by Xiaolu Guo
I must have stayed in front of door nearly an hour watching all those fascinating guests. Then I see a taxi coming. And a man comes out from the taxi. That is him, the man I met two hours ago! Why did he arrive so late? Are Italian mans all like that?
“Antonia!” I shout.
Perhaps right name because he doesn’t correct me, or maybe he didn’t understand I am actually shouting his name.
He walks to me and apologise:
“I am very sorry about this. My friends changed their mind. They wanted to go somewhere else instead. In fact, it was better than this party. Let me take you to the other place.” His English accent is almost inunderstandable.
“All right.”
I don’t want to tell him I wait here for so long. It would be not cool to let him know. So I follow him and get into his taxi.
Inside of taxi, so close, I can see his face clearly. He looks bit formal in his plain suit and black leather Made-in-Italy shoes. His hair is very few in the middle of his head. He seems sincerely but a little boring, if I can judge like that.
“So what you do?” I ask.
“I am an avocado,” he replies.
“Avocado?” I am surprised to hear. Is a fruit also a job? “Please explain me,” I ask.
“If you are going to be put into prison, you can hire me to help you in the court,” he says.
“Ah…is like a lawyer?”
“Yes! Yes! Avocado is lawyer.” He is pleased that I understand.
“What about you?” he asks.
“I am…just a tourist. Actually I am studying English.”
“In Venice?” His interests are aroused.
“No. No. Studying English in England,” I say.
“Oh, your English is good.”
“Thank you. But why you are to do with this Asian culture festival?”
“Because of my friend. He gives legal advice to this organisation so he said, ‘You must come along too.’”
“I see.”
Not another avocado!
The taxi stops in front of a disco. Behind the disco is really the open sea. Is like a big pond full of black ink. I feel dangerous, as I think it’s very easy to fall into that black pond.
It is a public disco, not “private party.” It is already 2:30, the endless night. The music is so loud. American disco, it is too much for me. Lots of teenagers dancing inside. I want to leave immediately. But Antonia pull my arm into the dancing floor, and I see his friends are all there shaking their shoulders and tingling their heads. So we are dancing right in the middle of the floor, everyone tripping over my rocksack, and my head being hit heavily every single second by the crazy music. Oh, I can’t dance like that, this is not my culture. My movements must be really ugly. It is a battle between the violent music and my boney body. And Antonia, he looks OK. He seems enjoying the music. His dancing style is a bit serious, but I am sure it better than mine.
I am getting so bored. So bored in the crowds. I can just stand there and fall in sleep like a horse.
“Are you OK?” Antonia dances towards me. His dancing almost like a slow walking.
“I am bit tired. Actually I want to go,” I say.
“Really? Where you stay?”
“I don’t have a place to stay yet.”
“You don’t? So where you are going to go now?” Antonia is talkative in the extremely loud music.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if you want, you can stay in my hotel. My room has two beds.”
“Really?”
“Yes, no problem.”
The taxi puts us in the middle of nowhere. Suburb, definitely suburb. There is a very simply looking hotel in front of us.
“Look, the sea is just over there.”
I look to where Antonia is pointing but there is only inky darkness.
“Do you see it?” he asks.
“Kind of,” I say.
He presses the door bell. I feel embarrassed. It is already half past four and if the hotel people know he brings a Chinese girl back, what they will think?
He presses the bell again.
“You know the man inside, his ears are not very good,” he explains.
“OK,” I comfort him.
Eventually there is a very old man opens the door. He even doesn’t bother to raise his eyes to look. He says, “Buona sera” and then straight back to his room to sleep.
Antonia’s room is in ground floor, just by main door of hotel. I am thinking tomorrow morning the reception will discover me easily and shame me.
He opens the room, and switches on the light. Then he shouts something like swear in Italian. He is scared.
“What is it?” I ask.
“There are some little animals here,” he shouts.
“Where?” I can’t see anything.
“Here! Look the floor!” He points. There are some ants, big ants. They are moving around.
“Oh, just some ants.” I comfort him again and start put my feets on the ants, crush them with my shoes.
Antonia looks disturbed deeply. He runs into bathroom and pulls some toilet paper out. He kills rest of ants with paper, and flushes the paper into toilet.
There are two single beds. He didn’t cheat me at all. I remove all my clothes, only left underwear. My pyjamas bottom of rocksack and don’t want unpack. I cover myself tightly while he is in toilet brushing and flushing. Two minutes later he comes out and looks around for several seconds. He must be surprised to see how quick I am inside of the duvet. Then he asks:
“Should I turn off the light?”
“Yes. See you tomorrow,” I say.
In the darkness, I hear his snoring quickly comes. Honest snoring. I can tell. I am thinking he is quite a nice-heart man, but somehow he is not very interesting. Or maybe he is just normal. I count the hours to the morning. Two hours later it will be a sunny morning, and I will leave this damn island Lido and go to Venice…
I am almost fall sleep. Thinking of sex, no, I am having a dream about sex. Lesbian sex, me and a woman who has an unrecognisable face. Maybe she kisses me or touches my breast. Then I am suddenly awake. I feel somebody’s lips press my lips. I open my eyes. Antonia is kissing me. He looks very stupid in the dim light.
