‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I should have told you before.’
I wonder to myself whether you could swim to St. Kitts, how long that would take. Or whether you would perhaps sink halfway, in peace, swaying like seaweed.
‘I wanted to be honest,’ she says, ‘I didn’t want to keep anything from you, but you’re a risk. Haven’t you ever noticed that? That women want to save you? I think — I know you won’t let yourself be saved. You enjoy the attention, the worrying about you, but you don’t want to be saved. That’s your life. I’ve thought about it, about a life with you, but I kept seeing scenes of people being dragged down while they were trying to rescue someone else.’
A silence. Then, ‘That wasn’t very kind. I’m sorry.’
‘I guess. . I guess I thought it might amount to something.’
‘What do you mean, Ludwig? What exactly might it have amounted to?’
‘A possibility.’
‘That’s not particularly reassuring. A possibility. A woman wants to hear a bit more than that, you know. What kind of possibility were you thinking of?’
It took a long time before I came up with the answer. Then I said, ‘The possibility of a roof over my head.’
I went on with my life as a liability. Many things were relegated to the background. During those years I was the lover of wives, widows, women who said but I’m old enough to be your mother. That was what I goaded them into, to care for me, to feed and clothe me, to be my mother. The only way that could happen was along the road of sexuality. I couldn’t stand them when they acted like nervous schoolgirls or when I saw them paying too much attention to their appearance before we went out to dinner at a restaurant. I preferred to have them be a bit indifferent towards my person, but to take full possession of my body.
I had, generally speaking, little to fear from them, as little as they did from me: we were not out to fool ourselves. Concerning our position with regard to the other, there was to be no doubt. Upright statements of infatuation I responded to by putting an end to relations. Emotions disturbed the process. An older woman who asks may I hold your hand? and then begs for your love is a terrible thing to see. It is disgusting. I was ashamed of myself then for having prompted that disfigurement, for being part of that disfigurement.
It was an equilibrium that demanded a great deal from both parties. The woman who was best at it was Lotte Augustin, a German. I met her on the Lagonissi peninsula, close to Athens. She had a life to go back to, which helped. She was the ironic beauty from the television series, who appears whenever a murder has been committed upon a wealthy industrialist — the detectives repress their awe of crystal and Japanese wallpaper as they enter the salon. As soon as the widow appears, blonde, a red suit-dress, rings glistening on her fingers and looks that are the subject of professional maintenance, you know who did the killing.
That Lotte Augustin is staying at this particular resort says a great deal, but not everything. The expenditure of one thousand euros a night for a Junior Waterfront Suite with private pool must not feel like the loss of a limb. Not even when you extend your stay twice, for a week each time. After that she goes back to her life, her work, to her marriage to a CDU federal state minister that had remained intact first for the sake of his career, then for the sake of the children, and now simply because it has already remained intact for so long. Against the tanned skin above her breasts, gleaming and redolent of suntan lotion, there hangs a little golden cross. She is not a church-goer, but sometimes she prays for her children’s souls.
I feel her prying eyes in the piano bar. She smiles distantly at me from behind a magazine. Later on she says, ‘I thought you were German.’
‘My grandfather was German. I’m half Dutch, half Austrian. Two times almost a German. Does that count?’
She shakes her head.
‘Fraternal peoples.’
She bears an air of fluid melancholy. She has sold the shares in the health-care interim management company she set up, for three and a half million euros, she still holds a position on the board of supervisors, but has turned the daily management over to a woman in her early forties — she believes that women have to help each other climb the ladder of success. She spends a lot of time phoning from her recliner beside the infinity-edge pool. I float in it and try to remain motionless. From that position the water of the pool blends perfectly into that of the Saronic Gulf. None of the people she talks to know that she is almost naked. Her heavy breasts hang a bit to one side of her chest; when you lift them, the skin in the creases beneath is pale. Her areolas are almost black from the sun, the prominent nipples always erect. Beside the recliner is an ashtray with a layer of sand in it; a skyline of Dunhill filters marked with red lipstick. When she speaks German she is forceful and to the point — when she switches to another language her personality changes along with it. In English, she is less confident. She hesitates over certain expressions and words, sometimes she will finish a sentence in German, irritatedly. She swims without getting her hair wet. I lie in wait like an alligator. Her blue eyes glisten. Her pubic hair is thin and closely shorn, she pays careful attention to the magazines and the latest fashion. We mate on the broad marble steps of the pool. The water makes her dry, later it gets slipperier. She lays her head back on the sun-warmed marble. She wears waterproof mascara. The light makes its way into her open mouth, I see gold molars, worn fillings, I avoid the flow of her breath. All the scents of age can be masked, except for this one. The water laps against the pool’s edge, sparkling drops slide from her oiled skin.
The obscenity of this intercourse excites and repels me. The longer I put off my orgasm, the longer I can keep the worst of the repulsion at bay — the confrontation with suspicions about my own perversity, the reasons for things that someone my age is not supposed to do. The shame concerning the latter, until I am back in my room, until sleep has passed. The next day the feelings of lust return unabated: the climb to the high dive, the fear and the delight just before the leap, the fall, with an exploding heart.
Lotte Augustin accepts this pattern of comfort, ecstasy and escape. She says, ‘This must be a lot stranger for you than it is for me.’
It is an uncomfortable, interesting observation. Her desire for me, so much younger than her, in the flower and recklessness of my youth, is healthy. Everyone wants to possess youth, it is a respectable longing. That I make love to a woman who is almost sixty, on the other hand, is sick. But all forms of human intercourse, no matter how different in kind, tend towards a certain equilibrium. And so we cancel out her age against my sickness. Biology against pathology.
The modesty of the first few days has left her now, she takes her breasts in her hands and offers them to me, the sensation of her soft, fragrant flesh makes me light in the head. During the act her mouth is always open, with her constant keening she puts herself in a trancelike state, until suddenly her eyes open wide, as though awakening from a nightmare, and she digs her manicured nails into my flesh and moans things in German.