Insatiable

by Val

1st April 1997

  Esperanza, Esperanza, sólo sabe bailar chachachá.

  Esperanza, Esperanza, sólo sabe bailar chachachá.

  The radio in the taxi I took at Barcelona airport was on at full blast. I even had to shout at the taxi-driver to get him to understand where I wanted to go. It never occurred to him to turn it down. The taxi was full of religious knick-knacks, and there was the photo of some saint or other on the rear-view mirror. Even the dog with the nodding head on the back shelf had a cross hanging round its neck.

  ‘So you’re from la France? I could tell at once, mademoiselle. So, are you on holiday here?’

  Poor guy, it wasn’t his fault, but I didn’t have the slightest desire to talk to him, so all I did was nod in agreement. He didn’t seem to get my point, and went on chatting.

  ‘I speak un petit peu the French. And also speankin inglis.’

  ‘Speaking English,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, speankin inglis,’ he replied, proud of himself. ‘When I was young I went to England to work as a cook. That’s where I learned to speank the language. But that was many years ago, and I can’t remember much any more. I still do the cooking at home, though. My wife can’t complain. Every Sunday I make her a fideuá. It’s not easy to make a decent fideuá, let me tell you.’

  After he had told me all about his wife’s favourite foods, what his children do, and what good children they are, let me tell you . . . and how well his daughters-in-law have been accepted in his village, I finally managed to say goodbye to the taxi-driver. I gave him a good tip.

  It was late, but I thought I might still be able to catch up with my bank manager from the other night. I wanted to see him and make a start with what we never got around to at that dinner. When I gave him a call, I got his voicemail, so I immediately left him a message:

  ‘Call me at any time.’

  At any time? He’s going to think either that something has happened to me, or that I’m crazy. Too bad. At least this way I’ll find out if he’s really interested in me.

  At one in the morning – nothing. At two, still nothing. By three I couldn’t stay awake any longer, and went to bed. At half past four I was still tossing and turning, unable to sleep a wink. At a quarter to five I got up for a pee. Five o’clock, and still I couldn’t get to sleep! At a quarter past, I got out of bed and ate some chocolate mousse. Guess what? I still couldn’t sleep. I realized it was never going to happen, so I got up looking dreadful and wanting sex so badly nothing my hand could do would calm the urge.

  2nd April 1997

  Because of the lack of sleep, I had a terrible day. I was in a bad mood all morning, and on top of everything else, I had to start the preparations for my trip to Peru. My workmates did not dare ask me what was wrong, but I was so pale that Marta, the secretary, asked me if I didn’t need a shot of glucose from her bottle of Coca-Cola to give me a lift.

  ‘I hate the stuff!’ I told her, not lifting my eyes from my computer.

  I was trying to write a fax to set up a meeting with a Peruvian company. ‘Anticipating your prompt Coca-Cola, I remain yours sincerely,’ I wrote. When I reread it, I was even more annoyed because I had to correct it.

  ‘Please Marta, don’t bother me any more, I just make mistakes,’ I snapped at the poor woman. She left my office with a sigh, shutting the door silently behind her.

  I couldn’t send the fax. I checked the number to make sure I had got it right, and tried again. Finally it went through. I hope they reply soon. I’ve already set up several meetings, but I don’t want to leave Spain until I know exactly what I’ll be doing in Peru.

  In the afternoon my boss, Andres, called me in to discuss how my plans were going.

  ‘Well then my girl, how do you feel about your trip?’

  Why does he always call me ‘my girl’? Andres must be around sixty, and I’m thirty years younger, but we only work together. His attitude often makes me feel like a little girl. He’s still got a good head of hair, going white now, and I’d wager that a few years ago he was quite a woman-chaser. Now, though, I bet the snail is back in its shell. So all he can do is adopt this fatherly tone.

  ‘What’s wrong with you today?’ he asked, taking off his glasses and narrowing his eyes.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, Andres. I had a bad night, that’s all. Why are you all going on at me so today?’

