Authors: Hannah Tennant-Moore
Wreck and Order (23 page)
Inside are several patio tables, two of which are occupied by single men drinking beer; a chubby-faced bartender chatting with a white couple sitting on barstools and drinking an icy blue beverage out of long, bright straws; Christmas lights flashing over three rows of liquors.
“No,” Suriya says, standing in the doorway.
“Hello, madam!” the bartender calls out. “Come in, please.”
“Do you serve food?”
“Of course, madam, whatever you like.”
“No,” Suriya repeats, holding the door open, refusing to take one step inside.
“Don't you want to see the menu?”
“No.”
So I follow her back out. “What is wrong with that café?”
“For my whole life, if someone asks me âHave you been inside a bar?,' I must answer no.”
“That wasn't really a bar. It was also a restaurant.”
“El. There are people inside that room sitting and drinking beer. They are committing no other activity.” She shakes her head, lips pursed. “I cannot eat in that place.”
Rajith is growing fussy, complaining, tugging at Suriya's hand. I give up.
I follow Suriya back to the lounge chairs by the pool. She unwraps tepid two-day-old curries whose stench overpowers the wafts of chlorine and sunscreen. Rajith takes eager handfuls of Suriya's cooking. She drops a large ball of food onto her tongue and then gestures to the pool attendant with her dirty hand. “Now he will tell me I cannot eat in this place,” she says. But he just watches us with the same disdain he reserved earlier for the domed, cloudless sky. I'm hungry and dig in, too. An enormous white man wearing a Speedo that sprouts long, curly, blond hairs dives into the pool. A small girl in a party dress complains to her mother in French that it's too hot outside. A hummingbird dips in and out of the arbor marking the entrance to the bathhouse. The Sri Lankan girl in goggles performs a perfect crawl stroke from one end of the pool to the other. Out of soggy newspaper, we eat handfuls of sticky red rice and fatty curries. I can't stop eating, even though my stomach contracts around each bite of the old food, grown viscous and clumpy on our travels.
Suriya takes a long shower again that afternoon, emerges with rouged cheeks, wearing the towel like a sarong, her knee-length black hair soaking the rug. I invite her to sit on the edge of the bed with me. Her face is open and easeful, until she sees the tightness in mine. “What is it, El?”
“I've decided that I need to travel on my own.” Terrible phrasing. “I mean that I need to spend some time alone now. It's been so good to be with you here, but I justâ” I pause and wait for her to help me. She stares. “I am not really good at being with people. I wanted to show you a vacation. But now I need to be alone and quiet. Go somewhere and meditate, I think. And work on my translation. My French works.”
“So Rajith and I go home. No problem. Thank you for showing me a vacation. You are so kind. I understand it is difficult for you.” She stands up and rummages through her bag with her back to me.
Carrying clothes folded into perfect squares, she returns to the bathroom. I watch her narrow, downy calves until they disappear behind the closed door. I actually allowed myself to believe Suriya and I were changing each other's lives. The angelic, impoverished Sri Lankan and the privileged, self-destructive American join forces and set their small worlds to rights. A heartwarming tale.
At the foot of the small mountain that supports the Royal Resort, we wait for buses going in opposite directions. Rajith is bouncy and talkative, taking my hand and telling me things I have no hope of understanding. I thought I would have time at the bus stop to properly thank Suriya for being such a good host, to explain how much her friendship means to me and how impressed I am by the way she moves through the world, tell her I'll miss her and will try to come back soon. But my bus comes right away. My skinny arms enclose her skinnier frame. Her body is hot and stiff. I step back and hold out two ten-thousand-rupee notes. “I can give you more if you need.” She shakes her head side to side, takes the bills, puts them in the breast pocket of her dress, bites down on her lip. I hug her again. Her arms remain limp at her sides.
