THE BEAUTY OF INSECT SEX

On a hot day in June, I sat naked by the window, waiting for my lover. Outside, Athens was humming with life. I could see the Parthenon up on the hill, the modern apartment buildings downtown, a metal sea of cars in the streets. I could hear the honking and the swearing and could imagine the drivers sweating in their seats, impatient under the scorching Greek sun, their hairy arms hanging out of their open windows.

Out of all the great cities I had fallen in love with over the years, Athens was perhaps the one I loved the most, what with its quaint neighbourhoods and cobbled alleyways and gardens with geraniums and jasmines and hibiscus trees blooming in abundance. If things were different, today I would have visited Monastiraki and the antique market at the foot of the ancient rock of Acropolis.

There was a discreet knock. The engineer. I picked up a towel, wrapped it around me and went to open the door.

‘Sorry I’m late, sweetie. I came as soon as I could get away,’ he said, a little out of breath. He was referring to his wife, of course.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ It was not the wife that was the problem.

‘I brought you strawberries. I know how much you like them.’ He kissed me, not missing the fact that I was not wearing any clothes. I did not respond to the kiss but accepted the strawberries, knowing that I would not eat them.

He sat facing me in one of the two armchairs by the window, and lit a cigarette, the first of the many he would have. The smoke rose in rings above his head and mingled with the dust motes before disappearing into the folds of the curtain.

I looked at him and I could picture his so-familiar body naked. I saw the shape of his toes, the hairless legs, the slightly too large belly, the puffy nipples. He was a middle-aged man, beginning the descent into old age. Not even attractive in the usual sense of the word. But you don’t have to be attractive to be the one.

I was drinking a glass of white wine. Now tilting my head back, I gulped it all down in one go, as if it were medicine. I walked barefoot towards the small refrigerator in the corner and brought out a cold bottle of wine, half empty already.

‘You should not be drinking so early in the day, sweetie,’ he said with his usual concern.

‘I need this,’ I said. He shook his head in disapproval but did not insist.

I knew we would have to talk about it, much as I was trying to delay it. And yet, even on that day, I enjoyed being there. I have always loved hotels, they fascinate me. What a sweet parenthesis of life! Here one can take a step back from the relentless flow of events, escape the noise of everyday scenes, the inanity of supermarkets and buses, the repetitive actions of meaningless office work, the empty exchanges of empty words with the people we meet every day. Here one can sit and watch life go by and it does not touch you.

This time I was staying at the Divani Caravel, a hotel well above my means. I wanted to go away in style, abandon my lover in a way he would never forget. The previous night, upon my arrival, I had been given a room on the sixth floor, with a large bed and a lounging area. The gift of a small chocolate on my pillow had thrilled me to no end. I slept deeply without dreams, which was a relief, and in the morning I enjoyed a swim in the pool on the roof, with a fabulous view of the Acropolis.

I had been basking in the luxurious surroundings when suddenly, uninvited, the thought of the soldier popped into my mind. He was the man who had taught me to love that city. Three days and three nights we had spent together in a hotel room in Palio Faliro. Maybe Poseidon Hotel? I think so. We had made love again and again, and when we got hungry, we ordered pizza. There was a heat wave that summer, but we did not care. Our limbs ached, we were burning.

‘Can we drink the water from the tap?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is great water, from Lake Marathon. See how soft your hair is after you wash it?’ He stroked me awkwardly. He was a very large, very athletic man.

I cupped my hand and drank my fill out of the tap, then lay down with him. He took me in his arms and made love to me with all the forcefulness of his youth.

I think of the soldier every time I come to Athens, every time I wash my hair. I think of the water coming from Lake Marathon and I feel baptised in the history of Greece. And I know that the only reason I come to this city is to be made love to. I have come to Athens always for that and only for that: to be made love to.

After my swim in the morning, I went back to my room and took a shower, relishing the lavishness of the bathroom with the black marble and the golden taps. I tried on a few outfits, but nothing seemed good enough for the final act. In the end, I decided to remain naked. I am still attractive, I think, though not so young anymore. One day I will get old, but that day has not come yet. One day I will get old and then I will die and I will go and meet my soldier again. But that day has not come yet.

The engineer was now looking at me, trying to find the right words.

‘Let me explain, sweetie,’ he said.

‘Explain what? That you are thinking with your dick?’

I wanted to spit out the words, the way it is done in the movies, but it came out too meek and I sounded ridiculous. What I wanted to do was tell him that I was dead already. I had lost paradise. Who could survive that?

