Semmant (17 page)

Chapter 19

L
idia Alvares Alvares had a secret weakness: online forums, the feeding ground of the quasi-intellectual crowd. There, hiding behind a playful nickname, she shared fragments of unwritten plays. Her phrasing was shaky, but the public received it favorably. Lidia’s protagonists lived in sentimental retro. It was exotic in those circles dominated by Ego Manic and Down Hause, by Devastator and Seducer in Blue. They competed with Malicious V and Sara Swallows, as well as five or six other hot-tempered avatars whose gender no one had ever bothered to discover.

In the main, the virtual milieu proceeded briskly. The regulars patiently bore their crosses. They wrote about herpes and depression, sensationalism and consonance, the triumph of polygamy and anal sex. And also about democracy, avant-garde painting, and the injustice of life as a whole. Some of them, like Lidia, practiced amateurish writing that was usually mocked, though without much spite. Sometimes, they met in real life – it was awkward for many: they blinked and squinted, as if entering the light after prolonged darkness. Almost everyone got plowed within the first half hour. The men would try to hook up with the unappealing female contingent, but everything ended, usually, only in shame. That same night, the victims of alcohol and abstention, the owners of pimples and flab, would slink back to their customary twilight. Their routine would start over – to go on, and on, and on.

This was the environment into which I was to insinuate myself. To mimic, and later – to stand out and get noticed. And to steal upon a certain victim who suspected nothing.

As I had expected, this turned out to be easy. Soon after registration they admitted me into their company, taking me for one of their own. I started small – posting one short comment each day. A few phrases, nothing more – so as not to seem defiantly immodest. They contained no novelty, but there were plenty of seditious slogans and proclamations. They were naive but full of emotion; the audience could not help but take the bait. All the aborigines go nuts for glass beads – and, perhaps, it also helped here that I called myself by a word that didn’t exist. Defiort was my call sign, and no one, including Lidia, had the faintest idea what it meant. Neither did I – and I never tried to guess. It would have been even funnier to call myself Semmant, but I was afraid she would remember that name. Though more than likely, my fear was baseless.

After a couple of weeks, I felt the time had come. My virtual double took on form and maturity. My comments became harsher; I went from being a disorderly rabble-rouser to voicing a position. I might not have actually had one, but I made it look like I did. This always gets respect.

Then I sat down again to write. I wrote a story and edited it patiently. I let it sit for a while, then read it and tried to make it better. Finally I was sure it could not be improved any more – and I posted it to the forum in the dead of night, like laying a trap for a shark or a fox. It was the account of how I met Adele.

Coming up with it was a tricky task – from the very beginning I had to set the right tone. My imagination suggested many different paths, and I rejected almost all of them. The threads of fine energy – I had to maintain them under tight control. I had to set them apart, save them for the decisive step. To keep them on hand like a resource of passion, to focus it later on the target like a laser beam.

Ultimately, I chose something simple – light flirtation, back-and-forth, innocent. I envisioned it: here she was, walking into a bar at the Palace Hotel. That is an attractive place; it has style. It’s immaterial whom I might have been waiting for – a lawyer, a bank manager, a real-estate agent. All of them at once, or one by one, they’re running late; time passes idly. I’m bored and looking around. I sip my water with lemon and glance with displeasure at the screen of my mobile – but here, suddenly, everything changes. A girl in pink silk makes a hasty entrance, looking over people’s heads. She’s not alone; she has a companion. He’s self-confident and probably a jerk. Or maybe I just think that – the sight of a beautiful woman who’s with someone else always reminds you the world is messed up.

I imagined: soon they have an argument, quick and ugly. “Get lost!” The girl dumps him and turns away. The man immediately leaves, hissing something in reply. When he stands up, everyone sees he is not at all young. The gloomy bartender gazes after him sympathetically. “Who’s the lucky guy that gets to pay for her cappuccino now?” I think derisively, and then it occurs to me: I am!

I jump up ahead of the rest – in case anybody else is planning to do the same. I walk up, introduce myself, and crack a joke that’s quite to the point. The girl looks at me calmly, cocking her head a bit to the side. Then she nods, “Well, all right. Just call me Adele.”