I heave my pack onto one shoulder and fumble for the other strap, feeling a pang of such emptiness that I cannot wait to be alone on the bus, just another tourist. “Nangi, please tell your brother and your parents thank you for me. And Nangi, I can't tell you howâ” The bus starts to pull away. “Go, go.” Suriya gestures frantically. I leap onto the bottom rung of the steps, practically shouting, “Colombo? Colombo?” An adolescent boy wearing bleached jeans and a gaudy necklace meets my eye and nods. I push my way through the thick mass of flesh in search of a place to stow my bag. The bus lurches into a pothole. I swing backward and nearly crush an infant with my pack. The mother presses the baby to her bosom, her hand clamped over its head. “Sorry, so sorry,” I say. There is no Sinhala word for sorry. She looks at me steadily through narrowed eyes. I should not be traveling in her country for the equivalent of a handful of pennies. I have been blessed with birth in America. If I can afford a plane ticket to this country, it is my duty to pay for a private driver. But I'd rather stay home than watch Sri Lanka pass by through tinted glass. I don't care how many babies I have to take out in the process. No, no. I
do
hope your son's head is okay. And I'm so glad you don't know English. Or telepathy. “Sorry,” I say again, aloud, sincere, heavy with the weight of myself now that Suriya is gone, now that I've sent her away.
Ducking under arms, swinging from one seat back to another, I make my way to the front of the bus and deposit my bag under the driver's seat. A young woman holding a baby and sitting beside a small boy points at me and nods her head toward the few inches of space next to her older son until I sit down. The musculature of the woman's face seems to have wasted away around its frame, displaying her gums and teeth like the plaster model of a mouth in a dentist's office. Her cheekbones press into her skin, half-moons extending from her temples to her nostrils. Her sari is tied in the Indian manner, bunched and stretched in a thin strip over her shoulder for ease in traveling. Her torso is a small, hard cylinder. The baby lies across her lap, his thick eyelashes pressed together and his tiny tongue falling to the side of his mouth. The mother couldn't be much older than twenty. She reaches into the purse sitting on her older son's lap and takes out two pieces of dull yellow candy. She hands one to the boy and the other to me. I open my mouth wide and dramatically place the candy on my tongue. The child imitates me with slow precision. The baby gurgles and paddles its feet against his mother's concave stomach. She puts him over her shoulder and pats his back, but it's too late. He is wide awake and suffering and his suffering must end now. He pulls at his mother's sari blouse, pushing his feet into her stomach and trying to scale her upper body. The mother pullsâgently, gentlyâhis hands from her blouse buttons. She puts her index finger in his mouth. He cranes his neck back and bites down. Her eyebrows wince lazily. He spits out her finger and resumes his wail. She holds him against her chest, rocking methodically, her face blank with exhaustion. Motherhood: the greatest gift of all time, according to Suriya and government posters pasted throughout Sri Lanka. The little boy sits with his hands on his knees, leaning forward to see out the window past his mother's shoulder. The baby's wail claws at my throat.
When I was a little girl, I had the usual fantasy of feeling the baby kick in my stomach, singing it to sleep, nourishing it through my breasts, my body existing only as sustenance for another creature. The fantasy began ebbing in adolescence, as I retreated further and further from my peers, lusting after vagueness. I have little respect for the maternal instinct now, the hope for self-fulfillment through the most obvious pathway of the body, the dumb ease of a woman with a baby, their bodies so perfectly suited to each other it's as if they're already dead and appearing in an album of old family photographs. At what used to be called childbearing age, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary about the devils that plagued her, “heavy black ones,” devils of failureâa twenty-nine-year-old woman, unmarried, childless. Twenty years later, she wrote to herself that children were nothing compared to writing. But of course I am no Virginia Woolf. I am a modern evolutionary casualty, a woman capable of bearing children but deprived of the will to do so; a woman endowed with the will for meaningful work but constitutionally incapable of pursuing it. I am the type of human who will die out.
Outside the train station, vendors are building pyramids out of watermelons, papayas, and wood apples. They shake out their legs, down clay cups of tea, yawn, hack, spit. “I give you good price, madam,” a man says, holding out a watermelon to me. I'm carrying a water bottle in one hand and a coconut roti in the other. The straps of my backpack dig into my shoulders. Heat surges through the veins in my face. I look down at the watermelon and shake my head, scowling.
“But you can balance on your head, no, madam?”
Peals of laughter from the vendors.
A man covered in warts and fist-size moles shuffles his bare feet along the pavement, hand outstretched, repeating a Sinhalese plea in a monotone. I put a coin in his hand as we pass each other. He scowls at his palm. He expects paper money from tourists.
I was relieved the first time I heard the anti-panhandling announcements on the subway in New York.
We ask you NOT to give. Please help us maintain an orderly subway.