I realized instantly the absurdity of the thought but could not help it. I was dead and still suffering. Dead like the dead in the painting in Madrid.

If only I could flee back in time, back to that day in Madrid, when we were still happy. Then I might escape the pain. And I did, for a moment I did.

Museo del Prado. In the first year of our relationship, we had managed to get away together for a whole weekend. We spent the entire day walking in the museum corridors, hand in hand, the sunlight coming in through the windows on the arched roof. There were hundreds of paintings: Goya, El Greco, Velázquez. I was trying to understand who I was, what I was. He was smiling and holding my hand.

The Garden of Earthly Delights was set apart from all other paintings, on a white curved pedestal, revealing the great affection of the Spanish for Hieronymous Bosch, whom they call El Bosco. The story of the triptych begins in the left-hand panel with the garden of Eden. God is standing in front of Adam, offering him the gift of a girl. Winged beasts and other exotic animals are roaming among the flowers. But the seed of violence seems to be lurking there already: a cat with a dead lizard in its mouth, a bear-like beast devouring an antelope. A world of mindless insects and carnivorous animals, an amalgam of beauty and cruelty that is not really cruelty, just the way things are.

I remembered that life well, in a sense I had lived there with my soldier. That was where my story had begun too. It seems we are all destined to live through the entire history of mankind, each one of us reliving it again from the beginning, till the end of time. 

The central panel depicted scenes from a different kind of garden: gigantic fruit, strawberries that resembled female genitalia, fish walking miraculously on land, people cavorting in groups, a couple making love in an immense mussel shell, a blue fruit pod in which naked figures stood, presenting their buttocks to the spectators. Lust without shame, carnal pleasures without guilt. Freedom.

We could easily walk into that central panel, my lover and I, we would fit right in. We had already experienced our share of lust, a sexual life that compared to the age of innocence was an excess, a cornucopia of the body’s wants. It was already too much, and yet our greed pushed us further and further. It would not relent.

Finally, the dark world of the right-hand panel, the future that was to come. Human figures tortured, mutilated, suffering the most ingenious, the most unlikely torments in the hands of demons. And in the middle of it all, a majestic figure sitting on a throne, devouring men and women, and excreting them as if they were filth into a huge chamber pot.

The Prince of Hell.

I stood for a long time in front of the painting that day. I knew I was lucky to be living a life of indulgence, lucky to have at last what I had always wanted. My own personal garden of earthly delights, a garden made up of the hotel rooms I visited again and again with my lover: the themed rooms of Hotel Priamos, the red room where he tied me to the bed posts, the baroque room where we played the feeding game, the Hollywood suite with the round bed and the pictures of Marilyn on the walls. Then the Arabian-nights room, where I danced naked for him, playing the whore. His whore.

It did not last, no more than a year. The revelation of all the lies soon after, the swift transfer to hell. Here I was now, in the claws of the Prince of Hell, being devoured whole. I was done for.

‘This does not affect how I feel for you,’ he said.

‘But it affects how I feel for you.’

He flinched. But he would soon recover. And then he would give me what I had come to get. He would make me assume the position, the one he called my position, as if I had been born – created – for that purpose, as if I had been gifted to him by the circumstances, by an order of things that is no more cruel than carnivores devouring each other. It is what it is.

Did El Bosco have that in mind when he painted God offering the girl to Adam? It is possible, just possible. And I would accept the position as my destiny, as I always did. I would stand naked facing the wall, my forehead and palms against it, my buttocks offered to him with a slight tilt of my waist. He would make me wait for the longest time and when enough time had passed and the beads of sweat had gathered in the small of my back, he would finally put out his cigarette and walk up to me. Today he would not even take his clothes off. He would place his hands on me and –

Who was I kidding? I would never leave him. I did not care for an ordinary life, a home with screaming children, bags filled with groceries, nights spent in front of the television, small excursions on Sundays, meals in taverns by the sea. What woman would want such things when she could have the garden?

‘You knew all along what you were getting into, sweetie,’ he said.

Yes, I knew. He had delivered what he had promised. But now I wanted more. I wanted it all, even though I knew that he was unable to give it to me. He would never write poems for me with tender things from his heart. He would never say to me, O my Luve is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June. Unable to give up everything for one woman, unwilling to sacrifice all for the sake of one. That was his main flaw. He wandered the streets of Athens, a noble vagabond, like the Ulysses of old, always eager to embrace the next delight awaiting him around the corner.

‘Just tell me: how is it possible for someone to offer all this to a mediocre slut?’ I said, managing to spit out the last word.

