*1* 

[Hemingway ; Eve email exchange industry tips ; Hemingway client dispute with Eve ; buying stuff ; laryngitis & manipulating the doctor ; Pau ; Goebbels ; autism x neurotypicals ; uncle doctor incompetent ; seizures mentioned ; The Duke’s first appearance ; first mention of Laurens van der Post and South Africa and sangoma ; anima and dressing]

 

My more experienced colleagues play dumb, and stay with the eminently better physical version of fuckery. But I’m still new, and it’s going to take a while to compartmentalise these things. Hemingway (my client, a writer) wants to know me ‘for real.’ He is paying to transgress the boundaries of what is paid and what is not. Finding it quite easy to be myself (apart from lying that I like him) I happily tell him about my real life, minus the identifying details. 

 

I take more risk than perhaps I should, more than others would.  I like adventure. Growing up unprotected gave me a reflex to merge with others — I do it against my will and I’m almost always right about someone’s trustability. Sometimes I’ve thought they also feel the merger, that them feeling me a part of them keeps them from doing me harm. I used to hitch hike a lot: one gauges ontological threat — not psychological ones.  Liking adventure and also sensing danger aren’t in opposition. Sometimes, in Duke’s case, in Goebbels’s case, in Hemingway’s case, I notice the problem from the get-go and seeing as it won’t kill me, proceed while things snowball.  

 

Hemingway was my first serious client.  

 

 

Hi Eve, just sent you a mail…got my first serious inquiry for a 4 day gig…makes me nervous a bit! I hope I haven't put you off --I've just been particularly scattered and busy settling and trying to get things going...Hope you have landed well back in Barcelona x

I landed well but i think i caught a cold, I'm not feeling well at all. It's freezing up there, isn't it? Regarding your inquiry, i think you should tell him all your different fees:

• 48 hours + each additional day
  -lunch/dinner date + each additional hour
  -"bedroom" date +each additional hour
  -social time per hour
  But don't do it in a cold fee list, give him practical examples: "If you would like to spend 3 days together, that would be x for the first 48 hours plus x for an additional day. If you prefer to spend 6 or 7 hours together, say going for a walk and then lunch and then 2 or 3 hours of intimate time, that would be x for the "social time" hour, plus etc etc". And give it some flirty poetry: "And if you would like to POETRY POETRY for a couple”

 

Thanks! Hope you feel better soon. Should we still plan on Saturday? I'm feeling slightly manic here dropping a bunch of cash for a few nice things....my best friend here is a stylist. I'll still have to order a bunch of things online I think. Where do you normally shop online?

 

I always had style.  Since I was bullied as a chubby kid in my Shamu t-shirt, I studied fashion, but with immanence: I could see my face had too much intensity to wear patterns above the belt; a few select solid colours dignified my facial expression. I never succumbed to any trend that infantilised my stare.  I knew, within the economic frame of thrift shops, how to manage my appearance, but my taste had no confluence with acceptable mainstream fashion. 

 

Committing to whoring was committing to discipleship in fashion and marketing, and my entrance into the world of women, mainstream, Western symbology and serious, mature capitalism. Eve keeps spreadsheets based on type of garment, seasonal sale times, client type (classy, casual, etc) and other key classifications.

​

The thing about Saturday is that it won't be like "let's go to that one shop and get all you exactly need in one hour"... I'm afraid it takes time and we're very likely to be going from shop to shop trying on things and we still might find only one or two good things only if we get lucky... That's why I like to pre-select or buy things online.

 

Yes that's ok re Saturday, I'm slowly gathering things here and online as well… more moral encouragement and details, any thing you might want to sell me etc… :) As for rates, I feel like the extended rates are quite low, and also wondering how you calculate for, say, 6 hours less than 4 full days. I'm tempted to say that I don't make reductions for less hours of a day after the first 48. And you're saying I should make it subtly clear that the longer term dates have a limit of bedroom time ?

'Dear Hemingway,
It was lovely to read your email. I appreciate your reflections about how you see me, and about your restlessness and engagement with life and where you are coming from. I agree that we seem to have similar and compatible characters. It would be a pleasure to accompany you during your time in Barcelona. If you would like to spend 48 hours together, it would be 3600 Euros, with 1200 Euros for each additional day (I could make a reduction of 100-200 Euros for 4-8 hours less than a whole day) ....'

