My Year of Love

by Nizon, Paul.

  I can’t say I was sad, because I wasn’t feeling anything, I was probably sad to the extent that I felt almost chloroformed and had become insensitive to pain. I thought about the girl who’d appealed to me at the Greek restaurant and suddenly I felt this desire for a woman. It’s like an addiction, I’m like a gambler, I’d bet the shirt off my back to get what I wanted. My horror vacui filled itself up with this desire, it seemed as if I’d have to give up the ghost if I didn’t find a woman. So I got up again, ran down the stairs and onto the street. The Chunga Bar on Rue Victor Massé in the 9th arrondissement below Pigalle is one of these establishments that you notice when you’re strolling past, because through the window or the half-open door you see a whole row of girls of all skin colors sitting at the bar like birds on a perch. With their generously plunging necklines and short skirts, these partially dressed girls call themselves hostesses. During the day, when not much is going on, they stare out at the street with their painted faces, smoking, and thoughtfully keeping a lookout for customers and clients. The fellow at the door, the tout and if necessary the bouncer, had guided me in, I let it happen, because I was undecided, so I just murmured, it’s okay, not necessary, I know my way around. And inside, in the darkened bar that smelled of women’s perfume and shimmered with their appearance, I surprised him by asking in a very business-like tone for Cathy. She came out from one of the hookers’ hangout corners where the girls were whispering and, sit with me there, she said and pointed to a well-lit table up at the front, a table that was set, where she sat down right away for a meal. Haven’t had anything between my teeth since noon, she said, and now it’s long past midnight. And now, with slightly affected hand and mouth movements, carefully calculated gestures so that she won’t smear the thick make-up on her pretty mouth or get any food on her skintight, expensive dress, she eats little bites of an omelet. I haven’t been in town for very long, I say, so I’m just asking to make sure, you do remember me, don’t you? No, she says, feigning unfamiliarity between two bites, and then right afterward: how are your books coming along? Then while eating she takes my hand, placing it on her hip, there, put your hand there, she says and keeps on eating. And then she says, with a glance at a tall and quite good-looking lad in a trench coat who’s leaning gloomily against the bar, look at him over there, he’s been waiting quite a while, he’s crazy about me, but I don’t like him.

  Why, I say, he’s quite good-looking. Oh, she says, chewing, he’s so . . . I just don’t like him, that’s all.

  And I feel her smooth body through the glittering material of her dress, my hand remembers, there’s a familiarity, a feeling of beingon-you in this touch, and now I remember how we used to sit here before, and across from us this old man Cathy called the Papa of them all, she said he came every week and liked to have them nibble behind his ears, that turned him on, she had said, and asked me to dance with her, and we danced over to his table pressed tightly together and stayed in that spot, right under his eyes, he liked that, watching, and she was pleased to do that for him.

  Later, I had already said good-bye, but stayed a little while sitting there, Cathy did go up then to the man in the trench coat, after all, she has to work, and while he—from his profile he seemed to be very drunk or maybe just melancholy—started grazing on her cheeks, her hair, her neck with his lips, she winked at me. She let him do everything to her and yet never let me out of her sight.

  I like the confidential aspect of such relationships, which by the way are very casual, very lightweight. I like the complicated solidarity, because here, where everything is influenced by venality, the extras, the little votes of confidence, do have the nature of beautifully shining kindness. I’ve always had this special relationship to so-called loose women, this offhand relationship that also incorporates closeness. When did that begin, I sometimes ask myself.

  I’ve always been surrounded by women, I grew up in a household of women, there was my mother, my sister, my grandmother and great-aunt, and our servant girls; and since we had turned our household into a boarding house, and especially into a boarding house for students, several female boarders always lived with us under the same roof, some of whom strongly appealed to me or at least attracted me. There was one in particular, called Colette, and hardly do I think of her name or speak it aloud than the memory of another person occludes it, of a young man called Gerhard Kummer, obviously the two of them were involved in some way.

