Necropolis (35 page)

The next day was Saturday so I went to the hospital, I had a tremendous desire to be with Kay. I told him everything in his ear, whispered to him that I had had sex with a mentally retarded man for money, although I didn't tell him it was for drugs; I said it was to arrange our apartment, to fill the vases with roses and the closet with wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy and fill the refrigerator with vegetable, and fruit, which was what the doctor had said he would have to eat when he woke up, and I said, I'm preparing for your return, my love, I feel you close to me, I know you're there, you just have to break one thin membrane, I can feel it, you come and I'll be ready, and so Saturday went by with me lying beside him, I had managed to sneak in some of the drug, so I snorted it in small doses, just to keep calm, and I felt happy, I swear, very happy in that room with a view of a parking lot and the overhead section of the metro line that goes from Charles de Gaulle to Nation. Through the window I could see the train passing in the distance, surrounded by smoke from the chimneys, and I imagined anxious women traveling in those carriages, longing to get home and have sex with the men they loved and cry out with joy between four dirty, peeling walls; and I also imagined disillusioned young girls looking for some kind of direction in their lives, girls who might have been raped, and might be thinking and thinking and feeling abused and guilty, the poor things, some of them might well be savoring the idea of sticking a needle in their veins to escape this den of iniquity; some might be looking up at the sky in the hope of seeing an igneous ball that would destroy everything once and for all, devour the city in a hurricane of fire, the colossal towers leaning and falling in clouds of dust and terrified people running through the rubble, choked by the smoke and the waves of heat, pushed toward nothingness by the winds of destruction, yes, a few lost young girls must be thinking all that, and things even worse that that, which the mind did not dare imagine, let alone say; I imagined them coming and going in the metro trains I could see from the window, with Kay breathing artificially beside me, and I felt protected, as if the world and its miseries could not enter this little room that smelled of disinfectant, this room where death prowled.

When dusk arrived I was filled with a sensation of emptiness and silence, so I went to the bathroom and set up my two gray lines on the wash basin, and when night fell I started seeing the lights and thinking again of my young girls, how many of them must be fucking their men, listening to music by the Fugees and drinking tequila or gin from a bottle, and how many were hugging a telephone that wouldn't ring and they knew it, with the bottle of pills open and a bottle of Vittel ready to swallow the lethal, liberating charge of fifty sleeping pills; and there must also be happy women leading clean lives, writing doctoral theses with the remains of pizzas or Chinese food beside them on their desks, and women cooking and looking after babies and watching the clock, calculating how long the sliced chicken and the potatoes and the leeks have been in the oven, and as they look at the hands of the clock trying to imagine what metro station their husband has reached on his way home, and thinking all these things I fell asleep, hearing these voices emerging from the lights of the suburbs, and when I opened my eyes again everything had already gone black and all that remained was the weight of the night, the oppressive darkness, and the silence, and I could almost hear Kay's blood flowing in his veins and I started again to put a little powder in my nasal septum and already the night was going and when I opened my eyes again it was Sunday morning and a nurse was coming in to take his blood pressure, to give him injections and change the serum; this activity disturbed me, so I left the room with the hope that this week would be the last and that very soon Kay and I would be reminiscing about it over laughter and a glass of wine.

I don't know how much time passed, I really don't remember, but one day the doorbell rang, and when I opened it, with my heart leaping at the idea that it was Kay, I gave a cry of surprise, because it was . . . my cousin Giorgetta! and I cried out because she had changed a lot: her pink cheeks had turned glassy, with just a little flesh left around the bone. I was pleased to see her and we opened some of the bottles of wine I had been keeping for Kay, until she said, listen, you wouldn't have a little…? I handed her a syringe and my case, and immediately we had a fix, although I only snorted, and we spent the night drinking and doing drugs, talking about the divine and the human, with long moments of silence, and the next day, already recovered, she said, Sabina, I've come to stay, there's no work in Rome and my mother can't stand me, she's put me in clinics three times, I can't go back, I've been so alone, you're all I have.

