Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  The name of the island where I grew up and where my father’s quarry lay has lost any meaning in my language, but I’m told that in Greek it could be understood as “Isle of Stone”. For it was the Greeks who, centuries ago, first realized its potential as a quarry-island, situated on a timeless shipping route and therefore conveniently located for loading the creamy white limestone, so easily sheared from the rock face.

  Over the centuries, the demand for quality building stone dwindled: trade was lost to the modernized quarries on the mainland; techniques on the island improved, but too late: hydraulic drills with compressors replaced the old, hand-cranked bore-drills which used to pierce the rock face with a neat, carefully spaced row of deep holes, drilled to an exact depth, first horizontally, then vertically, ready for the rusty iron wedge and the swing of a heavy hammer (the island was too small for blasting): this, when deftly wielded, could separate a half-ton block of oolitic limestone from its mother’s mass in one blow. The quarrymen had a blunter phraseology for this action, however. They would call the process of drilling “screwing the rock” or “making a cunt” and the process of splitting or wedging, “delivering the child”, in an arcane dialect full of crude quarryman’s metaphors.

  I grew up on this micro-island: however as a child it seemed anything but small to me; after all, to a child, a place is only as big as its imagination. Also, its structure was extremely intricate, since each family had its own quarry, worked, over the generations, into a labyrinthine, gigantic geometry of huge blocks, platforms, water-filled hollows and caves populated by bats. There was no road (for where would it lead to?) and the path that ran around its elliptical circumference could be paced in under half an hour. Most of the houses were grouped around the island’s main pier (there were other little jetties that belonged to the quarries, sometimes shared, sometimes not). And most of the houses boasted delightful gardens, that were decorative and practical, a sensible mixture of flowers, fruit-trees and vegetable patches. It was quite normal to see chickens scratching in the dirt of this tiny esplanade.

  Behind the houses loomed the narrow quarries, cut into the side of the island’s bulk, which in turn rose uncertainly into a hill covered, along with the usual dense Mediterranean scrub, by tall cypress trees and scented, shade-giving pines. It was soon after the incident with the strangers – day trippers, probably – that I became acutely, no, painfully aware of the limitations of my little universe.

  Of course I knew of the mainland’s existence for there it was, a mile or two across the sea, but it was the islanders’ tradition not to concern themselves much with what went on over there: one old man of eighty professed never to have left our shores.

  That same summer a pretty, dark-haired girl, a year or so older than me, had arrived on the island to stay with her widowed aunt. Because I was more naturally gregarious than my peers, I immediately set out to befriend this exotic newcomer, but my puppyish enthusiasm was not reciprocated. When I had shown her all our secret places of play and adventure, the minute geography and the even smaller ecology of the island, she remained unimpressed.

  With mounting indignation at her indifference, I asked her if she would like to see a truly magnificent edifice, having left the best until last – our own family quarry. The girl, Magdalena, replied scornfully, “Why on earth do you think I would want to look at another pile of rubble, you little hick? Thank God I don’t have to stay on this stupid rock with you island bumpkins much longer. It only takes a few minutes to walk around it, and what’s more, the people here are so stupid, every day they make it even smaller...” and she laughed mockingly at me.

  Of course, she was perfectly right. The cumulative effect of centuries of working the quarries must have been to make our island smaller, though it was somehow an unpalatable truth and one I had not been properly conscious of until that moment. But she came with me nevertheless, making it clear she had nothing better to do. There was nobody working the stone that day, and we climbed to the hidden ledge where my friends and I had spied on the visitors the year before. Magdalena, sixteen years old, going on twenty-five, idly traced a geometric pattern in the stone dust with the big toe of her right foot. The hiatus in our conversation hung heavily between us in the hot afternoon air, interrupted only by a persistent cicada. For the first time I noticed her long, coltish legs, the graceful arch of her back, the bright bead of sweat that coursed down her neck and the gentle swell inside her starched and pleated cotton blouse.

  “I can show you something, if you like,” she said, the tone of her voice suddenly lower and less harsh, “but you mustn’t tell anyone.”

  I nodded my agreement.

  Magdalena slowly undid the mother of pearl buttons of the white blouse. I stared in awed silence. When she had finished I could see the space between her breasts, damp with perspiration from our climb.

  “You can feel them if you like.” First with one hand, then, more boldly, with both, I felt them. Springy cushions of flesh with hard little nipples. The sensation was interesting, but not particularly arousing. I plucked up courage and asked, “Can I feel between your legs?” At first she pretended to be shocked, but really, she was amused by my presumption; she hitched up her skirt and yanked her knickers down to her knees. “There,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, “you can have a quick feel if you like.” When I saw the dark, furry vee there, it seemed nothing like the genitals of the woman we had watched from above. I reached out and felt her. She gave a shriek of mock outrage and pretended to slap my hand away. But I was persistent. My fingers traced the outline of her nether lips. Glancing down I saw that they were a delicate coral-pink and swollen, slippery with a wetness that leaked from within. They opened up to my fingers like the shell of a mussel: inside I felt a warm swamp. At the top, where the lips seemed to join, there was a hard little nub of flesh. Magdalena moaned when I stroked it and leaned her head back, eyes half-closed.

