Sex with Esther

SHE LOVES SEX, BUT IS SHE CAPABLE OF LIVING HIM?

during the first part of your life, you only become aware of happiness once you have lost it. Then an age comes, a second one, in which you already know, at the moment you begin to experience true happiness, that you are, at the end of the day, going to lose it. When I met Esther I understood that I had just entered this second age. I also understood that I hadn't reached the third age, in which anticipation of the loss of happiness prevents you from living.

With regard to Esther, I will just say, without exaggeration or metaphor, that she gave life back to me. Undoubtedly I had had the tendency in my relations with people (I almost wrote "in my official relations with people," and it was a bit like that, in fact) to overestimate my state of despair. Something in me therefore knew, had always known, that I would end up finding love--I'm talking about reciprocated love, the only one that counts. I was not, however, naive; I knew that the majority of people are born, grow old and die without ever knowing love. Not long after the epidemic of mad cow disease, new measures had been introduced to ensure that people knew where their beef came from. In the meat section of supermarkets, in fast-food establishments, small labels appeared, generally worded thus: Born and Raised in France. Slaughtered in France. A simple life, in fact.

If you look at the circumstances, the beginning of our love story was extremely banal. I was 47 when we met; she was 22. What's more, she was an actress, and it's well-known that film producers sleep with their actresses; some films even appear to have been created solely for that purpose. That said, could I be considered a film producer? I was a celebrated comedian. As a producer I had only Two Flies Later to my name and was about to produce Motorway Swingers. My treatment kept itself to one sentence: "To bring together the commercial advantages of pornography and ultra-violence." This was not a treatment; at most it was a pitch, but it was good; my agent had told me lots of young producers proceeded like that today. I had become, without knowing it, a modern professional. I had also been sent three DVDs from the main Spanish artistic agents; I had begun to prospect for potential actors, indicating that the film had a "possible sexual content."

I put a plate of Arroz Tres Delicias in the microwave and put a DVD at random into the player. As the meal heated up, I had the time to eliminate the first three girls. After two minutes the machine beeped; I took the meal out of the oven and added some pepper puree. At the same time, on the giant screen at the back of the living room, Esther's trailer was beginning.

She was naked, standing in a room that was difficult to make out--no doubt an artist's atelier. In the first image she was being splattered with a jet of yellow paint--the one throwing the paint was out of the shot. Then you found her stretched out in the middle of a dazzling pool of color. The artist--you could see only his arms--was pouring a bucket of blue paint on her, then spreading it over her belly and breasts; she looked in his direction with trusting amusement. He guided her by taking her hand; she turned over on her front; he poured some more paint on the small of her back, spread it all over her back and her ass; her ass moved, accompanying the movement of the hands. There was in her face, in each of her gestures, a deeply moving innocence and sensual grace.

I knew the work of the artist Yves Klein. I knew there was nothing original or interesting about this happening on an artistic level, but who still thinks of art when happinessis possible? I called her agent the following day.

Our first meeting took place in a bar on Calle Obispo de León, a fairly big, typical bar, with dark wood paneling and tapas--I was rather grateful to her for not choosing Planet Hollywood. I arrived 10 minutes late. I sat down in front of her on the bench, experiencing something like the sensation I had had a few years previously when I went under general anesthetic: the impression of an easy, approved departure, the intuition that at the end of the day death would be a very simple thing. She was wearing tight, low-cut jeans and a clinging pink top that left her shoulders uncovered. When she stood up to go and order, I caught sight of her thong, also pink, showing above her jeans, and I began to get hard. With her light-blonde hair and her very white skin, she did not really look like a typical Spanish girl--I would have rather said Russian. She had pretty, attentive brown eyes, and I no longer remember my first words, but I think I indicated almost immediately that I was going to drop my film project. She looked surprised rather than really disappointed. She asked me why.