There was a gray-haired black man who kept showing up in my subway car. His tiny eyes blinked under thick brows as he shook the coins at the bottom of his battered twenty-ounce Pepsi cup, intoning, “If you can spare anything in the category of a few dollars or a few cents. If you can spare anything in the category of a few dollars or a few cents⦔ The vain, stubborn care of the word
category
was a fist around my heart. The authoritative voice on the intercom required me to ignore it. I tried to explain the sadness of this relief to Brian. “But it doesn't help anyone to collect a handful of coins on the train,” he said.
“But that might be the only way some people can make money,” I said.
“You can't really believe that.”
So many times a day I loathed him. Why does it still feel terrible to be exiled from the “normal days” he promised?
I walk into the train station and buy a ticket south. I want to find a sleepy beach town to finish my translation, stare at the ocean, reckon with the state of my life. When the train arrives, I heave my pack through the window to reserve an open seat and then clamber aboard after my belongings. I lean back against the sticky leather seat and close my eyes. My favorite fact of traveling: so many hours in which it is impossible to do anything at all. The train grumbles and lurches. I rest my elbow on the ledge of the open window. The wind tastes sweet on my arms. Suriya will be alone in the kitchen tonight. The image is a lump in my throat. But I don't wish I were there with her.
We chug through the hysteria of Colombo's sounds and smells and competing needs until we are riding the spine of a high, narrow mountain, alongside a river gilded with mineral silt. Fragments of artificial color dot the hillsideâthe saris of Tamil tea pickers plucking rough leaves by the handful and dropping them in giant sacks tied to their backs. Water buffalo crawl antlike in the paddy fields below layers of mountains, the closest ones feathery with giant pines, the farthest purpled silhouettes.
We stop at a town that has set precarious roots in the hillside just below the tracks. A pudgy woman gets on the train and sits next to me, a toddler on her lap. The girl wears a red tank top on which sequins form the words
HEARTS HEARTS HEARTS!!!
She eats cookies out of her mother's purse and beats a rhythm on her knees. “Butalay, butalay, boom boom!” Men walk up and down the aisles, hawking fried fish and dhal balls, calling “Swaray, swaray!” Sunlight spears the tip of my elbow. Metallic claps coming from the floorboards between cars keep time with the jolting of my seat. As pictures outside the window flash and disappearâwaves hurling themselves at shore, women weaving palm fronds into roofs in their front yardsâI feel myself inside a small, sparse room. Curtainless. Bright. White walls, heavy furniture with peeling white paint. A bed covered only in a white sheet, always mussed. Clean but untidy. Objects lie about, living inside their discrete functions. A mew of contentment presses against my closed lips. For a short while I am so relaxed that where I imagine myself to be is the same place as where I am. The train picks up speed and jostles the room out of my hands.
Hours pass. I sit. The mother and toddler are replaced by a man with a small, deeply creased face. He nods at me in greeting, picks up an English-language newspaper that has been abandoned in the aisle, shakes it open and laughs. I glance at the headlines: President Lowers Rice Prices! President De-mines Northern Region! President Opens State-of-Art Cinema!
“Were you reading this?” he asks.
“No.”
“Good. All lies.”
“Is that a government paper?”
“Indeed. Garbage. You are from the U.S.A.?”
“Yes, I am. How can you tell?”
“My elder brother has lived in Chicago for many years. I recognize the American manner.”
“What is the American manner, exactly?”
“Friendly but cautious. Wary.”
“Your English is better than most Americans'.” I offer a smile that I hope distinguishes my friendliness from that of my wary compatriots.
His family used to be quite cozy with the British, he tells me. He spent most of his childhood on a golf course, in neat little suits and bow ties. His laugh is raucous and long. His uncle served in parliament and his parents were some kind of government administrators. The British loved the Tamils. Divide and conquer! Well, the Sinhalese have certainly put us back in our place. “Nimal.” He holds out his hand.
“Elsie. So what happened to your family after independence?”
