conversation was laughably superficial. In the early evening, when she wanted to return to her hotel, he suddenly started adopting a much more domineering attitude. He suggested they go and eat something. She wasn’t stupid and had an uncomfortable but irresistible queasiness in her stomach.
He told her he was a Spanish actor who had left his home in Spain for France as a teenager and was trying to establish himself as actor and musician in France.
“What instrument do you play?” She wanted to know.
“A computer,” was his reply.
No, really? She was naive enough to be amazed that you could make music with a computer.
“I will show you,” he promised.
After dinner he said she had to come and visit him for a bit so that he could play her some of his computer music. Now the warning lights were really flashing – she knew it would be very irresponsible to go and listen to music in a strange Spanish-French actor’s flat.
The smell of sex hung heavily in the air. And it was mainly from his side. But, she argued in her innocence, it was her twentieth birthday and if she didn’t lose her virginity now, she probably never would.
En route to his apartment, he heavy-handedly pinned her against the wall of an underpass and kissed her. It still had no impact on her, but the idea was nevertheless exciting – kissing a stranger in Paris does not happen every day. There was a violence in his movements that probably turned her on a bit in a twisted kind of way. He pressed his fingers in her mouth and forced his leg between hers.
There was ample opportunity to turn back. But she didn’t turn back.
She had the sort of fear for such situations that children have for the devil in the Children’s Bible – their hearts leap into their throats; the God-fearing enchantment is angst as well as pleasure driven.
They want to look.
She had to feel.
At that moment it became a calculated decision, because she knew there would be no turning back once she entered his apartment. When she stepped through the door, she knew that she had now given him permission to do with her whatever he wanted.
He grabbed her. He played a CD by the rock group U2 through his computer, and at the moment he penetrated her, the song One was playing.
He pinned her down with such force that she knew there was no chance of escape. He slapped her face and then kissed her, pulled her hair and forced her body into many different positions.
We’re one, but we’re not the same.
Did I disappoint you, leave a bad taste in your mouth?
Did you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head?
U2 sang.
When she eventually asked him to please be a bit more gentle with her as it was her first time, he jeered at her like a madman.
“You lie, bitch!” he mocked.
He started saying strange things that scared her. It occurred to her that she might not survive the night. She panicked, reproached herself and tried to force her thoughts in another direction; she thought back to the times as a small girl when she had kissed her Kewpie dolls on their rubber foreheads, as if she loved them. (It disgusted her sister. How could one display love for a rubber doll? But there was comfort in the smell of baby powder.)
The Spaniard plucked her back to the present, to the frightening sex game on the floor of his cluttered, dirty flat.
“I’ve pinned you down like a butterfly now,” he whispered in her ear. “You are the ocean and I am the rock.”
It unsettled her. Maybe he’s just trying to be kinky, she tried to console herself. Maybe.
“After I make love to them, I kill all my lovers,” he panted.
Now she was terrified. “Please … please take me back to my hotel!” she begged.
He agreed, on condition that she first eat a peach while he watched and masturbated.
No. She couldn’t.
“I’m not hungry,” she sobbed. She just wanted to be alone. She had just sacrificed her virginity, given it up. More than that: it had been brutally taken from her.
“Why you such a cry baby???!!!” he suddenly screamed at her like a lunatic.
She wanted to bath, wash him off her with soap. “Please take me back!” she cried.
After what seemed like an eternity, he took her back to the hotel. Her body was racked with sobs as she shut the door behind her in the early hours of the morning.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you …” she murmured.
She was safe.
She was alone.
Why, she asked herself repeatedly, why were you so fucking stupid?
She sat in the bath enveloped by a strange silence and felt suddenly dead. Stripped of emotion. She didn’t want to feel anything. For hours she washed him off her. Scrubbed. Over and over.
And learned to feel nothing.
It would later stand her in good stead: naked to the bone – alluring, but without pretence, without emotion, without judgment, without meaningful results.
She was glad she was no longer a virgin, but she didn’t like sex. It hurt her. She longed for the warm, embracing orgasm in Germany, but in her heart she knew: a measure of violence would have to play a role in her sexual experiences from now on.
Every time it would have to be sore enough to feel like the first time. It held a strange, God-fearing enchantment for her.
She wandered the streets of Paris for a week, wondering if people could see she was no longer the same person. In her dreams she could feel Patrick Po touching her. She could smell his breath and his body. The hollow feeling in her stomach that she woke up with every morning was not from hunger.
But the dream gradually faded. And she was still a virgin, she decided. She made a resolution: Nobody would take her virginity away from her.
And even though she ended up in the sex industry later, she would remain a virgin. Penetration would never change that … until she decided to give it to someone of her own free will.
And it would also be a Spaniard.
Coincidence?
3. Suburbia
I am a Broederbond baby who grew up with double-ply toilet paper and fluoride pills.
Our home was a place that functioned on rigid routine. Great emphasis was placed on every possible aspect of education during my formative years, except ball skills.
(Those I would learn much later – but not the sort my mother would
