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.
A week later, Petra called about the job with the mentally retarded guy. When I’d finished I said to his mother, madame, I assure you that I do it with a lot of respect and consideration for the patient, so please, if you have any acquaintances with similar cases you can call me, I have a cousin who needs work, a very healthy young woman, and the mother said, of course, Sabina, I’ll talk to the people at the special help center and if there’s anything I’ll call you, of course. Three days later, the telephone rang and the first job for Giorgetta arrived. A young man of twenty-five suffering from something very serious, dementia, mental handicap, Williams syndrome, I don’t quite remember. The young man was bedridden and obese. When Giorgetta saw him, her first impulse was to jump out the window, but then she thought of the money, so she undressed and did the job, telling herself, these are God’s mistakes, people who also feel, and even if it disgusts me I have to think that for them it’s much worse, I can take a shower and go out and back to normal life, the streets and the metro and the parks are waiting for me and I’m free, and that should give me strength, this is what she told me when she got home and prepared herself a good fix, pleased with the two-hundred-euro bills she’d come away with, and as we took a dose she told me that for her to give him a blowjob, two nurses had had to support his belly, he was that obese, and that his penis was small and flaccid, like a child’s.
We clung to each other all night and the next morning the telephone rang, and it was Petra, announcing a good job, something that could be really important for both of us. I asked him if he wanted to drop by and he said, no, this is something different, I prefer to talk to you face to face.