  Gerhard Kummer was an extremely self-controlled, but also very rebellious young man of not quite twenty. He worked as a proofreader in a printing business, but aspired to better things. He had grown up in the country and didn’t seem to have been in the city long when he moved into our boarding house, a newcomer to the city, green, and as such, he made a great show of dignity, both in his appearance and in his behavior—I think this poseur wanted to give the impression that he was a man of the world. He had the habit of confronting me in the stairwell and involving me in a conversation in a roundabout way by employing strange introductory turns of phrase. He began, for example, with “hm, what I wanted to say was . . .” or “hm, I just had an idea . . .” or “hm, the thought just occurred to me, hm . . .” while he strove to stand there looking very important, I don’t know who he was imitating at such moments, he shifted from one foot to the other, and the strangest thing was that while doing so he directed his eyes at my stomach, he sent them circling around like two small beetles at the height of my stomach, which I found very embarrassing, and then, what’s more, he avoided opening his mouth while speaking, so his monologues went on and on, always in a strained voice with a nasal twang. At first, I was impatient to the point of being indignant, I couldn’t stand his verbiage, and I also took exception to the fact that he seemed to have a very high opinion of himself. Gerhard Kummer read a lot, that was obvious, and one couldn’t help but notice it because he liked to lecture and expatiate with a lot of verbal footnotes, which of course didn’t make it any easier to listen to him. He read both classical writers and all sorts of books on the occult, the occult in particular interested him. It didn’t occur to me that he wasn’t just a braggart and a nuisance in the house, a crude sectarian, but that he might be a young man with real problems, a very lonely young person who was trying to make friends, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so cold to him. But Gerhard Kummer’s attempts to make contact, his long-winded advances to me finally did meet with success, and the reason for that was the arrival of a new female boarder in whom we were both very interested.

  The new girl, called Colette, appeared in our apartment late one evening when the dinner table, the table d’hôtes, had already been cleared, it was winter, and I saw her negotiating with Mother at the long table under the lamp in the dining room, I happened to surprise them in their negotiations when I looked in quickly as I went past because I heard voices, no, because I became aware of a voice I didn’t know.

  She had the most catlike eyes I’d ever seen, so lazy and moist, and she smelled strongly of powder and perfume, or of a mixture of powder, perfume, and pure sexuality. Her mouth was wide and full, wide and moistly glistening, and together with her half-closed cat’s eyes, that were likewise moistly glistening, and this particular scent, her face made an absolutely erotic impression. She slumped lazily in her chair, only partially present, mentally absent, only physically there, as if she got along in life without thinking, with her body alone.

  My mother must have registered the same thing, I could see it in her disapproving, profoundly negative posture; but Colette didn’t seem to take offense, she hardly looked my mother in the face, she spoke quietly and sleepily to herself. She got her room and her place in our apartment, our daily routine, our boarding house, we were reliant on rent money in those days, the times were anything but rosy.

  It wasn’t long before Herr Kummer brought the conversation around to the new girl, and now, from one of the speeches he gave while standing in the stairwell, a speech slowed to interminability by the many redundant and hackne
yed phrases he brought out in his strained voice, I found out that he too was interested in the new female boarder in the room next to his. Gerhard Kummer was evidently disturbed by her, in fact, he was all worked up about her, but the main thing he was trying to put into words was the fact that Colette had an extremely active sex life. She had a boyfriend, I knew that much, a showoff in his thirties who made a vital, if not brutal impression; but in addition to him, according to Kummer, there were other gentlemen as well who enjoyed Colette’s sexual favors. I was perplexed, less by the fact itself than by the bearer of such knowledge. How could he be so well informed, I wondered, and after considerable beating around the bush he acknowledged that he had witnessed her in the act. Witnessed her in the act? Yes. When Colette had company, he would crouch on the sloping roof outside her window and watch. With that I became more interested in this boarder and detective I had always taken for an unsophisticated person and a moral coward, and as we became more closely acquainted I found out that he walked around on the roofs at night. Possibly the young man’s own sexuality was somewhat repressed. In any case, he was curious, a voyeur; he did it both intentionally and deliberately as well as unconsciously, because as it turned out he was also a sleepwalker, neighbors had discovered him one evening or night walking across the roofs and had notified the police. After that, there were conversations with Mother, his relatives were sent for, people discussed what to do, and then one day he didn’t come back. Around the same time, he gave up his job as a proofreader, chucked it, as he told me, he wanted to further his education by taking evening courses, he had saved enough money to do so, and much later someone claimed that our former boarder, Herr Gerhard Kummer, had earned his certificate for teaching primary school and had even gotten married, and, right, one could see him now and then arm in arm with his wife, a respectable young married couple going home in a very civilized manner after attending a concert or a lecture, but that was later, in any case, we lost touch with him.