  Now – I felt excited. But too excited, as things turned out. I asked her if we could fuck. She gave a snort of derision and asked me if I had done it before. I told her no, but that I knew how it was done. She laughed some more, still mockingly, and her laughter and the uncertainty made me nervous, sapped my confidence.

  Magdalena immediately sensed this, and laughing, put her hand over the crotch of my shorts and squeezed. “You’ve got a stiffie all right, but how long would you last?” And without warning she fished inside and brought my cock out. A couple more squeezes and I shot all over her hand. “Ughh! You boys are so disgusting,” she cried. But I don’t think she really meant it.

  *

  Four years later, a merchant seaman and still as virginal as the oil my grandmother pressed from the olives I helped her to pick, I found myself in the company of my shipmates in one of the Port of Piraeus’ infamous streets of brothels. We cruised up and down in time-honoured sailors’ tradition, looking for suitable berths to dock our schooners. Eventually we came to a house where it was said there was a girl from our native land; this appealed to us as something of a novelty, since prostitution was not exactly common back home.

  As the youngest of our party, and under suspicion of being a virgin (something which, of course, I hotly denied), I was accorded the dubious honour of being given first place in the queue. The old Athenian madame ushered me into a hot room with faded wallpaper where a shrouded lamp cast a pink glow on the bed and its occupant.

  Although she looked different, with hair set in a blonde perm and too much makeup, I recognized Magdalena instantly. If she remembered me, she did not say so, but we made some desultory conversation in our own tongue, I gave her the money and we got down to business. She stripped off the diaphanous peignoir and her bra as if she did it a hundred times a day. Perhaps she did. I could see that her breasts had become much fuller and this had the desired effect of making me hard. She rolled the rubber on to me with a practised skill that matched her professional patter: “My what a big boy you are, I’ve never seen one so huge, why, you’re
going to fill me completely...” and so on. I was more naked than her now, for she had retained her suspender belt and nylons.

  As she guided me into her with the assurance of a professional, I thought back to the strangely contemptuous seduction she had treated me to four years before, and for some reason felt a pang of sadness tinged with resentment. As emotion cooled my virginal ardour, it had the effect of prolonging my performance to the point that Magdalena became at first restless, then looked pointedly at her little wristwatch and finally said, “Are you going to finish soon? I haven’t got all day, you know!” My resentment grew and I started to fuck her with great lunges, violently, as if to punish her for the betrayal I felt, the humiliation she had made me feel. But she reacted by raking my back with her fingernails and drumming her heels on my arse just like a jockey spurs on his mount, her features distorted by a grimace of lust. “Yes, give it to me you swine, fuck me hard... do me... fuck me... fuck the shit out of me!” And as she shouted this she started to climax, there was no doubt about it, for next she started to scream with pleasure. I stopped, not realizing that she was enjoying herself and thinking that I had gone too far. But she looked up at me urgently and muttered urgently, “Keep going you bastard... don’t... stop... now!” So I kept going until I took my pleasure too, by which time the itch between her legs was more or less satisfied. After which Magdalena curled up to me like a sleepy kitten and closed her eyes.

  This peaceful scene was only marred by the raddled old procuress waddling in, jowls flapping like dewlaps, to see what was amiss, for she had never heard one of her girls make this sort of noise before, and she was convinced that I was murdering her. My companions were hard on her heels. They too had never come across a tart that climaxed in such an unladylike way; indeed, they had only encountered ones who, on the whole, faked their climaxes most unconvincingly. Later they teased me mercilessly about my “technique” and how I had got the Athenian whore to scream so loud.

  *

  Ten more years passed and I returned to my birthplace with no other thought than to court, marry and settle down to have children with an island girl. Usually it would not have done for an islander to find his wife here – mostly the women sought mainland husbands to escape the endogamous group of the island’s population. But in any case, this turned out to be no more than a romantic presumption: most of the girls my age or younger were already spoken for. What’s more there was little work to be had now, and consequently the lure of the mainland proved hard to resist, with a resulting change in the island’s demography. Quite simply, there were too few girls of a nubile disposition.

  My widowed father put it rather more bluntly:

  “The pick of the crop has been plucked already – you’ll not find a girl here to marry now,” he pointed out with a certain amount of grim satisfaction; he had never come to terms with my seafaring career, expecting me instead to join him in cutting the family’s stone.

  After a few weeks I had almost come to agree with the old boy. But then I heard that Magdalena was on the island and, when I saw her again, I fell immediately under her spell, for she had become an entrancingly beautiful woman. Now in her twenty-ninth year, she had a sumptuous figure which she held proudly; wonderful legs; a luxuriant tangle of jet-black curling hair fell around her face, its colour complementing her big black eyes.

  Of course she was of little interest to any of the island’s single males except as a relatively unusual phenomenon – an attractive, unmarried woman far beyond a marriageable age... an object more of pity than lust. I was intrigued to know if she remembered our meeting in Athens’ steamy port or, indeed, now that I was more properly placed in context, whether she would remember our first meeting.Apparently she did not.

