Enchantment

by Pietro Grossi

  So it was that graceless, ridiculous expression of pleasure that started my brief, shambling relationship with Tara. Everything went well until about a month later. We had seen each other a few times, always alone. We’d go out for a bite to eat, maybe catch a film, then drop into a bar somewhere, fill ourselves up with vodka like the first evening and go back to my place. Once we actually took the vodka to bed with us, and ended up falling asleep in liquor-soaked sheets.

  Tara often talked to me about her half-Venezuelan origins and her new-age parents who had moved before she was born to a hippie commune in California. When she talked about those years, her eyes gleamed like a little girl’s and she said they had been the happiest in her life. I asked her once what had made her leave, but she muttered something about an accident and changed the subject. She also often talked about her name, Tara, and told me it belonged to an Indian goddess, the mother of all the goddesses and a source of light for the buddhas. Thinking back on it now, I can’t help realizing that whenever she talked about those years in the commune and about her name, there was always something slightly excessive, slightly forced in it, but at the time I dismissed it without further thought.

  All that mattered was that she seemed quite stuck on me and called me her “little genius”. She found it a bit hard to distinguish between astrology and astronomy, and often asked me to explain some sign of the zodiac. I would smile: part of me wondered what the hell I was doing with someone like her, but I would tell myself that that arse and that mouth were a more than valid answer to any question. I think what confused her was the word predictions: to simplify things, I had told her I studied the behaviour of the stars and made predictions about the future of the universe. So from time to time, leafing through a magazine, she would read out a horoscope and ask me, quite seriously, if I agreed. The fact that I was a distinguished scholar had reawakened in her a deep interest in horoscopes.

  So that was how it went on: my conceited awareness of my intellectual superiority helped me quench any doubts I might have had as to why she kept going out with me and waving that arse in front of my eyes, and I had the unconscious illusion that this whole relationship might have been weird but was somehow solid. Up until that evening.

  We had arranged as usual to have a bite to eat somewhere and then decide what to do. It was her day off and she had told me to call her on her cellphone about seven to make arrangements. At seven she hadn’t answered, or at 7:10 or 7:17 or 7:32 or 7:50 or 8:02. After four rings, the answering machine came on and at the third attempt I left a message, saying hello and that it was after seven and I was waiting to hear from her and I was at home and she should call me. I’d never had any great desire to get a cellphone, and to keep in contact with people I used a white AT&T answering machine, which when it was empty displayed a single—and until that moment anonymous—luminous red zero. When there were messages, the number flashed. After an umpteenth attempt, at 8:23, which made me feel weak and nauseous, as if a rat were starting to gnaw at my stomach, I decided it was better to go out, if for no other reason than to eat something. When I got back, I ran up the stairs, convinced I would find a message from Tara on the answering machine and would finally hear her apology and we would meet and I would overcome that sudden terrifying sense of disorientation. But that damned zero was still there, as calm as could be. I lifted the receiver to make sure it was working. I redialled Tara’s number, but again there was no answer. Feeling stupid and ridiculous, and overcome with an undeniable sense of panic, I left her another message, telling her obstinately that I was still at home, waiting for her, and that she should get in touch.

  About ten I called Fausto.

  “Listen,” I said after our hellos, “any idea what’s happened to Tara?”

  “Who?”

  “Tara.”

  “Who’s Tara?”

  “Come on, Fausto, the girl from Novecento we went to that club with.”

  “Oh, yes… She was hot. Are you still seeing her?”

  “Yes, we were supposed to meet tonight.”

  “She stood you up, eh?”

  “Something must have happened. Maybe you’ve spoken to her friend…”

  “No way, I never saw her after that night. I don’t even have her number.”

  “All right, thanks anyway.”

  “You sound down. Come out with me. We’ll find a couple of whores.”

  “No, thanks, Fausto, maybe another time. I have to get up early tomorrow.”

  With images of Tara going round New York with some of her girlfriends and a few men starting to invade my thoughts, I tried to calm down by watching an old film with Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant, but it didn’t help much. So I threw myself on the bed and tried to read. I slept in fits and starts, one hour at a time, but couldn’t stop myself going into the living room to check that damned red zero in the dark, hoping every time that she had called while I was asleep to say something had come up and she was sorry and would call me tomorrow. Obviously there was never anything, just that damned little luminous circle staring at me like the eye of the devil. I saw Tara in clubs, her arms round a huge tattooed guy with a cock as big as a pole throbbing inside his leather trousers. I saw his hands on that round arse and those thighs and that skin as smooth and dark as leather. I had to masturbate twice, and both times I thought I was also doing it with the tattooed guy, which left me feeling even more nauseous than before.

  The next day, pale and dead beat and with two green chasms under my eyes, I went to the university and told everyone I was coming down with something and might even have a fever. After lunch, when I got back home, I saw at last a little bar flashing on the answering machine.

  “Hi, it’s me,” the voice said. “Sorry about yesterday but something bad happened to a friend of mine and I rushed out and left my cellphone at home. Talk to you later. Bye.”

