Alaa al-Aswany - The Automobile Club of Egypt

“Yes.”

She slid her arms around him and laid her head on his chest. Mahmud looked down at her naked body and saw how raddled it was. Her neck was deeply lined, her heavy breasts sagged pendulously to the side and there were liver spots all over her flabby skin.

“Do you think I’m beautiful?” she asked as if reading his mind and wanting reassurance.

“Of course.”

Rosa planted a kiss on his neck, smiled sadly and looked up at the ceiling.

“No, Mahmud. I used to be beautiful. I’m old now. You’re young, and you must know many prettier women.”

Mahmud said nothing but felt a little uneasy. He really wanted to leave, but suddenly Rosa became jolly again. She got out of bed, took his hand and said playfully, “Come on, let’s take a shower.”

“You go first.”

“No,” she said with a giggle. “Come with me. Let’s have a shower together.”

She pulled him into the bathroom, laughing, turned on the shower and started soaping him up, patting his muscles.

“My fantastic stud!”

Then she handed him a big pink sponge. “Mahmud, will you scrub my back?”

He had hardly started doing so before she whirled around, threw her arms around him and started insatiably kissing his stomach, working her way up to his chest and finally to his mouth, while her hand slithered around between his thighs. They fell onto the bed again, still dripping wet. This time Rosa went slowly. The first time she had gone at it hammer and tongs, but with her initial thirst quenched, she could now allow herself to luxuriate in total pleasure, as the two of them gave themselves over to a veritable tidal wave of lovemaking that left them both spent. Mahmud asked if he might take another shower before he got dressed. As he said good-bye at the door of her apartment, he felt that everything between them had changed. The way he felt when he embraced her, the timbre of her voice, even the perfume that earlier had seemed maternal — all of them now drove him mad with desire.

Mahmud lay on his bed thinking over what had happened with Rosa until he fell asleep. The following day, he went to the Club and worked as usual but could not banish the questions: Might he discover that what happened with Rosa had been a dream? Perhaps a hallucination?

If not, had Rosa fancied him from the start, or was she suddenly overcome with lust? She was over sixty, but at what age did a woman lose her libido? Was it only foreign women or did all women, whatever their age, desire men with such ardor? Did his mother have such feelings? Did her sedate and dignified appearance belie an incandescent desire for sex? He felt awkward to imagine his mother feeling passion, but then he told himself, “Of course my mother and father did what I did with Rosa; otherwise, how would my siblings and I have come into the world?”

Mahmud plunged headlong into this new reality. Rosa did her best to satisfy him in bed, teaching him so much about the technique of lovemaking that after a few weeks he became quite expert at it. They met so often that they developed their own rituals, which he loved. Rosa would start off by feeding him up. She served him various delicious meals, such as kebab and kufta from Abu Shaqra, chicken and brain sandwiches from the New Kursaal and fatta with calf’s foot from Hati el-Geysh. When he expressed his astonishment at how much she knew about Egyptian food, Rosa shook her head and laughed. Just like any good mother, she told him, “Mahmud, I’ve lived in Egypt longer than I lived in England.”

She taught him to drink wine. It tasted a little acrid at first, but then he felt the soothing sensation work its way into his brain. Time after time, his visits to Rosa followed the same routine: Mahmud would eat heartily, drink a whole bottle of wine and then go to the bathroom to brush his teeth and take a shower. He would come out wearing only the cashmere dressing gown Rosa had bought him. Then he would sit down next to her saying nothing, his legs crossed, as if he were waiting for the train. Rosa would sit there squirming a little, getting herself worked up and chatting away about nothing in particular. She would ask him about his family or grumble about how lazy and what a liar her doorman was, as if her relationship with Mahmud was nothing unusual or as if they were a married couple or a pair of lovers whose relationship was not simply sexual but extended into everyday life. Mahmud would sit there giving terse answers without looking at her. Suddenly, she would move closer to him, and he would feel her hot breath, or she might start stroking his curly hair or running her fingers along his broad lips. Mahmud would take his cue from that, and then the performance would start. He would enfold her in his strong arms, giving her no chance to resist. Then, like a toy he had played with long enough, he would carry her off to the bed. After kissing her for a long time and caressing her slowly, he would then run his hands all over her body until she relaxed and opened up to him, at which point he would make violent and merciless love to her. He seemed to be trying to hurt or punish her. Mahmud would pump away at Rosa like a machine, devoid of any false emotion or fake sentiment. He went at her with ever-increasing roughness, like a street brawler with Rosa his adversary. He would find her weak spots and then set at them as if there were no tomorrow, until she could do no more than lie there like a rag doll. Mahmud’s lovemaking, so rough and crude, drove Rosa wild. He seemed to have uncovered in her a land mine that had lain hidden for years under her polite and refined veneer. He took her back to a distant past, a primordial time when men and women did not disguise their animal lust but simply acted on it without shame or guilt, the way they might eat when they felt hungry. There was another reason why Mahmud was so good in bed: being slow-witted, he went about it slowly. He could lie there caressing Rosa for an age, forgetting time and space. Then, with the careless rhythm of a piston, he would make Rosa scream with wide-eyed delight as wave after wave of uncontrollable pleasure flowed through her. Rosa always had a few orgasms before Mahmud ejaculated. At that point, she would behave like a celebrant performing the rituals of a festival. With a happy and grateful look, she would kiss him on the face, neck, chest and hands as if he were a cat in his owner’s arms. Mahmud was such a fantastic lover that when Rosa thought back to all her previous lovers (including her late husband), she realized that she had never before experienced sexual pleasure such as Mahmud gave her.

His tumultuous nights with Rosa became such a fixture of his life that he could no longer imagine going without them. He lived for them the way a drug addict waits for his next fix. If a few days passed without a visit to Rosa, the absence of sexual relief beset him like a muscle cramp. She released all his pent-up sexual frustration, so he now slept soundly at night and no longer dreamt of sex. She gave him a life of ease: delicious food, fine wine and a soft bed. He felt some pride at bedding Rosa, for here he was, a dark-skinned Egyptian, expressing his manhood for the first time with an English lady who had become attached to him. His feelings toward her were strong and contradictory. One time when she was not feeling well, he visited her as she lay in bed every day for a week to check on her. There was no doubting that he loved her, although not in the usual sense of “love” between a man and a woman. By dint of their sexual exertions, he had managed to uncover the real Rosa, and he felt for her the sort of affection that one might feel for a work colleague, and when they were not having sex, he treated her with all due respect and enjoyed her company. Sometimes it even seemed to him that he was doing a sort of favor for a close friend, the way he might help someone tidy up or move some heavy furniture around. He did, so to speak, a bit of heavy lifting around the place to keep her happy and, once finished, would go and sit in his comfy chair. Occasionally, after they had finished lovemaking, he would feel a storm welling up inside him and an urge to get away. In those moments, Rosa was nothing more to him than a haggard old woman, pretending to be younger than her age, and he, young enough to be her son, was no more than a lad who had been seduced into fornication. With that, he felt a sudden resentment and wished he had never met her. Such sudden bouts of aversion might make him snap at her, but he would soon come back to himself and apologize, refusing to leave until he was certain that she had forgiven him. The waves of repulsion stemmed from his feelings of guilt. Mahmud had always been too lackadaisical and lazy to follow the strictures of his religion in an organized manner, except for going to say his Friday prayers, but sometimes his conscience would prick him.