In my case this totally depends on each client. I use my intuition to decide what I can /should do. Eg: if I'm sure he's loaded, I CAN charge the full fee. If my intuition tells me that it's better to give him better conditions to "make him loyal", I do that. But other girls are more strict and always apply the same rules.

 

And the style, I mean, of writing…I put a few more personal things in there. It's hard to maintain the right mix of personal and professional. I think the first part, before the fees info, is definitely too short, you should have elaborated much more on everything. The way you did it sounds a bit like just summarising or paraphrasing. He was attracted to you because of your personality, so I'm sure he would be much more satisfied – and reassured – by your response if you gave him more of that: much more information about who you are, opinions, etc. Like, for example, with the "restleness in life" part. You could go like "To me, it has always been essential to find new challenges in life, and exploring different cultures has given me bla bla bla bla"

 

It was lovely to read your email -- I am traveling at the moment in the UK and just received it this morning. I appreciate your reflections about how you see me, and about your restlessness and engagement with life and where you are coming from. I am, indeed, a truth seeker and a deep-sea-diver of unknown territories. I agree that we seem to have similar and compatible characters. It would be a pleasure to accompany you during your time in Barcelona. If you would like to spend 48 hours together, it would be 3600 Euros, with 1200 Euros for each additional day. I would love to hear more about you and your passions and tastes, and your vision and desires for how you might want to spend our time. I look forward to being in touch.

I'm going to bed, i didn't sleep at all my last night in London and I'm knackered.

Good idea

Sleep well dear x

Hope you're feeling better tomorrow 

 

Thanks, preciosa 💋

 

Hemingway wrote me asking if I would mind if he did a full day with me and another escort as a trio. It was Eve, I was pretty sure.  I ran it by her and she gleefully confirmed it. A paid weekend learning from Eve in action was the best way was a miraculous way to dip into extended dates.

 

At the last minute, Hemingway wrote me changing his mind. He loved the idea of me, but felt uncomfortable about our age gap. He decided to go with a woman a bit older and closer to his age. It was Eve— she confirmed it, acting surprised. I took her word that she didn’t connect the dots at the time, but looking back, I’m sure she had. I wasn’t mad at her, but it was 7000 euros down the drain, so I fought for it, messaging him that I was in fact older than my profile states (initially I subtracted a couple years, now I added a few) and subtly guilt tripping him into at least trying me out before cancelling.

 

He responded negatively, apologetically — Eve confirmed — she had the date.

And then he wrote back — actually, I am here early — I feel bad for cancelling — want to do an overnight tonight?

 

I bought a white leather bag to do the overnight with Hemingway. The bag was a mysterious living sign. I only intuited that I was moving up in the world by buying a brand new leather overnight. I had only one actual purse other than that, the black Longchamps crocodile skin handbag Eve had initially recommended.

 

I met him at a restaurant. Hemingway, bald, tall, from Florida, with a spindly gait. Truffle oil is worse than garlic on the breath, but I wonder if maybe the locals think of it as high class.  You know what, he said back at the hotel, before we had sex, let’s do the next nine days.  I’ll cancel the other.

 

He presented me with a small Louis Vuitton pouch, red, textured, with a gold zipper, thick with the next 8 days cash: some 15000 euros he had planned to give Eve. It was his first time buying such a thing, waiting in line in the crowded store on Passeig de Gràcia — he wouldn’t do it again. The funny thing was that the overnight rate was a couple hundred less daily than the additional 24 hour full days, after the first 48 hours (I since amended that). He would have had a better deal keeping me there than letting me come back from 10-10. 

 

I locked the bag in the safe. Hemingway was a writer; he was also a photographer, he stressed this; he came to Barcelona to do street photography (not to see escorts). I asked to see some of it.  I dislike most photography. The medium ended 15 years ago by hipster boyfriends and unrequited lovers making ironic photos of Texan men with trucker hats and twenty-five-year-olds doing poignant poverty tourism in The Gambia.  The novelty of the other isn’t something I never thought of during my travels in a thousand and one lands, quite the opposite, but almost as soon as I notice something odd, it seems to fuse with me.  I think this must be a defence mechanism — the fusion that keeps me from documenting the other or using the other as a muse, yet somehow makes me more creative than those who cannot be possessed, who only siphon through possession.  Hemingway stressed how he worked as a journalist and offered to help me with my writing. He was thinking, he said in a hushed voice, of doing an article on Barcelona escorts.  He hopes I won’t mind.  Just don’t use my work name or identifying detail, I say.  I won’t be doing this forever.  That’s why I chose you, after all, because you aren’t suited to work as an escort, he would say, in the hotel at the top of Montjuic.