  ‘OK, let’s leave it there. But remember, my girl, that I need you to see everyone on the list in Peru.’

  ‘Of course. Don’t worry. I’ll sell my soul to the devil if need be. You know me.’ Even I didn’t believe what I was saying to try to reassure him.

  ‘If things get tough, I’ll send someone to give you a helping hand.’

  I shot out of his office because it was getting late and I still had a lot to get through. I almost fell over a heap of files Marta had spread out on the floor, and collided with her desk. Just at that moment, my mobile sounded.

  I was out of breath and even more annoyed than before – Marta noticed and kept her head down among her files – when I reached my office. But it was too late. ‘Call 123 . . . New voice message,’ the mobile told me. I was so nervous I made a mistake dialling my voicemail. My nerves play those kinds of tricks on me sometimes. Calm down, I told myself. Calm down, this isn’t going to help.

  ‘This is Cristian. You left me a message yesterday evening. I’m returning the call.’

  My bank manager! I slid the door to my office shut and dialled him back at once.

  ‘Hi Cristian, it’s me.’

  ‘That was quick!’ he answered, surprised.

  If you only knew how much I feel like fucking you, I thought.

  ‘Well, I got back from France yesterday and wanted to know what you were up to. How are things?’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of work, but fortunately I’m in a privileged position. I finish by mid-afternoon.’

  ‘Lucky you! So what do you do with yourself all afternoon? You must have a lot of free time.’

  I wanted to know more about him, and especially if he could fit me in somewhere.

  ‘I work out. Go shopping. Sometimes I go for a drink with a beautiful woman friend . . . what are you doing later?’

  Aha, that’s good, I thought. He wants to see me.

  ‘If you like, we can meet up. I don’t know what time I’ll be finished, but I could phone you as soon as I leave the office. How about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine. Bye.’

  Just as I was leaving the office, the heavens opened. I hadn’t brought an umbrella because the weather had been fine all morning, but the moment I stepped out into the street I became a Noah without an ark. It’s always the same. Everybody started to run like crazy, jumping over the puddles of mud and water that had already begun to form on the pavements. I decided to go at my own pace. There was no point running: I had no umbrella and it was raining so hard I was bound to get drenched anyway. Besides, I like the feeling of wet hair when it’s hot, and the smell of damp asphalt. The rain takes me back to when I used to visit my grand-parents in the country as a little girl. And the summer holidays I used to spend with my friend Emma.

  By the time I put the key in my front-door lock, I was soaked through. What I needed was a hot bath with lots of salts.

  I threw all my clothes off in the corridor – even my bra was dripping. Then I went into the living room naked and put on a Loreena McKennitt CD: The Visit. I poured myself a glass of red wine and lit some perfumed candles in the bathroom. With a Shakespeare poem to a harp accompaniment playing in the background, I took a leisurely bath for about an hour. By the time I emerged, all my fingers and toes were wrinkled. It feels great! This is how I would like to die. I confess I’ve often imagined how it would be. I think it must be like a lengthy dream as we travel in towards our soul. The pain of death is what most frightens people. But death cannot be pain, because pain is physical and death is the definitive state when we have ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’.

 
I’ve got my own theory about what happens to us when we die. We are pure energy, and on our death our atoms mingle with the rest of the Universe. Our little bundle of energy becomes part of the energy of the Cosmos. There’s no heaven and no hell. And that’s how I feel when I’m making love. I can feel my energy flowing into that of the other person, and I’m taken on a journey until I fuse with the Cosmos. The energy of my orgasm is a tiny part of myself that mingles with the Universe. When I collapse exhausted after sex, I gradually return to my human state. My body cells go on a journey to the stars, where they are dispersed forever, caught up in a tumult of energy that I cannot control but which is constantly calling me.

