The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

by Maxim Jakubowski

  What did he expect? That he should always be ready to forgive her fragility, her angers and her silences without reacting? Without a word of protest?

  Trevor had just signed the documents, and he was convinced he was doing the right thing.

  He wanted to bid goodbye to this spiritless life, and its troubles that sapped his strength over and over. He wanted to break up this failing marriage into a thousand pieces. But the thought right now of that small white band on Kate’s finger where the wedding band had been had a strange effect on him. No way did it provide him with that sense of power or freedom it should have done.

  All Trevor now felt was so much more empty than before and the knowledge of this scared him to death.

  I’m walking down Charing Cross Road. It’s already getting dark when a drunkard stops me. He takes hold of my arm and asks me for small change. His nails are filthy and there is alcohol on his breath. I pull away from him and mutter a few words in Italian, pretending not to understand his language. As I walk away, the drunkard shouts after me. Something about my being a “stuck up Italian cunt who should go back to her own country”. I’m not sure whether this is a threat or just a suggestion.

  7

  Ever since I was small, I have believed my father was a hero. Like in a Marvel comic. For me he was the brave protagonist of a thousand adventures. He was my father, the invulnerable.

  I admired him for his strength of will, for his habit of undervaluing danger which I thought was an extraordinary gift, almost as good as walking on water. My father was never scared, even when we experienced an earthquake. It was the earthquake we went through in the 1980s which shook all Italy and when whole buildings collapsed. I remember that day well and am unlikely to ever forget it. I was just a small girl, staying in her little room. when the first major tremor happened. The light went out and the glass in the windows shattered as if hit by a missile. I slumped to the ground, closed my eyes and began to pray.

  That was the moment my father walked in. He took me in his arms, and carried me down five flights of stairs, dodging the fallen masonry and broken glass.

  I still had my eyes closed. I only opened them again once we were all gathered together in the street outside. With eyes now open wide and full of tears we saw how badly the whole area had been struck. Whole families just standing there and discovering the rubble of a palazzo which had just lost its whole front.

  The walls of my house had cracked open like chalk and we all shed tears. All of us with the exception of my father who was attempting to maintain the morale of the people by saying, “Nothing to worry about, a bit of plaster and it’ll look even better than before.”

  It feels incredible, but he was right, as we found out in time.

  My father was a courageous man. He did not tolerate obstacles or limits to one’s achievements, particularly so when it came to his own family.

  He’d already suffered one heart attack, but still, every morning, I’d see him sitting at the table having his coffee, with a lit cigarette hanging from his lips, even though the doctors had expressly forbidden him to smoke. At first, I’d pretended to ignore him, but one day I’d finally lost my patience and asked him why he was being so obstinate. He replied that it was all because of the heart attack.

  So he then explained to me why it was the heart attack’s fault. It had taken him to the very gates of death, but not far enough to reach his destination. That knowledge that he had escaped death’s clutches had made him stronger, and now he believed he was immortal, like God.

  I’m sure that if God’s heart had been as damaged as my father’s he would have resisted the temptation to smoke a cigarette every ten minutes or so. But Dad was too enamoured with his dreams of power to think of that, and the second heart attack took him by surprise. One sad December day, his heart stopped and he died. Just like that. He died and was buried like any old wretch.

  I inherited very little from my father, heredity wise. Just moral standards I could pass on to posterity.

  All I borrowed from him was a taste for smoking. I light a cigarette and I feel invincible, as if I were smoking a piece of God himself, having compressed and rolled the tobacco inside the thin paper, and indulging without a filter. It’s a feeling of omnipotence which gets even stronger, depending on the circumstances; for example, every time I find myself at Marconi airport, returning from a long trip.

  I set my feet down on the ground and I feel like a goddess. Strong and powerful. Full of courage and good sentiments, because yet again the plane hasn’t crashed and I am still alive. So I light myself a cigarette and it’s the best one of the day.

  “You’re not allowed to smoke here,” a hostess shouts at me. She gestures at me with her arm. “You must go over to the bar.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I respond. And turn back towards Mauro who’s come to pick me up from the airport. “What a cow . . .”

