Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

I stood up and went to the shower and stayed there for nearly an hour, letting the hot water run over my shoulders, directing the jet of water at my pubis and hearing distant drums, everything was very new and the desire I felt for that man was irrational and probably unhealthy, what others call love at first sight or — which comes to the same thing — the intuition that somebody can destroy us, and so I said to myself, Sabina, when you finish your shower you have to get dressed, walk past Kay and take Giorgetta outside, take her away from Paris and back to Rome, where your aunts are; I felt I was on the edge of something very dangerous and on the verge of falling.

But when I came out of the bathroom, what I saw made things even more complicated, because I saw Kay lying beside Giorgetta with the syringe in his forearm. They had both just injected themselves. From her position, it was obvious my cousin had taken another fix, so I went to the kitchen, made myself a chicken sandwich, had a Diet Coke and waited, how long would it last? After a while, I went to Kay’s room, which was filthy and was where he kept his rolls of film and developing equipment, and lay down facing an old TV set which was switched on but with the screen blank. I looked for the remote and when I pressed the button saw it wasn’t switched to a TV channel but to a movie.

I pressed play and, to my surprise, what did I see? it was a porn movie! A really old movie by Lasse Braun called Sin Dreamer, with pot-bellied men lying in a meadow, having sex with plump women with vaginas as hairy as spiders, a really old-fashioned kind of movie. I got very aroused, and when it finished I looked for another, because those two addicts were still lying on the carpet, and the one I found was Frequence Blue, by the same director, only this time I put my hand inside my panties and started touching my clitoris, I remember it very well, there was a scene in the country where a woman in an old Citröen sucked the cocks of three gendarmes from the highway police who were going to give her a fine, and at the end I heard noises and saw Kay come into the room, so I jumped on him and we had sex again, really wild sex. Then Giorgetta came in, with her eyelids inflamed and her skin all dirty, and asked Kay for more heroin, but he said, that’s enough for today, sweetheart, cool it, sleep a bit, you need to rest, and she said, O.K., and immediately slipped through the door and lay down on the floor again. Finally we fell asleep, with me embracing Kay, the man who had deflowered me, and Giorgetta on the carpet, her habitat for the last twelve hours.

And that’s pretty much how the weekend passed, with Giorgetta injecting increasingly large doses and me having sex with Kay, who with each fuck seemed to me more delicious and his penis sweeter. On the Monday, about ten in the morning, Kay had some black coffee, grabbed the bag with his cameras, and said, my dears, I’m going to work and I won’t be back before tonight, so make yourselves at home, I don’t know what’s in the fridge, so feel free to go to the supermarket and buy provisions, which wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway, ciao, à ce soir, and he left, slamming the door behind him.

No sooner had Kay gone than Giorgetta rushed to the drawers in his night table, the sideboard, the closet, and the kitchen, looking for drugs, and when she didn’t find any she said, the bastard’s left me high and dry, I’m going out on the street to get some more, wait for me here, and I said, Giorgetta, do you realize what you’re doing? Seeing the look of surprise on her face, I added, you’ve turned into a junkie in only three days, don’t you think that’s a bit. . excessive? but she replied, I told you I wanted to do something crazy on this trip, I didn’t say anything to you about the fact that you’re fucking Kay, did I? No, I replied, because it’s none of your business, and she wagged her finger and said, that’s exactly what I was thinking, so let’s make a deal, we each mind our own business, what do you think? I said yes, and she left. That night, when Kay got home, she still hadn’t returned. She came back three days later in a very bad state, with staring eyes and her skin all greasy, smelling of excrement and with blood in her anus. I bathed her without asking any questions, only ventured to say, have you had enough yet? can we go back to Rome? We did go back, in fact, but against all expectation I was the one who immediately got on a plane and returned to Paris, because I had fallen in love with Kay. He promised to make me a big star and I believed him, how could I not believe him when he allowed me to fuck him every night and suck his cock and lick his balls? Love at first sight and the bond with the first male who goes on the prowl between your legs did the rest.

Seven months later, Kay left me for a Norwegian model he was taking photographs of, and set off for Oslo. But I went after him. I wasn’t going to allow a junkie in a silk bra and G-string to take my man, however languid and rich she was. When I got to Oslo, I went to stay in his brother Stef’s apartment, because I’d known him in Paris and got along well with him, and devoted myself to waiting for Kay outside the front door of his girlfriend’s building.

The whore would do drugs with him and give him five-hundred-euro bills, and I realized that for somebody like Kay, a child of the Scandinavian middle class, a left-wing activist and enemy of globalization, an opponent of Norway’s joining the European Union, she represented something special, a way of touching something distant and desired with his fingers or his foreskin. I waited for them for about a week, but in vain. Stef didn’t know his brother’s whereabouts, at least that was what he told me.

I was already on the verge of going back to Paris when Stef invited me to a party, saying, a group of my friends is playing tonight at Yellowstone Creek, which was a trendy techno bar in the city, so I went with him. But on the way back home he raped me. I don’t want to go into details, I’ll only tell you that first he tried to drug me, then to seduce me the natural way, with laughter and alcohol, and when he didn’t get anywhere he resorted to violence, first beating me up and then, when I was on the floor, fucking me as much as he wanted and forcing me to suck his ass. When he’d finished, he called two friends and invited then to fuck me, which they were happy to do, the bastards. When they were all satisfied, they left me lying in one of the side entrances of the railroad station in Oslo, at four in the morning, where I almost got raped again.

As you might have guessed, Kay returned to Paris when the bitch got bored with him and threw him out on the street. I was in his apartment waiting for him, because in the meantime I had threatened my mother that I’d go back to Mexico and so her boyfriend from the Tijuana cartel decided to send me a few dollars a month, which allowed me to wait for my man calmly and, above all, with my resentment intact. I was also able to analyze my rape obsessively, and I say “my rape” because it was a painful baptism into life, as if somebody had said, hey, you, do you want to be really free? do you want to be able to stroll through the world as you please with drug addicts and punks and alcoholics in a highly altered state, not only that but walk around in miniskirts and your belly button in full view, open to the dirty air of the cities? Well, this is what happens, this is the price, they raped you and now you’ll be someone else, someone stronger, the tribe inevitably reprimands women who resist being confined to the female role that males have created for them, and that’s why whoever abandons that way of thinking is violently punished, in a way that is tantamount to amputating her arm or her clitoris, something like that.