color of bruised mushrooms. If she heard him enter she did not acknowledge his presence. Neither did the three locals huddled around a TV set in the far corner, their attention consumed by Magnum P.I.
The woman—surely she was thinner than the previous day, but no, that wasn’t possible—continued to look at the counter as Meredith ordered an espresso in his halting command of the language. As she turned to the coffee machine he noticed the spinal defect which pushed her head forward, explaining her limited movements. She handed him a steaming cup of black liquid with a trembling hand as he slapped down his money and shuffled to the nearest seat, turning his back so he wouldn’t have to look at her funereal visage.
Meredith continued to tremble on the steps of the cinema, his stomach raw from its expulsion. The figures were closer now and he could see it was the Dachau woman and the fattest of the bar’s occupants. The man was absently rubbing his crotch as he escorted the emaciated woman, though as they drew nearer Meredith realized the man was not holding her by the arm but caressing her arse. The thought of those two in a sweaty sexual embrace did nothing for his nausea. Yet it had been the atmosphere in the bar—or rather the invasion of the whores—that had finalized his resolve to come here. He looked up. The couple stopped by a dimly lit doorway and entered.
Doors. Opening and closing.
They seemed to punctuate every aspect of his life.
A sudden cold draught and explosion of noise from behind pulled Meredith from his thoughts as two of the whores who plied their trade outside the pensione entered the cafe. They cheerfully stepped to the c
ounter, laughing and joking in a torrent of sound and broad gestures. One lifted her ample bosom to the other and broke into a loud cackle, the other echoing her movements, then joining her friend’s laughter with a deep chuckle.
Each night these women had fractured his sleep with their nonstop chatter and bargaining outside his window. The Three Weird Sisters: Miss Piggy, the Vacuum Cleaner—because her mouth, a perfect, puckered circle, reminded him of the line “nothing sucks like an Electrolux” from a blatantly sexual advertisement for domestic appliances—and Mother Mary, as he’d dubbed them. They stood on the corner by the pensione for over twelve hours at a stretch, gossiping, joking, smoking, spitting, and scratching their fat arses.
The first night he had not been able to sleep before three A.M. with the noise coming from the street. Initially the wailed hymns of the drunks stumbling from the bar down the street, then from the endless chattering of the whores. Periodically a car had drawn up and he’d heard doors opening, then slamming shut, each vehicle pulling away fast only to return a while later as the cycle of copulation continued throughout the night.
Miss Piggy made a masturbatory motion to the Vacuum Cleaner, who laughed again, then whispered to her companion, who giggled in reply, pointing at Meredith. The Vacuum Cleaner blew him a kiss, then returned to her conversation. The Dachau woman was pouring two shots of rum without request, obviously a ritual for the whores, who toasted each other, swallowed as one, threw their money down, and departed as they had arrived: loudly.
Although his feet still ached, his legs were regaining their strength and he felt restless, the appearance of the whores once again bringing thoughts of sex to the fore. He started to luxuriate in a sense of inevitability and, as if lured by an invisible Ariadne’s Thread of lust cast by the streetwalkers, stood from the table and departed the lifeless cafe.
So here he was, tired, queasy, and shaken. But the thought of returning to the grim confines of the pensione stirred his resolve. He’d check the place out. What he’d felt a few moments ago was the culmination of days of heavy drinking and a poor diet. No wonder his stomach had rebelled.
He stood.
And entered.
A dry, dusty smell hit his nose, the smell of a place not inhabited by man but rodents. The interior was red, tidy and functional though, not an abandoned place. The only decoration was two wilting potted palms standing sentinel on either side of the doors he assumed led to the screening room beyond, inside the ticket booth sat an overweight, middle-aged man with black hair slicked back in an attempt to cover his large bald patch. His complexion was sallow, waxen under the spotlights illuminating the booth. Meredith placed a 20,000 lira note on the counter, The cashier continued to concentrate on his cuticles. By one pillar to the right lounged a swarthy youth with a sneer, his body language aggressive, his jeans taut over muscular thighs as he reclined, his rough trade gaze passing through Meredith’s flesh as if he could see into his soul. He knew then he had come to the right place.
Click.
He turned to face the cashier. A ticket protruded from the metal counter like a small pink tongue. He took it and his change, stepping to the left of the booth to enter the inner sanctum.
For an instant blindness caressed his eyes, total, eternal. Then some distance in front a scrambled rainbow of light jumped and he made out a fuzzy rectangle of video-generated imagery with the sound of muted voices. He stood against the rear wall, mentally counting to ten as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. The light from the enlarged video image cast meager illumination on the aisles before him. A nigrescent sea of seats dotted with heads bobbing in the blackness like buoys came into focus. Here and there tiny beacons of cigarettes, clusters and constellations of red points, produced trails of smoke that hovered like ground fog above the body of men that composed the congregation in this church of desire. The majority of heads were separated by empty seats, the fractured symmetry of which was disrupted by occasional groups of twos and threes. But these couplings were in the minority. This was the refuge of the lonely, the lost, not a place for comradeship, yet paradoxically a vessel for communion with the flesh.
Meredith strategically took a seat in the back row to survey the audience. On screen a girl with hair the color of rotting wheat swallowed a penis.
