- I'm happy with him.
- You've got used to easy life, lack of emotion. Try this once and then we'll talk. If you decide to date him, I have his phone number. And it's only fifty euros, whole service.
- Please don't talk like that. It bothers me.
- You've been a nerd ever since we were in high school. You're missing out. I used to think so too. But I fell. And I don't regret it. What I was missing....!
And so Wednesday afternoons went by. After the incisive glances of the women on each centimetre of his anatomy, calls and datings, demanded with total discretion, would arrive, which were progressively increasing in frequency, so that these joyful married women of La Ciotat could continue to combine their extra-marital sexual encounters with work and family. Carlos had always admired his clients' ability to make his role of satisfaction go completely unnoticed in such a small town.
Carlos was spending his life between the daily punishment of bodybuilding in the gym and the hourly sex he so successfully offered at homes. But now, in front of the sea, next to no one, he was thinking about the meaning of what he was doing, what it might take, what the future might keep for him.
He felt the weariness of a dark day. His daily activity of punishing his muscles with the sophisticated torture machines that filled the space of gym, as job training for his job, became increasingly uninteresting to him. He'd been thinking about retiring for a while. While doing weights or cycling or walking on various machines he had already remembered his whole life from start to finish.
- Will I always be like this? Will I end up an old man with an impressive physique and an empty head?
He knew he had to keep his body resources stable and even improve them, as his clients detected any excess or defect that had arisen and did not hesitate to let him know. And he kept on and on running without moving, pushing machines for nothing over and over again, swimming laps and laps in the pool to always returning to the starting point. Action without imagination, without illusion, without satisfaction.
But now he had another reason to stay there day after day. It had been 7 years since his partner died, the most intense social experience of his life.
He stared into the void as he heard Mina's distant voice and laughter come from the past. And he remembered. He recalled that they met one night of partying as they listened to the emotional strength of Manu Chao's voice, covering an August night sky. The following week, Charles was already installed in the young woman's flat in the poorest part of Paris. For him it was an unexpected well-being to enjoy a beautiful young woman with ebony skin and stunning eyes. But it wasn't an exclusive love. Unwittingly, he became just another pimp in the neighbourhood, conscientiously organizing and tidying the flat and the food for both of them, based on the abundant income that his wife's unparalleled beauty brought to the home. These were years of shared happiness, of travels and adventures, of sensations of deep pleasure for two new young adults, until the final drift began in Amsterdam.
While at Noord's campsite, where they arrived on a free ferry, made available by the city to the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, Mina began to dive into a nearby tent when drug was offered to her. Carlos couldn't stand the sight of the needles and that was his first big disagreement.
Heroin became part of their lives, in their completely conflicting attitudes. His life got worse when they returned to Paris. Mina under the effects of drugs began to accept unlimited clients, the relationship with Carlos, until then so well shared with her clients, was reduced to moments of fall into a drowsiness from which he could not get out but at the cost of more drugs. Finally Mina disappeared, moved to her pusher’s flat, where income flourished with the sale of drugs and sex. Carlos, for whom his life at the time had no other meaning than the attraction for Mina, went to rescue her to the nerve centre of Parisian drugs, to get nothing more than a great beating from the thugs who were the protectors of the business, from which he had to take time to recover. Sometimes he still felt the itching, perhaps psychological, in his humerus that was broken at the time.
He fled from there to take refuge in his city, to live off his mother's income, and that would remain his life for a long time, until that very day.
He'd never see Mina alive again. He knew that she had died and he went to the funeral to hear all the contempt that had come from the heart of her parents who had already lost their loved one a long time ago, pouring all the guilt on him and cursing the passive young man.
Since then he stopped approaching women and it was a long time before he allowed his body to be used again for the first time for money. It was one night at his mother's birthday party. A friend of hers practically raped him while they were both in a state of complete intoxication. It was not much more than satisfaction of the desire retained for too long with hardly any awareness of the other person, but it was the starting point of Carlos' life from then on. On the bedside table it was fifty euros notes. The unexpected companion of that night had set his fixed rate for the coming years.
He remembered his pre-teen years, harassed for being the teacher's son. With a daily frequency he was bullied a collectively by the future workers and husbands of La Ciotat, they told him all the insults they knew at their age, they beat him and stole his books and money. The situation became so stressful that he ended up hating school as a whole, hating it for the rest of his life, and refusing to go to class. A change of school meant a relative calm but learning and Carlos were completely divorced. Now when he made love with all his passion to so many women in the city, his greatest pleasure was to dream that it was a domination struggle that paid back to the horned husbands all the aggressiveness that had been inflicted on him in their student days.
Everything changed in his strenuous routine of gymnastics and sexual services when one day Aphrodite appeared. She stood next to him on the gym running machine and did not seem to notice his presence. But the sky opened up for Carlos. It was an improved Mina, more mature, with healthier features, a faint natural smile that shone while she was running, with a body to dream about, just his size.
Over the next few days and months, Carlos was punctually present at the date he had not been invited, and his eyes could no longer turn away from her. Unfortunately, on the second day of such platonic admiration, he was called to the gym office. The young woman had complained that Carlos was keeping his eyes on her and she had begged them to tell him that she was a married Muslim woman and that she did not want to be disturbed or even approached. Carlos was forced to forget his youthful illusion, but although he tried, he couldn't do it. He was in love. He continued to coincide whenever he could with the young woman's fixed schedule and sneaking in with eager looks when she didn't look there.
One Tuesday Aphrodite didn't show up. Carlos realised it immediately. The time that he now spent between levers and weights, which before used to pass quickly, became eternal. The automatic movements, which he used to make at the same time as her without any effort, were once again a boring and annoying workload. He looked at his growing muscles day by day, and knew that he had reached a level that was highly appealing for his clients, although he no longer had any illusions.
When three weeks passed without seeing his idealized queen, he knew that her absence was more than just a disease, his initial assumption. He asked the gym managers but no one knew anything. His interest in continuing to build more muscles in his body declined so much that he thought about quitting. Without her presence there, exercise was an ordeal.
When he least expected to solve the mystery, he saw her. She was dressed all in black. Yes, it was her. Was she in mourning?
A restrained feeling, the need to be close to her prompted him to speak.
-You're Aphrodite, right? What happened to you? Why don't you come to the gym?
She looked at him with a frightened face, seemed to be trying to protect herself from such unhealthy company by covering her face and quickly crossed the street without even looking at him.
- What happened to you? Are you going back to the gym?
Aphrodite's hasty steps were lost on the opposite sidewalk, without even turning her head.