 

The next day I came back at the same hour.  We went to a Catalan restaurant Goebbels had recommended, Gresca, and I, avoiding the more gruesome meat dishes — raw pigeon, sardenyas (sea slugs—I had tried those already at ABAC, my first Michelin client—he told me it was a vegetable), sheep’s brains and some odd testicles that are the Catalan specialty – ended up with a tableful of lacklustre tapas that neither of us were interested in any more than the annoyed chef.  The days passed, from sunset to dawn I would visit him at his hotel on that hill and walk down the next day in my ballerinas, the heels in my white bag, stop and get a juice or brunch on the way back. He started emailing me every day, sentences of authoritarian terseness.  Men trying to impress me always try to sound like Hemingway. He was still caught up wanting to know the real me, but pressing harder as the time was ticking away. I didn’t have a problem with sharing the real me; I wasn’t quite anyone else, or not myself, but then again I don’t think I have been myself with anyone for a long time, since I haven’t actually enjoyed the company of anyone very much, or felt excited about an approach, for some years now? It would take someone who sees me to bring it out.

 

Despite his minimalist gruffness, and his constant skepticism about the depth I was willing to share with him, Hemingway made it easy to talk. He was interested in what I had to say, but not inordinately so; he didn’t come across as really doing a journalistic piece on me.  I can free associate endlessly without a trace of self consciousness to men like that.  To keep him happy (by showing that I trust him), I submitted to a photoshoot after agreeing that we could delete all of the photos that showed my face in detail.  It was a beautiful hotel, and our room had a balcony showing the cityscape, so I could use them. Men most interested in me incessantly question my responses to things.  They can’t figure out why they like me, or how to separate what they want to see in me from what they cant help seeing.  I had a “bored” expression during sex — which had so far been rather quick and uneventful — which he only brought up a week later as apocalyptically destructive to his libido.  In conversation, I smiled occasionally to reduce moments of tension, which had increased with his inquisitiveness re my inscrutability.  The tension reducing smile / laugh was something I picked up from living in Thailand. He felt mocked, and I tried to explain, but this answer was too abstract for him.  Thailand, after all?  This isn’t Asia.

 

The moments of tension multiplied, and I wondered whether I could fulfil the appointed time.  I wasn’t cancelling: he would have to fire me. We both made it through, but bruised enough that I was sure he would never call on me again.  I slept for a couple days to recover.  When I looked at my work email, there was a backlog from him: some angry, some appreciative, and the last one: can we do more overnights?  Maybe ten, at least 4 more, but after the four, we would go day by day. Would that be ok?  I disliked him, but for that amount of money . . . I would try. He was not completely awful.  We went to good restaurants, and he more or less let me sleep at night.  If he fires me after a couple days, I’ll still keep the money. Sure, I wrote him, forcing in some of my own literary banter in response to his reams. And the next day, as we were talking during dinner, the force left my voice, and the sound wobbled from audible in one moment to barely a whisper the next.  I excused myself and whispered playfully that he should tell me some good stories while I recover my voice; I was not used to speaking so much. You know, you have only a 1 percent chance of getting married for the first time as a woman after 35, he told me. I went to the bathroom, googled the statistic, and came back.  I’m sorry, he said, I shouldn’t tell you facts like that.  We went back to the hotel, and it seemed my voice recovered, as we spoke about his writing and his wife who laughed and refused him if he asked for anything other than missionary position. But my voice gave out again, and this time it did not come back.  I wrote a message to him saying we could play a game.  He loved the idea.  We did a sort of charades and then played a Q&A with sticky notes, then took a bath together in the large tub.