  I think that’s why we want to repeat the experience time and again. To try to understand it better. Not that I ever really understand anything. It’s a petite mort I am eternally trying to domesticate. That’s what we French poetically call our orgasm. Every act of lovemaking is my way of getting closer to this sense of ecstasy. But I can never grasp it properly, which is why I’m condemned to repeat the experience endlessly, to try to comprehend it. In other words, it’s a mountain with a huge abyss into which I never quite fall, with one foot on the ground and the other in mid-air. And my body swings like a pendulum between the human and the divine.

  It was eleven at night. When I got out of my bath, I had a text message from Cristian.

  ‘Rain, champagne, your skin . . . why do I feel so aroused?’

  Cristian sure knows how to arouse someone himself with a suggestive message like that.

  ‘When we meet, I’m determined to find out what those three dots mean,’ I texted him back.

  ‘Good night . . .’ he wrote, to show he had got the message.

  No doubt about it, he’s a clever guy.

  I went to bed, but had difficulty sleeping. His messages had set my hormones racing, and I didn’t know whether I would have the patience to wait until the next day.

  3rd April 1997

  I arranged to meet Cristian in a bar after work. I knew nothing was going to happen because I have my period. Shit. It came on this morning without warning. It was early, as though my body were telling me it was tired and needed to take things easy. I should have cancelled our date, but couldn’t. I was too keen to see him again.

  After an interesting conversation over a few glasses of French red wine and some tapas, he invited me to the most fashionable disco in the city. When I see someone dance, I can tell straight away whether they are sensual or not. In Cristian’s case, there’s no doubt: he dances really well. And . . . rain, champagne, his skin . . . I’m gone.

  Gone into a parallel world, a dreamless huis clos, in which my body melts eternally into a velvet robe, where pleasure goes beyond all limits and becomes tiny diamond drops in the corners of my eyes, where his fingers brush against me like butterfly wings, and the hands of the clock whirl round twenty-four hours with me caught up in them.

  It all began with some hectic dancing, while we chatted and flirted with friends Cristian met up with in the disco. Our drinks of rum with Coke or lime were stronger even than the music blaring out from the loudspeakers. I was dancing on an endless thread of silk like a tiny tightrope walker, caught between feeling his swollen penis rubbing against me inside his tight Italian trousers, and the burning glances a stranger was throwing at me as I whirled seductively round. I could feel myself falling, losing control. I wanted to feel I was alive.

  ‘Tame me,’ I whispered to him with my eyes.

  I am looking for someone special, a man who can express his feelings through sex. Back at Cristian’s place, after an exotic fruit punch, I lost all my senses and found myself spreadeagled beneath a penis that looked far too big for me, but which was impossible to resist. I took three hours to explore every part of this fleshy vibrator with my mouth. Underneath the sheets I looked like a comic-book ghost; I could hear him saying I was driving him crazy with pleasure, and sucked and chewed at him until I felt his prick had explored every single filling I had collected since I was a little girl.

  I had two things blocking my suppressed sensuality. Embarrassed, I quickly removed one sitting on the bidet; he put the other one on me with an expert touch. I let myself go, like a puppet in the hands of a higher power, too aroused to do anything at all.

  His unshaven cheeks did not bother me as in an act of generosity he ran his face down to the centre of gravity of female pleasure, forgetting that what is most intimate should be earned, not stolen by force. But he had extrasensory perception, and that made him dangerous: all I could do was approve with my eyes all that he did.

  He wasn’t bothered either by my unkempt bush, a sign that not everything can always be planned, that everything comes together because that is the way it’s mean to be. The smell in the room was like no other.

  ‘Attar of roses,’ he said, reading my mind.

  Everything faded into one. Rum from the night before at the disco, the fruit punch, now essence of roses at dawn, the black bottle of Armani each time I went to the bathroom, the bagnoschiuma from a Melia hotel in Italy on my skin when I took a quick shower, not wanting to miss a single moment of his presence. All these odours and tastes coursed through my veins, while at the same time my blood cells were reproducing at vertiginous speed.

  He was crushing my mouth because that was the only way he knew how to kiss me, and I could feel I had a cut on the inside of my lip. He kissed me like a dog licking its returning master when it realizes it hasn’t been abandoned. He bit my neck like a cat on heat, which prepares for the reproductive act with a ritual of this kind. All this gave me goose flesh. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end for hour after hour.

