by Ioana Baetica
excerpt 02/01/1980I am reading something by W. Faulkner, which lives among dusty shelves, with a tidy certitude; that certitude divorced reality a long time ago, quietly depleting, like a breeze of air when it sees injustice taking hold… and I now believe that this is exactly the way things are: all my theories about eroticism, which I took from books or heard from people, are divorced from reality, or they are the products of reality's miscarriage. Because at first, reality gave birth to them, and then it got rid of them the way one gets rid of a tight jacket hindering one's moves. Today I tasted some of his urine. We both went behind the house, leaving the others almost drunk inside, grimacing to rock music, their eyes goggling out, and their cigarettes hanging from their lips. I told him my ass was frozen, and he covered my naked buttocks with his wide palms, to warm them up. Then we peed. "Let's see who can hold on longer!" And when he fastened his zipper (now how can I stand the thought that other women's panties, too, will get caught in his jeans zipper?!) and turned to leave, I ran my fingers on the wall he had urinated on and then I licked them. Tasted of lymph and sea water. Very perfumed. Acid and perfumed. Then, for a week, I touched my food with my fingers before taking it to my mouth, to make it "holy." And it felt as if I was biting the sea. Still that evening, I asked him to let me hold his penis while he let urine flow. I think I had done that before, but I cannot really remember when or where. Oh, yes! When he tried to explain to me how men pee, and I tried it too, standing. Nothing came of that. This time I felt a warm vibration in my palm, the way one feels when one's joint is a little numb, and blood bursts forth through one's capillary vessels up to one's finger tips. I played with his urine jet, I drew geometrical figures unseen before on the fence: next day in daylight, when I passed by, of course they looked like two halves of a heart, separated by the distance between the perches. Again that evening (what an evening!) he gave me his food ball, which he had chewed for a long time (I think originally, it had been bread with margarine). I squeezed it a little between my tongue and the roof of my mouth, to get his saliva, and then I swallowed everything with crazy appetite. Some other times I would swallow his semen. Afterwards, we made love in a small, very dirty room. I liked his entire unwashed body – he had not washed for 24 hours – and most of all his penis. Very tasty. I do not believe there is any other body in this world so dirty and smelling so good, unwashed, yet so clean. I spread his semen with my finger on the dirty floor: Vlada. I was thinking, what if he were to call his friends from the other room, and place them in chairs, to sit there motionless, their hands on their knees (it has to be on their knees!), to watch us do it, whispering to one another comments on our failed, or sublime, passages, taking notes while sipping beer. What if one of them was mad enough to get close to the screen and stretch out his hand, crossing over to us – Cristi would castrate him right then and there with his pocket knife, which he always wears in his jeans rear pocket, under his leather jacket. "Nobody, nobody, don't let anybody touch you with his dumb, unimaginative hands. None of them is a connoisseur. Don't let anybody ask less than you can give, girl! Do it only with me, honey. Just me!" "Only you, Cristi, I know, only you." When we used to love each other very much, I mean when he loved me too, sometimes, after we made love, I liked to braid his pubic hair, or to separate it into locks, and stick the locks with saliva and semen, like some kind of a hair set. I created wondrous hair styles with curls, or parted his hair in the middle with my stainless rings, or I let it flow free along his powerful, yet fatigued penis. I think this is a profession I would dedicate my entire life to: being his pubic hair stylist! Take my bracelet off and stealthily place it under his balls, like a tiara surrounding his pelvic area. What a fascinating face he has down there! At the top of his penis there is a vigilant eye, able to figure out the G point in the darkness of my vagina. And when that eye cries, it sheds so many tears! Sometimes it whines or weeps, a few tears coming down onto my palms. And when it sleeps – which does not happen very often – a lid of wrinkled skin closes the eye on top. Silky eyelids, always rebel, and adopting their own positions – no matter how much I tried to stretch them and tidy them up with mascara – gather around his tear glands-balls. What a round eyebrow over this eye… one made of soft, smooth skin, put forth by a slightly oval curb completely surrounding his eye. His iris is deep, it is some kind of a channel, whose optic nerve roots go right to his brain. If you run – I mean if I run my fingers over this slippery retina, I am left with a sea water perfume on my finger tips, something between sweet and salty, between amnesia and anamnesis. Still at the time when I started that hair stylist's shop, I sometimes rejected his penetration, and satisfied myself, rubbing my vagina against his knee or ankle. But he got terribly angry when he was left out and made me rub his penis softly, in parallel rhythm with my movements. Which, of course I only did three or four times, enough to arouse him and make him force me. In fact, he sometimes found refuge spaces when normal sex did not make him happy anymore, and he ejaculated in my ear (spermatozoids talk to one another!), or in the small hole on the back of my neck, where the occipital bone joins the cervical vertebrae. Where the hair ends. He lifted my long hair with his right hand, pushed my forehead into the pillow, and climbed on top of me, pushing that zone where the skin is so thin with his penis. Invariably, his left hand was leaning on the window, and I knew when he was about to finish. I knew because he began