They had to leave Colombo after Black July, the month of riots in retaliation for the Tigers' first big attack, which killed thirteen Sri Lankan soldiers. Colombo raged for weeks afterward, with Sinhalese mobs setting fire to Tamil homes, businesses, and people. A mob nearly killed Nimal. His perfect Sinhalese accent saved his life. “Death to Tamils,” he shouted, until the mob was convinced he was one of them. But his family could not stay in Colombo after Black July. Sinhalese his parents had been close with cut off all ties, afraid of being branded collaborators. Nimal's best friend bid him farewell after school one day. “I must not look you in the face again in this life,” he said, and turned his back. After the riots, Nimal's uncle quit parliament. He had stayed even when his party was forced to support the Sinhalese-only language policy, even when they gave up the fight against the law requiring Tamils to get better marks than Sinhalese to enter university. But after the government-supported pogrom, Nimal's parents and uncle had to accept the gravity of anti-Tamil feeling. Their family name would not protect them from a mob armed with machetes and kerosene. They moved to Vavuniya, Tiger country. Those were the golden years for Prabhakaran, who had prepared himself to lead the Tamil Tigers by torturing insects and sticking pins in his fingernails to inure himself to pain. He demanded every family give one child to the LTTE. Nimal had only one sister. The Tigers loved female fightersâbombs could easily be hidden under the dresses of seemingly expectant mothersâbut Nimal would never have sent his sister to war. So Nimal joined the Tigers. When they said jump, you jumped. Anyway, he didn't mind joining, after what the Sinhalese did to his cousin. Crucified him in the road. Nailed his hands to the pavement. Left him there to be stampeded. Nimal thought Prabhakaran was a lunatic, but this lunatic was the Tamils' only hope. The Tigers used to put up posters that showed two different Tamil girls: One going to school with pigtails and a neat dress, then ending up dead in the bushes, her skirt pushed up past her waist; Sri Lankan soldiers smirked nearby. The other girl stood tall and proud in camouflage pants, staring down the barrel of a rifle. This was not only propaganda. Nimal's sister did not join the Tigers and she was raped by the Indians, the supposed peacekeeping force that came to help end the war. India sent the most brutal men they hadâfrom backward tribes, no inkling of civilizationâand gave them no direction. Nimal told his sister never to tell anyone that she'd been raped so she would be able to get married later. Which she did, to a carpenter who was forced to build bunkers for the Tigers. They had four kids. The whole family is dead now. Killed during the last months of the war. Rajapaksha knows how to win a war, you have to hand it to the man. Jail the journalists and bomb, bomb, bomb.
Or so goes my fantasy of the story Nimal might tell me, a tidy, personalized illustration of the Sri Lankan horror stories I've read about.
What actually happens is that Nimal crumples the newspaper and chucks it out the window, asks me what city I live in, tells me he was in New York once, asks what I think of my country's first black president. I try to get him to talk about how his family fared during the war, mentioning the Black July riots to let him know I'm informed, but he just laughs more, tells me I know my history, am I sure I'm American?
I turn my face into the breeze from the window, strong enough to justify closing my eyes, Dieu merci. I spend a lot of time reading alone while others are sitting in traffic on their way to a desk, and I tell myself this makes me better than other Americans, with their slavishness to their computers and SUVs and houses with two guest bathrooms. But what do I have? I have a full, active mind that brings me neither peace nor love nor contentment nor purpose. If I were a character in a novel, I would be the quintessential twenty-first-century narrator: characterized by the aimless bustle of the sharp mind, revealed through thoughts about my inner torment rather than events that explain the torment. There was a blog post about this on some literary site one time. I read it in my pajamas after Brian left for work, drinking coffee, eating instant oatmeal. My mental activity both sustains and paralyzes me! Exactly! I finished my oatmeal, sat at the table. The obvious paradox was that there was nothing I could do with the realization. I was not some dynamic character out of, say, Dickens or George Eliot or, umâ¦I grip my fist in front of my mouth, deeply ashamed, even in the theater of my mind peopled only with other thoughts, to be unable to recall a single other nineteenth-century novelist. As if quick recall of canonical writers would lead to inner peace.
But now something is happening that shuts my brain up. We are hurtling through a darkness so complete its texture is the total absence of texture. There is no boundary between self and air. My hand, inches from my eyes, is an indistinguishable part of the mass of black particles careering about me, interrupted here and there by thin wisps of light. Near the end of the tunnel, the white threads spin together. The light becomes shapes. The shapes become objects, disappointing in their familiarity.
Nimal claps his hands on his thighs. He looks past my shoulder at a train station, barren except for a man in a sarong, picking his teeth on a shady bench. “I exit at the next stop,” he says. “Would you like to come with me?”
I cross my arms over my chest and stare at the seat back in front of me. “I am married,” I lie.
“I wish you and your family happiness and good health.” He retrieves his bag from the overhead rack and explodes in laughter by way of goodbye.
So long, stranger.
