The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  * * *

  “Dr. Sutherland—we saw your interview. Without doubt, the most handsome psychologist in Rio…”

  An avuncular voice hailed Dick across the terrace. Señor Marcial Pereira, a leading film critic on a Rio newspaper, approached our table, accompanied by two of Copacabana’s ambling beauties. He recognised Dick from the interview he had given the previous evening on a local TV station. He joined us at our table with his companions, who surveyed us with the eyes of empresses. Like all the women in Rio, they were filled with such character, elegance, and hot beauty that only some inexplicable oversight had prevented them from achieving Hollywood careers.

  “We have a party tonight, in my apartment at Ipanema,” Pereira told us. “A festival car will collect you at ten. Each day we must relax a little more. I leave you with my actress friends—Carmen and Fortunata. They are most anxious to meet visiting Englishmen.”

  When he had gone the women settled themselves at our table, eyes conferring as they swiftly surveyed the crowded terrace. Both wore the same loose silk frocks that revealed their thighs and shoulders. They were scarcely older than my daughters, with an equal command of the space around them. Carmen’s dark hair sprang from a sharply sloping profile that was part Portuguese and part Indian. Her forehead was perpetually creased, as if she were fretting over some misplaced clue to the world. Her friend, Fortunata, a passive, heavy-breasted blonde, was waiting for the signal to leave, but Dick, excited by the heady body scent of the two women, was already ordering drinks and practising his pidgin English.

  “You live in Rio? Here?”

  “On the beach? No.” Carmen was ticking off Dick’s television smile, his gold medallion and credit cards. “São Paulo. We come for the festival.”

  “Like us. We come from London—in England.”

  “London, oh … Carmen and I go to London.” Fortunata stared down some Carnaby Street vista inside her head, at the end of which stood the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She spoke wistfully, as if unsure whether Carmen would agree.

  “Rio is much better,” Dick assured her. “Many beautiful women. Like you two.”

  “Yes … many women in Rio.” Carmen sounded like a commodities dealer in a slow market. “You prefer beautiful women?”

  “Of course. Especially in Rio.”

  “You’re an actress?” I asked. “Have you made any films?”

  “Yes. I act in films. With Fortunata.”

  She spoke matter-of-factly. I assumed that we were with two São Paulo prostitutes visiting Rio on a speculative trawl. I waited for Dick to realise that there was only one way to impress them. Carmen was strumming at the tabletop with one hand, while the other flicked at her shoulder strap. She was exposing her breast to me, at the same time letting the hem of her silk dress ride up her thigh.

  I remembered Marilyn Monroe’s early years on the fringes of prostitution. I had shaken hands with the great Fritz Lang and with the crew of the Starship Enterprise, but this stony-faced beach whore would be my real contact with the international film industry. Perhaps she had appeared in TV commercials advertising dog food or a valet-parking service.

  I looked up from her breast. Dick was ready for me to make the first move. Since our arrival at Rio airport he had scarcely taken his eyes from the women who strolled along the sidewalks of this extravagant city, but I knew that the idea of sex always excited him more than the event. He needed me to complete the circuit of desire and fulfilment. For years I assumed that he and Miriam had been lovers at Cambridge, a suspicion she had always denied but Dick had subtly encouraged.

  Carmen was flicking at her shoulder strap, like a bored guitarist trying to think of a tune. Fortunata primly smoothed her skirt with the broad hands of a docile child.

  “Where do you stay?” I asked. “Here in Copacabana?”

  “We go to our apartment.” Carmen pointed to a nearby side street. “You have American dollars? One hour, two hours…”

  “Dick? Money for time? Shall we go?”

  “Of course. Money is the original digital clock…”

  We left the Luxor and set off through the crowds in the Avenida Atlantica, past the beggars and jewellery salesmen, the nightclub touts with their waiting taxis. Carmen led the way on her long legs. She stepped into the traffic when we reached the side street, avoiding the hundreds of pimps standing on the pavement, each with his woman. Prostitution powered Rio, provided its engine. When I first walked down this side street on the evening of our arrival I had been struck by the charm of these countless couples talking amiably on the wide pavements, a tribute to the marital bliss of this benign city. But the husbands were touting their wives’ wares, like so many bales of cloth. Freelancers and festival hunters such as Fortunata and Carmen had to run the hazards of the traffic-filled roads.