Basically I didn't know, and I threw myself into a long explanation, which went back to when I was her age. It emerged from the story that I had led quite a solitary life, marked by hard labor and intercut with frequent periods of depression. Words came easily to me; I was speaking in English, and from time to time she had me repeat a sentence. All in all I was going to drop not just this film but almost everything; I said I no longer felt the least ambition or rage to win. It seemed to me that at this point in my life I was truly tired.

She looked at me perplexed, as if the word seemed to her badly chosen. Yet that was it; perhaps in my case it was not a physical tiredness, rather a nervous one, but is there actually a difference? "I've lost faith," I said finally.

"Maybe it's better," she said. Then she put a hand on my sex. Nuzzling her head in the hollow of my shoulder, she gently pressed my cock between her fingers.

In the hotel room, she told me a little more about her life. Certainly you could describe her as an actress; she had played in sitcoms and police series, in which she was generally raped and strangled by more or less numerous psychopaths, and a few advertisements as well. She had even taken the starring role in a Spanish feature film, but it had not yet been released, and anyway it was a terrible film. Spanish cinema, she claimed, was on its last legs.

Her skin was very soft, and soon I knew I was in another world, separated from the ordinary world by a few centimeters of fabric--indispensable social protection, since 90 percent of men who came across Esther would be seized by the immediate desire to penetrate her. Once her jeans were off, I played for a little while with her thong, noting that her sex quickly became moist; it was five in the afternoon. Yes, it was another world, and I stayed there until 11 the following morning--it was the cutoff point for breakfast, and I was beginning to get seriously hungry. I had probably slept for brief periods. For the rest, those few hours justified my life. I was not exaggerating, and I was conscious of not exaggerating: We were, at that moment, in the absolute simplicity of things. Sexuality, or more precisely, desire, was of course a theme I had touched on many a time in my comedy sketches; that many things in this world centered around sexuality, or more precisely, desire, I was as conscious of as anyone else--and probably more so than many others. In these conditions, as an aging comedian, I had occasionally let myself be overcome by a sort of skeptical doubt: Sexuality was perhaps, like so many other things and perhaps everything in this world, overrated; perhaps it was just a banal ruse dreamed up to increase competition among men and the speed at which the whole system functioned. There was maybe nothing more to sexuality than there was to lunch at an excellent restaurant or to a Bentley Continental GT, nothing that justified getting so worked up. That night would show me I was wrong and bring me to a more elementary view of things.

In the morning, the sun returned to Madrid. I called a taxi and waited a few minutes in the hotel lobby with Esther while she replied to the many messages that had accumulated on her mobile. She seemed to have a rich social life; most of her conversations ended with the expression un besito or sometimes un beso. I didn't really speak Spanish; the nuance, if there was one, escaped me, but I became conscious at the moment when the taxi stopped in front of the hotel that in practice she did not kiss much. It was quite curious because, by contrast, she liked penetration in all its forms; she presented her ass with a lot of grace (she had pert buttocks rather like those of a boy), and she sucked without (continued on page 137)Sex with Esther(continued from page 68) hesitation and even with enthusiasm; but every time my lips approached hers she turned away, a little annoyed.

I got into the car. Whilst moving off down the avenue, a few meters farther on, I turned around to wave good-bye, but she was already on the phone and did not notice my gesture.

•

As soon as I arrived in the Almería airport I understood how my life was going to go in the following weeks. For some years already, I had almost systematically left my mobile off: It was a question of status. I was a European star; if people wanted to contact me, they had to leave a message and wait for me to reply. This had sometimes been hard, but I had stuck to my rule. This time my first action, on getting off the plane, was to switch on my mobile; I was surprised and almost terrified by the violence of disappointment that seized me when I saw that I had no message from Esther.

Your only chance of survival if you are sincerely smitten lies in hiding this fact from the woman you love, of feigning a casual detachment under all circumstances. What sadness there is in this simple observation! What an accusation against man! However, it never occurred to me to contest this law nor to imagine disobeying it: Love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed. That's what men, normally, call love. During the first few days I went through great moments of hesitation regarding my phone. I forced myself to separate myself from it, then to respect an interval of two hours before switching it back on. On the morning of the third day I had the idea of leaving my telephone on permanently and of trying to forget to wait for the ring; in the middle of the night, on swallowing my fifth Mepronizine tablet, I realized this didn't serve any purpose, and I began to resign myself to the fact that Esther was the stronger and that I no longer had any power over my life.

