Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  She was not just an artist eager to promote herself as such, she was the personification of all the European artworks he had ever been enchanted by: Klimt’s red-haired heroine covered in gold dust and kisses; Modigliani’s muse Jeanne Hebuterne with her long face and lily-slender fingers; Raphael’s pale and mournful Madonna; Max Ernst’s surrealist vision of a woman with the plumage of an owl.

  He was not the only one whose attention she had commanded. Almost every man in this basement wine cellar and café was staring at her through the curtains and tatters of cigarette smoke. She leaned over the bar to order something (what an ass), then turned around to return the stares of the dozen men, while wearing a Mona Lisa smile. She seemed amused by all the attention but a little smug too, as though she expected it and it didn’t bother her; she could handle herself. Seeing that she was not intimidated by them, even though she was the only woman there, the men resumed their conversations and stopped staring, all their hastily erected fantasies reduced to rubble.

  She looked at Yves for a few seconds. Her smile dropped and she walked straight over to sit next to him. He did not want her to see him from this close. He was hungover, his clothes were rumpled, his hair unwashed. He was not nearly handsome enough for a woman of her statuesque beauty. So he kept his head turned away from her and stared at a bull-fighting poster for an upcoming event (which would be reviewed in the art pages of the Spanish papers not the sports sections, he remembered) and kept smoking while his forehead and armpits oozed sweat.

  She tapped on his shoulder and said something in Spanish. Slowly and fearfully, Yves turned to face her. Not many women he’d ever seen were blessed to have such a lithesome physique and such an exquisite face, pale and round as a pearl, with deep brown eyes that radiated curiosity and mischief in equal measures.

  Her accent, once they worked out that neither of them was Spanish and settled on speaking English, provided a harsh counterpoint to those delicate features. It was a Germanic sledgehammer which squashed consonants flat and pulverized vowels; an accent which left no room for doubt or irony.

  “You know who you sound like? Your accent reminds me of Marlene Dietrich or Nico from the Velvet Underground.”

  She did not smile at the compliment as he’d expected. “I am not from Germany. I am from Linz in Austria.”

  “Ah, yes—the birthplace of Adolph Hitler, the failed artist.”

  “Many people know this already. It is not so interesting. And I do not wish to have conversations about trivia and historical facts. I am trying to overthrow bourgeoisie conventions and the mundane in my art. So I disdain celebrity gossip and polite falsehoods spoken for the sake of filling the void that is modern living and hollow materialism. Silence is better than this emptiness.” Almost apologetically, she allowed herself to smile. “If we are going to become lovers we must think of more interesting things to say that go straight to our hearts and discuss our real feelings.”

  If we are going to become lovers? The most beautiful woman he had ever met could not possibly be thinking about letting him share her bed after they had only spoken for five minutes. He didn’t even know her name yet and now he was too agitated to ask. What was going on here? Was she a prostitute in artist’s drag? Had she just escaped from a mental institution? Was she stoned out of her mind? But she didn’t look stoned, and her breath did not smell of liquor.

  Yves was pouring sweat and exhibiting all the tics and itches of a monkey with a bad case of lice.

  “Am I making you nervous with my straight-forward talking?” Her laughter was a rich and throaty baritone, a few degrees warmer than her voice. So that was what lurked behind her enigmatic smile: a love of provocation and a passion for shocking people and trashing taboos.

  It was one of her many traits that he sometimes admired but would never quite get used to. The other person’s social standing did not matter. Neither did the situation. When one of the biggest European fashion photographers asked her opinion of his exhibition at the opening party, she said, “Technically it is very good, but none of these pictures make me feel anything. It is technique at the expense of emotion. None of them seem very original either. Excuse me, I need another glass of wine.” The photographer looked crestfallen. Yves and everyone else within earshot cringed. Yet, she was not trying to be cruel or egotistical; she was simply stating her opinion. Behind the photographer’s back, few would disagree with her assessment, and many were secretly glad that she’d stood up to this egomaniac and put him in his place.