  We dodged through the passing limousines and entered the lobby of a huge block of low-rent apartments. Beside the annunciator buttons hundreds of mail slots ranged like all the addresses in hell. A minute elevator carried us to an upper floor where a low-ceilinged corridor ran forever into the gloom past dozens of doors. The perspiring tenants lounged outside their cramped apartments. Children played under the dim light, and a damp corridor life survived like fungi in a cavern. Men in vests and undershorts leaned against the walls, mothers dressed their daughters’ hair, old women worked at trestle tables.

  At the door of her apartment Carmen turned, hand on key, and peered at me. During the short walk from the hotel she had forgotten my face. She waited for a curious old man to drift away.

  “Okay, now we see. Fifty dollars.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “For two. As long as you like. Afterwards we go to Señor Pereira’s party in Ipanema.”

  “Fine by you, Dick?” He already had his arm around Fortunata while I searched for my wallet. He was romping playfully with her, as he did with my daughters.

  Carmen stuffed the notes into her purse and opened the door onto a crowded room. Three middle-aged women and a small child were working at a trestle table, surrounded by piles of plastic sacks. They were producing cheap mementoes for the film festival, stitching cardboard-backed photographs of film stars into gilt papier-mâché frames, assembling festival kites from ready-made components which they snatched from the sacks. Hundreds of belt buckles with movie motifs, 2001 lapel badges, and other geegaws lay in open cardboard boxes on the shabby sofa, lined up in rows by the methodical child. Bags of spare components filled the small kitchen and were piled around the lavatory in the bathroom.

  “Wait a minute…” I turned to Dick. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  “No.” Carmen tugged my arm with surprising force. She pointed to the bedroom of the apartment. “We go in—it’s just for us.”

  A woman with a stapling machine glanced at us without interest and drove a staple through the forehead of Elvis Presley. As Carmen unlocked the door I assumed that she and Fortunata rented the room during the day. Beyond the double bed, unwashed windows looked out onto the rear balconies of a vast apartment block, more low-rent housing in this city where the poor were pushed away into the sky. Every balcony was crammed with bird cages and cardboard cartons, washing lines and abandoned furniture.

  “Okay—nice time now.”

  Carmen tried to close the door, but Dick and I were staring uneasily at the room. The rumpled sheets were stained with sweat and lipstick, the pillows covered with a blue glaze of mascara and vaginal jelly. Underwear hung across the pine dressing table, and on the floor beside the bed were a dozen paper tissues, each crushed around a smear of phlegm. Impassively surveying this scene was a small cine-camera on a tripod. Nearby, boxes of Kodak film were stacked on the wall unit.

  “Jim, you’ll catch something…” Dick frowned at me, turning towards the door. He held Fortunata by the waist, but his interest in the escapade had cooled. His eyes had retreated behind his handsome face, and he seemed to have aged since setting out from the hotel. The cheap cine-camera threatene
d him in a way he had never known at the BBC Television Centre, with its soft and accommodating lenses. I was surprised to find him so obviously out of his element and wondered why he had urged me into the hands of these two prostitutes. Perhaps he hoped to see me humiliated in some small way that would do no damage to our friendship but would leave him in the dominant position.

  Behind us, the stapling machine stamped through the faces of the film stars. Undisturbed by our presence, the women hunched over their table, now and then snapping at the child. An old man in a vest wandered into the apartment, tried to remember something, and faded into the corridor.

  “Jim, we need another room, we can’t all…”

  “Yes…” Fortunata brightened up, drawing Dick towards the bed. “It’s nice … all together.”

  Pointing to the women in the sweat shop, I said to Carmen: “Ask the women if we can use their room—just for an hour.”

