Blitz

by David Trueba

  Naked before her — I on my feet and she seated on the bed — I offered myself to her desire; I wanted to be a sort of unwrapped gift. Helga interpreted my position as an indication that I expected her to suck my cock, and her subtle movement made it clear she wasn’t going to do that. She grabbed my hand and yanked me onto the mattress. Then she rolled over on top of me, or rather beside me. She started taking off her clothes, struggling awkwardly. My assistance served only to complicate things, but soon the laborious process became amusing and even exciting.

  Although from time to time she laid her hand on my cock, which was growing unreservedly, Helga displayed an almost adolescent shyness. After I succeeded in tugging her dress all the way down, I came up against her panties, the underwear of someone who hadn’t conscientiously prepared herself for such an exercise in disrobing. But the uneasiness caused by the inducements of a body with evident imperfections vanished when she herself removed her bra, whose hooks my fingers had fumbled with clumsily and in vain. Two breasts emerged, white and unbound, swaying like fruit on a tree. Now, for the first time, Helga showed a trace of forcefulness and even pride, rubbing her chest against mine, confident in her desirability, less reticent than she’d been until that moment.

  We kissed messily, our kisses growing wetter with each onslaught. Her tongue was sour from the vodka and mine furry with drunkenness. She tousled my curly hair. I believe she’d told me at dinner she liked my curls, but neither she nor I had thought she’d end the night playing with them, tangling her fingers in them while I stretched out full length, replacing the cat as the object of her caresses. Helga’s pussy wasn’t easy to reach, because she shoved my hand away several times, not at all coyly. It became imperative for me to stimulate her, practically speaking, but mostly because every time her fingers grazed my member, I felt an uncontainable surge. I wanted her to come before I did to settle any dispute about priorities. With Marta, that was almost always the way things went. I’d manage to make her come without taking my eyes off her face, which tensed with a hint of annoyance as she lost her self-control but none of her beauty. From that point on, I could let myself be manipulated or dominated, and I could finally let myself come. Helga guessed my mental process, it seemed, because she put her hand on her sex and tried to arouse herself.

  The scene was complicated, the bed was small. The bedspread slipped off of it before we made any decision about getting between the sheets. When I put my hands on her ass to help her climb on top of me, I noticed that the liberated flesh of her hips was shaking too. I clutched it tight. But far from tempering my excitement or sending me irretrievably into nostalgia for Marta’s lost ass, as perfect and smooth as an apple, the feel of Helga’s flesh only increased the delirium of carnality I was plunging into.

  It was Helga who tore off the covers and dived hastily between the sheets, with the shyness that can return with age, just as senility can entail a childish lack of inhibitions. She smiled at me, naked and alone on the other side of the bedclothes, completely exposed while she was covered to the chin. I jumped comically into the sheets and we were skin-to-skin again, but now with the doubled stimulation of being under cover, where everything happens out of sight. I got on top of her, but when I began prospecting for penetration, I encountered a firm opposition I was unable to overcome. I tried my agile fingers again, aware now that it would require some work to make her wet through the buffer of her pubic hair. I’d grown used to Marta’s shaved sex, and to how simple it had been to spot the moisture glistening on her thighs.

  Helga stopped my hand with hers and shifted around a little. No, she said, the problem is it’s been too long since the last time I did this. It was a curt statement, nothing at all like a request. She closed her eyes and let her head fall backward onto the pillow. I moved my cock closer to her sex, but with no intention of penetrating her — I just rubbed myself against her there for a minute or two. And this shuts down if you let a long time pass without using it? I tried to make that sound more like a real question than an ironic remark, but Helga responded with a guffaw. Yes indeed, she said, it seals itself hermetically. I remembered the shelf in the bathroom, got out of bed quickly, and ran over to it. With the speed of a thief, I sought out a jar of moisturizing cream I thought I’d seen in there. None of the brands was familiar, and all the labels were in German, but I found the hand lotion and dashed back with it into the bedroom. This will help, I said. I knelt on the bed in front of her and rubbed some cream onto my cock. That amused her, and she put some of the white stuff on her fingertips and began to rub it in resolutely and skillfully. Her hand slid up and down my penis so vigorously and excited me so much that I pulled the covers away from her breasts and climaxed on them in a torrent. She didn’t stop stroking and then squeezing me, with the dedication one applies to emptying a ketchup bottle. My semen ran over her breasts and down to her armpits in long streaks.