  In the morning I found myself, exhausted but satisfied, on a black rug that contrasted sharply with the pale white skin of my body.

  He dropped me early outside my place. I walked up to my apartment like a zombie, suddenly finding I had been changed against my will into a kind of Marguerite Duras, obsessed forever with a lover who drove her mad at the age of fifteen, and condemned ever afterwards to write about a passion that imprisoned her in that moment of adolescence.

  I Go On A Trip

  4th April 1997

  Dear Granny,

  I’m writing you this letter to tell you that last night I saw the stars. In close-up. Yes, so close I could almost reach out and touch one, but it was a shooting star and it vanished. What I mean Granny is that I had one of the best lays in my whole life. I thought you’d be pleased to hear it. I went to bed with a man I had only seen twice, and had met by chance in a bank. But it was magic. The first time, nothing happened between us. I think that was because neither of us wanted it. But last night I slept with him. We went out for a drink and then to dance. Afterwards, he took me back to his place. He’s got a great apartment, a loft, with a huge balcony running all the way round it. All he needs is a big fat cat like Bigudi to prowl from one room to another. I’d warned him I wasn’t prepared for sex that night because I had just got my period. So it was all a bit unhygienic . . . I felt so embarrassed. But he told me that sometimes we cannot help ourselves, and we have to accept it. So I went with it. Were you as filthy when you were a young woman? I’ve lost my bearings. I can’t stop thinking about him. Am I so frivolous that I’ll fall in love with a man just because he is a great fuck? I don’t like that idea, Granny. What am I to do? If he calls me, should I see him again? Give me some advice, please. I need it.

  A big, big kiss. Take care of yourself.

  YOUR LITTLE GIRL

  PS: I’m going to Peru next week. I’ll send you a fax with my address there if you want to write to me. And a postcard from Machu Picchu, I know you’ll love that.

  6th April 1997

  Four o’clock in the afternoon, and Cristian hasn’t called or sent a message. Shit! I couldn’t stop thinking about him all day. Could I be falling in love? Why doesn’t he get in touch? Didn’t he enjoy spending the night with me? If he didn’t, why did he say it had been sublime? Empty words . . .?


  My brain was racing, and I couldn’t help thinking about what he might be doing on such a sunny day. Was he on the beach with those same friends we met up with in the disco, laughing at the way I spread my toes just after I’ve come? Just imagining that possibility crushed my self-esteem. He could at least have called to say he enjoyed the night with me. We women like to be told these things over and over. And I’m no different from anyone else. Cristian doesn’t seem to be much of a psychologist, and that disappoints me. It’s not as if I’m asking him to be the father of my children, but he could at least be polite enough to stay in touch. But who cares? If he can’t be bothered to call, that means it wasn’t worth it anyway.

  Just in case, I looked for a book that’s always useful in moments like this. It’s called How to Break Your Addiction with Someone, by Howard M. Alpern. In it, the author says: ‘Some people die due to abusive relationships. Do you want to be one of them?’

  What am I doing? I’ve only ever met him twice. Perhaps all he wanted was to make love to someone without any complications, and there I was. Why am I getting into such a state over this guy?

  It’s hard for me to admit, but I really want to go to bed with him again. I’m going to read the book, and follow the advice in the final pages. I’m not falling in love, I’m not falling in love, that’s what I’ve got to tell myself.

  At one in the morning, I woke up sprawled on the sofa with the book over my face. I had fallen asleep in an awkward position, and my whole body hurt. I dragged on my slippers and went to the bathroom, still groggy, to clean my teeth. I’ve literally got the pages of the book printed on my right cheek. I was really annoyed with myself, and went to bed promising myself I would remove Cristian’s phone number from my diary once and for all. A shooting star – that’s all he was.

  10th April 1997

  ‘You need to leave. Right this minute!’ Andres shouted at me, glasses in hand.