  “They must work, it’s very busy.”

  “I’ll give them ten dollars. They deserve a rest. Tell them to go to the movies.”

  “Sure. I tell them.”

  Carmen spoke to the women, who together peered at me, baffled by this show of modesty. They downed tools, stowed the money in a shared handbag, and moved into the corridor. As Carmen closed the door I saw them leaning against the dingy wall outside the apartment, lighting their cigarettes as they waited for us to finish.

  Dick had pushed a tray of film badges onto the floor and sat back on the sofa cushions with Fortunata, who had slipped the shoulder straps of her dress. With a thin smile he pretended to admire the weight and curvature of her heavy white breasts, like a greengrocer assessing a new variety of albino melon. When Fortunata flicked at her extruding nipples with little gasps I shut the bedroom door.

  Carmen stepped out of her high-heeled shoes and hung her dress on the wardrobe, brushing the silk with housewifely concern. Using her free hand, she reached out and expertly released my belt buckle.

  “Okay. It’s very nice.”

  I undressed beside her, aware of her jollying me along. Time, not money, dominated the prostitute’s life. To enjoy sex with them required a special knack of its own. A teenage girl with a cat in her arms was watching me from a balcony thirty feet away. While I drew the curtain Carmen took a spermicide dispenser from the dressing-table drawer. Screwing it into the open tube, she squeezed three inches of jelly into the dispenser. She lifted a leg onto the bed, parted her labia with her fingers, and eased the shaft into her vagina. She pressed the plunger, withdrew the dispenser, and wiped her fingers on the sheet.

  Waiting for her, I turned the camera and pointed the lens towards the bed.

  “You like for me to make a film?” Carmen asked.

  “You’ll film us here?”

  “It’s good, for four minutes. Only one hundred dollars. Perhaps you show your girlfriend. Or your wife.”

  “My wife?”

  “Yes! It’s popular, it’s really good.”

  I sat on the bed, staring at my reflection in the camera lens. Beyond the bedroom door I could hear Dick laughing as he chased Fortunata around the workroom and the women in the corridor shouting to the straying child. By comparison, the bedroom was a stage set. This earnest young prostitute, the stained sheets, and the tissues with which she had wiped her clients’ semen from her vulva, an enticing spoor for future customers, together seemed like film props. The presence of the camera transformed and even dignified this seedy bedroom.

  As we lay together on the waxy sheets I asked: “Have you been in other films?”

  “Sure! Many films…” She screwed up her face, dismissing the bedside camera with a contemptuous wave. She held my limp penis in both hands, tugging lightly at my scrotum. “I make many films—I’m acting for real director.”

  “That’s good.” I could guess the kind of studio. “For Señor Pereira, maybe?”

  “Señor Pereira … ugh!” She grimaced at the mention of the film critic. “His films … not clean!”

  I moved the hair from her fierce forehead, admiring her determination. “You’ll work for other directors. You’ll be a star one day.”

  “Yes…” Ignoring the doubts in my voice, she licked her fingers and smoothed her eyebrows, gazing fiercely at the future that lay beyond the walls of this rented bedroom. As she searched her lips for a small sore, the muscles of her arrow-shaped face were set with a touching confidence.

  She noticed me lying beside her and returned to work, shaking her head over my feeble erection. She took her left breast and teased out the nipple, tapping it with her sharp nails until it grew erect. Raising it to my mouth, she pressed the warm body of the breast against my nose and chin, placed my hand against her buttocks, and steered my fingers down to her anus, pushing the tip of my ring finger into the soft pad. She reached down to the root of my penis, searching for my prostate. When my penis came to life she nodded encouragingly, made sure that my eyes stayed on her breasts and my fingers on her anus. With her strong arms she turned me onto my back and squatted across my hips, sitting on her haunches so that the only part of her body to touch me was her vulva.

  Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia. At last, when the rake of both penis and pubis had matched to her satisfaction, she settled down and let my penis enter her vagina. She bobbed away energetically, glancing briefly at herself in the dressing-table mirror and now and then blowing the hair from her eyes.