  I dropped on top of her, overcome by my arduous return to gravity and normal consciousness. I noticed our shared wetness and the lotion on both of us, and I recognized her ironic grin, just above the bedclothes, which she’d once again pulled up to her throat. We remained unmoving while the sticky substances between us solidified. She stroked the nape of my neck with her fingertips and scratched my scalp through my hair and I wondered how the fuck I’d wound up in that particular location and what the fuck I could do to escape. Unreason was now being replaced by rationality, always so inconvenient.

  She rocked her body to open a space between us, and then she said, wait, and resettled herself. I’d probably been crushing her, and so I moved away until I was stopped by the edge of the bed, while she tacitly maintained her position, like a soldier who falls back to his trench after a battle and concentrates his efforts on holding the line. We both stared at the ceiling, looking for an escape, and her sigh sounded a little embarrassed. Well, now comes the hard part, right? she joked. No, I said, but I couldn’t come up with anything to add to that.

  I’d better go away and let you sleep, she suggested after I started breathing noisily, half out of drunkenness and half out of weariness. I hardly slept at all last night, I said to justify myself. Marta was so near but at the same time so far. And now, one night later, so far but so near. I’d keeled over in the bed, suspending my active life, but now I held Helga back when she tried to get up. No, stay, I said. Although she appreciated the thought, she shook her head. I’m sorry, she said, excusing herself, I’m way out of practice, I feel a little absurd. I didn’t say anything, and silence overtook her explanations. I was still holding her around the hips, with her bulging belly under my arm. You know, I haven’t been with a man in almost twelve years, she confessed. Cut the crap, I said. I immediately regretted saying that, because it sounded like a taunt. I wanted her to look at me, but she wouldn’t raise her eyes. So many years without sexual relations had made the moment almost a second loss of virginity for her. In spite of intoxication and exhaustion, I tried my hardest to convey tenderness. At least the tenderness she deserved.

  I stroked her loose thighs. Despite the tolerable perfume she was wearing, the smell of her nearness suddenly seemed muddy. When I touched my semen while caressing her, it felt disagreeably cold. Our sexual presence was totally uncomfortable and dirty. I tried talking, and we were able to keep up a short conversation. She apologized and said she’d surely caught me at a weak moment. I denied it. When you and Marta were together, did you sleep with other women sometimes? she asked me. I rocked my head back and forth. Only three in five years, I answered truthfully. An old girlfriend, someone quite a lot wilder than Marta in bed, had captured me after a party and given me a short, intense update session on what I’d been missing. When I finally got away, it was with a bad conscience. But not as bad as the second time, one summer when Marta spent a couple of weeks at the beach with her parents and I wound up with a girl I’d met through friends, a girl from Logroño: we went to bed in her hotel room, I came, and then I absconded, I barely said good-bye. The rudeness of the
falsely virtuous. The third woman was the most recent; after sexual activity with Marta had been reduced to such a degree that fucking became a physiological necessity, the roulette wheel stopped on a photographer friend of ours, a woman of Guinean origin who helped put together our catalog and came to the office to take pictures of our best 3-D models. After we got to know each other better, the photographer and I, we had three or four encounters characterized by perspiration and aerobic passion, but with no hope for the future and with not the smallest emotional connection between us. She knew Marta, and she’d tell me, you’ve got such a pretty girlfriend, she’s ravishing. She’d photographed Marta on several occasions during her stint as a promising actress, and she talked about her, about the woman I lived with, as if we were chatting over some beers in a bar instead of frolicking naked on the bed in her apartment.