And now we come to the land of infinite plywood shacks with plastic tarps for roofs. The only visible earth is a small rectangle of dirt in the center of every four shacks. In one of these tiny yards a dog lies on its side, unblinking. In others, kids chase one another and shout. The train continues past a mound of garbage several stories high. I block my nose against the stench. Scavengers walk atop the compressed mass of refuse: insects crawling atop a mountain of colored sand. Nearby, barefoot kids play cricket in a field.
A family gets on the packed train and settles in the passageway between cars. The mother and three children immediately fall asleep, draped over one another. The father remains awake, sitting in the open doorway with bent legs to keep his family from falling to the tracks below. As they near their destination, the parents wake the kids with chocolate cookies, which the baby laughingly smears in her sister's hair until the older girl cries. The father takes the baby while the mother fixes the toddler's ponytail, murmuring in her ear. A family. The most natural thing in the world, for some.
I get off the train in a beach town whose name appeals to me. On the street outside the station, well-dressed men fall into step alongside me, offering me the best room in town, very good price, special price just for me, come and see, they drive, no problem. I find an unaggressive rickshaw driver, fit my bag into the back of the tiny three-wheeler, and ask him to take me to the Retired Peacock, a guesthouse recommended to me by a pimply older man just before I got off the trainâ“Italian lady owner. You say Tharaka sent you.” The driver barrels past vans and flatbed trucks piled with timber, then turns down a narrow coastal road. The air is aliveâvapor exhaled by leaves after a rainstorm. Or something. Droplets of sunlight flirt with the surface of the ocean. It's pretty, is what I mean. Boys in torn shorts stand on fishing stilts in the shallows. A pile of rocks covered in wire separates the road from the sand, protection against another tsunami, more hopeful than actual.
We turn down a dirt path. I am all alone in the back of this rickshaw on this unknown road under a pale pink sky, just visible through the gaps in the silly palm trees. My freedom is huge and it adores me. The driver honks at a cow blocking our path. The beast moos in protest before ambling into the woods. Rebar juts out of crumbling pastel walls, the remains of houses decimated by the tsunami. The driver stops in front of a white picket fence. “Welcome” is written in English, Italian, and Sinhala in small, neat, golden letters. As I step out of the rickshaw, a pack of dogs bounds toward the gate, leaping and growling.
“Dogs okay,” the driver tells me, extending his palm to collect the fare.
“You don't scare me,” I lie to the dogs as I walk through a yard of patchy grass and unpainted stone huts. A lanky boy lugging a dead palm leaf stops short when he hears my footsteps. He looks terrified, like I did that time in Paris when two giggling girls passed me as I was walking in the Jardin des Plantes and I shrieked and dropped my book. I spent so much time alone thenâraking the dead leaves of my thoughts, staring at the piles and hoping a pattern would emergeâthat the intrusion of laughter frightened me.
“Do you have any rooms?” I ask the startled boy.
“I get Manuela.” He walks to a stone patio attached to a house. Fluffy blue cushions are scattered on the ground. A solid stone coffee table and bench seem fashioned directly out of the earth, an ancient boulder resigning itself to the quaint human need for furniture. A woman rises off the bench and sets her book on the ground. She wears a yellow linen skirt and a loose tank top, no bra. Her hips are wide, her arm muscles conspicuous, her hair long and dry and white, tied in a ponytail slung over one shoulder. “You want a room? You did not phone?”
“No. I justâsomeone on the train told me about this place. Tharaka? He said he knew you.”
“This is a resort. This is not a backpacker hangout. Really, you should have called. You should not trust a stranger on the train.” She stares out of pale, pale blue eyes.
“How much are your rooms?”
“We have private cabanas. They start at three thousand rupees.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“How much were you hoping to spend?”
“More like six hundred.” I have thousands of dollars in the bank. Still, it feels true that I could not afford to pay thirty dollars a night for a private hut on the beach. I'm so accustomed to frugality, never having counted on myself for a steady income. That's partly why it felt like I was doing something really good when I brought Suriya and Rajith to a fancy hotel. But it was just another idea from which I wanted too much.
“I can't open up one of the cabanas for six hundred rupees,” Manuela says. “I'm sorry to turn you away. I'll have one of the boys take you back to town at least. I was about to send him to the market anyway.” She has the indeterminate accent of a nonnative English speaker who's been speaking English for many years in a country of nonnative English speakers. “Might as well take off your pack and have a drink before you go.” She walks into the main house and returns with a lopsided hand-blown glass filled with ice water. She sits down cross-legged in front of the bench and rolls a cigarette. I walk to the edge of the patio, which extends to a cove. Upturned canoes lie on the sand. Hammocks link palm trees. Manuela coughs.