  I held her strong thighs, aware that she was working as hard as the older women assembling their trinkets. All of us, myself certainly included, were working to make the film festival a success. Even the empty camera in whose lens we were reflected had helped to shape our sex act. As she smoothed her eyebrows Carmen was measuring her profile against the lens, preparing herself for the even more elaborate sex films in which she would appear. Lying between her thighs, I was little more than an extra recruited from the hotel terraces of Copacabana. When she raised herself, teasingly holding the tip of my penis between her breasts, I almost felt that we were extemporising a small variation on a fixed routine.

  With its passive and unobtrusive despotism, the camera governed the smallest spaces of our lives. Even in the privacy of our own homes we had all been recruited to play our parts in what were little more than real-life commercials. As we cooked in our kitchens we were careful to follow the manufacturer’s instructions, as we made love in our bedrooms we embraced within a familiar repertoire of gestures and affections. The medium of film had turned us all into minor actors in an endlessly running daytime serial. In the future, airliners would crash and presidents would be assassinated within agreed conventions as formalised as the coronation of a tsar.

  When I came, my cheeks pressed to the spermicidal pillow, Carmen nodded matter-of-factly. She took her breasts from me and disengaged her vulva from my penis, a technician turning off a life-support system. Her body shining with my sweat, she stepped from the bed and opened the door into the next room, where Dick and Fortunata were playfully throwing the plastic mementoes at each other. Dick, I noticed, had not undressed.

  Carmen watched them bleakly and closed the door. She plucked a tissue from the carton on the dressing table. With a jerk of her thumb, she confided: “He no fuck.”

  Deftly she scooped my semen from her vulva, wiped a streak from the inside of her thigh, then crushed the tissue and threw it carefully onto the floor below the camera, a small offering to this one-eyed inquisitor.

  * * *

  Later that evening, I saw Carmen under the lens of a very different camera. As promised, the festival limousine arrived at the Luxor to take us to Pereira’s party at Ipanema. Another guest, a Dutch film distributor, shared the car with us. He and Dick kept up an animated commentary as we drove down Copacabana Avenue, pointing to the movie theatres besieged by the eager crowds, the gangs of whores and pimps striding arm in arm through the flashing strobes, and the passing tourists
stunned by the sight of the Rio police holding up six lanes of traffic while they knocked about some pickpocket or parking offender.

  Throughout dinner Dick had been in unflagging good humour, while I felt vaguely depressed. Missing the children, I telephoned Cleo Churchill, who had volunteered to look after them while we were away. I spoke to each of them in turn, thrilled to hear their voices telling me of the day’s triumphs and excitements, a model aircraft lost in the river and a tame squirrel in the garden. Listening to them, I wanted to put the receiver down and head for the airport. Cleo spoke last, reassuring me that all was well and that the children scarcely remembered me.

  “Don’t hurry back—they’re having the time of their lives. I hope you and Dick are thoroughly misbehaving yourselves.”

  “I am, but Dick’s been too busy giving TV interviews. Everyone agrees he’s the sexiest psychologist in Rio.”

  “And in London—bring him back in one piece.”

  I remembered Dick romping in the women’s workroom, and Fortunata with the medallions of Jane Fonda and Bardot clipped to her nipples, Robert Redford’s face pressed to her pubis. Dick would look but not touch. Yet I was depressed and he was in ebullient form. A certain reserve now marked his attitude to me, as if I had failed an important test. I had always been reluctant to appear on television, a shyness that amused him and which he put down to an old-fashioned strain in my character. Clearly I was too bound to the mundane, to the contingent realities of a wife, children, and desire, to the fear of death and the anguish of space-time. Dick had side-stepped all these, accepting that the electronic image of himself was the real one, and that his off-screen self was an ambitious but modest actor who had successfully auditioned for a far more glamorous role. He might interview Carmen and Fortunata, but he would never break the spell by touching or needing them.