 

I woke up and still could not speak.  I was not sick as far as I could tell — just laryngitis for the first time in my life, apparently. I searched for an urgent care doctor and made an appointment.  Unable to even whisper my request, I passed a message to them that I had a very important speaking engagement this evening and needed something to speak again.  I knew that opera singers and rock stars like Courtney Love sometimes used cortisone to sing when they got laryngitis. I was careful to make the doctor think he was deducing the cure on his own, lest his narcissism would make him refuse my request. Doctors tend to hate patients who have knowledge of medicine.  The doctors in my own family mocked savvy patients at the holiday get-togethers; whenever I speak straightforwardly to a doctor with knowledge of my own body and reasonably good medical terminology, he sneers and holds the diagnosis or prescription just out of reach of poor Icarus. I didn’t have time to see another doctor today, so I kept my mouth shut until he came up with the excellent idea of cortisone.  He reminded me that I should let my voice recover naturally, and lay off it after the event. I hoped to only have to take it only once. 

 

It worked within hours.  I couldn’t speak terribly well for dinner, but later that evening, it had worked magically, I was back with full force.  

 

As soon as my voice came back, things went downhill again.  

 

He enjoyed the surprise and novelty of a mute muse, and probably more than anything, knowing his desire for the “authentic,” my willingness to improvise and make believe. Now that he’d seen a wondrous slip, I was culpable for future reinforcements.  Between sending me dozens of emails threatening to tell the IRS about all the cash I was getting and my landlord about hosting Johns, he had a dozen roses delivered by courier one eventing while I was fucking Goebbels (which quietly impressed Goebbels ).  In the note, he invited me on a paid date to Jamaica.  It would be another 15,000 euros, so I accepted, despite the danger, which was more than rhetorical by now.  I asked all the money in advance, and also requested money to buy a nice suit for non-escort work, since he wanted me to stop escorting.  He had bought me a 300 euro silk scarf along with the LV bag, so I ventured Chanel — it would be about 10,000 euros for a decent Chanel suit, I said.  Both of us new to luxury escorting standards.  I kept the money and bought a grey silk suit for 500 euros or so from Fleur du Mal, the best one-stop shop for sex workers.

 

Part of the deal we have is to occasionally keep in touch between meetings. Always searching for something he can grip onto to verify his Imaginary, I offered the juicy reveal that I was writing a story I may publish myself. He had, after all, dangled the carrot of sponsoring me for a year to work on my writing.  He wrote back with annoyance and contempt: “I don’t like the sound of that, he said. That’s my story!” 

 

Another regular, Pau, always brought me to the best Catalan restaurants and bars.  A diehard for the socialist party, CUP,  who normally saw escorts at the lower-mid range, he originally booked me for lower cost massage when I started out, and to his chagrin, became addicted to the company of a “high class” (expensive— few of us know anything about class) escort.  “All any man wants is a woman in Louboutin heels”.Goebbels, of the centrist party would poke fun at him when I mentioned the restaurants he brought me to. Pau was truly discerning about hotels and restaurants, precisely because he was not loaded: if he was going to shell out that much, he wanted everything perfect. He would proudly invite me to a 2000 a night suite on the Red Square, but complain for an hour about an expensive parking place.  If the restaurant or hotel didn’t fit his expectations, his idealistic buoyancy deflated into inconsolable pessimism. My job was to create a pleasant atmosphere, and when he got into one of these moods, there was nothing I could do to cheer him up.  The restaurant had an inattentive server; he would mock all attempts to convince him that life was worth living; far worse when he interpreted something I did as malevolent. I didn’t kiss him enough, I didn’t look him in the eye at the right moment, I yawned during a long car trip; it was a wonder I managed a single date without triggering his insecurities — because of course, whatever I did wrong was a sign that I wasn’t enjoying his company. Needless to say, I enjoyed it less and less as he maligned my innocent gestures. 

 

A basketball scout, he thinks he can see the core of my being and the truth behind all my expressions. On the one hand, he thinks that I’m a genius — he uses that word, yes, he says, and he uses it for almost no one, he says — and also thinks that I am exceptionally, intentionally cruel to him. It is true, perhaps, that I have an uncanny knack for bringing out the shadows of people: some sort of aesthetic impulse to harmonise  — space, sounds, characteristic, colour schemes, etc., also pokes at personal imbalances in people that I am often only marginally conscious of.  Even though I knew I would receive hell for any mention of a personal lover, at the beginning of the story with Goebbels, the Catalan spin doctor, I was curious about the players in the political drama around him; Pau followed the drama and knew the characters; some of them personally.  So I surreptitiously (I thought) would ask about so and so connected with the minister, or the blonde weatherwoman who was the lover of Puigdemont, and so on, to feel the aura of Goebbels wafting around me, when I was entranced by him:

 

    Goebbels has an old school haircut like all the others in his political party — including the president. He likes me because I can be a black and white movie. I respond with zingers to his zinger, have the swagger and still melt in his arms.