On the evening of the fifth day, I called her. She didn't seem at all surprised to hear from me; time for her seemed to have passed very quickly. She happily agreed to come visit me in San José; she knew the province of Almería, having holidayed there several times as a small girl. "Un besito," she said just before hanging up. We had stepped up another gear.

•

She arrived in a turquoise pleated miniskirt and a Betty Boop T-shirt. In die airport car park, I tried to take her in my arms; she quickly moved away, looking flustered. When she put her suitcase in the boot, a gust of wind lifted her skirt, and I got the impression that she wasn't wearing anything beneath it. Once I was in front of the wheel, I asked her the question. Shenodded with a smile, hitched her skirt up to her waist and parted her thighs a little; the hairs of her pussy formed a small, well-trimmed blonde triangle.

As I fired the ignition she pulled her skirt back down: I now knew that she wasn't wearing any panties; the desired effect had been produced; it was enough. We arrived at the residence, and as I was taking the suitcase from the boot, she went ahead of me up the few steps leading to the entrance. As I made out the lower curves of her little ass I grew dizzy and almost ejaculated in my trousers. I caught up with her and embraced her tightly. "Open the door," she said, rubbing her ass distractedly against my cock. I obeyed, but we were scarcely inside when I pressed against her again; she knelt down on a little rug nearby, putting her hands on the floor. I opened my fly and penetrated her, but unfortunately the car ride had so excited me that I came almost straight away. She seemed a little disappointed but not too much. She wanted to change and have a bath.

If Stendhal's famous saying (which was also appreciated by Nietzsche) that "beauty is the promise of happiness" is in general completely false, it can, however, be applied perfectly to eroticism. Since the beginning of the porn film, fellatio has always been the jewel in its crown. It was also the only incidence in which you could occasionally find a bit of real emotion in the act, because it is the only incidence in which the close-up is also a close-up of the face of the woman, where you can read in her features that joyful pride, that childlike delight she feels when giving pleasure. In fact Esther told me afterward that she had refused this caress in her first sexual relationship and had only decided to launch herself into it after having seen a lot of films. She now did it remarkably well and took pleasure in her own mastery; later, I never hesitated, even when she seemed too tired or indisposed to fuck, to ask her for a blow job. Immediately before ejaculation she would back off slightly to receive the jet of sperm on her face or in her mouth, but then she would return to the attack to meticulously lick, right to the last drop. Like many pretty young girls she became ill easily and had a delicate stomach, and she had at first swallowed reluctantly. But experience demonstrated to her in the clearest manner possible that she should take advantage of it, that swallowing their sperm was not, for men, an indifferent or optional action but rather constituted an irreplaceable personal experience. She now gave herself to it with joy, and I felt immense happiness on coming in her little mouth.

•

Weeks later spent in Madrid, when I was almost always with Esther, remain the most miraculous in my life.

She was not well educated in the normal sense of die term; the thought never crossed her mind to empty an ashtray or to clear what was left on her plate, and she didn't mind in the slightest about leaving die lights on behind her in rooms she had just left. (There had been occasions when I, following step by step her journey through my residence in San José, had to flick off 17 switches.) There was also no question of asking her to think of doing the shopping or bringing anything back from a shop that was not intended for her own use or, more generally, to do any kind of favor for anyone, like all very pretty young girls she was basically only good for fucking, and it would have been stupid to employ her for anything else, to see her as anything other than a luxury animal protected from all cares as from any difficult or painful task so as to be better able to devote herself to her exclusively sexual service. But nonetheless she was very far from being that monster of arrogance, of absolute cold egoism, or to speak in more Baudelairean terms, that infernal little bitch that the majority of very pretty young girls are; there was in her a consciousness of illness, weakness and death. Although beautiful, infinitely erotic and desirable, Esther was no less sensitive to animal infirmities, because she knew them. Once I became conscious of this, I began to truly love her. Through her various illnesses, her physical weaknesses, which were real, Esther could arouse an unaffected compassion in me.