‘Ah, sweetie.’ He sighed, the air hissing through his teeth. ‘The sole responsibility of an engineer is to make the garden beautiful. The garden belongs to everyone who would care to walk there – whether it is a mediocre slut or a superb slut.’ He smiled at me, the bastard. Was this flattery or an insult?

I could have accepted his choice of concubine to cheat on the concubine. If he chose mediocrity, so be it. He was not the first and would not be the last. What I could not forgive was the way he had trampled on my happiness. How I meant nothing. I hated myself for believing in him, for admiring him even. I hated myself for participating, without my knowledge, in this ménage à trois. It was disgusting. We were all disgusting. Creatures of the earth, creatures of darkness. Filth.

I got up and went to the window. I looked at the Parthenon on the hill and there was a single thought in my mind. Jump. Just jump and end it all.

If only I could stop thinking. If only I could sit still for a while, with the palms open on my knees, and look at the dust rising in the air. If anyone asked me what I wanted then, I would answer that I wanted to return to the left hand of the triptych, the life I had with my soldier. I wanted to devolve, to return to a simpler organism. Something like an insect perhaps, mating at all times and at all places, with all possible mates. A quick opening of the legs, a sudden relaxation of the belly, as if about to defecate, so as to facilitate the entrance of the male, then a ramming movement back and forth like a piston, a sweeping of the flesh, an ever-increasing passivity in the face of the violence of the other, until the heavy load of desire trickled into my guts and an ending of sorts settled upon us, followed by a hasty withdrawal of the male. Then silence.

The beauty of insect sex.

What need would I have then of red, red roses? An insect would never lament the absence of love.

But I could not go back ever again. I had been given this gift, this utopian land, it belonged to me. I could walk in the garden any time I wanted, with any person I wanted, I could go to any place I wanted, in the literal sense of the word eleutheria, according to the Greeks, παρά το ελεύθειν όπου ερά, freedom to go wherever one pleases.

I wanted to scream. Forced to experience that scene to the end, an insect trapped in the amber of the Attica sun. If I opened the window and jumped, would he have the time to stop me? I could say I wanted to smell the air above the city. He would believe it, coming from me. He would sit there and watch me take deep breaths of blue sky, with my eyes half-closed. And then I would suddenly climb onto the ledge and jump.

What would he do then? Rush to the street, through the hotel corridors and the golden lifts with the mirrors, run out the revolving doors, past the uniformed porters, push through the small crowd, take my broken body into his arms? And what would he do with the flesh and bones? No matter how long he poked there, until the ambulance men came to pick up the pieces, he would not find anything left, not the woman, not even the insect. Just a dirty smudge on the pavement.

‘I wish there were a different way to do things, sweetie. But there is not. Freedom is a world of opening, not a world of closing. It would be madness to shut oneself in the garden with one person. It would poison everything.’

He was talking and getting more animated by the minute, a very intelligent man, creating a better story than my own, a story in which he was the central hero, the sensual hero, the man who knew the true meaning of earthly delights. He never apologised for lying to me. He was living out his own dream, so different from mine. He was an engineer and I was an insect. Even if I was moving away from being an insect, more and more, into the sorrow and loneliness of humanity.

‘I want to die,’ I said.

His face changed expression, he could not stand this, for he loved me, despite loving others too. He put his arms around me, why are you crying, why, and he would not let me go. He was suffocating me, forcing this love on me, the wrong kind of love. I did not want a love shared equally among many. I wanted a crazy love. I wanted the garden to belong only to me. I was crazy. If I could not be an insect, then I would be crazy. 

I should have been able to stand up to him. I should have been able to stand up to that lunacy of a sun, I should have been able to dissipate the dirty dust of the hotels of my life, to dissipate the smoke of the thousand cigarettes he had smoked next to me, to laugh at his story of noble journeys with mediocre sluts.

‘Why, sweetie?’

My pain was overwhelming him now, he was trying to staunch it. I wanted to believe in him again, I wanted it so much. And I did, for a minute I did. Standing with my legs slightly apart, I rested my body against his, allowing myself to stay in his arms. I gave myself to him again, for a moment I did.

I clearly felt it then, what a revelation! What a journey, undertaken by each and every one of us, just as El Bosco had painted it! I had reached the end. I let go, and the grand edifice inside me collapsed. A million broken pieces, an ancient temple in ruins under the sun, a chorus of insects singing madly, perched on the white stones.

‘Why? Because I was not the one,’ I said. ‘That’s why.’