  Her outspokenness, combined with her height, her hip-length hair and her penchant for dressing like a Bohemian bazaar, would soon make her a very recognizable figure in the salons and galleries of Europe, after Yves helped her to discover a mode of expression bold enough to match her outsized personality.

  She touched his hand, another bid for attention, for control. When no one was looking at her she seemed smaller, sadder. Her main vices, he quickly discovered, were an addiction to attention and a craving for control. “You are reminding me of someone… maybe an existential philosopher and novelist like Jean Paul Sartre.”

  He had never heard that before. Yves looked down at his rumpled black trench coat, his old black trousers spotted with cigarette ashes, and the unpolished shoes. “Thanks, I guess. Sartre was not a man known for his great looks, but under the shabbily dressed circumstances, that’s very generous of you. I’d thought I was looking more like a down-and-out detective from an unpopular film noir set in Barcelona.”

  She laughed—charitably, he thought. “I think old noir novels are very funny.” She did a passable impersonation of a male American voice, “That babe was a real looker who had two good reasons for wearing a tight sweater,” and burst out laughing. Half the heads in the room swiveled in their direction.

  Yves was relieved to discover that she did have a sense of humor after all, but the comic reprieve was short lived. “Tell me something interesting about yourself and why you are here in Spain.”

  “I’m trying to finish a novel and this is the most inspiring, artistic and magical city on earth to write in and about. For one thing the setting is almost perfect. You’ve got the beaches near here on the Mediterranean, and some are nudist. You’ve got the mountain in the middle of the city, which is Montjuic in Catalan, the mount of Jupiter, the God of War in Roman mythology. You’ve got the old Roman tombs and the Greek walls in this part of the city and the Gothic cathedral, which is one of only two churches that the anarchists did not burn down when they rounded up all the priests and nuns and shot them in the street in the nineteen thirties. The other one they spared was Gaudi’s still unfinished La Sagrada Familia, because those two churches had outstanding artistic merit, or so they said. Every morning when I go to teach English at this real estate company where all the students smoke in the boardroom and the coffee machine has beer, I pass by the hotel that George Orwell guarded during the Spanish Civil War. You really have to read his book about those times called Homage to Catalunia, which spells out most of the ideas he later used in Nineteen Eighty-Four, particularly in regard to propaganda and how they edited and censored his articles about the war. The subway station where I get off is right beside the so-called street Calle de la Discordia with all those buildings by Muntaner and Gaudi’s creations with the balconies like skulls, the mushroom-like turret and all those sculptures on the roof and wave-like lines, because Gaudi said nature has no straight lines so neither should architecture. On Sundays, when the museums are open to the public for free, I like to wander around them with all these Spanish families. Here, art is not elitist like it is back in North America. It’s family entertainment for the masses. Over at the Palace of Music, designed by Muntaner with all these pillars featuring the winged horse sculptures, or Pegasus, of Greek mythology, there’s a special rate for paupers and students on Sunday morning. Last week, we saw Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. I’m not really a connoisseur of classical music, but this was an intense performance. At the end, the crowd threw roses on the stage
for ten minutes and brought the orchestra back for three encores. Never seen that happen anywhere else. I mean, just look at the wine barrels in this bodega. People wander in here with their empty Pepsi bottles and get a refill of wonderful Rioja wine for a few dollars. No, this city has it all, the wine, the churches, music, history, art, public parks, nightlife, and you probably haven’t even tried the grilled rabbit with this garlic sauce called ali olli yet or the fried octopus for tapas. Barcelona es fantastico!”

  She began clapping loud enough to cause more stares. “That is the most beautiful summation of any city I have heard during all of my life. It is like you are knowing my mind. You must be a very good writer and you must give me some of your work to read.”

  Surprised by how complimentary and enthusiastic she was, he shrugged and looked away. “Thank you. I’m working on some travel stories too. That’s some of my research and background details.”

  She took his hand in hers. “Come now. We must go and explore this fantastical city together.”