I looked at her and said, then you don't have much, almost nothing in fact, I don't have a job, the money from my mother's boyfriend isn't enough to live on, I have to go out looking for work, and Giorgetta asked, intrigued, and what is it you do? I told her about the mentally retarded guy and she thought it was an excellent solution. Of course, she said, that kind of person has the same needs, dips his wick just like the others, only they pay more, help me to find something like that, but I said, you have to take care of yourself, Giorgetta, you mustn't give the impression you're a mess, this is done with the patient's mother and a nurse, so image is important, know what I mean? It's a medical matter, the crazy guy has sex with you, you empty his testicles, and then you go and change, just as if you were a physical therapist. The mother may even invite you to have a cup of tea.

Giorgetta looked at me enthusiastically and said, okay, I get the idea, call your friend and tell him you need to increase your clientele, an Italian cousin of yours has arrived who wants to conquer Paris, tell him if he wants to pay to fuck me, to try me out, I'd be delighted, tell him I scream a lot and I love S and M and do Greek and French, and even swallow, that'll excite him, tell him. I called him with her standing there and of course Petra, who was sex crazy, asked if he could come that very night.

He arrived at ten and when he saw Giorgetta, who had had a good shower and put on some make up, he said he had a better idea, which was to do it with the two of us, a threesome. We looked at each other dubiously, but he immediately added: I'll pay double, of course. We agreed. I had never felt either desire or repulsion for a woman, so it didn't bother me having Giorgetta naked beside me, because I had known her since she was a girl. When he told her to suck me and she approached, I didn't feel any disgust. Petra had a great time. He cried out, sang in Romanian, quoted Shakespeare and Sophocles as he penetrated me and Giorgetta sucked his balls, and afterwards, to round off the evening, he took us out to eat couscous at the Royal Maroc, a restaurant in République. We drank three bottles of rosé wine from Boulaouane and then, quite merry by now, ended the night drinking cognac in a bar in Bastille. At dawn, we went back to Kay's apartment to sleep.

A week later, Petra called about the job with the mentally retarded guy. When I'd finished I said to his mother, madame, I assure you that I do it with a lot of respect and consideration for the patient, so please, if you have any acquaintances with similar cases you can call me, I have a cousin who needs work, a very healthy young woman, and the mother said, of course, Sabina, I'll talk to the people at the special help center and if there's anything I'll call you, of course. Three days later, the telephone rang and the first job for Giorgetta arrived. A young man of twenty-five suffering from something very serious, dementia, mental handicap, Williams syndrome, I don't quite remember. The young man was bedridden and obese. When Giorgetta saw him, her first impulse was to jump out the window, but then she thought of the money, so she undressed and did the job, telling herself, these are God's mistakes, people who also feel, and even if it disgusts me I have to think that for them it's much worse, I can take a shower and go out and back to normal life, the streets and the metro and the parks are waiting for me and I'm free, and that should give me strength, this is what she told me when she got home and prepared herself a good fix, pleased with the two-hundred-euro bills she'd come away with, and as we took a dose she told me that for her to give him a blowjob, two nurses had had to support his belly, he was that obese, and that his penis was small and flaccid, like a child's.

We clung to each other all night and the next morning the telephone rang, and it was Petra, announcing a good job, something that could be really important for both of us. I asked him if he wanted to drop by and he said, no, this is something different, I prefer to talk to you face to face.

The appointment was in a café near the Belleville metro station, a neighborhood where everyone is black or Chinese or Arab, and Giorgetta was getting quite nervous by the time we met with Petra, who greeted us and said, come, it's this way. He led us down a side street and we entered a building that wasn't too dirty, in fact it was the least dirty in the block. We went up to the fourth floor. On the door was a sign saying Eve Studios. We were received by a man with a businesslike look who, when he saw us, cried, at last I've met you. Petra has told us all about you, and he was right, come this way, I want to see you properly, my name is Dimitros, I'm the head of the company. He explained that he published porn magazines that sold well in Europe, and that he now wanted to make the leap into movies, which was why he needed two actresses. He had studied the market and had worked out that he could make two films a month, which would mean approximately five thousand euros a month for each of us, and that would be just the start, because if the company grew the income would increase, what did we think?