  I didn’t recount those details to Helga. But she laughed at the way I told her about the three outside women in five years, almost in the style of a mathematical equation. Then I said I supposed those workplace accidents on the relationship-building site were signs of how things between Marta and me were already getting bogged down, slowly, even before her old boyfriend the Uruguayan singer returned like a deferred dream. The eighth time I referred to him as the Uruguayan singer, Helga teased me. You say Uruguayan singer as if you were talking about some exotic bird species. Well, maybe that’s what he is, I answered evasively. Sex is almost always the most reliable gauge of a relationship, Helga opined, making a conversational detour. My husband stopped insisting we make love. He had a way all his own, forthright and abrupt, he’d get in bed and pressure me into doing it, but then he stopped. He cheated on me with his lover for seven years before we separated. Seven years? And you didn’t notice? Yes, I mean, I don’t know, I thought he was letting off steam, so to speak, I even found it somewhat convenient, but I never imagined he could get into another serious relationship. Now I understand I was mistaken, but at least I’ve stopped feeling guilty about it. That was the worst, abandoned and guilty. I feel guilty too, I said.

  All at once the idea of a long and stable relationship, the shadowy realm of marriage, repelled me. I’d spent the evening feeling sorry for myself because Marta canceled the promised happiness of growing old together, and now something told me that even had I gone down that lengthy road, it would have led inevitably to catastrophe. It was better for love to break apart in its splendor, and too risky to subject it to the passage of time. Oh no, what stupidity. Who knows the truth? Who cares about the truth, the truth that will come to pass whether you want it to or not, if just walking toward it slowly is beautiful?

  Helga had big nipples, and the intense pink of her areolae contrasted with her moon-colored flesh. I glimpsed them every time she shifted her folded forearms, coyly careful about rearranging her breasts before she went on talking to me. The couple is the only remedy we have against loneliness, she said, but we all know it’s not perfect. Then she added something in German: Einsamkeit. Loneliness, she explained. German’s pretty, I said, I’ve always wanted to learn it.

  She smiled and rolled onto her side. One summer in Mallorca, back in the days when my husband and I still spent our summers there together, I gave German lessons to the son of some Spanish friends. I thought she was implying she’d gone to bed with him, but she was shocked when she heard me taking that for granted. Don’t you know any German? No, none at all. She touched my nose and said Nase. Then she brushed my lips and said Lippen. Then my eyes, Augen. My hair, Haar. And my ear, Ohr. And when she touched my chin and said Kinn, I put my hand on her breast. Brust. I thought she meant I was being brusque, abrupt. Or that she was talking to me like those masters who command their dogs in German because they obey more readily. But that wasn’t it. We smiled at each other, and she reached for my cock and named it in German, der Penis, but couldn’t avoid blushing. Surely not, I said, no one uses the scientific name, do they? We say la polla in Spanish. La polla? Yes. Der Schwanz. Her hands were still oily from the lotion, and her lesson in linguistic anatomy had succeeded in arousing me again. I thrust my forearm between her legs and lifted her forcefully. Then I applied myself to exciting her, looking for creases and bone ends, all the while studying her mouth and forehead for her reactions. Something in her exploded at once, the result of overstimulation and the accumulated energy of desire, repressed for so many years and now bursting out like water through a broken dam. Helga clutched the sheets in her fists and let herself go, groaning and even screaming so loudly that I put my hand over her mouth a couple of times. I was worried about what her German neighbors would think, accustomed as they were to silence from the solitary divorcée on the third floor. My conscientious work paid off when I was able to watch her come, so hard, so movingly.

  Then, having felt my erection, she lowered her head to suck my cock, but not before saying, I’m terrible at this. But I didn’t let her go beyond an enthusiastic and generous demonstration before flinging her onto the mattress, and this time I indeed penetrated her. We reached a point where she couldn’t attain any more pleasure than she’d already felt and I couldn’t reach my goal. We fell into a sort of mechanical process whose result was more strenuous exercise than wild passion. A blockage of the senses, which were somewhat numb and refused more ecstasy. And so I pulled my over-moistened penis out of her and jerked myself off, this time coming on her navel and the folds of her white belly.