“No. Go to sleep, Antonia,” I say. I feel a little disgust.
“Antonia! My name is Andrea,” he says, then obediently, he goes back to bed. He looks funny. Wears a shorts but still with his white shirt. His two naked legs are a bit skinny and hairy.
I give up sleeping. I can sleep anytime in my forever Unlimited Inter-Rail train, so why waste time here in Lido? I get up and dress up. I brush my teeth and take all my belongs. Very quietly I close the door behind me.
The morning is never been so bright and fresh to me. The wind is blowing my yellow skin. I feel free. I feel my body is entirely free. I walk to the seashore. There are some little boats are swinging on the sea. The sea is truly blue. Pure blue like a dream. The water is like a magnet, attracting my body towards it. I agree with you, sea is beautiful.
“I feel sad about my life,” you once said to me.
“Why?”
“Everything feels empty and endless.”
“What you want then?”
“I want to find happiness.”
“You can’t have happiness at all times. Sometimes you will be sad. Don’t you think?”
“But I don’t see any happiness in my life.”
“Then what’s your most near happiness?”
“…The sea.”
That was our conversation one day, in our home in London. Now it is like a replay. It echoes above the waves.
Tavira is situated in the southeast corner of Portugal; it is considered to be one of the most picturesque towns of the Algarve region.
tavira
A very slow and old train, clink, clink, clink…it is so slow that it’s like I am sitting on a real time machine. I can feel the time moving in the space physically. It is much more interesting than watching
clock.
The train moves along the south coast of Portugal. I didn’t stay in Madrid or anywhere in Spain because I lost eighty euros when train stopped in Madrid. Maybe they are being stolen. I didn’t feel like to stay in the big city anymore. It is always aggressive in the city. Here, the train patiently takes me to Tavira, a little town close to Atlantic Ocean, yellow sand everywhere.
Out of the station I find blocks of old residential houses, decayed in the hot sun. I walk to a corner café between two streets, white plastic tables and white chairs outside. I sit down, breathe out, get rid of the stale and take in the fresh. Suddenly I feel everything slow down and stop. In the shade of sun, two old local mans with very dark skin sit on the chair. They are smoking, quiet, in the morning. Two little tiny coffee cups are left empty in front of them. Everything is brewing very thick in the early morning here, like the sun, with passionate beams. They got a real sun here in their sky, not like in England. English sun is a fake sun, a literature sun.
The other side of the café is a grocery shop. Some vegetables and fruits are being sold. A young woman standing outside, she seems mad, I mean, real mad. She keeps talking to nobody, and there is no anybody there at all, not even a wild dog. She wears fleshly red lipsticks like she just drank a glass of blood. Sometimes a car passes by and she talks to the car. Strange, somehow there is always a mad woman in any little town in the world.
A young girl, looks like a backpacker, a tourist, wanders in the street. She wears a tight lemon-colour T-shirt. Her young lively breasts drag those old local man’s eyes. As she disappears into the end of the street, two old mans withdraw back their eyes, and both exhale the smoke from their mouths. It must be a pleasure for them, in the morning street, seeing a young active breast under the lemon T-shirt.
The sunlight is like a knife cutting off the earth, half of the world is in the shadow, and the other half is bright. It is like a black and white movie, and everything is in slow motion. The sky is deadly blue, blue and blue. In alley ways, the old houses are silent, with rusty iron balcony and wooden window. They are sucking people’s soul. I understand why some foreigners travelled to a strange town for a short stay, but one month passed by, and then three months passed by, still there, and eventually ended up to live there for the rest of their life. That strange power, forces a person settle down a foreign land, whatever how wild he was. I can feel that strange power. It is something opposite of adventure, something comes from the living habits, and acceptance of monotonous, the monotonous of everyday’s life.
Sitting in this corner café with old mans, I am melted under the hot sun. My body is losing its shape, and floating in the air. My entirely existence is being sucked by a strange power. It scares me.
I find room on top floor of Residencia Mina. A budget hotel. The room is narrow but clean. With the beautiful sky light it feels light hearted. I love this small Mediterranean-style hotel. Standing on balcony I can see the river wriggle and connect to the sea. The sand is dark yellow, and the houses are colourful. Two or three old mans sit on the bridge above the river, smoking, chatting. The old streets, the green bushes, the sea birds…All these are exposed under the sun. I feel very close to the nature, the happy side of the nature.
I climb the steps up to roof of hotel. It is like a tropical garden, full of pot-planted palm trees and flowers. The sea not far away, shining in the distance. There are several ferries carry people to the outskirt part of beach. It is high noon, and the late summer sun is really hot. I take off my shirt, letting my body naked. It feel so good I take off the rest of my clothes. My soul is dancing. If happiness is a brief matter, then I am in this brief moment. I wonder whether the sadness inside a human sometimes is just because of lack of sunlight.