  The tone was, understandably, somewhat cool. I immediately felt stupid and ridiculous, and went into the bathroom to wash my face and look in the mirror and see if there was something in my eyes of the man I thought I knew.

  Two evenings later we saw each other again. We had agreed to meet in Washington Square and then grab a bite to eat on Bleeker. Everything felt different. I tried to seem casual, but wasn’t very successful. I had lost my desire to laugh and I had no idea how to get it back, and if we didn’t laugh and talk crap to each other, we didn’t know what to talk about. She told me that two evenings earlier the junkie ex-boyfriend of a friend of hers—the father of this friend’s child—had died. She had gone running to her friend to take her out and in her hurry had, as she had told me, left her cellphone at home.

  “But where did you think I was?” she asked, smiling.

  I shrugged. For the first time I started to suspect that a relationship with a woman is very similar to a long and complex trench war, and that every small tactical error is very difficult to make up for. After dinner we didn’t stop for a drink anywhere: I was tired and I had a difficult class to give the following morning, so I told her I preferred to go straight home. In the bedroom, we didn’t tear the clothes off each other as we usually did, because I wanted to take things more calmly and gently, but I was sober and frustrated and I came even before she could give a moan.

  “Is that all?” she said, laughing, as I got up to go and wash.

  From that moment, and for some weeks, my relationship with Tara—if you could call it that—was nothing but a rollercoaster of disappointments and torments. From time to time she’d be impossible to get hold of, which only made me all the more desperate to reach her. Every time, like a primal trauma, I would be overcome with the same nausea and vertigo that had carried me away that first evening by the answering machine. I even started drinking a fair amount. I would buy bottles of Belvedere, the vodka from that first night, and get through them sprawled on the couch watching old films, with a cushion behind my neck. I often masturbated sniffing the couch and the little table, searching for traces of her smell. I even found myse
lf licking the edge of the chest of drawers in the bedroom where, one of the first times, I had laid her and forced her legs open and licked her. As I ran my tongue along the cold edge, I was thinking that Tara’s arse had been in this spot, maybe her cunt too had touched it, and the most throbbing erection of my life swelled in my hand. A few moments later, after coming on the floor, I sat down broken against the chest, put a hand over my face and started sobbing.

  I was still seeing a lot of Fausto. Maybe it was because he was, paradoxically, my only link with Tara, or maybe it was just that he was the only person who could get me out of the house and keep me out until oblivion overtook me. It was a different time from any other I’ve known: we went from parties in which all I did was drink and babble incoherently to clubs I would never have believed existed.

  One evening, as we were leaving a bar in the Meatpacking District, Fausto laughed and told me to follow him. We crossed the street, opened a little door hidden in the wall, and went down two flights of stairs. Immediately to the left of the entrance, bars ran from the ceiling to the floor, separating a dark corner from the rest of the room. Behind the bars, a hairy, overweight man was tied to the wall completely naked and was being whipped by a woman dressed in latex.

  It was one of the few times Fausto and I had a conversation that was slightly more serious and personal: we talked about Italy and the reasons he hadn’t gone back and how, if things had worked out, we would both have preferred to live there and not in a country which, however welcoming, was still a foreign country.

  As we talked, sipping our drinks, we moved to a room where there were hammocks and two or three wooden pallets. On one of the pallets, a woman was being masturbated in an almost surgical manner by three men, and emitting loud cries. Walking around the club, well-dressed customers alternated with completely naked people and wild-eyed men with huge erections in their hands. The surprising thing, though, was my absolute imperviousness. The fact that we were chatting as we moved though a club where people were being touched and penetrated in front of everybody, surrounded by half-naked maniacs with eyes popping out of their heads, didn’t seem to matter. Over the years I went back to the Hellfire a few more times, and every time it was like entering a parallel world governed by its own rules, where what you saw lost any feeling of strangeness.

  Fausto grew bored with my attempts to extract from him an opinion or any words of comfort about my relationship with Tara.

  He sighed and cut me short. “Forget about her,” he said, raising his eyes to heaven. “It’s not worth making a fool of yourself over a girl like that.”

  I think it was those simple words that made me suddenly choose Fausto, the apparently least appropriate person, as my mentor. And yet it was only a marginal symptom of the general paradox in which I’d become hopelessly entangled: what was I doing with Tara? Was it for this that I’d spent the best years of my life? Once, in a few pleasant moments of solitude, happening to look up at the star-filled sky, I let myself wallow in mathematical models for describing gravitational waves. What was I doing with this simple-minded creature who found it really hard to understand the difference between a star and a planet, and was convinced that the moon shone with its own light?

  “What are you talking about?” she’d replied with a laugh when I tried to explain to her that the light of the moon was actually the reflected light of the sun. “It’s a different colour!”

