Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

I know there are many rumors about me, but what nobody knows is that I myself am the source of them, since they make me seem larger than life, and the idiots who repeat them, thinking they’re hurting me with their vulgar comments, are merely inflating the sails of my ego, pushing the boat that little bit farther out. “When they fly I am the wings,” as Brahma says in that poem by Emerson. The result is that they keep talking about me. They can’t stop talking about me. And that makes me very happy.

But let’s get to the story. I wasn’t always this woman who so many men today would like to have in their beds and who as she walks earns a string of lustful glances and throats being cleared and husbands scolded by their wives. I wasn’t always what I am. I was once a young girl and men scared me. That’s true. They scared me because they were as strange to me as bulls or scorpions, seeing as how I grew up among women, being an only child brought up by my mother and two aunts, all three of them abandoned by feckless men, who had moved from Naples to Rome and settled in a first-floor apartment on Via dei Monti di Creta, on the outskirts of the city, a long way from the center, next to a garden of pine trees called the Pineta Sachetti, where I used to play as a girl, until my mother met a short, stout man who spoke with a strange accent, and we went to Mexico City to live with him, and that’s why, when I speak Spanish, people think I’m Mexican.

We lived in an apartment on Calle Ámsterdam, near the Parque Independencia, and I attended the Sor Juana high school. By the time I finished school, I was a demure young lady, and that was how I stayed, oh yes, I didn’t change until later, in another country, France no less, the land where the storks come from, the land of love, but also the land of the most revolting vice and licentiousness. I should point out that my mother left me to my own devices during vacations, she would give me money and airline tickets to wherever I liked, so as to leave herself free to have a great time in Veracruz or Acapulco with her lover, who was half businessman and half drug trafficker, from what I discovered later, although more the second of those than the first, so I went traveling around the world, almost always with the daughter of one of my aunts from Rome, my cousin Giorgetta, who was crazier than I was and did everything before I did.

When I was eighteen and she was nineteen we went together to Paris, the city of vice and depravity. On the second day, through friends of Giorgetta, we ended up at a party thrown by a group of immigrants in Belleville, a party that lasted three days and where there was a lot of alcohol and drugs right from the start, although not for me, because I was very young and hadn’t yet picked up any bad habits. The group consisted of Jamaicans, Senegalese, and Spaniards who, if I remember correctly, were all studying with a Japanese friend of Giorgetta’s. It was just like a movie, I started seeing all kinds of strange things, a young guy with a hypodermic syringe hanging from his forearm, a woman lifting her miniskirt and injecting herself in the groin, another who was rubbing her nose against a mirror as she danced and crying in French, yes, yes, with the muscles of her face tense as wires, another man biting off half a pill and offering the other half to his girlfriend on his tongue and the girlfriend gobbling it up like a fruit, young girls wetting tampons in gin and sticking them in their bottoms, their faces all shiny with pleasure, people smoking some kind of brown tobacco from silver paper, tobacco that took the brain to another dimension, everything washed down with strong alcohol and, of course, hours later, when all modesty had been thrown out the window, I saw another kind of image, a young Jamaican penetrating a woman on a small table in the dining room, my cousin Giorgetta, behind the bathroom curtain, putting a penis in her mouth, a penis so black it looked like a clarinet, a man stroking another man’s ass as he danced, things like that, but I stayed as I was and only drank beer and a little Coke to keep going, and when I finally made up my mind to leave, and I’m telling you this so you can see the kind of bad influence I had to contend with, I went to look for my cousin and found her naked and bathed in sweat, having sex with her Japanese friend on the same flea-ridden mattress where a Senegalese guy was fucking a Spanish guy in the ass, which was quite a shocking scene for a young girl like me, if you see what I mean.

When the party was over, we went back to the Japanese guy’s apartment and Giorgetta slept for something like a hundred hours in a row, and when she woke up she spent another three hours in the shower and then she came out and said, Sabina, let’s do something really crazy, and I said, crazier than that party? She looked at me pityingly and said, don’t worry, I’m older than you but I began at the age of thirteen, you’re too quiet, you know, you need taking out of yourself, come on, let me take care of it. We went to the house of another friend of hers, a Norwegian who was about ten feet tall, and he and Giorgetta talked for a while and he asked her, are you sure? and Giorgetta said, very sure, it’s what I want now, so the guy tied a rubber band around her forearm, burned a liquid in a spoon, put it in a syringe and injected her.

Immediately, Giorgetta’s eyes rolled back and she started shaking, which got me quite nervous, but the Norwegian, whose name was Kay, said to me, don’t worry, she’s shaking with pleasure, it’s like having a hundred orgasms at the same time, do you want to try? I said no, I can’t feel a thousand orgasms because I still haven’t had my first, I’m a virgin. He opened his eyes wide and cried, really? and added, please don’t move, I want to take a photograph, you’re the first virgin I’ve met since I came to Paris, and then I asked, and what do you do? and he said, I’m a photographer, let’s see, stand over there. I heard the click of the camera and then a second click and a third, and then lots more, as many as the orgasms my cousin Giorgetta must have been having — by now she’d slipped off the couch and was lying on the carpet — thousands of clicks from a camera focused on my body, and I knew he desired me, and I started taking off my clothes, first my sweater, then my skirt, my blouse and my bra, and lastly my panties, my white virgin’s panties, and when I was naked Kay kept saying in French, parfait! parfait! and I could see the bulge in his pants getting bigger, so I said, take that off and let me see what you’re hiding there, and he showed it to me, and it was all pink and as big as an elephant’s trunk, with yellow hairs, and he said, you should suck it, it doesn’t taste bad, so I went to him and sucked it and it wasn’t too unpleasant, it tasted like rust or wet wood, so I carried on sucking and feeling his veins swelling until he said, open those thighs, I want to see what you’ve got, and he opened me with his tongue and I saw stars, he explored me with his finger and finally he put his penis in, which hurt me at first, but was quite nice after that and moved inside me very smoothly. Just as I was about to have my first orgasm he took it out and moved it up to my mouth and said, swallow it, you’ll like it, and so I did, and he spurted a bitter liquid that burned my throat.

When he withdrew, I grabbed his arm and said, where are you going? you haven’t finished with me, and I put his mouth back in my cunt and said, now suck and lick until I tell you, and he did as he was told, and one or two minutes later I felt a ray of light split my body in two and I screamed as much if not more than the girl in the movie Carrie when they tip the bucket of blood over her, and I lost consciousness, and when that huge volcano had stopped erupting and I returned to reality I saw Giorgetta looking at me through half-open eyes, and saying, did he fuck you or did he give you a fix? and I replied, the first, how are you? and she said, with her cheeks covered in drool, this is too much, it’s really intense, I can’t speak, I’m sorry, and she lay down on the carpet again and as she did so I noticed she was giving off a disgusting smell. I looked at Kay, who was just emerging from between my legs, and he said, don’t make that face, it’s normal to shit and pee when you shoot up for the first time, you’ll have to get used to it.