Santiago Gamboa - Necropolis

I collapsed. I was speechless.

A mixture of fear and happiness swept through my body, like some strange contrast liquid. Delphine had come in behind me and when she saw me on the floor she screamed. After a few minutes I got my breath back. I had to make a decision. Delphine went to the Banana Café in my place and I ran to the hospital. What I had waited for for so long had just happened and now I was scared, is he all right? will he remember me? I got to the room and saw him, he had his eyes open. He looked at me and an expression of doubt came over his face, but then he said, Sabina? and burst into tears. I kneeled beside him, kissed his hand, and thanked God. He had come back, and he remembered me. He was alive. The world had started turning again for the two of us.

The first thing he asked was, why are you dressed like that? I told him that I had made myself beautiful for him, but he didn’t seem to believe me. I explained that it was by chance and that I had to bring him up to date with everything. There have been many changes, darling, things are going very well for us now, you’ll see. He still had to spend another week in the hospital, for tests, and the best thing was that there were no serious lesions in the brain. The only thing he had lost was the sense of taste; things tasted neutral, like cardboard or a blank page, that was how he described it. He could bear the fact that he couldn’t enjoy food, but what he found very sad was that he could no longer savor the taste of my body. But he was alive and remembered everything.

Gradually I told him what had happened during the year he had been absent. About my addiction and subsequent detox, and the main reason I told him all this was to dissuade him from falling victim to heroin again. He didn’t feel the need, his body was cured, but in his mind he remembered the pleasure and the sense of calm. All the same, he didn’t relapse, and after his “rebirth” he stayed clean. With time, of course, we did do other drugs, but nothing really serious. Coke, to hold up under the relentless pace of the work, and sometimes hashish to fight stress. We did, though, drink rather a lot. It’s really hard to live in this rotten world without having at least one damn vice, given how hard and inhospitable reality can be, but anyway, let me carry on with my story. Kay quickly got used to my work. Once he had gotten over the blow of that thing with Petra, which he barely remembered anyway, he started to work in the photographic department of Eve Studios, which was no longer based in that dirty building in Belleville, but had taken over a large apartment near the Opéra, almost thirteen hundred feet of studios and offices.

We left the apartment on Rue Oberkampf and moved into a more spacious, light-filled one on Rue Pascal, in the vicinity of Boulevard Arago and Place des Gobelins, which meant that on Sundays we could go to the little market on Rue de la Contrescarpe and eat oysters and drink Chablis and read the newspapers, which was one of Kay’s great pleasures. Kay had opinions and ideas on everything that happened in the world. Thanks to him, I stopped being some kind of selfish animal who only cared about acting and making money. Thanks to him and all those newspapers I became aware that the world had a lot wrong with it and that the bad things that happened to other people could happen to me one day. That was what I thought as I listened to Kay commenting on the news, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, all the victims of violence, in other words, reality in all its glory. I really took notice of what he said, but at the same time I thought to myself, it’s curious, when I was on the floor, like a fallen gladiator about to receive the fatal spear, who cared about me? Nobody, I went through that ordeal alone, and I say alone because calling my cousin Giorgetta company would be like giving a human identity to bedbugs and lice: the lice I sometimes got, in those first movies, from my partenaires on the set. The world is cruel to small things, and I was one; a weak flame that needed to be kept alive by protecting hands and could only become a substantial fire with a great deal of effort and sacrifice.

Our beautiful apartment on Rue Pascal became our bolt-hole. Large and silent — an increasingly rare thing in the lawless cities where we live today — it gradually filled with shelves and books, histories of the cinema and biographies of directors, my own favorite director being, of course, John Cassavetes, while Kay’s was Blake Edwards, especially his amazing Days of Wine and Roses, with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, a movie that reminded him of what he had been through and what we had both suffered. For anyone who knows Cassavetes, I have to say that being with Kay I felt like Gena Rowlands in Faces, I’m sorry, I put that in for the fans. You’ll notice that my references are to normal cinema, auteur cinema, and you may think that’s a contradiction, since I’ve devoted my life to porn. Well, my answer to that is that the cinema is not divided into good cinema and porn, but good cinema and bad cinema, period. A porn movie by Lasse Braun or Othar Bill James can be as good of its kind as a film by Kubrick of its kind, that’s my opinion, anyway. Porn has its Olympus, fantastic actors like John Holmes, who died of AIDS, but who had one of the most extraordinary penises ever captured by a camera, or Ron Jeremy, a really funny man, a man without any great qualities and rather comical-looking, but great at fucking and an exceptional actor, who even did a few things outside the porn world, a short role in Jesus Christ Superstar and another in Reindeer Games, with Ben Affleck.

I come back to what I was saying before: our apartment on Rue Pascal was filling with beautiful things and artistic friends who came and went. As I said before, Kay started to make a career for himself as the photographer for Eve Studios, which then sold his work to magazines, Hot Video or Stardust or Plaisir xxl, for good prices, sometimes for more than they paid me, which was strange, but didn’t shock me, since Kay was talented and by this stage we were sharing all our income.

One night, after a bottle and a half of gin and lemon, six hashish cigarettes and an intense session involving three of my seven bodily orifices, I made up my mind to tell him the last secret I had kept from him, in other words, my rape. I don’t know how I found the strength. I told him the story in minute detail. Kay looked at me, stunned, and said, Stef? He went to the window in silence and after a while said, he was always an idiot, trying to imitate me in everything and never succeeding. What he did to you was unspeakable, and he’ll pay for it, he and his lousy friends, I already know who they are.

The next day, much to my surprise, Kay dragged me out of bed at nine in the morning, which was early for us, and rushed me to Charles de Gaulle airport. We got on a Norwegian Air plane and two hours later we were in Oslo. We took a taxi, didn’t even drop by his family home, but went straight to a lawyer’s office, where a formal complaint for rape was drawn up. Then we went to a police station and lodged the complaint with all the requisite details. From there we went to a hotel to rest and the next day we flew back to Paris and waited for proceedings to begin.

A week later, the telephone rang and it was Stef. He had been informed of the complaint and wanted to know if his brother had gone crazy, but Kay replied, you’re the crazy one and you’re going to pay, you and your lousy friends, where do you keep your brain? in your ass? you might think more clearly if you did, you idiot, what was going through your mind to make you do something like that? did you think I’d never find out? Well, you screwed up, not only did I find out but it so happens that I’m a civilized person, and I believe these things should be dealt with by the law. You’d have preferred to settle this with a couple of punches in the nose, like you do with your cronies, which just shows what an idiot you are, because this is different, this is the worst thing you can do to a person, somebody I trusted you with, and for that if nothing else they ought to put your balls between cubes of ice and puncture them with a drill. That woman thought she was safe with you and you took advantage of her weakness; now stop sniveling, don’t dare call this house again, as far as I’m concerned you’re no longer my brother. The lawyer has orders not to stop until you and the scumbags you call your friends are in prison with long sentences, far from the people you contaminate with your stupidity, if you did it once it’s because you’ve done it other times, God knows with what poor women, so I’m going to do the human race a favor, a favor that consists in giving you a kick up the ass and making sure you all go to prison for most of what remains of your useless lives, with plenty of time to just breathe, eat, and shit, which will be the noblest thing you can do. Goodbye.