Valera spent hours on his family’s balcony in Alexandria, looking for ships and pissing on the Berber merchants who trundled below with carts of sticky dates and ostrich plumes. Flaubert had done this before him, on his trip down the Nile in a felucca with Maxime Du Camp. Coptic monks had swum up to the boat, naked, begging alms. “Baksheesh, baksheesh!” the monks cried out, the felucca’s sailing crew hollering back this or that about Muhammad and attempting to cudgel the monks with frying pans and mop handles. Flaubert couldn’t resist taking his prick from his trousers, waving it and pretending to piss on their heads, and then delivering on the threat as the wretched monks clung to the rigging and prow. “Baksheesh, baksheesh!”
Valera was more furtive, sending a patter over the balcony railing and ducking behind a potted plant as the merchants yelled up, indignant, and then briskly wheeled their carts away, leaving Valera to read in peace, without the irritating clang of handbells and the distracting grind of wooden cartwheels on the paving stones. He was busy supplementing his strict lycée education with Rimbaud and Baudelaire, with Flaubert’s letters, volumes he purchased on trips to Paris with his father. His father proudly paid the extra customs fees for Valera’s crates of literature, unaware that some of it was not only improper but downright lewd, like Flaubert’s letters from the year he went down the Nile, 1849. Pages were passed among schoolboys, creased and underlined, depicting a life that confirmed the essential goodness of everything the boys had been told was bad, a life that involved fucking before breakfast, after lunch, before dinner, all night, and then again the morning after, ill with hangover — the best yet, by Flaubert’s own account. Valera memorized Flaubert’s reports and dreamed of his own sentimental education of see-through pants and sandalwood, of the endless succession of breasts and velvety cunts that Flaubert encountered.
Valera longed for a French girl named Marie, closing his eyes to close the physical gap between their two bodies, as he pretended his own hand was Marie’s lips, mouth, and tongue. Dark-eyed, pale-skinned Marie, who lived at the convent next door. She was older than Valera, but she let him hold her hand and even kiss her, though nothing more. The promise of her warm body was buried under layers of no and not yet. Every morning the girls were taken into the convent courtyard by the nuns, and Valera would strain at the kitchen window to see them doing their knee bends and stretches. On occasion the sun angled in such a way that it penetrated the girls’ thin white cotton blouses, and he was able to glimpse the shape of Marie’s breasts, which were round and large. They were not suspended in any kind of undergarment, like the complicated muslin-and-elastic holsters his mother wore, and he wondered if brassieres were only for married women. When he looked in the mirror he felt unfree, a hopeless entwinement of longings and guilt. His private pleasures were wrecked by the specter of guilt, even with the door locked, the covers pulled up: a fortress of privacy breached by his mother’s voice, calling his name. He figured he’d stored up a lifetime of lust and that upon its first real release he would unburden himself in one violent salvo and then settle into a more manageable state. He imagined that physical proximity would instruct him in so many things — first of all, the real distance between people. He was willing to pay to begin this education. He strolled the Rue de la Gare de Ramleh, where the whores worked in the open, but the truth was that he could not distinguish male from female, even as he’d been told that men were on one side of the street and women on the other. But which side was which? He was embarrassed to ask. They looked the same, wore their scarves knotted and wrapped the same way, trailed the same perfume. He longed for his own sexual delinquency, but he had no taste for surprises if he should accidently choose the wrong side of Ramleh. On the night of his fourteenth birthday he mustered his courage and visited a brothel on Rue Lepsius, where native women — maybe they were Jews — yawned and adjusted their hairpins. A large doll lay on a chair, its legs splayed wide. Valera quickly selected a woman in gold-slashed bloomers whose curly hair reminded him of Marie’s. Together they entered a little chamber with threadbare rugs and a rickety settee. The woman flopped on the settee and began puffing on a hookah in a mannish and private-seeming fashion, eyes closed, mouth like a trumpet bell exhaling smoke toward the ceiling in O’s that floated virginal and then frayed and collapsed. When she was done with the hookah she took off her bloomers. The settee creaked loudly as she pulled Valera down and wrapped her legs around him. Soft pressures enveloped him. He ignored the symphony of creaks from the settee and moved into a drifting sea, felt a sensation of a boat and waves, but whether he was the boat and she the waves did not matter, only the pleasure of movement mattered. Suddenly the woman bore down, activating ridiculous muscles. He didn’t know that females possessed such muscles, which were like a hand that grabbed him and squeezed until there was nothing left to squeeze.