“How long have you been here?” I ask.
“Twelve years.”
“And you stay here year-round?”
She nods inside whorls of smoke.
“You never go back toâ”
“To Italy? No.” She smiles with abrupt tenderness.
“Do you mind if I walk down to the beach?”
“Please.”
The wet sand mirrors the sunset. I raise my skirt above my knees. Warm water pools around my ankles. “Oh,” I say out loud, and cup my hands over my smile. Could I ever love anything more than the ocean? A huge wave rears up. I run backward, but the water crashes down on my legs and knocks me off my feet.
Manuela calls out from the patio. “Why don't you just stay here? I don't have any reservations for a while. Eight hundred rupees?”
My cabana is a hollowed-out stone containing only a white bed frameâhigh off the ground and net-free, since there are screens on the many circular windows. We eat bread and bananas for dinner. Manuela eats with one hand and reads with the other, sitting cross-legged with her back against the stone bench. I float in a chair swing. Cicadas fill the gaps between the crash of waves. Manuela offers me a glass of wine. I hesitate for a moment, afraid of my excitement at the prospect of breaking the alcohol fast my body has been relishing since I got to Sri Lanka. “I'd love some wine. Just one glass.”
“I wasn't offering more than a glass.”
She walks toward the kitchen. Acne covers the surface of her back, pustules so tiny and white they are almost pretty on her leathery skin. She returns with two glasses half full of lovely maroon liquid. A dog sighs and rests its chin on its paw. The ceiling lights are dim, their fixtures clogged with dead insects.
“For a resort, this place doesn't seem all that hedonistic,” I say. “It's more like a monastery.”
“Or a prison. A voluntary prison.”
“Why did you put yourself in prison?”
Manuela's laugh is like a glass half full of lovely maroon liquid. Convenient metaphor that happens to be accurate. When she first came to Asia, she tells me, she had all these ideas of changing her life. She had been trying to party her way out of misery for most of her adulthood. She spent two years at a monastery in Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Although she never actually took the vow, Manuela lived as a nunâcelibate, no eating after noon, barely speaking. And then she realized that for her being a nun was just another extreme, another way to avoid herself. She got to know an Italian couple staying in Bodh Gayaânouveau Buddhist fanatics who were in the process of divesting themselves of their worldly goods, one of which was a large property on the Sri Lankan coast. They offered it to Manuela dirt cheap when it seemed like the war would never end. Manuela never (“nev-er,” she repeats, separating the syllables) thought she'd be the kind of person who would operate a resort, but it's ended up being perfect for her. As soon as she started hiring local boys to build the cabanas, she felt immense relief, as if the vague inner demand she had spent all her life trying to ignore suddenly shut the hell up.
“And now you're helping people. Giving them a place to get that same kind of relaxation.”
Manuela shrugs. “Everyone wants something different from this place.”
I push off the ground and swing toward the far wall, where drawings hang suspended from a wire with clothespins. Several of them feature Christmas trees of increasing precision, neon green and covered in sparkles. “
Buon Natale!
” is written in red and green block letters. I ask who drew them.
“Emil. My son.” Manuela stands and tucks her book under her arm. “Take care walking to your cabana. I don't have the ground lights on.” From the darkness beyond the patio, she asks me to forgive her, she never asked my name.
I dream of a middle-age man wearing a dirty sweat suit, carrying a cane. His belly droops over the exhausted stumps of his legs. His few hairs are slicked against his sweaty scalp. I'm lying on the edge of a bare mattress. His wide hips hold my knees apart. He puts the unlit end of a candle inside me. Even my dreaming self is ashamed for conjuring this cliché grotesquery. But once he moves my underwear to the side and sticks his thing in me, I no longer see the man. I think only of his thoughtless, greedy enjoyment. I come in my sleep, my legs clenched around my hand.