  They stood up and this was another point of convergence in their favor; they were almost exactly the same height. She said, “Height makes a big difference. Tall people always stand out. We cannot hide in the crowd and we can see things the shorter people cannot. Does it not seem to you that we walk faster too and are always waiting for other people to catch up?”

  “Yeah, exactamente.”

  She wanted to explore all the backstreets, landmarks and plazas of the Barrio Gotico. These streets were so narrow that the sunlight never scoured their gutters and every turn was another detour in the history of art and architecture: the street where Picasso painted his “The Whores of Avinyon” (the women long gone but the building and balcony where they used to sit to attract customers still there); Gaudi’s first commission, the fountain in Plaza Real; the mosaic by Joan Miro on La Rambla, where hundreds of caged birds sang louder than the traffic and the buskers ranged from mimes and a juggler with chainsaws to flamenco dancers and a classical duo of violin and cello. Near Calle Escudellers stood an old wooden bar from the 1920s called Solo Quatro Gatos (“Only Four Cats”) where Dali, Miro, Andre Breton and the other surrealists had once gathered. In there the waiters still conjured up the “green fairy” of absinthe in the traditional way by placing a cube of sugar on a special fork covering the glass before pouring water over it to dilute the licorice-tasting liquor.

  Their walk through literary and art history was interrupted every time she saw a stray cat and knelt down to pet them. If they looked hungry she’d buy cans of tuna for them. Yves did not like cats yet. Every time she stopped to play with one, he’d curse them under his breath as “whiskered weasels” and “furry freeloaders.”

  Their happiest discovery of the night was La Paloma (The Dove), a dance hall from the nineteen twenties, which still had the same chandeliers, red velvet walls and candelabras on each table. Onstage stood an ensemble dressed in matching dinner jackets and ties playing big band hits (“In the Mood”), jazz standards by Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie’s Orchestra (“Dream a Little Dream of Me”), as well as bossa nova, flamenco, Elvis, and The Beatles.

  In the only city on earth ever ruled by an anarchist government, which had prohibited the use of the formal word for “you” (usted), commandeered all motor vehicles to use as public transport, and attempted to level the class system so that everyone was equal and no one in their army had to take orders from anyone else, the atmosphere in those Barcelona nightspots back in the early nineties was friendly anarchy. As the gay painter from Valencia who lived with Yves said, “Franco the dictator died in 1975 and we’re still celebrating in 1992.” The only rules in effect seemed to be that everyone had to get euphorically drunk, everyone had to dance, and everyone had to be as gleeful and raucous as possible.

  Yves had always been a reluctant and awkward dancer, but she grabbed his hand to pull him out on the dance floor. She had that rare ability, mostly seen in the very best teachers, to make everyone she came in contact with rise above their limitations. Because she was such a free spirit, it encouraged him to shed his inhibitions too. On the dance floor, teenagers were leaping around while old couples in evening attire, who had probably courted on this same dance floor, waltzed past doing the foxtrot, amid a sprinkling of expats and tourists trying to keep in step with the percolating Brazilian rhythms of “The Girl from Ipanema” by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz.

  Dancing with her was a form of public foreplay. After brushing against each other a few times, after circling around each other and moving their hips in a pantomime of sex, she wrapped her arms around his waist and initiated the first kiss.

  At midnight, the ritual was that the patrons would line up on either side of the stage. Then the club owner, nicknamed “El Tigre” for his alleged carnal prowess, and dressed flamenco style in red and black, strutted down the line as the crowd clapped and cheered to a Latin backbeat. Whenever he saw a woman he liked he would flick a belt around her hips to pull her out of the line so they could perform a mating dance together. As the belt went around her hips, Yves cringed. This was going to be ugly. She would slap his face, remind him that the word macho comes from Spanish, call him a sexist pig, maybe complain, as some Western women did, that Spanish men hissed at them like cats when they walked by.

  On the contrary, she said something in his ear that made both of them grin. El Tigre pulled the belt away and held out his hand for Yves to shake. In Spanish, he told him, “You are a very lucky man.”