The salvo he’d been dreaming of was not violent, though it produced a strange aftershock of trembling. Most unexpected was the sadness that followed on the heels of pleasure, like smoke from an extinguished candle. But like smoke, the sadness quickly dissipated, and a week later, behind the open bazaar, he paid a native woman to let him touch her bosom. He’d been so consumed with the mechanics of the act with the woman in the brothel that he’d all but forgotten to investigate her breasts, which had stared up at him, jiggling softly in rhythm with the creaking settee. Behind the bazaar, he prodded and handled the breasts of the native woman as if they were fruits for purchasing. They felt, to his horror, like farmer’s cheese with gravelly bits buried deep inside. He was sure that Marie’s breasts would not be lumpy and unpleasantly complicated. Marie’s would be springy and consistent, like two water balloons. He would wait for hers and hers alone.
* * *
One late afternoon on his way home from rugby practice, Valera saw a strange machine parked on the seawall, a cycle with odd compartments, painted black. He supposed it was technically a bicycle — two wheels, a seat, handlebars. But it had a motor like an industrial machine. Its surfaces gleamed, showing none of Alexandria’s pervasive dust, road dust, brick dust, lime dust. As if it had just been transported from a trade show or museum, and yet it ticked with life, metal expanding as the cycle cooled: someone had just ridden it. Over its solid black rear wheel was sprung an odd upside-down sluiceway or gutter with interior machinery. German names were lettered in gold on its rear, “Hildebrand & Wolfmüller, München,” in fussy and old-fashioned cursive stencil like on the Prussian War — era sewing machine his mother kept for the seamstress. The place name, München, made him think of workmen whose lives were organized around haptic knowledge and early wake times, tinkering away as the Bavarian sun rose over narrow cobblestone streets. The cycle’s frame was thick and looked made of iron, to which a giant canister was bolted, a sort of metal keg that must have been the engine. There were no pedals, just two rigid pegs. The front wheel was spoked, the rear an opaque black disc like a factory flywheel. A young man came around the corner, and by the tap and click of hard-soled, well-made city shoes, Valera understood that he was the owner of this weird cycle. The sun was already low over the sea. The man’s hair was slicked and wet with the possibilities of evening. Valera had never seen him — a Frenchman, he guessed. The man got on the contraption. There was nothing athletic in the attitude of his body, as if he would get the cycle going without physical effort, as a horseman swings his leg over, settles in the saddle and digs his spurs. He compressed a crank with one of his fancy shoes, to start the motor. After a few tries, it caught with a rumbling bub-bub-bub, coughing smoke, banging and backfiring, almost sputtering out, but then it seemed to find itself, and idled evenly again. Oh, but what happened next. Above the din of the engine Valera had not heard the broad, heavy door of the convent sing shut on its hinges. Had not heard the soft slap of a young woman’s espadrilles. Marie, walking along the seawall. She was glancing nervously at the convent’s open casement windows, moving quickly as if to avoid detection. She did not notice Valera. She approached the man on the bubbing cycle, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him. Is this real? Valera asked himself. Or am I dreaming this absurd betrayal? Marie hopped onto the seat of the cycle behind the man, her legs wrapped around his, her arms clutching his waist, the side of her face pressed against his back, her skirt bunched up around her knees. Off they went on the black machine, a thin looping trail of white smoke unfurling behind them.