I spend my entire allowance on Da Vinci watercolors, on charcoals, sketch pads. It’s been five whole years since I drew, since that fiasco with the Savings Day prize. But it’s as if I’ve been drawing on the inside the whole time: where did these color combinations come from? The splashes of yellow, the animals, the women in long dresses, the urgent need for black? I paint like a construction worker pouring cement, thick layers of color on larger and larger sheets of paper. I want to paint the walls of my room black and then cover that black with pictures of snakes wearing crowns, leaky pirogues, female figures in long skirts whose hems blaze with flames. Indigent families warm themselves by that fire, children reach up to pluck fabric fruit off the skirts. The snakes with crowns are Anna’s father. The pirogues are my parents. The women are Antigone, who this year has taken to wearing long, tasseled skirts. And the fire on the hem, of course, is Anna.
As for me, I’m the hungry child in the background, reaching for a piece of fruit.
“What kind of crap is this?”
I’ve unrolled my drawings on the table in the round room in the apartment in Paris, next to a pile of books by Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Guy Debord, directly beneath a photograph of Poulantzas and a poster that reads: I take my desires for reality, because I believe in the reality of my desires. It’s Easter. I came to visit precisely because I believe in the reality of my desires. I had the cylindrical container between my legs for the entire flight and this is what I get for my trouble. Anna is back to making her familiar old faces. She’s not afraid anymore.
“What don’t you like about it?” I ask.
“Why don’t you ask what I do like? It’s easy, quick, ornamental. You’re better than this.”
“Do you want me to explain the symbolism?”
“Symbolism shouldn’t be something you have to explain.”
I have to admit, she has a point.
“Come on, I’ll show you something that doesn’t need explaining.” She grabs me by the hand and literally pulls me up to her room, which for the next ten days will be our room. It’s a tiny attic with a slanting ceiling and a double bed strewn with woven Moroccan pillows. She lifts the bedspread, revealing a wooden drawer in the base of the bed. She pulls open the drawer and hands me a photograph of a skinny boy with liquid eyes and short hair.
“Well? Does that need explaining?”
“You guys are a thing?”
“His name is Raoul. He’s half French, half Algerian. Aren’t those the most amazing eyes? I want you to meet him, Maria.”
“Have you guys gone far?”
“Yes, I have to tell you about that, too. . He touched me all over!”
“You didn’t write to me about that!”
“There are some things you can’t write about.”
Anna confuses me the older we get. She’s always telling me what to do — to kiss her, to break up with Kostas — and meanwhile she does whatever she likes. If I were the one who’d let a boy touch me everywhere, I’d have had her to reckon with.
“I think we’re old enough now. It’s so amazing, to be touched like that.”
She explains in detail how a boy pushes aside your skirt, then your underwear, then slips his finger into your vagina. It sounds disgusting.
“And it doesn’t hurt?” I ask.
“Just at first.”
“What do you like about it?”
“It’s a way of getting closer to someone.”
Before we leave the house I shut myself in the bathroom for a little while. I lock the door and try to find my vagina, some depression that would admit a finger. If it brings you closer to someone else, maybe it could bring me closer to myself, too. But I can’t find an opening. It’s solid everywhere.
“What, you started locking the door?” Anna shouts, pounding on the door with her fists. “What kind of friends are we, anyhow? We don’t pee together anymore?”
Raoul opens the door and kisses us the French way, three times, on alternating cheeks. He lives by Blanche station, in a tiny room with an unmade bed, posters for the band Bazooka, and books about Fassbinder, Godard, and Pasolini. His window looks onto the rooftops across the way and while the two of them kiss, I stare out at the depthless, tiled horizon. He’s really very handsome and he’s a university student, too, studying graphic design. From the very beginning, with Apostolos the plumber, I knew Anna would go for older guys. He’s twenty years old, just imagine!
Raoul is very polite to me. “Anna talks about you all the time,” he says, then opens a beer with his teeth and offers it to me. It’s eleven in the morning and we’re drinking beer; the day is off to a strange start. We go out into the freezing Parisian air, pull our hats down over our ears, and they take me to see Beaubourg. We wear ourselves out with walking, stop every few hours for coffee, mussels with pommes frites, or pear tarte, we climb Montmartre, Raoul and Anna kiss, I stare at my coffee spoon or the hem of my coat.
“We have to find you a boyfriend, too,” Anna says slyly.
They decide to introduce me to Michel.
Michel dresses exactly the same way Raoul does — black shirt, a chain on his pants, a leather jacket with Sex Pistol patches — but his ears stick out and he has a sad look in his eyes. A similarity in dress says a lot about a friendship. Anna and I, meanwhile, are in our goth phase — romantic white blouses with lots of lace, white powder on our faces. It’s not healthy, to consume such large doses of The Cure and Verlaine all at once.
“How did the two of you meet?” I ask.
Raoul tells me they went to the same boarding school. One day, during room check, when they were supposed to be cleaning their rooms, Michel picked up all his trash off the floor and pinned it to the wall, like butterflies. The monitor had no idea how to react. The rumor spread from mouth to mouth and Raoul was impressed. He learned everything about the Sex Pistols from Michel, about the situationists and the Marche des Beurs anti-racism movement, even formed ties with some people in squats in Berlin. I figure all that learning must have happened in sign language, because Michel barely ever opens his mouth. Could I fall for someone so silent? For now it’s enough that he’s active in the anti-racist movement and that he rides his bicycle all over Paris, and if he wants to tell me something he just draws it, as if he were mute. He wears glasses, too, like me. How do two people with glasses kiss, anyhow?
I find out that very same night. They take off their glasses, place them on the table by Raoul’s bed and slowly sink into the pillows, half blind. If you’re nearsighted, the other person always looks better when you’re not wearing your glasses. His skin looks softer, his eyes sort of hazy, as if you’re only dreaming them. Until the others come back bearing pizza, Michel and I kiss, just kiss. I try to unbutton his shirt. “Aren’t we moving sort of fast?” he asks.