to scratch the glass softly with his nail and to gnash his teeth. Then he turned me face up, riding on my hips. "Now I'm a woman for you. I'm becoming a woman, look!" And he squeezed the skin around his nipples with his palms, moving up and down lasciviously, while I raised my Mount of Venus, almost convinced that a penis would spring out of it, penetrating his anus. At the very end, when we both fell, lifeless, next to each other, lost among damp and crumpled sheets, when my temple rested on one of his buttocks, when I saw the straight dimension of his butt join the perfect straight lines of his arms, and my fingers followed my eyes like a shadow, I felt on a ski track. I felt dizzy again. I went straight into dreaming, and of course, there, I made love with Cristi again, and he moved rhythmically like a reptile, like a lengthy creepy creature, being absorbed, little by little, into my vagina, sitting in the plastic chair of a joyful ice cream parlor, in the full swing of a summer afternoon. He was swallowed bit by bit, bone by bone, until only a name was left of my monster, only the letter C, which, hungry after we had got close, I put in my coffee and ate like a chocolate croissant. Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air [end of poem Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath]. Like air-air-air. We had been bored with oral and anal sex for a long time, so they did not stimulate our senses anymore, unless they occurred in totally new circumstances. For example, he once gave me cunnilingus while I was playing the piano, my legs spread: his buttocks, leaning on the pedal, followed the instructions on Grieg's score. Then, he had put most of his extremities in my vagina countless times, so we had long since gotten fed up with that too. So, one day we used the inanimate objects in his room. First Judah, the velvet monkey he had had since he was a kid: he had to rub his plastic muzzle on my labia, while a string of artificial pearls was being strongly tied around my breasts. Cristi said that, if I did not let milk flow right then and there, he would squeeze me on, until my nipples burst and folliculin flowed. But unfortunately, the pearl string gave way before me, and the pearls spread on the carpet. Then we both understood that whatever was not natural was terribly predictable and boring. Therefore, we gave up using anything else except for our young bodies. For the same reason, there was a time when we basically refined the technique of limb bondage, giving up ties, belts, and silk scarves, imagining we were tied to the desk legs, without actually being so. And we made love stoned in our imaginary world, just using our free and feverish sexual organs, which bumped into each other desperately, under the illusion that they were watching each other in a mirror, and convinced they could go beyond, into the space of the reflected image. We suffered terribly because we did not have a camera to satisfy the innocent voyeurism inhabiting both of us. But we were careful to overcome our crisis by forgetting to pull the curtains. So, I am absolutely sure that, in our borderless joy, we offered unforgettable moments to the family across the street. We fantasized that during those moments they could masturbate themselves, or each other, watching us from the darkness of their kitchen, perhaps together with their friends and neighbors, invited there for the sublime show of the maestros on the third floor. We imagined that the entire building next to us or perhaps the entire neighborhood gathered at the window across the street, watching us fascinated. Sometimes we thought we heard them breathing or pushing each other to find room in front, close to the window, and then we waved to them from the other side and turned one more lamp on. But there was a poplar tree standing in the way, so, when the gentleman on the ground floor made up his mind to cut it one day without explaining why, we both knew why he had resorted to such a profoundly anti-environmental action, we forgave him, and smiled at each other meaningfully. Obviously, there was no public place left in town without Cristi's seed: park, rest rooms in bars, roofs, cemetery, the church yard, the kindergarten yard, building entrances, railway station, bus station, movie theaters, library, culture club, hospital, and health care center – fountains of semen burst out of all those places, and nobody knew that, with every step they took, they crushed at least one of Cristi's spermatozoids. We smeared our humors on the door knobs of some people we did not know, mail boxes, sofas in train cars, walls in waiting rooms, beer mugs, carpets in institutions, new clothes in stores, and bread in bakery shops. Most of all we liked winter, when we pulled our pants down and spent 10 minutes bare assed in the snow, to kill our fever somewhat; afterwards, we ran like crazy in the field near the town, chasing each other in the dark, stopping for some penetration every 20 meters, and then we ran again. We ran until Cristi launched a phosphorescent thing, like a rain of light drops, from the top of his arrow. He hypnotized me. One night, we bribed the guard and went into my high school building at the ground floor, in my classroom, and we did it on the desk where I sat – the second one on the right – "so now you will be inspired when you take tests," he told me among spasms. In Registration Record (Polirom, 2004), Ioana Baetica (b. 1980) "fabricates, not without talent, a text that records the passage from callow, nerdish teenage to the 'maturity' of scandalous experiences, confessed while watching oneself, with a pretended ease like that of Catherine Millet. Reading Pan's Pulse, her micro-Fracturist novel, we watch the extravagant show of a wonder child, boosted by the critical reactions that came immediately: 'a remarkable debut,' a blow against 'the rather prudish world of the contemporary Romanian literature,' and so on." (Florina Pârjol)
by Ioana Baetica
by Ioana Baetica