    Sex with Goebbels. I like it. He cant give me an orgasm, and he rarely comes. but we have sex for hours, 6 hours, 10 hours. We stop and talk a bit, me sitting on him and drawing his hands on my breasts, reflexively, to stay connected at the major points, me lying on his chest, or over his arm as he shows me some pictures on his phone. He let me hold it, which surprised me. As a compulsive liar, that’s much more delicate material than his cock. 

    He isn't very big. None of the lovers I have loved having sex with have been big; I don't know if it means anything. Maybe. I can fit the whole thing in my mouth, I can enjoy him inside me for so long probably because it’s small. And maybe they all compensate with something special because of the size. I guess he and I are addicted to the interaction, the sex is an excuse, as if some inverse absurdity of shy teenagers passing notes. 

    An Italian tango dancer I just started seeing came over last night.  He is a blast to dance with, but I’ve already learned that dance chemistry is not the same as sexual chemistry. We had been out talking for a couple hours at a bar about sociology and Catalan identity, he came home and immediately asked to give me a massage. We had already had sex a few weeks ago, and it’s not a big deal to me, but it was strange how he had to ask for something so mundane. 

    I thought of Goebbels. He comes in the door, says nothing apart from Hola, if that, and his attention is like a razor on my face, my breasts my legs, my ass, my whole body. It bothered me at first that he skipped asking about my day. That was when he was pretending to date me though, before we created this unspoken arrangement. The Italian spared no time in caressing my crotch and breasts, after a shameful massage. He was a sociologist, but ditched academia and now is a licensed massage therapist. “I normally charge for this” he said as he led me onto my bed. 

    “Yes, if you only knew that I normally charge for this, as well” I thought. 

    Then he turned me over and before even a caress on my back, which he was supposed to massage, he got up to find a condom. 

    I was unenthused, but relaxed, and I’m sure he noticed nothing while it took him about 6 minutes to come. He cuddled me for 30 minutes then left. With Goebbels it’s like having a slumber party with an 8 year old. We laugh, we wrestle, we prove ourselves smarter than the other, exchange performances of singing or orations, but mostly unlike my Bette Midler singing 8 year old self, we fuck, loudly, and passionately.

    It didn't used to be passionate.

    “Fuck” he said. It was the first time I had said fuck when we had sex, he was mirroring me again. It confuses me, and I like him more.

 

The day I gave away my personal relationship with Goebbels to Pau — who had already guessed it — I thought Pau would never see me again, but he always came back.  As an autistic woman, I told him, I am blunt, I have special interests — sometimes they are people — and look, you should read about autism, because you’ll see that we very rarely do anything out of malevolence, and are very often misinterpreted. It amazed me how flatly he dismissed this.  It was the first time I used autism as an excuse for anything, as far as I recall; I had only just been diagnosed, and it was the first drawn out relationship with a person that I didn’t choose to be with.  I would have never hung out with Pau for free, so aspiring towards mutual understanding is always dicy. 

 

As I’ve made attempts to be a real person, to have purses, to know real people of some professional level (neurotypicals), regardless of whether I like them or not, I have been shocked again and again at how little outside a very narrow structure of behavior one has to stray to be shunned forever by them. It is mind boggling that they call autistic people rigid, because I do not know any autistic person who would judge someone based on what they think another person would judge them for.  The absurdity of neurotypicality is that their judgments are so often twice removed: almost never are they judgements that the person doing the judging makes an internal assessment about; the judgements are almost always an idea about what they think is generally acceptable or normal (normal always being a standard made by an unseen other). The principle of Lacanian lack, substitution — the tragedy of being bound to it — well, I am not — in fact, I find it weird —  but that only proves I don’t exist, I suppose? Not that I love autistic men; that would make things too easy for me, eh?  The men have another type of rigidity — so often the dry, scientificating atheist — whereas we autistic women tend to have a silly, creative streak — and their own dogmatic compensations. Ive tried occasionally to collect dogmas, to stabilise my identity with a gimmick, but it’s always been the collapse of frame I find gratifying, so my ego structure works more like a hot-air balloon.  I have had several autistic clients, and I have generally been happy that they are able to feel so connected and seen with me, but I don’t feel seen by them.