  Mauro half smiles as we make our way to the bar. He’d likely smile more but his face is still bruised and painful.

  “So, are you going to tell me what happened? Who did this to you?” I ask him.

  “Trevor . . .” he whispers.

  “Trevor?”

  “Yes, him.” Mauro shrugs his shoulders and looks sad. “I was sure he hadn’t found out.”

  “Oh, come on . . .”

  “I’m serious. I didn’t want to hurt him.”

  “You should have thought of that before. Why in hell did you go to bed with his wife?”

  “His ex-wife,” Mauro corrected me.

  “Ex-wife,” I repeated after him, incredulous. “Correct. So that was OK with your conscience.”

  Mauro was silent for a few seconds.

  “It never occurred to me.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “Trevor. I was always trying to understand his side of the argument, but he’s the one who gave up on Kate. He didn’t make the slightest effort to hold on to his marriage. He was too busy acting the part of the doomed artist . . .”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said angrily. “He has more talent than the two of us put together. It’s just that Trevor hasn’t broken through yet. Just a question of luck.” My words caused Mauro to fall silent. He looked at me with his wide, nutmeg-coloured eyes, took my hand firmly into his to calm me down.

  “Fine, you know better. Trevor is a genius and I’m a piece of shit. But for now let’s make peace and have some coffee.”

  We sat down at the airport bar and ordered a couple of coffees and a plate of snacks. I was starving and ate almost all of them, but it wasn’t enough. With hungry eyes I began staring at the warm pastries behind the counter. Mauro couldn’t help smiling at me.

  “You haven’t changed at least,” he said. “You still have the appetite of a wolf.”

  “You’re wrong. I have changed,” I replied.

  “Is that why you’ve returned to Bologna?”

  “I was missing spaghetti and tomato sauce.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am. You try eating fish and chips seven days a week and tell me if I’m wrong. It’s better here. Even the airport coffee is delicious.” All the while sipping a tar-coloured espresso and pretending to be ecstatic.

  “You can tell me,” Mauro insisted. “Did you come back for Trevor? I know he rang you . . .”

  “We just exchanged gossip. Nothing more.”

  Mauro’s gaze was fixed on me. I knew he was studying me.

  “In England, things were not as I expected,” I confessed to him. “I managed to publish a couple of short stories in a anthology, then nothing more.” As I was talking, I spilt some coffee on my sleeve. Impassive, I wiped the stain dry with a tissue.

  “I’ve been offered a job as an editor in Turin. Correcting and improving manuscripts. It’s well paid and I’ve said yes,” I said resolutely.

  But Mauro did not approve of my decision.

  “It sounds dubious to me. You went to England to write a book and now you’re content to read othe
r people’s books. It’s a pity. After everything you’ve achieved . . .”

  “Actually, I haven’t done that much,” I replied.

  “Does that apply to Trevor too?”

  Mauro was beginning to get on my nerves. This was becoming more of an interrogation than a conversation.

  “Why bring Trevor into it? He’s a closed chapter,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you. You go all pale every time I mention his name.”

  Sunk. Mauro has caught me out and now my appetite has gone. I can barely breathe in and that’s a damn effort.

  “Did he tell you that he’s returning to Canada?”

  Go fuck yourself, Mauro. Just shut up.

  I’ve tried everything not to have to think about of him and have no intention of doing so now. All I want to look at is the fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling and burning my eyes. I want to stop the tears from running on my face. I want a cigarette but no one here is smoking and I’m losing my mind.

  Trevor. Every time Mauro says his name, an invisible hand takes a grip of my shoulder and drags me down a well of memories.

  “I want to get out of this bloody place.”

  I’m losing my balance. I’m screaming out in pain.

  Trevor’s name steals my lucidity and my concentration.

  I’m hurting like a dog. And, like a dog, I still feed on the scraps of that night.

  “What are you thinking of?” Trevor asks, lighting a cigarette.