“And just so you know,” she adds right away, “I work as a whore, and I have a ‘friend.’ There won’t be any love for free; don’t kid yourself. So now, do you still want to buy me coffee?”

“Ha ha ha!” I laughed out loud in my Madrid apartment.

“Ha ha ha,” I wrote in a new line. There, in the Palace Hotel, I also laugh and praise her honesty. She immediately grows in my esteem. We talk about a multitude of things, and I am uninhibited and eloquent. The same as I had been with Lidia when we argued over the red shrimp. But here there are neither shrimp nor oysters. There is neither ambition nor any objective to come out on top. And soon I realize I can hardly sleep with her for money.

This upsets me. I stop talking, frown, and Adele seizes the initiative. She asks the most indecent questions. I don’t know why she’s doing that, but we now talk of things intimate, physical, and coarse. However, even amidst coarseness she knows how to be elegant.

“Tell me, then,” she says, “me, who knows everything about men. Me, who… well, you know. So, tell me…”

And then it seems to me there’s a loophole. A secret entrance into coveted obscurity. Adele looks into my eyes so innocently – no one in my place would be able to resist. I get excited and wave my hands; my speech is full of allegories. It is peppered with “sincerity” and “impudence,” an “unreserved impulse” and a “lascivious nature…”

Adele does not stop me. She listens attentively, without interrupting. I keep gushing, completely letting down my guard. And then I’m caught in the net. Adele smiles at me, leans across the table, trailing the scent of her perfume. She utters a few phrases, and I am smitten and vanquished. I am awkward, silly, and cannot ever comprehend what happens and how.

That’s an amusing sensation, and I shared it in the story sparingly. Sparingly, but such that it must be believed. And I imagined: Adele stands and walks up to the bar. Hundreds of solitary destinies – the reflections of her words – surround me in a dense cloud. I want to yell after her, “You’re oversimplifying!” But, of course, I don’t do it; that would be pointless.

Adele… As soon as I had written all this, I believed myself – that’s exactly how it happened. In the stifling Madrid summer, in the Palace Hotel bar. This happened – and it was
beautiful
! As I had been planning from the very beginning.

Yes, I knew her, was acquainted with her – this girl who didn’t exist. And besides, I now had her phone number. I made it up too, and it happened to be quite useful. Looking at the nine nonrandom digits, it was easier to move forward.

Thus, I put forth the effort, which successfully attracted attention: the forum crowd noticed the story. Some of them criticized it – on literary and aesthetic grounds, or for its latent homosexual roots – but the majority were favorably inclined – to me as well as to Adele.

Two girls and a boy sent me notes suggesting we meet up. However, I was not looking to make acquaintances; outsiders did not interest me. They were just a smoke screen, window dressing. I was holding out for Lidia – and soon I saw: she did not remain indifferent. With the help of a simple script, I tracked visitors to the page where the text was located. Lidia read it more than once. I had determined her IP a long time ago; there could be no mistake.

Well, all right, I said to myself, then waited two more days and launched an all-out attack.

Adele came to life, became real – in a truer sense even than those who hid behind aliases in this forum for onanists. Many of the women I knew seemed like an illusion compared to her. I started with her early childhood, then moved onto further details. Different periods of her life revealed themselves at each step. Secondary school, troubled youth. Playing – with cars, not dolls – and her first school parties. Girlish whispering on stuffy July nights and shy kisses in the half-darkened hall. The neighbor’s glances at her bare legs. Her thoughts, innocent for the time being, about her own body.

I did not hurry to pull back the veil but tantalized my audience, built up the tension. The readers would be impatient, I knew, thirsting for the spicy, the explicit. And they got it – the loss of virginity, pain replaced by acute pleasure. I described it, sparing no color. No one was left with any doubt: something shifted in her consciousness, something unexpected was revealed from within herself!