 

Dean, the youngest brother of my mother, was (is, if he is still alive) also a doctor. I lived with him for a couple months as part of the shuffle between relatives just after I was orphaned. He almost went into the priesthood, he said, but settled on paediatrics.  His wife, Joyce, had all the modern mechanised cooking and baking equipment, plump, with a Pentecostal haircut of large, soft brown curls and doeey eyes, a complacent face, a stocky body.  He was short and sleight, and they had children later in life, David, the truck-loving mousy haired affair, and then Brian, shockingly blonde and severely autistic.  Later they adopted Hana from India, wanting a girl, and spoke elogiacally about her medical trials once she arrived (very low hemoglobin, hushed tones). I wrote Dean once, telling him that I was sure I had some form of autism, asking for help.  I had read Temple Grandin enough to see myself in the way she describes thinking in pictures, her empathy towards animals, extreme pattern recognition, heightened sensory sensitivity. Instead of walking around in imaginary cattle shoots, I walk around in existential thought-experiments.   

 

He never wrote me back, perhaps thinking me a hypochondriac.  Always the oblique communication, the hallmark of elevated society.  Had he written back that he thought I was a hypochondriac, we could have hashed it out, I could have told him the details I withheld to be concise, concise enough for him to read me…Later, I would be diagnosed with temporal lobe partial seizures when I was living in Buenos Aires; much later, with autism. There was nothing to do with the diagnoses once I had them, anyway. My state of constant flux, my lack of family or helpful friends prevented me from stabilising enough to get medical care and from seeing how much the issues stemming from epilepsy and autism had contributed to that flux.

 

Pau would likely be diagnosed by a psychologist as “borderline personality” if the diagnosis wasn’t gendered — used almost exclusively to pathologise the responses sensitive (often autistic) women have to double binds and trauma.  Pau had a lot of feminine qualities himself; even his sexual interests were more diffuse, less focused on orgasm or on the penis in general. He is far from any point on the autistic spectrum — I’ve never met an autistic man so paranoid and emotionally biased, anyway.  Maybe I needed to categorise him to reduce his leakage into my soul. With his inferiority complex, his unpredictable shift in mood, his disordered attachment, his intense pessimism, he is one of the more dislikable characters I have ever met.  He hates most famous people, but kept tabs on every petty media character in Catalunya and choses restaurants knowing they are hangouts for Catalan “celebrities” (there are no actual celebrities in a hole this small, but they keep one another well employed).  When he sees one, Pau never says anything except the whisper: “check your messages.” I would read on WhatsApp who was sitting behind me to my left: usually, a journalist or a politician.  One night, at a date in a bar, he alerted me to another one — but this time, he was rather handsome, my age, and staring at me. That’s the Duke, polemic journalist, El Nacional, behind you, Pau had written. The journo whispered something to his friend with a side glance at me when I passed him, leaving the bar as he and his friend were outside smoking. I rolled my eyes.  I figured he was saying something about my outfit — I felt overdressed that night, with a weird, chunky necklace of gold and bronze leaflets dangling over me and a gaudy purse; high heels, which people never wear in Barcelona; it was an experiment I realised too late failed. Pau assured me he was saying something racy about how hot I was, but with the clothes, and especially the accessories, I felt like I had my skin on backwards. I rarely wear jewellery, and the weight of the necklace felt like carrying a large prop.  Men hardly notice these things; only a rare male has a sense of fashion for their own sex, let alone women. The ones that know anything at all tend to know the labels just enough to divine whether what you’re wearing is expensive or not.  

 

I read the article Pau sent me by the journalist. There was intelligence in his voice, something edgy, but missing the point, any point at all — perhaps that was his point. For all its arrogance and theatricality, it carried a self-belief, or a synthetic rhythm that signals something almost alive, incipient intelligence, trapped energy, a potential for coherence that he doesn’t know how to inhabit. He’s trying to do literature — équivoque, hermeneutic self-mythologisation — through provincial journalism because he doesn’t believe in his deeper creativity or intellect.

