Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

They took me to another room with a bath, and said, please have a wash. If you want to take a shower there’s no hurry, take your time, when you’re finished come into the living room. By the time I was dressed, Petra was waiting for me with the money. Before we left, the old lady said, thank you, mademoiselle, if you like I can ask for you again in a month, and I said, ask for me, and I’ll tell you if it’s possible at the time. The woman handed over ten two-hundred euro bills and squeezed my arm saying in a low voice, I know this can’t be easy for a young woman, but you have to understand, they’re human beings, too. . I understand, I said, I’ll wait for your call, and went back down to the street with Petra.

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.