  As he danced away and the crowd resumed clapping, Yves yelled in her ear, “What did you say to him?”

  Her mouth brushed against his ear and each word she spoke pulsated in his inner ear with her breath and the rhythm of the words. “I told him he is a wonderful dancer, and I would be honored to dance with him, but I am in love with another man. So I cannot dance with him.”

  Their eyes met. They did not look away. The patrons, the band, the club disappeared. Yves felt like he was standing beside the lip of a cliff, waiting to dive into the water below. It was a long way down. It could be dangerous. There could be rocks just beneath the surface. Still staring in her eyes and smiling a little, he said, “I want to say the same to you, if it’s not a bourgeoisie convention that you are trying overthrow in your art, of course. But don’t you think we should exchange names first?” She laughed and kissed him again.

  Even if he had set out to write some erotic fiction set in Barcelona, he could never have come up with an outline like this. Meeting an artist from Hitler’s birthplace in a basement wine cellar and, after a short chat and a long walk, two coffees, a few glasses of absinthe, some red wine, and a pack of Fortuna cigarettes, not five hours later they were confessing their love for each other and making out on the dance floor of a museum-like club to the tune of Latin jazz—and they still had not exchanged names yet!

  Zara (she finally confessed before closing time, the name Slovenian), treated sex as another form of sculptural art, kneading his flesh like clay, melting his resistance and bones in the kiln of her sex and mouth, insisting on making eye contact in the midst of the deepest penetration and having the frankest discussions with his sweat dripping on her face. “You are making me so crazy right now. Don’t cum yet. I want to reach my second climax. Here I will grab your balls.” “You’re the only woman who can keep me in a permanently erect state even after I cum. God, making love with you is like being a lightning rod in the middle of an electrical storm. It’s scary and beautiful at the same time.” “You are a poet of fucking.” “Or just a fucking poet?” Zara laughed. “Do a sixty-nine now. I want to taste your cock and feel your tongue in my ass.”

  Barcelona became their alfresco bedroom and a series of stages and backdrops for their acts of lust. Stumbling out of bars at 3 a.m. in the Barrio Gotico, they had sex against the old city walls pock-marked with bullet holes from where revolutionaries had been executed by firing squad back in the eighteenth century, on the beach after a midnight screening of Ingmar Bergman’s do
cumentary about a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute, with the melodies still coursing through their veins, the sand still warm from the sunshine and the moonlight making the waves phosphorescent, on a bench in the cactus garden at the base of Mount Jupiter on a week-day afternoon, hidden by a blanket and surrounded by twenty-meter-tall cacti imported from Death Valley and, on the floor of her studio, their bodies covered in paint.

  Afterwards, Yves pointed out the handprints, the curved lines of their buttocks, the dashes of hipbones and smears of nipples, the head of an uncircumcised cock that looked like a tulip bulb, all combined with the palate of mixed pigments they had left on the old canvas. He said, “This is a whole new genre, babe. I call it ‘sexpressionism.’ In fact, let’s create a dozen more for your new solo show. And to think that all these artists moan and bitch about the agonies of the creative process when I’ve never had more fucking fun in my whole wretched and miserable life.”

  Zara was at her most beautiful and innocent looking when she tipped her head back and closed her eyes to laugh. “You are so funny. Every day I learn something new and fascinating about you that makes me love you more.”

  “I can’t believe how sweet and warm-hearted you are. At first I thought you were just this ice queen and frigid intellectual.”

  “But I am an ice queen and frigid intellectual. You are the only man who can make me melted or warmed over. No, we say it in German like… oh fuck it.”

  “Wow. I never knew that expression was German. Yes, fuck it. Now you’re talking my language.”

  They kissed again; they could not stop kissing.

  Initially, the canvases were conceived as a joke between them, an artistic diary of their sex life. But Zara’s agent thought they were saleable, so did the curators she knew and, much more significantly, so did the buyers, patrons and collectors who responded to her taste for provocation and her wild image, coupled with a frank approach to eroticism that guaranteed generous amounts of publicity.