  There was something in my action that had to do with erotic fury and defiance. Not toward Helga, needless to say, but toward the sense of unhappiness and abandonment the memory of Marta gave me. Helga made no move to caress or kiss me, but instead she pulled me down onto her calm body and embraced me, and then she let me roll off of her, turn my back, and flee into sleep, without subjecting me to any aggravating, sentimental stroking of my hair and shoulders. If she felt suddenly abandoned, as she evidently was, she hid it discreetly. When I awoke after a first leaden snooze, charged with sexual satisfaction and alcohol, she pretended to be asleep at my side, even though her breathing gave her away.

  Later in the night, she started snoring, a series of little snorts, and I felt a bit disgusted and ridiculous. I moved farther away to my side of the bed, which seemed pretty narrow now that we weren’t sharing our bodies. I tried to go back to sleep, downcast, depressed, and shattered, empty except for Marta in my memory, including the memory I carried in my skin. In the course of our evening, Helga had told me the trauma of being left always leads you to idealize the person who’s gone; you carefully make him or her into someone more perfect, more human, more desirable, more irreplaceable. We do it, she told me, to cause ourselves more harm. That ideal we’ve constructed oppresses us; it’s a way of insulting ourselves that for months and years disables us from loving anyone more than we love it, and it makes us look upon men and women as pitiful pastiches of the unparalleled creature we’ve just lost. Then one day we find that our memory becomes more precise and more accurate, and from that moment we can resume thinking about being less unhappy. Helga had told me all this as she lay on the sofa, and the conviction she said it with seduced me.

  That night I didn’t have the strength to go over more details of my conversation with Helga or reflect on the friendliness and naturalness of her manner. I forgot the delicacy she’d shown toward me. The sexual culmination of our meeting had blurred the traces of the touching care she’d lavished on me from the moment she found me sitting on a street bench, broken and wretched. Helga’s every word, her every gesture had been a comfort to me, a solace I would take too long to appreciate. She wasn’t just a maternal refuge for the solitary, forsaken human waste Marta’s departure had turned me into. No. There was more. It was the intelligence, the good sense evident in her conversation, a gift that gave me a space, at least a mental space, where I could survive. A gift from a woman abandoned and alone, a volunteer willing to donate her free time, living in an empty but not unwelcoming apartment, sad but strong enough to offer me the first help I needed to set abo
ut reconstructing myself.

  Around dawn I felt the mattress move. I remained quiet, just as I would do in response to a slight earth tremor. The guest room, decorated with surplus objects taken from other rooms, echoed the creaking bed as Helga got up. I opened my eyes and saw her bending down to retrieve the clothes from the floor. She quickly arranged my things on a chair. Then she picked up hers and pressed them against her naked body, which I saw differently from the way I’d seen it earlier. Isolated from sexual desire, nudes always evoke, somehow, the frigidity of forensic anatomy. Everything on her jiggled, breasts and buttocks, flaccid thighs and forearms, disheveled hair. There was nothing ugly or disagreeable about her, but something inside me felt embarrassed, almost as if I were forced to feel that way. I had fucked an older German woman. A wave of shame I couldn’t dodge broke over me. If I analyzed my feelings, nothing was very clear, but my brain was organizing an intellectual and aesthetic defense, all iron barriers and unsentimental barricades.

  I started laughing silently. I assessed myself from outside, through the eyes of my friends and acquaintances, and the conclusion was hideous. I looked at myself the way someone on the comfortable side of the television set would look at me. Everything, I thought, smelled like semen and bodily fluids, which enhanced the scene’s grotesque and sordid aspects. For a few minutes before falling back to sleep, I transformed myself into a disdain-manufacturing machine. I heard from far off the sound of Helga’s footsteps entering her bedroom, then a long pee into what was apparently an amplified toilet. More recoiling, more manufactured ignominy. When she pulled the flush chain, I seemed to pull another chain and send that misunderstanding, which I was blowing out of all proportion, to the sewer. I’m pathetic, I told myself by way of consolation, and went back to snoring.