  When I encountered her during the island’s passagiata, the evening walk that so many Mediterranean communities take part in, she was arm in arm with her first cousin, to whom she bore absolutely no resemblance. She looked straight through me each time that we passed each other: not a glimmer of recognition. She was wearing black, so I presumed that the aunt had died, and that perhaps she had come to sell the house. I made some discreet enquiries and found this to be more or less the case.

  It was early in May and the island’s craggy contours were softened by the fresh greens of spring growth. I waited until the next evening and asked the cousin to introduce us. Then I asked Magdalena if I might not show her the island, for I had heard that she was a visitor. She declined politely but formally, pleading that her period of mourning was not yet over and that it would be improper to be seen in the company of a single strange man until it was.

  I enquired when that might be.

  She smiled and said “Tomorrow.” We made a time to meet, in the afternoon of the next day.

  We walked, our conversation stilted and formal, to the top of the hill and took the path to my father’s quarry. Here we found the same ledge where we had “played” ten years before, and we made a fine picnic of fresh figs, soft white goat’s cheese wrapped in vine leaves, half a crusty white loaf and a flagon of local red wine.

  “The wine is from my village,” she told me, after we had drunk most of it. “On a day when the air has been cleared by rain, you can see it from here.”

  “I didn’t realize you came from so close by,” I said.

  Our talk soon turned to our respective careers and, having told her about mine, I asked her what she did for a living. I have to admit, my motives were not entirely pure. With a completely straight face she told me that she had been working for a seaman’s mission. I was half-relieved, half-disappointed by this white lie – in a sense, I told myself, that was just what she had been doing.

  “But, as you already know, before that I worked as a whore in Athens.”

  Her face gave nothing away. She had turned the tables on me with such ease and so skilfully that it felt like a blow to the stomach. I floundered for an explanation.

  “I wasn’t sure that it was you,” I lied. “I mean... it all happened a long time ago,” I mumbled lamely.

  “So, would you like to show me your father’s quarry again?” Again, her face was deadpan, her eyes were downcast and her mouth evenly set. I led the way. The place was abandoned now, my father having retired some years before; since his son had decided to sail the ocean blue there had been no one who cared to take it over. But in its deserted state the quarry had become hauntingly beautiful. Spring flowers grew in chaotic profusion and the great cuts in the stone had healed with time so that now it was hard to see where it had last been worked. We climbed up to the same ledge we had visited twenty years before.

  The last step up was difficult so I gave Magdalena my hand. When she stood by my side she held on to it and looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” she said, her face softening, “perhaps it was rather a mean trick to play. In fact, I owe you another apology for the way I treated you the first time we met.”

  “You remember that as well?”

  “Of course.”

  We kissed. Clumsily at first, but with mounting passion. Her mouth tasted of wine and cloves. She pulled away so abruptly that I thought something was wrong. She just smiled, however, and stepped back and started to undo the buttons of her shirt. The gap between her breasts was smaller now, and they felt heavy when I cupped them, one in each hand, the nipples hardening with her need.

  She reached under her skirt and pulled down her white cotton briefs. I felt between her legs and was surprised by the wave of animal heat that met my hand. She was already very wet. She undid the clasp of her skirt and it fell to the ground to join her briefs. I knelt and pressed my face to her warm stomach, licked her deep navel, let my tongue continue down the soft slope of her lower belly, through the soaking curls of her luxuriant hair, like soft black moss, until I reached the quick of her, the bubbling, juicy cauldron of her desire. Her fingers pressed into the back of my head and I was aware that she had placed her feet more widely apart and tilted her pelvis upwards. She opened up to my mouth like a hungr
y, clasping sea anemone, and it seemed that soft tendrils clung to my lips while I tasted the rich salty flavours of her cunt. In what seemed like a few seconds, her thighs gripped the side of my head, quivering, shaking, while above I heard her breathing change to short, staccato gasps of exhalation.

  Gradually she relaxed and when I stood up she kissed my lips again, now shiny with her own juices. Then it was her turn to kneel. She looked up at me, her dark eyebrows raised in expectation. I slipped off my trousers and the rest of my clothes. My cock stood out from my body and her fingers closed around it; carefully she brought it towards her mouth. Looking down I saw, as if in slow motion, her pink tongue emerging to meet my glans and the sweat beading on her downy upper lip. Her other hand busied itself with my balls, tickling behind the tightly wrinkled flesh of the scrotum, a long finger burrowing between my buttocks and seeking out yet another centre of male bliss. Her mouth enveloped the head of my cock and she sucked it, swirled her tongue around it and speared the sensitive hole at the end, her cheeks ballooning and hollowing all the while and her head bobbing rapidly with the effort. I couldn’t help thinking, that these were all the actions of a street prostitute, and my mind shuttled between the images of Magdalena as serene Madonna of the passagiata’s gentle progress, in her black mourning dress, and the head bobbing up and down below me with such whorish animation. Of course it was an unfair juxtaposition to have made, but it made the excitement all the more intense, and I could feel myself approaching a point of no return.