Reverential silence blanketed the cinema. Not even the sound of bodies repositioning themselves interfered with the litany of lust coming from the screen. He lit a cigarette.
Behind the miasma of tobacco smoke lay the unmistakable musk of dust and damp. Yet there was more, and his nose wrinkled in reaction. There was a slight excremental aroma; this appeared to sweeten until a rich trace of hash rolled past his face; then this, too, changed, making him think of rotting orchids. This persisted for a while, then faded. One moment the atmosphere appeared damp, the next chalk dry. Suffocating. Then from somewhere in the auditorium came the unmistakable copper tang of blood. That, too, retreated. As he inhaled the cigarette the conflicting smells made his mind spin and he ground out the Marlboro as he tried to stifle another coughing fit.
The girl continues to deep throat the long, thin phallus. Suddenly it twitches spastically and a dribble of sperm leaks from the girl’s lips as she continues to eat it, then two jets of semen shoot from her nose.
The image jumped, faltered, faded. There was no discernible movement in the audience and the house lights remained off. On screen a rectangle of dots and wave patterns writhed, reminding him of the opening to The Outer Limits, but no Control Voice sounded from the speakers, no new picture took the previous one’s place for what seemed minutes. Finally, a smeared visual flicked onto the screen. Music with too much treble tinkled along in accompaniment.
On the left side of the auditorium a figure rose to use the exit, the movement prompting Meredith to try contact with a fellow lost soul. Sticking to the row he was in, he picked his way along to the other end where a man of similar age sat. Meredith selected the seat next to him, opening his legs so his right knee brushed the other’s left thigh, yet the man remained immobile, even when Meredith let his hand fall to his crotch as he watched out of the corners of his eyes. The man continued to stare dispassionately at the screen.
A white Rolls Royce cruises an Alpine road. Inside sits a big man sipping champagne, a woman on either side of him. One is a short blonde with her hair up in a bun, giggling as she drinks and caresses her naked breasts.
Meredith turned to his neighbor, smiled, and held his gaze. The man ignored him.
Lost in your own little fantasy, aren’t you? Probably about the blonde and what you’d like to do to her. What a waste.
The girl pours champagne over her breasts. The other woman—a brunette—leans over the man to lick at the liquid, the blonde’s nipples erecting.
Meredith stood, walked back along the row of seats to cross the aisle. Three rows in front sat another man. Balding, overweight.
No, too old.
The man, the blonde, and the brunette enter a large room. In the renter a group of nine people surround a young woman laid out on a table, silk cushions holding her off hard wood. She has a phallus in her mouth. Another thrusts in and out of her vagina. The crowd kiss, masturbate, caress each other in slow abandon until they perceive the presence of the man. The orgy pauses. The crowd clears and the woman on the table turns over to present her backside to the man who opens his robe in return, his large penis ready to enter her. She begins fellating the phallus of a skinny youth as the man sodomizes her. The group then couple in abandon.
Meredith paused to watch the film, smiling to himself at the excess on screen, before letting his eyes wander.
To his right, in the middle block, lounged a boy in his early twenties. Meredith homed in on him.
Onscreen the woman groans as the skinny youth ejaculates on her face. The man does likewise, his semen covering her back in a torrent. The group respond in a frenzy, the other men baptizing the woman in a monsoon of ejaculate.
He sat next to the boy, sprea
d his legs to brush his thigh. The boy turned. Meredith looked him in the eye whilst fumbling for his lighter.
“Pardon,” he said.
The boy nodded slowly, then provided a light.
In the sulfurous flash of the flame Meredith knew he was the one. The boy had a perfect complexion: olive-skinned, a light corona of stubble adhering to the fine, neoclassical lines of the face, the hair jet black, magnificently sculpted over the scalp. His eyes, Meredith saw in the instant of the flame, were brown, an unusual shade between gold and bronze. His lips were full, rich, ruby.
Meredith felt the heat in his groin explode through his system, causing him to look away, shocked by the fallout from the chemical charge that passed between them. The boy continued to hold his gaze.
On screen the image skipped as a new film replaced the previous one and Meredith was glad of the distraction.
A close-up of a mouth, open wide.
The camera pulls back to reveal a man, naked except for a leather harness, strapped to a chair. A tall dominatrix, her black hair matching her cat suit, masked, nails his scrotum to a piece of wood. In the background two old men bugger a child.
A boy or a girl? Meredith could not be sure.
Next to the pederasts is a woman, her feet and hands chained to the wall, her body systematically invaded with sexual devices wielded by a woman of indeterminate age.
A title slowly superimposes itself over the tableau: Crucified By His Cock.
Meredith chuckled at the pretension, then dared to look back at the boy, who was still gazing intently at him, a trace of a smile on those inviting lips.
On screen the masochist screams.
The boy stood, squeezed Meredith’s knee, moved toward the exit sign.
He was halfway across the auditorium before Meredith gathered his wits to follow. He dropped the cigarette and walked after him, nearly tripping in his eagerness to do so.
The boy went through the left exit. Gathering his composure, he followed.
The exit doors led to a narrow corridor. To the right was a bar with a few patrons. Meredith didn’t take any notice, as the boy was heading in the opposite direction. Meredith moved quickly. He could not lose him. Not now.