I think of you, while I am naked lying on the roof garden. We used to make love so often in your garden, by the fig tree. I remember all those details of when we were making love. I remember that you would take out my earrings before we make love. I remember that they were always entwined in my hair, very difficult to come out, but you would try hard to remove. That is you. That is one of the details I will always remember about you.
Unconsciously, I touch my earrings, but they are not there now. I am getting restless. I feel my nipples getting hard. I want to be exposed and touched in the hot sunlight. I think of book I bought in the train station while I was bored waiting:
Women’s Pleasure or How to Have
an Orgasm as Often as You Want
Question: “How do I build up my skills?”
There are two ways in which you build up your masturbation skills:
1. By doing it more frequently.
2. By doing it in a variety of different situations. This creates the sexual versatility that is so important to your progress.
Below are fifteen different ways of masturbating that you can practise. These fifteen methods are divided into four lessons.
Lesson 1: Masturbation in private
Lesson 2: Masturbation in semi-public
Lesson 3: Masturbation in public
Lesson 4: Improving your timing
Masturbating, I never tried it before. Nobody Western would believe that I never try to masturbate as a twenty-four-year-old woman. Or maybe I did but I didn’t know what I was doing. Sex in my understanding means something to do with a man, but not to do with myself. Having sex with oneself is like talking to oneself: bit mad. When I saw that Soho peepshop, I never thought to do with me. I also believed no love then no sex. Sex is an expression of love. But somehow this idea is changing. Now I feel tortured by the desire inside my body, and I feel strongly how much this desire wanting to be fulfilled.
“You should learn to play with your own clitoris.” Once you told me this on the bed. We were naked, and we had just made love.
Your hand touched my body. “If you want to have an orgasm, you should touch yourself here.”
I remember this conversation. But I never did it with myself, because I was always with you. Why do I have to?
On the roof of Residencia Mina, through the trees, the sun penetrates my skin. The leaves rustle in the mild wind. I start to touch myself.
The juice flows from my cave, and my fingers touch my hidden lips. Up and down. A great urge coming over me like a high tide flooding my body. The only thing I can see is the blue sky. The deep blue, like a boundless sea. The dry leaves under my skin are wet from my desire.
My body starts to shake. My breath gets difficult. My cave wants to devour something. I want to shout. It is almost painful, I feel like crying.
And I scream.
On my own. With myself. I did it. It is like dream.
For the first time in my entire life, I came by myself.
I can be on my own. I can. I can rely on myself, without depending on a man.
Faro is the capital of the Algarve region and the southernmost town in Portugal; tourism now dominates the economy.
faro
The train from Faro to Lisbon will depart at 1:30 in the afternoon. It’s twelve o’clock now. I learned Faro is a resort town. From the dictionary the resort place must be a very nice place, but in reality it is the opposite. Faro is very concrete. Almost ugly. What should I do in little resort to kill one and half an hour?
I walk around the train station with my rocksack on my back. The sea is just by the train station. But this sea smells bad. Between the sea and the inner land is an industry space, no beach. The rocks nearby the shore are dirty, polluted. It smells pee or something unpleasant. But some seagulls still convolute there. I feel sorry for those seagulls. I walk back to the street nearby the train station. People sitting outside of cafés looks at me. I can feel their curiosity to me. I bet there is few Chinese people come to this town. What is like looking this Chinese girl through their eyes? Without a companion with her, lost herself in the street, doesn’t know what to do about her life…Or maybe they just think of Chinese food when they see me.
12:30, still have one hour left to go to Lisbon.
I sit outside of a café, having a small cup of bitter espresso. How many cups of espresso the Portuguese have in one day? What is like if one’s body full of caffeine and sugar and nicotine and Coca Cola? Will it bring too much passion? Will the life be more energetic?
The espresso cup is dried up. I start to read Lonely Planet on Lisbon with my small Concise dictionary. The man in the nearby table is drinking the second cup of espresso. I am aware his watching on me. He is lighting a cigarettes now. He looks at the street, and then the blue sky, and me again. Now he stands and comes to me, and he sits on the chair very near to me.
He says: “Can you understand it?”
“Understand what?”
I close my guide book and look at him. He seems a very physical person, maybe he does low jobs. But he can speak good English. He is short, dark, energetic, solid strong body, broad chest, impressive face, intensive brown eyes.
“Understand the language. Because you are checking the dictionary all the time.”
Inside of his mouth, something strange. Some teeth missing there.
“Well, you know, I am a foreigner.” I am a little embarrassed.
“Don’t read the book. Look at the view. You should see it, not read the guide book.” He surveys my books. There is Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet lies on top.
“OK,” I say. He is definitely from local. I wonder if he reads Fernando Pessoa. He looks like a person doesn’t read any book at all.
“How many days you are going to stay in Faro?” he asks.
“Not anymore. I just came here for taking train to Lisbon, in one hour.”
By hearing this, he has no comments. There are no needs to develop more connection from his side, I guess.