  And yet my attempts to draw Tara into a steady and definite relationship were increasingly energetic, and also increasingly clumsy. She responded by standing me up more often. One evening when she told me she had to work, I took up position on the other side of West Broadway and waited for her to come out of Novecento. I had put on an improbable Mets cap and even a jacket, although it was quite hot, and I raised the collar to hide my face. I was convinced she had lied to me and that she wasn’t in the restaurant. But then I saw her come out and say goodbye to the other waiters and waitresses. I thought for a moment of catching up with her, then simply started following her. She walked north as far as Prince Street and turned right. On the corner of Broadway she went down into the subway, inserted and withdrew her Metrocard from the respective slits in the turnstile and took the stairs that led towards the northbound platform. I started waiting, half turned away, about twenty metres from her. Once on the train, I sat down quite far from her, but in a seat that allowed me to keep my eye on her. She simply sat there with phones in her ears and a book in her hand. I couldn’t see the title, but from the colours and squiggles on the cover I guessed it was a romantic novel. She looked like anyone else, an ordinary defenceless human being in the immensity of a big city, sheltering behind the silence of her music and her book. The fact that I was aware of what she really was, what kind of creature was concealed within those clothes, and the fact that she couldn’t see me, made me feel as if I were a government spy, or an alien from another planet.

  She stayed on the subway to 57th Street, and then past that, on the elevated, as far as Queens. On one of our evenings out she had told me she lived in a little row house in Astoria, and it was clear now that she was going home and that I was an idiot and that things might have gone well for a while, but the time had come to get out of this madness once and for all. As I was wondering if I would also get off when we got to the end of the line and say something to her, Tara stood up, put her book back in her bag, and walked to the carriage door. It was the 30th Avenue stop, which, as far as I knew, wasn’t the stop near where she lived. Doing everything I could to hide behind someone, I got to the door and, still keeping a few dozen metres behind her, followed Tara off the train and down the iron staircase of the elevated and outside, and found myself surrounded by the square apartment blocks of Queens. It was like a scene from The Warriors. Tara walked east for three blocks, then turned right and across a half-empty parking lot. At the far end of the parking lot she headed for the back of a brick building and knocked at an iron door. After a few moments, it was opened for her and she disappeared inside. On the front of the building, above a glass door and the big man standing in front of it, there was a red neon sign saying Boom Bar, with the illuminated drawing of a buxom, knowing girl in a bikini. I stood there for at least ten minutes, in a daze, at the other side of the little square, wondering what to do, then slowly, as if in a trance, dragged myself to the entrance. The man at the door was wearing a sweatshirt and wide black trousers and a shiny silver chain around his neck.

  “I.D., please.”

  I took my identity card from my pocket and showed it to him. As always happens in New York, he checked it carefully with a torch and gave it back to me, stared at me for a moment, then said, “Go ahead.”

  Beyond the door was a little room separated from the club by a dark blue velvet curtain. A girl at a table asked me for twenty dollars. It was a perfectly ordinary strip club, with its armchairs and its sofas and its bar and its coloured lights and its half-naked girls swaying their hips and opening their legs in time to the music on stages or around shiny steel poles. The same kind of strip club where I’d once gone with a fun-loving teacher of mine from Princeton to discuss my research. I ordered a neat vodka from a dark-skinned barman on steroids and sat down at a corner table.

  About twenty minutes later, she appeared from behind the curtain of the main stage, along with two other girls who were paler and taller than her. She was wearing a skimpy fuchsia bikini and two shiny boots with platforms nearly two inches high and heels of at least six. She had more make-up on than usual and her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail that made her look more adult and ruthless. She went straight to a pole to the right of the stage. From the back of the room I watched her rub herself against the pole and shake and bend, smiling at a few customers who approached and slipped some dollars into her G-string, and I didn’t recognize a single thing I was feeling. About ten minutes later she moved from the main stage to a smaller one, surrounded by a series of tables and armchairs. After a few moments I got up and sat down like
an automaton on one of the armchairs close to this smaller stage. Two other men also approached her. One of them slipped a five-dollar bill in her G-string and stood there for more than a minute watching Tara opening her legs in front of him and putting her hand behind his head.

  “You’re gorgeous,” the man said when she started dancing again round the pole. She smiled and winked at him, then continued dancing for herself. After a while she winked at the other man, then turned towards me, gave a little smile, and as she was already turning her head gave me another, sharper look. Dreary pop music was bouncing off the walls, and my heart seemed to be beating like a bass drum in time to it. Tara moved around the pole and glared at me again. Then she continued dancing for five minutes without looking at me, smiling a couple of times at the other man and finally accepting one of his dollars in her G-string. She then came down off the stage, danced her way to my armchair, rubbed herself against me for a moment and coldly whispered in my ear to take out twenty dollars and put it in her G-string. I took my wallet, dug out two ten-dollar bills and stuck them under the side of the G-string. She then sat down on my lap, facing me, unhooked her top and took it off. I had the feeling that everything around me was vanishing and for a moment I had the illusion that I could kiss her and lick her and take her right there on that chair. I passed a hand over her side and went closer to kiss her, but she pushed me back in my chair with one hand.