It’s a privilege to be ourselves here, without alcohol, drugs – without any stimulation apart from what comes from within.
And here we are. Our wet bodies struggling to find warmth in the moonlight. Fortunately it’s high summer, and the difference between swimming-pool water and sweat is only a few minutes ...
Why am I telling you this story?
Because Abelardo is the first man to whom I truly gave my virginity freely.
Wait, allow me to explain. Here is the short version, for purposes of introduction: Fucking is easy. It’s a clattering racket and it means less than a cigarette butt when the gasping and sucking is over. I have done it to the point of boredom, with more men than there are days in the year. I learned to divorce my emotional self and my physical self. That night, for the first time, a man reached out to me without reserve. It was wonderful.
“Kiss me,” he said.
We made love. That was that. And when it was done it was done. It was a moment in time when two souls could connect.
The difference between making love and sex, I believe, is this: You can’t make love if you don’t love yourself, and you can’t love yourself if you are not yourself. How can you give yourself to someone if you can’t grasp the worth of what you are giving?
I don’t see my past as “deep and dark”. It’s still an important part of who I am now. Yes, I’ve made mistakes. Many. But I like myself. Here and now, the way I am. I learned that I don’t have to apologise for who I am. You have to be yourself to give meaning to your life. I believe that.
Abelardo and I floated on clouds of self-love and shared it with each other. His hands felt like those of someone who loves himself. I could kiss him like a woman who cares about herself, who doesn’t make excuses for her sexuality. My orgasms give birth to worlds within myself; it’s an integral part of my being, and I’m not going to apologise for it.
Virginity is about much more than mere flesh. I am thankful that I could lose my virginity all over again at the age of thirty-five. I even saw some proof: The next morning at sunrise, there was a bloodstain on the paving by the pool.
Virginity is my choice; it does not have to be a physical condition.
Yes, Abelardo: I gave you mine …
Perhaps I will bump into him somewhere again one day.
Who knows?
2. In the city of light, love and monsters in church towers
Virginity will always be an issue for women.
Start just before your first sexual encounter, Carel said. But I want to work in a bit of objectivity first. If you want to write a story about yourself, you have to develop the ability to leave yourself every now and then and view yourself from above, as if you were someone else.
They call it the third person.
I learned that from the famous British writer D.H. Lawrence in his much-lauded novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Both the main character and her lover take turns being the third person.
In terms of virginity: when do you know for sure you’ve lost yours?
Was it when, as a girl, one Karin Eloff played catch with her cousins on her grandparents’ lawn one afternoon and fell so hard that there was blood in her panties? Even her sister would remember the blood-in-the-panties afternoon for the rest of her life. Or was it in grade one when she stumbled on the beam during gymnastics practice and landed on it hard between her legs. There was also blood in her panties then.
Then there was the time when she started to menstruate. Belatedly in grade nine. The blood ran down the drain in the shower in thick, snotty clumps. Some pieces stuck to the tiles on the shower floor. She looked at it and felt very pleased that she was a woman now. And wondered if it meant she was no longer a virgin.
Shortly afterwards, in grade ten, she went to Germany on a school exchange programme and had the most phenomenal orgasm of her life. She stayed with a family who had an eighteen-year-old son, and he had super-sexy, super-horny teenage friends …
Somehow it happened that in a communal state of drunkenness, one of them landed on top of her. She, flat on her back with a pair of jeans on, her legs slightly parted and her pubic bone shamelessly thrust up and forward; he, also fully clothed, with his huge erection rubbing against her clitoris in slow, instinctive movements.
All that rubbing had to lead somewhere.
The fabric of his jeans, and hers, rubbing against her clitoris – and his firm, friendly nudging – had her moistness seeping through everything into his receptive pores. Before she could stop herself, she began shuddering convulsively and wondered if she was giving birth to the greatest of all pleasures. She decided that if she had not lost her virginity now, they could keep it. She could not imagine that penetration of any sort could be better than dry humping.
The day she lost her virginity in biological terms, she didn’t doubt it for a moment. It happened in Paris on her twentieth birthday. She was doing au pair work in the Netherlands but had wanted to celebrate her birthday in Paris, the city of light, love and monsters in church towers.
Alone.
But it didn’t work out that way.
At the Fountain of the Innocents she was sitting in the weak summer sun and fantasising about the passers-by with their thick, dark hair and French accents when suddenly he was standing beside her asking something incomprehensible in French. She cannot remember exactly what it was, but a Frenchman stepped up to translate and explained to her that the guy wanted to know if she was a tourist. No wonder the United Nations struggles so. The whole affair became much too complicated and she is convinced to this day: Much was lost in translation.
Fortunately he eventually started talking to her in very broken English.
His name was Patrick Po.
Now that she can think back on it nostalgically, she realises the man had a meek little penis – a real little wiener. And he suffered from small-dick syndrome. But for a first attempt, it was passable.
Their 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