She may have sensed my lack of interest in discussing it, so she changed the topic: “You’re good at Spanish. How many years have you been here in Spain?”
“About five years,” I said.
She kept moving, brushing against me. “And you don’t have a fiancée or a girlfriend?”
I said, “Female friends, yes: the co-workers that you saw with us at the club. But no fiancée.”
She asked with a seriousness overlaid with humor, “Surely you are married in your own country?”
I responded in a similarly facetious tone, “Yes, four wives and forty children!”
She laughed. Then she covered the pot and said, “Come on, let’s sit in the living room for a while until the water boils off, then we’ll add the chunks of cheese and some milk. The food is going to be delicious!”
I sat on the couch, and she came and sat next to me, pressing against me and setting her can of beer on the table in front of us after taking two sips. When she saw me staring at the television screen, she said, “There’s nothing good on TV now.”
True, there were just late night shows advertising different kinds of cars and modern exercise equipment. So I turned it off, and she wrapped her left arm around my neck and reached her right hand to my shirt. She opened the buttons and said, “Why don’t you change your clothes? Make yourself at home.”
She laughed, pulling me toward her, toward her lips, and we began a long kiss, our tongues, our lips, and our quick breaths intermingling. All the while her hand played with the hair on my chest and moved further down. I had been thinking of her voluptuous breasts since I saw them bouncing in the club. I wanted to know what it was like to touch large breasts like that. With my lips still on hers, I made a move and slid my hand under her light undershirt.
Oh, how nice it was! Soft, my fingers sank into them, and my hands cupped all the way around. I felt both nipples standing erect. My fingertips brushed the ends of them. Then my fingers circled around on all sides. The warm place between the breasts, where they pressed together, made me shudder.
The shudder passed through my body, and my loins tightened. Her fingers descended toward my waist, and she clung to me all the more, melting into me with her eyes closed. I don’t know how long we continued like that, but when we stopped and I looked at her face, I found her smiling, blushing. She was even more beautiful with her shining eyes and her deep passion.
I said, “Make yourself at home! You can change your clothes too, if you want.”
We went off to the bedroom. I opened a dresser and took out for her a pair of my pajamas. When I turned around, I found that she had taken off her pants. I saw her white underwear pressing into the fullness of her butt and thighs, also white.
“Just the bottoms,” she said. “I’ll keep this shirt of mine.”
I changed clothes too, keeping my back toward her so that she wouldn’t see the taut erection in front of me.
We felt comfortable and free, such that she began to move more confidently and spontaneously between the living room, the bathroom, and the kitchen. She brought me back an open cup of yogurt with a small spoon inside. She gave it to me and sat on my lap, filling it up with her butt. I reached around with one hand, which I moved in a circle, caressing it on all sides. She leaned against my chest and kissed me from time to time. I started touching her breasts again, on top of her shirt … and underneath.
CHAPTER 5
After considering the matter in a halting, conflicted, and wavering way, I made up my mind not to sleep with Pilar. I would avoid falling into sin that night as far as I was able.
I had never slept with anyone before her. Yet I wouldn’t let her know that I was still a virgin because she wouldn’t believe me. She would laugh, or she would be afraid, or I don’t know what. I was also afraid of God and Grandfather and Aliya. And my confusion, my lack of experience, and the likelihood of failure.
I would be satisfied with the kisses I had won from her and my fondling of her large breasts, which were just the kind that I lusted after whenever I saw such a woman pass by on the street in my daily life. Or when they would bare them in the movies or at the seashore during the summer. For I hadn’t experienced anything in my life like Aliya’s amazing breasts: neither large nor small, succulent, firm, and erect — even when she was dead. As though they were created precisely to answer my desire. I wanted them that badly. She used to smear them for me with dates, and I would suck them under the poplar trees and the willows, lying on the sand in the middle of the forest along the shores of our Qashmars Village.
Pilar finished eating her meal after giving me a couple of bites to try. It really was delicious. (I said to myself that I would try to prepare it later, which I actually did. I even became an expert with the dish, varying the kinds of cheese and milk.) She washed the dishes in the kitchen, then came out and went into the bathroom. She pushed the door shut without closing it all the way. I heard the tinkle of her peeing. Then she rinsed her mouth, blew her nose, and washed up. She came out, gesturing with her head toward the bedroom.
“Come on.”
“No,” I said. “I am going to try to sleep a little here on the couch, even if only half an hour. I’m tired, and I usually have a lot of work on Mondays.”
Her expression changed a little, and she said, “Why the couch? The bed is big enough for both of us.”
“No …. Whenever I’m tired, I snore loudly. I also don’t want to bother you with my alarm clock.”
“Fine,” she replied. “Whatever you want.” She came over and gave me a kiss on the mouth, saying, “Sleep well.”
Then she disappeared into the bedroom. I closed the door after her, turned out the light in the living room, and lay down on the couch.
I wasn’t actually very tired because I was used to sleeping during the day. I also wasn’t sleepy on account of how hard my heart was beating from having a woman in my house, especially after all those kisses and caresses. I wanted a little time alone to go over everything that had taken place. This always happened with me. After any exciting event or conversation, I would go off by myself for a while to recall it all, contemplating it, enjoying it, scoping out its horizons. My fist squeezed the erection under my pajamas, and Pilar’s smell filled the place.
But what had happened brought me back to Aliya. I was always coming back to her, my first and only love story since we were kids in Subh Village. Memories of her fed my deepest desires. She was a cousin on my father’s side, and her house was next to ours. We were separated from them by only a low mud wall, which we used to cross by sitting on it and swinging our legs over. Their bread oven was close to ours, so we would gather near our mothers when they baked bread at dawn or sunset. They would talk about the female neighbors, the cows, the chickens, the fields, and the babies while we played around them and took the burnt bread crusts they gave us.
Aliya was my most beloved playmate: I would take her side in all the fights, and I would give her the best of the clay creations I made. Among these was a horse because she loved horses. I painted it white except for its tail, which was black, just like their horse. Her father was the only one in the village who owned a horse — the rest of us only had donkeys — and he called it “Lion” even though it was a horse.
When Aliya got bigger, she began riding her father’s Lion. She would shoot off toward the riverbank to let it drink, or she would take it to the field and return with saddlebags full of watermelons and eggplant from her mother. Whenever I saw her passing close by and heading off into the distance, I would remain fixed in place, reliving the scene of her on the white horse, with her long hair, black as its tail, dancing in the wind behind her head like the wings of a happy bird.