  “I’m thinking of the book I wish to write,” I tell him.

  “Is it that important?”

  “It is.”

  “More important than me?”

  His question hung in the air and stayed there. Like a hook which I could hang myself on if only my hands could reach it. But I didn’t. I knew that hook could not support my weight and I would fall heavily to the ground.

  Trevor was asking me how important he was to me. He asked with his eyes lowered and this angered me. I hated it when he did that. I hated Trevor and I hated his eyes when they negligently shifted downwards and avoided me. It made me feel like taking a hold of his face and yelling at him to stop. But on this occasion I controlled myself, but it was to be the last time. It’s his fault, it’s all his fault.

  I know that expression, that face. It’s my face superimposed over Trevor’s face. The face of someone with a definite goal and enough ambition to achieve it. But ambition on its own is not enough. Trevor’s eyes betray his insecurity. It will not help him to keep his eyes lowered and hidden behind his eyelids. I know those eyes, because I know Trevor and the doubts that assail him. He is like me. I know that for him too every day starts the same way. I imagine him looking at himself in the mirror and wondering, looking for something inside, a reason to forge ahead with the day or not. I see him, as he blames himself for being so stubborn, reaching wildly for something he should have taken hold of firmly when he was twenty years old, and that now appears like a mirage in the distance.

  Because I see Trevor every time he surrenders.

  I see him and I see my own face, like a reflection in the mirror. Everything he feels, I feel too.

  I recognize myself in his weakness, in the daily temptation to give up, to fuck once and for all with art and this journey that exhausts me. Like him I am scared, and just want to be normal again, and at peace with myself. To return to the days when everything was so much more spontaneous, and there were no goal posts to reach, and to manage to say “I love you” and to be able to live with that.

  Yes, Trevor. I must confess I want to say I love you.

  Such a simple thing, isn’t it?

  To say I love you, and that I love you so much that I will not be able to write another word for the rest of my life, because this love is so strong and so intense that it drains all my energy.

  Yes, Trevor. This love makes me weak. And it makes you weak. Maybe you didn’t know, but that’s the way things are.

  If I now say I love you, I won’t save your life. All I will provide you with is a pretext to accept it, to become content with what you have, even though that’s still not enough to be happy. For folks like us, happiness is inappropriate. For folks like us, happiness is a state of unthinkable boredom. Surely we are not ready to set our pride aside and give up the fight. We lack the courage to accept our fate and to love each other for what we truly are.

  We’re two losers, Trevor. Two beautiful losers who were lucky enough to meet each other and recognize ourselves, as if our reflections were seeking one another. But you are you and I am me, and we will know how to benefit from the occasion.

  It’s better to pretend not to notice, to cover our faces with masks, to start wearing another character.

  It’s easier to smash the mirror.

  8

  My eyes are red and clouded with tears. I can barely see, but on the other hand all my other senses feel stronger, more acute, and sharpen my perception of reality.

  The memory of that night now feels less painful, now that the din of the airport has brought me back to the present.

  The nauseating smell of this place, a blend of sweat and disinfectant, invades my nostrils and almost makes me sick. I try to get a hold of myself and wipe my face with my sleeve. Now it’s no longer stained by the coffee but also my make-up.

  “I didn’t go to bed with Maxim,” I tell Mauro. “I lied to Trevor.”

  “I’d assumed that.”

  “I wanted to,” I continued. “I wanted to move away from myself in order to be free and live my dream life. But life is not as beautiful as I thought it was.”

  Mauro and I walk towards the exit. I finally manage to light a cigarette and the first mouthful of smoke is wonderful. Even Mauro gives in and indulges in a Marlboro.

  “You still love him,” he tells me. “That’s why you’ve come back. To stop him catching that plane that will take him home.”

  I listen to Mauro’s words in silence. He looks as if he’s waiting for me to say something. An apology, maybe a clever fairy tale I could just there and then pull out of my head, just like a magician pulls the traditional rabbit out of his hat. But this time, there’s no way out, I’ve exhausted my stock of lies and self justification. There are no more white rabbits or thunderous applause ahead of me, just weariness.