And for the first time I felt moved in regard to others by charitable and friendly intentions: I would have liked everybody to be happy like I myself was. In short I was living again, even if I knew that this would be for the last time. All energy is of a sexual nature, not mainly but exclusively, and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing, it is absolutely no longer good for anything. It is the same for men. When the sexual instinct is dead, writes Schopenhauer, the true core of life is consumed; thus, he notes, "human existence resembles a theater performance, which, begun by living actors, is ended by automatons dressed in the same costumes." I didn't want to become an automaton, and it was this, that real presence--that taste for life, as Dostoyevsky would have said--that Esther had restored to me. What is the point of maintaining a body that no one touches? And why would you choose a nice hotel bedroom if you have to sleep there alone? I could only, like so many who had finally been defeated despite their sniggers and their grimaces, bow down: Immense and admirable, undoubtedly, was the power of love.

•

Unrequited love is a hemorrhage. Over the months that followed, as Spain settled into summertime, I could have still pretended to myself that all was well, that we were equally in love, but unfortunately I had never been very good at lying to myself. She visited me in San José once again, and if she still gave me her body with as much abandon, as little restraint as ever, I also noticed that more and more frequently she would move a few meters away to speak into her mobile. She laughed a lot during these conversations, more than she did with me; she would promise to be coming back soon, and the idea that I had of proposing that she spend the summer in my company appeared more and more plainly to be senseless. It was almost with relief that I took her back to the airport. I had avoided the breakup; we were still together, as they say, and the following week it was I who made the trip to Madrid.

She still went out clubbing a lot, I knew, and sometimes spent the entire night dancing, but she never asked me to accompany her. I imagined her replying to her friends who asked her out, "No, not this evening. I'm with him." I now knew most of them; many were students or actors, often with longish hair and comfortable clothes. Some by contrast would play the macho, but all of them, obviously, were young, and how could it have been otherwise? How many of them, I sometimes wondered, could have been her lovers?

For a long time she had been planning a party for her birthday on August 17, and she began over the following days to occupy herself with its preparations. On August 15, the day of the Virgin, Esther made love to me with even more lasciviousness than usual. Then she lay down and snuggled in my arms as night fell rapidly on the city, and it was only after half an hour of tender immobility that she told me she had had, for a few weeks now, something to tell me--no one knew yet; she intended to announce it to her friends at the birthday party. She had been accepted by a prestigious music academy in New York and intended to spend at least the academic year there. At the same time, she had been chosen for a small role in a big Hollywood production about the death of Socrates: She would play a servant of Aphrodite; the part of Socrates would by taken by Robert De Niro. It was only a small part, not more than a week's filming, but it was Hollywood, and the fee was enough to pay for a year's study and maintenance. She would leave at the beginning of September.

It seems to me that I stayed totally silent. I was turned to stone, unable to react. I almost suggested I go to the United States to settle there with her, but the words died in me before I could utter them; I fully realized that she had not even imagined the possibility. Nor did she suggest that I visit her: This was a new period in her life, a new departure.

When she knocked on the door of my bedroom on August 17, at about eight in the evening, she was wearing a small see-through top tied beneath her breasts, letting you make out their curves; her golden stockings, held up by garters, stopped a centimeter below her skirt--an ultra-short miniskirt, almost a belt, made of gold vinyl. She wasn't wearing any underwear, and when she leaned down to relace her high boots, the movement revealed most of her ass; despite myself I stretched out my hand to caress it. She turned around, took me in her arms and looked at me so compassionately, so tenderly, that I thought for an instant she was going to say she had changed her mind, that she was staying with me now and forever. But this didn't happen. We took a taxi to the party.