Yes, Adele’s body concealed many secrets. They compelled her to fickleness, making her change lovers easily and often. Then, when the initial curiosity wore itself out, it was replaced by another thirst – to lose her head, to fall desperately in love. A candidate showed up right away, that same chemistry teacher; he was morose and withdrawn, tall, dark-haired, gaunt. His sunken eyes peered out, like the eyes of a wolf. Awkward in real life, he was a completely changed man in bed. With him she understood it’s possible to move not broader, but deeper: to know each other without walls or barriers, allowing themselves very shameful things. Then she noticed that in the depths was an abyss – you could fall into it if you didn’t stop in time. The spiral narrowed, and the mad whirlwind spun faster and faster, but the instinct for self-preservation finally took over. She learned to control her impulses, to stop halfway, to say “No.” This turned out to be quite easy – uttering an unshakable “no” to a man. Her personality formed then for the first time, became whole, closed in on itself. It seemed to her she would not change any further…

The image of Adele was becoming increasingly multifaceted with each day – everything written over the last month was put to use. Perhaps, getting carried away, I had wandered into foreign territory, strayed into a forbidden jungle to which I had no right. But the readers grew all the more favorably disposed. They encouraged me and kept asking for more and more. I had surely touched some of their secret chords; I had reached their back alleys, picked up the master keys. I even thought once again: they could probably be told about Semmant!

But it was too late anyway. Now I was pursuing other goals. The phantom of love beckoned to me without revealing its face, and I dogged it relentlessly. My plan was executed perfectly, point by point. The decisive plot twist came at its appointed time. Adele became a whore – I wrote about her first experience of sex paid for by a man. I held nothing back: alcohol, excitement, involvement, then a complete lack of brakes…

I anticipated protest, objection; but the audience, in the main, took this event calmly. Only a few individuals raised a fuss, reproaching me for banality and cynicism. Almost all of them hid behind male nicknames. The women mostly kept silent – without expounding on morals or calling society to arms. Obviously, something else concerned them – I saw that many were rereading the text several times. I wondered: could these be their dreams?

Among the dreamers was Lidia – she could not help but be hooked. I was clearly on the right path. The breakthrough had not yet arrived, but the foundation was laid, the substratum established. The time for the fine energies had come – and Adele changed, grew, matured. From the exaltation of her body to the exaltation of her world. From the power over a man’s member to power over a man entirely. I wasn’t overly meticulous now, painting just bare-boned strokes. Nothing more was required – all flowed from one thing to another on its own.

Sometimes I concocted pretty strange stuff – I don’t even know why it came to mind. Sometimes I wrote frank nonsense simply because I felt like it. Still, all the stories had a goal. Reading them, Lidia was supposed to want me. This was predetermined by context, undercurrent – it was evident to all how much I wanted Adele. Or, for example, Rocío, Bertha, Martha. It’s easy for a woman to put herself in the place of another. And to know she’ll be better.

I imagined: Adele and I in the store, in the car, on the tennis court. The topics of conversation were innocent at first glance, but what we remained silent about was exciting and eloquent. Adele aroused me all the more but was still unapproachable. And I made no attempt, remembering: there’s no love for free. Only friendly kisses and heartfelt kinship.

Maybe I idealized her – so what? That was really how I believed her to be. And not just me – many of our conversations provoked a fervent response. “What a woman!” her admirers would exclaim again and again. They adored her, wanted her; though I knew: she’d be way beyond their reach.

At the very height of reader interest, I drastically altered my style and form. There were no more stories about Adele and me. It was as if we had split up and moved to different countries, and I wrote her letters, one after the other. They were not about her – but about me.

I gave them deliberately simple names: “First Letter to Adele,” “Second Letter to Adele,” Third, Fifth, Eighth. As far as the content was concerned, it made no pretense of simplicity. It harbored a struggle, a rivalry – who is tougher than whom? Her sexuality or my something – and how to define that something? I thought the question itself should be interesting enough.

If it ever occurred to me to alter my sex, then I would become an inspired slut. If, on the contrary, I changed from a woman into a man, then I would be a warrior, nothing less. Perhaps, I have an unbalanced Yin. Or Yang,
I wrote in one of them.