 

Or he miss the point purposefully?  He was a provocateur—that’s all.  But as easy as it was to pin and dismiss him, I felt the same unscratchable itch I felt with the other men I’ve known of that old lineage.

 

Scheherazade had perused the books, annals, and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples, and instances of bygone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts, and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well-read and well-bred.

 

The desire to weather the authoritarian imagination, the desire to saturate it with its own omniscience and implode it, drown it like Ondine drowns her listener, swallowed by the sea of his own projection.  The erotic smothering and hideous death of the psychopathic godhead that cannot navigate his own death drive. Scheherezade as poiesis —  poetry as a verb, ventus, vata. The king, caught up in her world, her wind, her anima, each a wander away from a pragmatic beheading.  

 

Sarah: “‘may narcissists become as boring as they really are’ (a prayer). 

you need someone who sees you, not someone who needs you to be looking at him all the time... that is the second half of the prayer. stanza two:

 ‘may you find someone with eyeballs of their own.’

 

Buy them all mirrors when you leave.” She wrote me.

It’s not their character we are fascinated with, it is the riddle: how to penetrate black magic with white magic?  A riddle— a koan— asks for implosion, scratched-out eyes, lest we stay trapped inside them. When I first arrived South Africa, Laurens van der Post, the white sangoma, son of famous anthropologist, reigning over Capetonian intercultural capital, told me that to do white magic well, you also have to know black magic. Each small worldview,  in collision, greater than the sum of their parts.  

 

That first encounter with the Duke was during Covid, just after they reopened the bars.  Barcelona was empty, an off-hours Disneyland. The bar, L’ascensor, an old analog pirate ship attraction with the entrance of an old wooden elevator.  

 

 

………

 

 

It was a couple years later that I started co-working at the Ateneu Barcelones.  Right off the busy Rambla, now bordering the wrong side of town, the path there strewn with garbage, sunglass and souvenir shops and dog shit. The Ateneu still had its golden hand knocker — one of the few remaining from metal thieves— probably replaced— on its gigantic carriage doors. The sentry sat down below, beyond the wide carriage room, and to the left, a modern administration add on, the stone stairs covered in red carpet beyond it, leading up to the game room and “jardinin romantic” as they call their terrace. The Palau Savassona was built in the late 1800s, a neoclassical noble residence — the institution moved in in1906, Barcelona’s oldest cultural centre.

 

I had just purchased my membership to the library, which also functions as a nap-inducing co-working space, dark squeaky wood and bitter old men licking their fingers as they turn newspaper pages. Back in the old days, it was open 24 hours a day and hosted great Noucentisme fascists like Eugenio d’Ors, Josep Pla.  Also Victor Catala, the lone woman infiltrating the male genius halls, and Tosquelles, a more internationally interesting character, the mad psychiatrist that inspired Guattari and Deleuze. Now a museum of personajes, aging nationalists, mediocre cultural bureaucrats snubbing one another righteously or having cold, diplomatic coffee monologues about their regard for a translation of Homeric verse enunciating their knowledge of a few choice Greek prefixes and declensions, defending their cynically guarded sub-sections of the Canon.  I came in with a synthetic white skirt speckled with clumsy flowers of various shades of blue, some shiny black boots, a velvet teal puffer with a grossly oversized hood. I had just purchased my membership, waved the paper at the sentry as if we were old friends, and climbed the stone staircase, realising that I could not enter when I reached the top: a digital fingerprint device. 

 

I was slurping a bubble tea when The Duke came up behind me. “T’ho obro”, he said. Slurping — and my unfortunate dress experiment.  I disappeared myself before he could have a look at me.

 

I didn’t know he worked there; I would had I read a few more articles by him. He offered himself as candidate to be president of the Ateneu in 2017; he and his colleagues proposed to refresh this space with younger, supposedly more radical cultural fare. He lost; the majority of members are old, and I suppose his polarising character did not help to gain votes. His loss seemed to humble him just enough for him to harden into a regretful cynic.