Immateriality gives way to the materialâthe soft sheet sticking to my sweaty shoulder, roosters crowing outside, interrupting the susurration of broom on stone. It's soothing to have a grotesque fantasy in a sweet setting. Maybe the particulars of my desire don't matter much at all. Maybe it's not so bad that all of my fantasies involve women being degraded. It would be less morally confusing, of course, if another kind of sexiness were possible, but I don't think it is, not for me. To express love explicitly through the physicalâhands clutched overhead, eyes locked, murmured “I love you's,” mutual orgasms in which I felt like a sweet little bird soaring over a waterfallâhow unerotic it seems. I used to worry that I'd been broken by bad casual sex and online porn, which I started watching during the gray, gray Paris winter, alone in my tiny maid's room on the attic floor with a two-euro bottle of wine and a couple of chocolate croissants, convinced the world owed me whatever inkling of pleasure I could wring from it. I would cover the worn, fake-tanned faces of the girls on my computer screen so I wouldn't have to see the way their eyes and mouths floated, detached and vacant, in the midst of the fucking. I just wanted to see fucking, humans making themselves feel so good they lost all control. But the guys went on talking and talking, calmly planning to make their sex partners drink gallons of cum or stretch out their assholes or destroy their pussies with their huge cocks. The scenes made me queasy and upset but they also got me wet (a self-protective evolutionary adaptation, I told myself later), so I'd go from video to video in search of something I could conscionably get off to. Finally I'd just stick my hand down my pants and start coming almost instantly and the orgasm was hard and tiny like a pebble and then I was all alone with the gross porn thing that had made me come, feeling now that its eroticism was really rage at the inaccessible things we could not keep ourselves from wanting and the unreasonable demands the grown-up world placed on us. Some of the girls seemed genuinely turned on by the violence done to their orificesâ“Pound that pussy! Stretch that asshole!”âas if their bodies belonged to some hateful stranger. Every ejaculation would only increase their willingness to be used like this again and again, just as my porn-inflicted orgasms felt good only insofar as they briefly relieved an incessant itch. The videos are addictive because they do not satisfy; each offers only the shallowest consolation for the inaccessibility of satisfaction.
A man gives orders to a girl on her knees, speaking as if he were ordering a hamburger. “Look at the camera. Open your mouth wide.” He jerks off and ejaculates without sound or expression, the dumb enactment of an imageâman's semen, woman's face. I once heard a radio interview with a porn star promoting her memoir. Her advice to the numerous male callers who wanted to get involved in the industry: If you can masturbate in a crowded room and stay hard for an hour and then ejaculate the instant someone tells you to, congratulations; you've got what it takes. And that's the classy, official stuff. The free, amateur videos have no rules at all: A woman being asphyxiated and whipped while her asshole is simultaneously fisted and fucked. Vaginas being electrocuted.
REAL LIVE RAPES captured on film!
A black woman in a hotel room into which more and more white men keep entering, laughing, wagging their cocks in her wide-eyed face, their own faces obscured to protect their identities, the woman turning in circles like a cat cornered by coyotes. A group of blobby, laughing men fucking a woman with a champagne bottle. If it broke, it would puncture her organs, her bowels would stop functioning, she would need a colostomy bag for life like that character in that David Foster Wallace storyâstop, please stop. These are a few of the scenes I stumbled on while trying to find a video of two people fucking. How to forgive myself for being an ordinary human? How to forgive the world that ordinary humans made?
I tried watching feminist porn a few times, but it only left me unsettled. The loving looks, the tonguey kissing, the focus on cunnilingus (depressing that the clinical Latin term is less unappealing than the slangâcarpet-munching, muff-divingâwhich I cannot even write without laughing). I should have desired these images but did not. Jared told me to stop worrying about it. “You're not blowing some fat fuck on camera because your daddy didn't love you,” he said. “You're blowing me.” He took my jaw in his hand and pulled my lips apart. I reached for his belt buckle. We had sex and I came twice, imagining a group of overweight men ejaculating into the various orifices of an underage ballerina. Or some other scenario that I pray never happens to anyone in real life.
A therapist might say that my fantasies are a sublimation of my distress over the pervasive portrait of sex as ruthless masculine aggression, the way a rape survivor may fantasize about rape to reclaim the experience, make it a means to sexual pleasure instead of an obstruction. The therapist would probably be right, and maybe I would be a more balanced person if I had agreed to see one, as Brian wanted me to. But I don't want to subject my mind to someone else's idea of a good life. I want to do my own research. God knows I have the time.
I have barred myself from checking email until I finish the translation. A kind of superstition: If I pretend that the publisher wants to buy it, he will buy it. I force myself to work for two hours before lunch,
efficace et machinal
, waiting for my real day to begin.