Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

I got back on my knees, lowered my head, lifted my ass, and waited in silence, one minute, two, until I felt his hands squeezing my hips and his mouth sinking into my buttocks; I was surprised and uncomfortable, but just as I was about to protest I had the first of at least a dozen orgasms, and I said to myself, here I am again, I looked for it, I guess I really wanted it, so I turned and opened his zipper and took out his penis, the penis of a man of 55, which was another novelty for me, and put it in my mouth, tout doucement, as Édith Piaf says in her famous song, and started sucking it with such relish that Petra began breathing heavily and his heart started pounding, I could hear the heartbeats from down there.

Then we moved to an exercise mat and had a spectacular fuck, the kind that, when you finish, you’re like the first human must have been who trod the earth after the first time he got laid, a feeling that reality had exploded, as if everything had been sucked into a black hole and all that remained in the world was that stage, Petra’s penis, and my desires as a woman; that night, when I got off the metro at Oberkampf and walked to the front door of our building, it hit me, should I tell him or not? Kay was hardly entitled to blame me and I wanted him to know that, wanted him to know I was no longer the innocent young virgin he had seduced one night, and, having decided that, I went upstairs, but when I entered the apartment I found him lying on the couch with a syringe beside him, and I said to myself, O.K., another night alone, enjoy your drug, you don’t know what’s waiting for you when you wake up, and I went to the window again, with a pot of plain yogurt and a French loaf and looked out at the light of the city and listened over and over to the electronic music of Cyder Bang Bong, the musical essence of what it means to live in one of those soulless cities where all worlds collide.

I thought about the words I would have to use to tell Kay, and I looked at him, heard him making those gurgling sounds the drug forced from him every now and again; it was then that I saw a scribbled piece of paper under the syringe, a sheet torn from a notebook, which said, Dear Sabina, I know everything, I know what you did today with your drama teacher, I followed you, I’ve been following you for weeks. . at this point the letter broke off, he must have put it aside to prepare his fix. .

Although I’d been pumping myself up to remind him of the fact that he had run away with that Norwegian whore, I felt guilty and stroked his forehead, and as I did so I screamed. It was freezing cold! His sweat was so cold, his forehead felt like a salmon in a distant fjord, so I started slapping him and crying out, wake up, Kay, for God’s sake, wake up!

I called the emergency service and asked for an ambulance, while at the same time giving him a cardiac massage, which was something I had seen in a movie, but to no avail. The Sapeurs, Pompiers arrived and took him away, also taking the syringe to analyze the dose he had given himself, and I tagged along behind them, crying and on the verge of hysteria, an image nurses must know well, there can’t be an overdose that doesn’t have a heartrending scene to go with it, and this was no exception. When we were all in the ambulance, they looked at one another, extremely disturbed. Then they tried electric shock and cardiac massage, but nothing worked. I didn’t dare look, at any moment one of them would turn around and say, mademoiselle, this man is dead, is he a family member, your husband, your boyfriend, or just your roommate? And I would take all the blame on myself: I’d killed him, it was all my fault, and I knew in advance that the psychologists would say, listen, Sabina, a person only does something like this when he’s been carrying it inside him for a long time, there’s no such thing as a sudden suicide, you mustn’t blame yourself.

Everything was very strange. Nobody had announced his death to me and I was already hearing words of relief; there were many difficult moments before we reached the hospital and there they took him out without saying anything to me, only the laconic words, wait there, sit down, fill out these papers, and that was all; the worst of it is was that my crotch was still quivering with the memory of Petra’s mouth, his tongue separating my inflamed labia, and I thought, how the hell did he know, if Petra and I were alone on the stage? Of course, the curtain had folds that could easily have hidden the spy, the traitor, the informer who had told Kay, who had whispered the terrible words to him, nobody could have come in without my knowing it, it’s a small place and I know everyone, that must have been it, I wouldn’t rest until I’d learned the name of the traitor, my God, there were words that could kill, yes indeed.

