Back on Rue Oberkampf, I started to ask myself questions like, what is life? is it worth living? what sacrifices are justified in life and why? questions connected with what I saw in front of my eyes every day, and one afternoon I don’t know why the idea came into my mind, but I decided to call my mother in Mexico City. When she heard my voice, instead of being genuinely pleased she sounded anxious, maybe she was worried I was going to announce my return, since by this time it was obvious that my presence bothered her. I quickly told her that everything was fine in Paris, that I was living with a Norwegian fashion photographer but that I wasn’t very sure what to do with my future. In other words: I was calling to ask her advice. She liked that and said, listen to me, Sab, I’ve always believed that what makes people noble and useful is studying, so you ought to study, darling, and in fact something just occurred to me: if you study, you won’t be able to work, so I’d like to help you, send you money to cover your expenses, how about it? I thanked her and thought it over for a few days, until I decided I’d study acting and phoned her to tell her.
On the phone, she sounded really moved, Oh, how proud you’ve made me, she said, a Gina Lollobrigida in the family, a Grace Kelly, a Julia Roberts, hey, Fito, come and hear this, and she immediately sent me a decent amount of money to start my course, and I enrolled in drama school at the Sorbonne, doing a little audition at which, in all modesty, I left the judges in raptures, and not only because I finished my monologue by taking my pants off and walking around the stage with a lilac-colored G-string stuck between my buttocks, but because my talent expressed itself openly, in a direct, transparent form.
A new period of my life began. I felt really active. An inner fire consumed me. Very soon I got together a group of friends from among my classmates from the school and we started going out, day and night, to see plays or hold rehearsals, and it was around that time that Petra first put in an appearance. Petra was a Romanian, and taught Expression through Movement. He was one of those Francophile Romanians like Ionesco, Mircea Eliade and E. M. Cioran, and well, it all happened very rapidly.
One afternoon, Petra asked us to interpret with our bodies something that made us feel afraid, and I evoked my childhood, which for me was the grimmest thing in the world. The one thing I could come up with was to sit down in a corner of the stage with my face covered, get down on my knees, pull my pants down and raise my backside; it was my way of expressing the fragility of childhood, transposing it to the sexual fragility of woman, my rape. Naturally, my male classmates, and some of the women, got a bit distracted, so Petra came up on stage and said, mademoiselle, can you explain your position?
I told him about my childhood and the horror of the rape and how all that formed a whole that generated all the greatest fears in my life. Petra asked the others to go and get changed. We were alone on the stage, and he said, can you get back in that position? I’d like to try and understand it in the light of what you’ve just said.
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.