  But Colette stayed on. I was in high school and still inexperienced with women, but I was bewitched by her sensuality, I was absolutely crazy about her and was always looking for new pretexts to get close to her. Finally, a certain familiarity developed between us, more a feigned camaraderie than a real one, but under the surface the atmosphere was charged, at least for me. This relationship allowed me not only to remain standing below the door to her room when I called her for dinner or to the phone, but also to go into her room. One evening, as I entered her room under some pretext, I found Colette in a negligee, she was in the midst of some elaborate toilet, and I sensed immediately that she was in a milder, more indulgent mood than usual, much more accessible to me, perhaps her boyfriend had stood her up or left her. We just stood around for a while, I was embarrassed, and she was prevented by my presence from continuing to attend to her personal hygiene, prevented also from going to bed. Then I summoned up my courage and tried to embrace her, it took all my courage to do so, I was somewhat younger than her and certainly less experienced, which was also the reason she’d been able to keep me at bay until then without any difficulty, but on this evening she seemed different, she seemed malleable, in need of love and affection. It’s true she evaded my importune attempts to force myself on her, but she did so in a way that just urged me on all the more. One of my awkward attempts turned into a chase around the table and straight across the room until suddenly, I’m not sure if it was on my initiative or under her direction, I fell on the bed together with her and lay full length on top of her. We lay there, the soft Colette, apparently created for nothing but bed, smelling of powder and sexuality, signaling a thousand appeals to my sex from every pore of her flesh, and at the moment compliant as she lay full length under me, and I snuggled up in her flesh, covered her face with kisses, stroked her hair, I did it all with my face as red as a beet, and I was probably panting terribly too, but I did it too long, it went on and on without developing into anything further, and Colette didn’t help me, so at last we were exhausted. She took my face in both hands, stroking it as one strokes a child’s face, but not a man’s, and she pushed me aside and away from her with a motherly sigh. With that, I had missed my only chance, I never got to touch her again, although I tried to get physical with her whenever the opportunity arose, she remained charming, but rejected my advances, she had relegated me to the realm of children and young boys.

  I had more luck with petite Oila. She was attending a secretarial school, and in the nights or evenings she visited me in the attic room I was so proud of because I had painted and furnished it myself. I was so proud of it that I had tried several times to do charcoal drawings of it, complete with the cylindrical iron stove and the pictures hanging on the walls, reproductions of Gauguin’s paintings of women. We often lay in this small attic room, or, more precisely, on the couch in this room, Oila and I, and in the warmth that the cylindrical oven puffed into the front of the room by the dormer window, and in the colored light of the covered lamps, I was filled with delight when I told myself that a girl was lying there with me, that everything, the entire set of everything feminine was collected on my bed, breasts with nipples, stomach and mons veneris, thighs, arms, hands, fingers, fingertips, and nails collected on my bed, offered to me to caress, explore, play with, love, and above it all was Oila’s head with her frizzy dark hair and her dark eyes and her mouth that was always in motion, and sometimes her eyes said: do it, do it a little more, do it again! and sometimes: no, not like that! said the eyes that kept watch over the entire position of Oila’s beautifully stretched out physical being, but naturally also over me. I liked it, I also liked this attentiveness, this watchfulness of goosegirls who don’t let a single one of their darling little goslings get lost or come to any harm.