The first guests arrived around 11 p.m., but the party really got going only after three in the morning. At the start I behaved quite properly, circulating half-nonchalantly around the guests, a glass in my hand; many knew me or had seen me at the cinema, which gave rise to a few simple conversations. The music was too loud anyway, and very soon I contented myself with just nodding my head. There were almost 200 people, and I was undoubtedly the only one older than 25, but even that did not manage to destabilize me. I was in a strangely calm state.

Around 10 in the morning, the house music gave way to trance. I had been regularly emptying and refilling my glass of punch. The alcohol had helped to halt the rise in my anxiety, but I could still feel it there, living inside me. A little earlier a few people had formed into couples; I had observed movements in the direction of the bedrooms. I chose a corridor at random and opened a door decorated with a poster depicting a close-up of spermatozoids. I had the impression of arriving at the end of a mini orgy; some half-naked boys and girls were flopped across the bed. In the corner a blonde teenage girl, her T-shirt pulled up above her breasts, was giving blow jobs; I approached her, but she gestured for me to move away. I sat against the bed not far from a brunette with dusky skin and magnificent breasts, whose skirt was hiked up around her waist. She seemed fast asleep and didn't react when I parted her thighs, but when I introduced a finger into her pussy, she pushed my hand away mechanically without fully waking up. Resigned, I sat back down at the foot of the bed and was plunged for maybe half an hour into a morose state of excitement when I saw Esther come in. She had bought two bags of coke and knelt down to prepare lines; she had not noticed my presence. She introduced the cardboard tube into her nostril, and at the moment she rapidly snorted the white powder with a well-practiced gesture, I knew that I would keep engraved in my memory the image of this little animal, who was innocent, amoral, neither good nor evil, who was simply in search of her ration of excitement and pleasure. Suddenly I thought of the way an acquaintance had once described a lovely Italian girl: a pretty arrangement of particles, a smooth surface without individuality whose disappearance would hold no importance. And it was this that I had been in love with, that had constituted my only reason for living--and, and this was the worst of it, still constituted it. She leaped up, opened the door--the music reached us, much louder--and set off in the direction of the party. I rose reluctantly to follow her; when I got to the main room, she had already started dancing again. I began to dance near her, but she didn't seem to see me; her hair twirled around her face; her blouse was soaked with sweat; her nipples were erect under the fabric; the beat became more and more rapid, and I had more trouble following it. I stuck my ass against hers, and she began to move in response; our asses rubbed against each other harder and harder, then she turned around and recognized me. "Hola," she said, smiling before starting to dance again. Then we were separated by a group of boys, and I suddenly felt extremely tired.

I had no special status. This feeling of exclusive attachment I had, which was going to torture me until it eventually annihilated me, found no correspondence at all in her. It had no justification: Our flesh was distinct; we were unable to experience the same suffering or the same joy. Esther did not like love; she did not want to be in love. She refused this feeling of exclusivity, of dependence, and her whole generation refused it with her. For most young girls, sexuality was just a pleasant pastime driven by seduction and eroticism, which implied no particular sentimental commitment The centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by pornographic films, that consists of ridding sexuality of any emotional connotation in order to bring it back to the realm of entertainment had finally been accomplished. What I was feeling these young people could not feel nor even exactly understand, and if they had been able to feel something like it, it would have made them uncomfortable, as if it were something ridiculous and a little shameful, like stigmata in ancient times. They had finally succeeded in tearing from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done; what had been destroyed could no longer be put back together. They had reached their goal: At no moment in their lives would they ever know love. They were free. Esther, too.

I knew more or less what awaited me. I was evidently now on the home straight. She had been my happiness, but she had also been, as I had sensed from the beginning, the death of me. This premonition hadn't, for all that, made me hesitate, inasmuch as we all have to meet our own death, see it in front of us at least once, and each one of us, in our heart of hearts, knows this. It is, when you think of it, preferable that death, rather than being clad normally in boredom and attrition, should wear the rare robes of pleasure.

Her skin was very soft, and soon I knew I was in another world, separated from the ordinary world by a few centimeters of fabric.

Translated by Gavin Bowd.