Giorgetta was about to say something but I gestured to her to be quiet; she had never had much of a head for business, so I spoke up and said, first we'd like to see something of what you do and to know what kind of films you want, and he said, of course, the thing is, I only do normal stuff, fellatio, Greek, sodomy, DP, facial ejaculation, all the classic stuff, no
fornicating with donkeys or eating shit, and then Giorgetta, intrigued, asked, what's DP, and Dimitros replied, double penetration, darling, two penises in your body simultaneously, if you've never done it before you may find it uncomfortable at first but you'll get used to it, it's a difficult position, you have to have good abdominal muscles, how's your physical condition, girls? and we both said, very good, so Dimitros continued: as I said, I only film the traditional porn themes, because what I'm interested in is art, eroticism, I'm a disciple of Lasse Braun, you may not know who he is, but I said, yes I do, I've seen his movies, my favorite is Sin Dreamer. Dimitros looked at me wide-eyed, and said, that's amazing, girl, that's the best porn movie ever made! tell me, what's your name?

We began two days later with a fairly simple scene. I played a nurse in the house of an elderly man. To give him something to eat, I phoned out for a pizza. The young man who delivered it, a fairly well-built Yugoslav named Yarco in real life, was helping me to divide the pizza into triangles in the kitchen and used the excuse of a few olives that had rolled onto the floor to start stroking my legs, my nurse's skirt being short. That developed into a scene of oral sex and then penetration on the table, at which point the cleaner arrived. That was Giorgetta's role. When she saw that Yarco had me on the table with my legs open and was thrusting into me, she started masturbating herself with the mouth of a wine bottle. This scene, of course, Dimitros rehearsed many times, because he wanted the reflection of my legs beating in the air to be seen in Giorgetta's bottle. That was his art, he said, through the camera he was expressing his anger at the world and his nihilistic vision of life, which he had no faith in.

We patiently repeated the scene. The next thing to happen was the miracle, which was that the old man, played by Petra, alerted by the noise, managed to drag himself to the kitchen to see why he was being left alone and once there, seeing Giorgetta sticking a bottle of Burgundy inside her and his nurse lying on the table, being sodomized by the young man, a ray of light from the window fell on his forehead and filled him with newfound strength. He threw off his pajamas, took out a fairly respectable penis, and set to with Giorgetta. In the climactic scene, which was the most difficult, I took Yarco from the front and Petra from behind while Giorgetta sucked their testicles in turn, and at the end came the great ejaculation, which hit Giorgetta's cheeks and mine and which we pretended to savor with relish.

All this took the whole of Saturday and Sunday, but at last Dimitros congratulated us and told us that even though we were beginners we had a lot of talent and a keen sense of art. He was sure he had pulled off at least three or four shots that showed his stamp, the mark of the artist. We left with three thousand euros in brand new bills each, so we decided to treat ourselves. We bought new clothes, went to the hairdresser, had dinner in a good restaurant, and of course, a good fix and a snort, a full dose, not the half we took to feel good during the filming. After three days of excess, I suddenly remembered Kay, and it was as if the sky had fallen on my head. I rushed to the hospital with my heart pounding, and the premonition that he had died, that they had been calling me but my phone had been off or mislaid, and when I got to his room and saw him there, lying on his back in bed, I felt the soul come back to my body, and I cried and cried, falling to my knees, and spent the night telling him about Eve Studios and the plot of the movie and how the fact that I'd seen his Lasse Braun movies had helped me, because the director was a very artistic and demanding person who didn't just hire beginners. You might earn more having sex with mental defectives, but this is a real job and gives you the opportunity to learn a trade. I told him everything until day broke and the bustle of cleaners and nurses returned and I went home, with the impression that he approved this new development.