 

The next day I came in with my burgundy, velvet effect trench coat — a Russian looking affair with an elegant cut and a flattering wide belt.  I entered the game room adjacent to the patio.  He was outside smoking, and immediately stole a look at me from outside on the terrace. We locked eyes for a moment and then I pretended I hadn’t seen him, went to the farthest section of the game room by the window and sat on the couch with my laptop on my lap, scrolling a pdf on the holy fool for my doctoral work.   

 

 

He had been stationed at the high table smoking his cigar, but suddenly picked up a motivated pace to catch a glimpse of me as he strolled back and forth from outside my window, then back to his post.  I saw him peripherally but stared ahead at my screen, not turning my head or eyes a single time, despite the shadow penduluming over the screen.  I looked absorbed in my text, without catching a single word, so much better it was suspended in a field of electricity.  The last of his dirty blond hair, soon to grey, his eyes, much more piercing in person — maybe just when he looked at me — he was tall, good posture, sturdy, and something about his gaze that saw.  It wasn’t immediately sexual pining, but I was caught. I wrote to Goebbels, the only person I knew who knew him personally, declaring that he had clearly been taken by me.  Goebbels was unsurprised, asked what I was wearing — nothing that special I said — it was true.  

 

Yes, I was dressed nicely, I looked attractive, but his reaction was not just a reaction to a pretty woman — it was to an intrigue, a past life, love at first sight, something out of the ordinary.  That day trained me to put together my outfits from another’s perspective.  Someone, not me, with good taste — a man — my animus apparently could teach a motherless woman how to accessorise. The men I dressed for at work liked my style; I always had style — my own, albeit far more sexy once I started working — but it was quirky.  I still saw through my own diffuse eyes, eyes that didn’t honestly care how I was seen by others, but could imagine a thousand scenarios.  But now I saw through his, a single pair of eyes— a condensed aesthetic that says what it needs to say and punt.  The animus, the Other, speaking in tongues, but now, only one tongue.  He must be deciphered, he reminds us that there are worlds we do not yet know, each time we trespass into a prohibited space.  My analysand from South Africa told me that my dream of a fat bald man following me around was my animus at the time, years before:

 

 

On a big spaceship. A man is washing his beard, I'm washing my hair. It seems easier for me to get clean and be private if I make the excuse of washing my hair. An old fat bald analyst following me around but I'm not that interested. He says 'what have I got to do to make you interested?' I say 'Kiss me.' He does but it is passionless.... Then he lays on top of me and makes the motions of sex. He says ‘it's the same as sex.’ I say I need someone who gives his whole self to me. He says ‘you’re not gonna get that.' At some point he gets angry saying ‘you can never get anywhere because there's something missing in you.  You can never be sure if you're passive or active.’  I said ‘you’re just saying that to jog the past and put me in romantic mood’ 

 

I believed the Jungian — it was too bombastic, narcissistic to disregard interpretive frames: you can’t analyse yourself they say.  Perhaps if Irigaray had seen the dream, she would recognise it for what it was — but then again, even she only imagined the rebellion against phallus; she never simply wrote from a totally different location, let the untranslated Other exist. All the French tail wags and hat tips of semiotics and syntax—it’s too bad and thank god I didn’t marry the publisher of Semiotext(e). These women are secretly jealous of my freedom— watch out for the evil-eye, the neighbourhood tarot reader says.  Lectura del barrio.

 

But if you read the dream through its own framework, it says: analysis won’t work, because I don’t accept substitution.  The analyst is mad at me for not offering him a transference — the not telling whether I’m passive or active sounds like he cannot find the “hook” — the lack, the duality — and is framing my lack of lack as lack.  I tell him — “you’re just trying to take me out of the present moment, you’re being manipulative and gaslighting me. I see it — I’m still not interested.”  The dream is straightforward and explicit in its own framing, but even the famous Jungians I employed, Nathan Schwartz Salant and Andrew Samuels, were apparently baffled, thrown off their polished thrones.  That’s a throwaway dream, they say. Some dreams don’t mean anything. 

 

I had the dream in Cape Town, when I was involved with Laurens van der Post, who, despite professing his love and attraction to me over and over, refused to make love to me.

 

 

 

*2*

[writing ; orphan ; Roth and Clarke ; recently open field experience ; Jung ; Mildred ; father’s Alzheimer’s ; memories from age 3 ; father’s bathroom poetry]

WRITING