As I was thinking this a doctor came out and walked toward me, Mademoiselle Vedovelli? I found it hard to look at him, my hands were shaking like wires, and he said, the vital signs are slow and there’s a loss of motor functions, but his brain is still working. In other words: your friend is in a coma. Now I need you to tell me exactly what happened, but I started crying again and said, he did it deliberately and it’s all my fault, I was unfaithful to him and he found out, that’s the truth, doctor, he’s been injecting heroin ever since I met him and he already had an overdose in New York a few months ago; he knew the right quantity to take to be safe, he wasn’t some street junkie, no, monsieur, he was a refined addict, believe me, but the doctor interrupted me and said, mademoiselle, don’t talk about him in the past tense, he’s still alive, and my hands started shaking again, the doctor had noticed that I was burying Kay, finishing him off, maybe because of his responsibility in my rape or because he had abandoned me, I don’t know, there are ways of hurting someone, resentment is the strongest thing that can unite two people, even two people who love each other and because they love each other they mistreat and destroy each other, which is something we have in our cells, like the need to reproduce or to feel pleasure, anyway, the doctor said that the best thing I could do was to go home, it was three in the morning, if there was any change they’d call me on my cell phone.

I left the hospital and walked as far as the Gare d’Austerlitz. Opposite, I found a brasserie open and ordered a glass of Sancerre. Then I walked down to the banks of the Seine. It was raining and the brown water was churning under the bridge and I thought about how good it would be to jump, once and for all, to leave behind the contradictions and the guilt, which was like ivy that had attached itself to my skin and was about to choke me. I stayed there for a while; then I carried on as far as Bastille, which at that hour was full of drunken young people coming out of the boîtes de nuit on Rue de la Roquette, and from there to Rue Oberkampf, where the memories, Kay’s smell, and the most terrifying solitude were waiting for me.

That night I couldn’t get to sleep. I drank part of a bottle of tequila and smoked a little grass, but they didn’t help. My hands were clammy with cold sweat and my heart was racing, so, in desperation, I had an idea to take myself away from the horror. . I knew where the heroin was, so I prepared a line and snorted it, calculating half of what he usually took. Immediately the apartment disappeared, and so did Paris, and so did I, and at last I felt calm.

I woke up the next day feeling strange. I was on the carpet, like my cousin Giorgetta, and I could see the view under the couch, which was something I’d never seen before. Dust, rusty springs, old cigarette butts and, right at the back, two tiny antennae, moving. It was a cockroach. I watched it tenderly and followed its rapid movements across the dust, and I said to it, little animal, help me settle a question, will you? The cockroach did an about-turn, retraced its steps, and stopped, moving its antennae, and I said, where do you think we go after we die? have you ever thought about that? The cockroach gave another complete turn and again stopped, this time closer to my face, and I said, do you think there’s life after death? do you believe in reincarnation and that kind of thing? and I said, I’d like to believe in something, I’d really like to believe that we get a second chance, and I mean that, my friend, sometimes our intentions are good but it’s the lack of experience that ruins us, or other people’s wickedness, oh, little animal, I don’t know if these things happen in your world, under the armchairs and in the drains, but I tell you this, that in my world wanting a little joy sometimes leads you to do harm, it’s hard to believe, I know, if you tighten a rope at one end it may break at the other, which is absurd but true, anyway, I’m boring you, I don’t know anything about you, I don’t even know if you have feelings, I’d like it if you did because I think you might understand me, right now I feel that I’m like you, that I’m walking in the dust and the rusty springs, moving my antennae alone, very alone in this world, just as you must be. . The cockroach, disturbed by the air shifted by my voice, stood up on its hind feet, did an about-turn and scuttled off to the wall, and before I could say anything disappeared through a crack and I was alone again, so I dragged myself to the table, where the bag of heroin was, and prepared two more lines, and in this way three days passed.