  Here we are, I thought. My dance with the cosmos ends here. I’ve reached the finishing line, cut the ribbon, but I’ve only won the consolation prize: a job as an editor and a failed photographer who thinks he can act as my confessor. Was it worth sacrificing everything, even Trevor, for such a meagre bounty?

  “And what if he doesn’t want to stay?” I ask Mauro, my voice a thin fillet of sound. “As a matter of fact there’s little to keep him here, not even me.”

  Mauro shrugs.

  “Trevor is alone, as you are. And when you’re on your own, one place is as good as another.”

  “How would you know that?” I tease him. But his response is quite serious.

  “There is no place where happiness is automatically guaranteed.” He looked around, watched all the people wandering around between the announcements of arrivals and departures. “Some of them still believe, but soon enough they will realize they’ve made a mistake,” he said.

  I nodded. All this fascinating crowd of nomads, all anxious to explore other worlds, just like a swarm of flies.

  Mauro had won. I no longer wished to escape.

  “Shall I take you straight home or to Trevor’s?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet. Give me just a minute.”

  I walked away from him and went back inside. The airport crowds made me dizzy as I watched the people rushing from one end to the other. Some were worried they were running late, others furious because their flight had been cancelled. Another was complaining because his luggage had been lost and it reminded me of Trevor’s first day here in Bologna when he had created such an uproar over his suitcase going missing. I recalled his reddening face, the nasal voice hurling insults at the airl
ine clerk, and how much Mauro had been laughing as he explained to me that this unlikeable quarrelsome person was a friend of his.

  And this is how love catches you by surprise. With a rude gesture. It runs into you, without even asking whether it’s right to cross your path. With no reason. Without even thinking of what it will do to you.

  MEMORIES THAT LINGER ON

  Carlos Benito Camacho

  Translated by the author

  Although I was born and grew up in the city, I spent fragments of my life in the country. Once, when I was a very young boy, my mother became ill and could not look after the six of us kids. While my brothers and sisters were taken care of by relatives who lived in the city, I was sent to the country to stay at an uncle’s.

  Uncle Miguel lived on a small farm, which was about 75 miles from the city. He was a tenant farmer who worked a 50-acre rectangular piece of fertile land. Like my mother he was born and grew up in the country and was a devoted Catholic who attended church every Sunday. He was married to Aunt Jane, a woman who was half his age. Since they were a childless couple, it was deemed convenient that I stayed there for a whole year. I did not like the idea of having to spend such a long time away from my brothers and sisters, in some remote place where I had never been before. But they said I had to go when my uncle’s old pick-up truck stopped out in front.

  My arrival in that exotic place was an unnerving experience. I was scared to death by those scrawny, rural dogs, which welcomed the urban alien with growls and barks. The first days were awful. I was homesick all the time. Hidden in some nook of that house, I would cry silently in sobs. My uncle’s solemn and distant presence was no solace to me, but Aunt Jane was a warm lady who cheered me up, talking to me as she smiled, giving me cosy hugs which fed my childish heart with sprinklings of mirth.

  As my uncle was away all day long, working in the field, I spent most of the time with my dearest Aunt Jane. She worked hard, too, doing the household chores, but she always found time to fit me in, taking me for a walk to the river or giving me a ride on one of the horses. She got up at dawn everyday, milked the cows, made the fire with wood in the out-kitchen, and then she made breakfast. When Uncle Miguel left for work, she would go over to wake me up. Although I was already wide awake, because of the cocks’ crows and her hustling around the house, I always shammed sleep and let her walk over and sit on the edge of my bed; and the magic moment came when she kissed my forehead as she gently rumpled my hair for a while, whispering nice things in my ear. And I woke up, letting myself be caught in her intense blue-eyed look which warmly seeped into my soul on those beautiful country mornings when the golden beams of sunlight slantingly streamed in through the window panes. Then I smiled at her, smelling the smoked hair which flowed down over my face. Being touched by that motherly woman’s warmth made me feel safe at home.