to her girlfriends. They had all seen her going out for a walk with her future ‘betrothed’. After all, it is not enough just to have a great love in your life, you must make sure that everyone knows what a desirable person you are. They were dying to know what had happened, and Maria, very full of herself, said that the best bit was when his tongue touched her teeth. One of the other girls laughed.
‘Didn’t you open your mouth?’
Suddenly everything became clear – his question, his disappointment.
‘What for?’
‘To let him put his tongue inside.’
‘What difference does it make?’
‘It’s not something you can explain. That’s just how people kiss.’
There was much giggling, pretend pity and gleeful feelings of revenge amongst these girls who had never had a boy in love with them. Maria pretended not to care and she laughed too, although her soul was weeping. She secretly cursed the films she had seen in the cinema, from which she had learned to close her eyes, place her hand on the man’s head and move her head slightly to right and left, but which had failed to show the essential, most important thing. She made up the perfect excuse (I didn’t want to give myself at once, because I wasn’t sure, but now I realise that you are the love of my life) and waited for the next opportunity.
She didn’t see him until three days later, at a party in a local club, and he was holding the hand of a friend of hers, the one who had asked her about the kiss. She again pretended that she didn’t care, and survived until the end of the evening talking with her girlfriends about film stars and about other local boys, and pretending not to notice her friends’ occasional pitying looks. When she arrived home, though, she allowed her universe to crumble; she cried all night, suffered for the next eight months and concluded that love clearly wasn’t made for her and that she wasn’t made for love. She considered becoming a nun and devoting the rest of her life to a kind of love that didn’t hurt and didn’t leave painful scars on the heart – love for Jesus. At school, they learned about missionaries who went to Africa, and she decided that there lay an escape from her dull existence. She planned to enter a convent, she learned first aid (according to some teachers, a lot of people were dying in Africa), worked harder in her religious knowledge classes, and began to imagine herself as a modern-day saint, saving lives and visiting jungles inhabited by lions and tigers.
However, her fifteenth year brought with it not only the discovery that you were supposed to kiss with your mouth open, and that love is, above all, a cause of suffering. She discovered a third thing: masturbation. It happened almost by chance, as she was touching her genitals while waiting for her mother to come home. She used to do this when she was a child and she liked the feeling, until, one day, her father saw her and slapped her hard, without explaining why. She never forgot being hit like that, and she learned that she shouldn’t touch herself in front of other people; since she couldn’t do it in the middle of the street and she didn’t have a room of her own at home, she forgot all about the pleasurable sensation.
Until that afternoon, almost six months after the kiss. Her mother was late coming home, and she had nothing to do; her father had just gone out with a friend, and since there was nothing interesting on the TV, she began examining her own body, in the hope that she might find some unwanted hair which could immediately be tweezered out. To her surprise, she noticed a small gland above her vagina; she began touching it and found that she couldn’t stop; the feelings provoked were so strong and so pleasurable, and her whole body – particularly the part she was touching – became tense. After a while, she began to enter a kind of paradise, the feelings grew in intensity, until she noticed that she could no longer see or hear clearly, everything appeared to be tinged with yellow, and then she moaned with pleasure and had her first orgasm.
Orgasm!
It was like floating up to heaven and then parachuting slowly down to earth again. Her body was drenched in sweat, but she felt complete, fulfilled and full of energy. So that was what sex was! How wonderful! Not like in erotic magazines in which everyone talked about pleasure, but seemed to be grimacing in pain. And no need for a man, who liked a woman’s body, but had no time for her feelings. She could do it on her own! She did it again, this time imagining that a famous movie star was touching her, and once more she floated up to paradise and parachuted down again, feeling even more energised. Just as she was about to do it for a third time, her mother came home.
Maria talked to her girlfriends about her new discovery, not saying that she had only discovered it a few hours before. All of them – apart from two – knew what she was talking about, but none of them had ever dared to raise the subject. It was Maria’s turn to feel like a revolutionary, to be the leader of the group, inventing an absurd ‘secret confessions’ game, which involved asking everyone their favourite method of masturbation. She learned various different techniques, like lying under the covers in the height of summer (because, one of her friends assured her, sweating helped), using a goose feather to touch yourself there (she didn’t yet know what the place was called), letting a boy do it to you (Maria thought this unnecessary), using the spray in the bidet (she didn’t have one at home, but she would try it as soon as she visited one of her richer friends).
Anyway, once she had discovered masturbation and used a few of the techniques suggested by her friends, she abandoned forever the idea of a religious life. Masturbation gave her enormous pleasure, and yet the Church seemed to imply that sex was the greatest of sins. She heard various tales from those same girlfriends: masturbation gave you spots, could lead to madness or even pregnancy. Nevertheless, despite all these risks, she continued to pleasure herself at least once a week, usually on Wednesdays, when her father went out to play cards with his friends.
At the same time, she grew more and more insecure in her relationships with boys, and more and more determined to leave the place where she lived. She fell in love a third time and a fourth, she knew how to kiss now, and when she was alone with her boyfriends, she touched them and allowed herself to be touched, but something always went wrong, and the relationship would end precisely at the moment when she was sure that this was the person with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. After a long time, she came to the conclusion that men brought only pain, frustration, suffering and a sense of time dragging. One afternoon, watching a mother playing with her two-year-old son, she decided that she could still think about a husband, children and a house with a sea-view, but that she would never fall in love again, because love spoiled everything.
And so Maria’s adolescent years passed. She grew prettier and prettier, and her sad, mysterious air brought her many suitors. She went out with one boy and with another, and she dreamed and suffered – despite her promise to herself never to fall in love again. On one such date, she lost her virginity on the back seat of a car; she and her boyfriend were touching each other with more than usual ardour, the boy got very worked up, and she, weary of being the only virgin amongst her group of friends, allowed him to penetrate her. Unlike masturbation, which took her up to heaven, this hurt her and caused a trickle of blood which left a stain on her skirt that took ages to wash out. There wasn’t the magical sensation of her first kiss – the herons flying, the sunset, the music…but she would rather not think about that.
She made love with the same boy a few more times, although she had to threaten him first, saying that if he didn’t, she would tell her father he had raped her. She used him as a way of learning, trying in every way she could to understand what pleasure there was in having sex with a partner.
She couldn’t understand it; masturbation was much less trouble and far more rewarding. But all the magazines, the TV programmes, books, girlfriends, everything, ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, said that a man was
