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 be proud of.)
My first memory is of my sister being pissed off with me.
I played with her sewing machine. It was a Fisher-Price toy, of quite good quality actually. It wasn’t every day that I had the chance to play with her stuff, but for some reason or the other that day I did. I must have been very small still, because I fitted into the pull-out drawer under her bed; I can remember I was still in nappies, because my bum was padded, or perhaps I was just fat!
I had scarcely lost myself in my own lovely sewing-machine world when an odd little creature with a mop of dark curls stormed into the room. Okay, I admit it, it was her room after all. She was probably about three or four years old, because the little body was still typically babyish: round tummy, round cheeks and short stomping movements. I can’t recall what she said at all, because I could not yet understand or speak Afrikaans. But it must have sounded and looked awfully angry to leave such an impression. Her tiny fists were balled and her fat little arms were swinging around fiercely like a windmill.
One short, chubby little leg had the jitters – like Elvis Presley in his early years. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, and she was certainly not singing Heartbreak Hotel, but I can well remember that the intensity of her reaction totally fascinated me.
It was my first meeting with rage. Wow, how interesting …
When I was a bit older, I would usually sneak into my parents’ room early in the morning to jump on the bed, shouting that I was the Pink Panther. Then, after my dad had left for work, we helped my mom make the beds and fetch the milk and orange juice at the front door. In those days the dairy still had a cart that left your order at the gate before sunrise – and no one stole it.
My mother’s dressing gown was maroon, and all the pockets were full of crumpled tissues. She must have had a really runny nose. In the late morning, we listened to Siembamba on the radio. Tannie Susan and Otterjasie were daily highlights. My sister and I were even studio guests on the programme once. I told all the friends about the Mac Mac Falls and the Bridal Veil, and then sang Koljander-koljander. It was my first public performance.
I remember already having a word for orgasm at the age of three. It was so gruesome that I don’t even want to repeat it here. No, really – but it’s a lot like the French term, little death.
Little death? I still haven’t a clue where I got it from. How I came to associate my orgasms with a sort of dying, God only knows. Did it perhaps surface from the collective unconscious? A previous life of which I was unconsciously conscious? Who knows?
I think my sister and I both had a strong connection to that collective reservoir from childhood. One morning she calmly announced, “Oumie’s dead.” When the telephone rang in the late morning, that was precisely the news conveyed to my mom.
My