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.
Thinking that, I understood “my rape” a little better, although there’s no point in deceiving ourselves, understanding doesn’t mean overcoming — because the other thing I couldn’t get out of my head was that the rapist was none other than Stef, my God, a young man who had been in Paris, looking at museums and going to concerts, a young man I’d cooked pasta in tomato sauce for, all that kind of thing — I said to myself, men have sex when the prey reveals her fragility, and that was what I had done. I must never appear fragile again. I didn’t feel guilty, as sometimes happens to women who are raped, which makes them go to psychiatrists, or sometimes kill themselves, or turn into avengers, these last being the most interesting, because in general, before they end up in some provincial prison, they manage to mutilate a few male members, even pulling them out by their roots, savagely interrupting the trunk-foreskin continuum or the even more complex trunk-testicles continuum, which usually results in a geyser of blood.
I am aware of the injustice that some innocent foreskins may be presumed guilty and cut to shreds, but what we can do if the tribe is cruel, cruel in a different way for each tribesman. The rules of a mob devouring itself, penises still throbbing with life on the floor for having forced themselves into vaginas or anuses that didn’t want them, oh, what are we going to do, the world is crazy, we are all crazy: this was what I was thinking as I sat there smoking, wrapped in a blanket, by the window of Kay’s apartment, which I haven’t mentioned was on Rue Oberkampf, near République, in the eleventh arrondissement, and that was why when I dared to go a bit farther than the corner, where the Monoprix supermarket was, I walked as far as the Canal Saint-Martin and kept myself amused watching the brown waters flowing past, laden with garbage, shit, and plankton. The river that was flowing inside me was the same, a stream of black waters, filled with rats, excrement, and semen, because that night in Oslo they didn’t only rape me from the front but also from behind, which was something Kay and I had had a taste of without going all the way, preferring to wait for the right moment, and now that heavily guarded treasure had ended up in the ravine, lost and abused. Take note, girls.
After many days at the window, having already abandoned hope, I saw him coming. His tall, stooped figure, in a blue coat and scarf, stood out among the passers-by on Rue Oberkampf; on one side he was carrying his camera case and on the other a small bag, and I said to myself, there he is, the bitch got rid of him, she must have gotten tired of his snoring and his farting and his sour breath in the mornings. I felt a gigantic flower growing in my throat, because I loved him madly. Of course I made him pay. He had to do things, things that would never have occurred to him, before I would give him the first embrace or have sex with him, which was what he had been longing for from the first second. And so our relationship started up again, rebuilt like a house after a fire, never the same as before, with traces of soot on the ceilings, but still standing. There only remained the matter of my rape by his brother, but I preferred not to talk about it, we could see about that later.
I was young and I felt that my strength was infinite, that I was still able to bear a lot of things, so he went back to his work in Paris and of course continued with the drugs. His months with the Norwegian whore had strengthened his addiction and he increased his daily dose to keep a steady pulse, so he had to work very hard. Heroin is expensive and I was a spoiled little girl who liked exclusive things, fashionable clothes, scents.
And so things went on for nearly six months until one day Kay suggested taking a few nude photographs of me. He said that kind of thing paid very well and we’d be able to take a vacation in New York, so I agreed, I went to his studio, and we did them. The poses were fairly artistic, though with a touch of spice. In fact, some were a bit too suggestive for my taste, although there were no close-ups of genitals. Kay took them with him the next day and in the evening came back with a lot of money. We packed our bags and went off to New York to live it up for a while, with a room booked at the Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle and friends who took us to MoMA and to see the view from Brooklyn Bridge, but of course, there’s also plenty of heroin there, it’s cheaper and very different, so one night I had to take Kay to the hospital after an overdose, which was pretty unpleasant. When he came out, we had to go back to Paris, as all our money was gone.