by Don Boyd
“And what about you, Margot?”
Margot seized her chance to disguise the overwhelming physical attraction she felt for Xavier with professional banter.
“I spend my time talking to psychologically damaged ex-patriots. And they are not all rich Americans hiding from the embarrassments of their ill gotten gains… pretending to be on some sort of modernista grand tour… or a handful of desperate trustafarians from Notting Hill who dabble in video art.”
“Xavier is an ex-pat, and an artist of sorts.”
Robert was trying to break the palpable sexual tension. He had effortlessly prized the cork out of the bottle and was now pouring the Cava as pedantically as a restaurant sommelier.
“No, no. I am an amateur! I can’t even draw.”
“I don’t believe you. You must invite Margot to see your apartment. It’s a shrine.”
“A shrine suggests something religious? Are you a priest?” Another girlish giggle.
“I have a very quiet private life rather like a priest’s, I suppose!”
Xavier chuckled as Robert gave him a glass. The Cava glistened on his lips. Margot wanted to kiss him gently, and run her tongue across those lips.
“May I have some too, please, Robert?”
“That’s a first. You always say that it sends you to sleep.”
“It won’t tonight. Too much on my mind.”
Robert poured, and they chinked their glasses. Margot and Xavier locked eyes and almost as if she felt guilty, she repeated the gesture for Robert.
“I am hardly a priest but I am passionate about the work made by all those American sixties artists who are enjoying a bit of a revival here in Barcelona.”
“You mean painters like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein?”
“As much as I like them, no! I mean performance artists and the early, experimental filmmakers. Video art.”
Margot began a private fantasy where Xavier had moved into her arms and had begun to unclasp her silver necklace, unzipping her dress. She so wanted to kiss his eyes and his lips.
“Andy Warhol made movies and organised happenings,” Robert chirped in, oblivious to the sensual foreplay Margot and Xavier were now enjoying, thinly disguised with their frivolous chit chat.
“True, Robert, of course. But there were others… I’ll show you my studio tomorrow, if you like? After lunch?”
His eyebrows had moved enough to suggest that unless she had a very good reason, Margot had no alternative. They were going to be lovers.
“I’d like that.”
They settled down to watch the boulevardiers return to their seats. A violin was picking out the chords of Lucia’s suicidal aria, as the percussionist gently adjusted the timbre of his kettledrum. The conductor entered to applause and the lights went down.
Robert reached out for Margot’s hand. He squeezed it but she drew away and moved her chair back to within an inch of Xavier’s long body. She looked behind her and he smiled again. This time, he looked into her luxurious and inquisitive eyes. She smiled and whispered:
“I know very little about video art!”
Margot noticed that Robert had been looking at his watch regularly. He began to fidget, uncharacteristically. During the sextet, usually a scene which, if performed well, earns rapt, silent attention from the audience, Robert leant back and whispered into Xavier’s ear a couple of times. As the audience erupted into tumultuous applause, he shot up, apologised for leaving early, kissed Margot very peremptorily on her cheeks, and left, whispering that he would see her at her office in the morning.
Xavier moved into Robert’s seat and within a minute or two the sexual charge which had been interrupted by Robert’s departure reignited. The guilty pleasure returned and Margot quite literally and physically had to control the outward expressions of a powerful, internalised orgasm. When she had calmed down, Margot resisted any further flirtation. She almost ran from the box like a scalded cat when the curtain came down, making a flimsy excuse about a dinner date with her husband.
Xavier laughed. “Cal Maño in the Barceloneta. One o’clock tomorrow!”
Margot had lied about her dinner date. She all but ran to the ladies’ toilets and locked herself in a cubicle. While she caressed her hard nipples and massaged her soaking vagina, she rang Robert on the mobile and left an ironic voice message.
“Roberto! What are you playing at? Where did you go? You abandoned me to a wolf. You will have to come up with a very plausible excuse. Ciao, ciao!”
Chapter Six
Margot walked slowly through the boisterous nightlife of the Raval, and wound her way up the steep, small street which led home. She opened the front door as silently as she could, but Archie grunted her a greeting.
“You’re early. I thought that you were going to have dinner with Robert?”
“He rushed off. I walked home.”
She went into the kitchen and was boiling a kettle when Archie appeared in his pyjamas. She jumped up with a shout.
“Lost in my thoughts!”
“Come to bed, Margot.”
“Soon, darling… I promise!”
She poured a cup of hot water and sliced a lemon for it, avoiding his eyes. He kissed her goodnight from behind and shuffled off. Margot was beginning to feel guilty. She poured her drink down the sink and tiptoed down the corridor to the bathroom, shedding her clothes. After a very speedy mouthwash, she climbed into bed next to Archie. He was snoring.
She closed her eyes.
I love Archie and wouldn’t want to be married to anyone else. He is in so many ways an ideal husband; so funny, so quaint, so energetic, and so clever. I will never forget the moment I realised that I wanted to go to bed with him. He was sitting at the end of a table in a small restaurant near my campus with a couple of very pretty girls on either side. He was ignoring their slightly annoying attempts to persuade him to flirt with them. He is a handsome, quirky looking man and at that time he was in his early fifties and had made Chicago, or the Windy City as he insisted on calling it, his home for some years. Despite this he had retained his rather eccentric European accent. Overweight and bald, but in no way self-conscious about it, he was using his magical talent to make us laugh. He told a great story about having a passionate and complicated affair with Peggy Guggenheim in the Venice of the 1950’s when she was at least twenty years older than he was – I had wondered later if this had been his subtle attempt to flirt with me. He is twenty-five years older than myself, and the moral of his story was quite clear: older women (and men) are wonderful lovers.
He followed that story with a witty anecdote about Salvador Dali – apparently he once appeared in the dining room at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes in a fur coat and a black tie and refused to allow the waiter to remove his magnificent mink until he was seated at the best and most prominent table in the room. He sat down and proceeded to regale the hotel for its silly policy of insisting on the wearing of ties in the restaurant. He then beckoned imperiously to the exasperated maitre d’hôtel and told him that he was now too hot. He insisted on removing his fur and in a grand theatrical sweep of his arms, he revealed that he was wearing nothing except the bow tie. He then parked his completely naked, corpulent body back in the seat at his table. In the company of two stunning prostitutes, one a tall Algerian man and the other an Italian nymphet, he ordered two lobsters, washed them down with a bottle of champagne and announced flamboyantly that he was going to fuck them both.
How true the story was didn’t matter. Archie told it with such wit. His language was peppered with arcane peculiarities and his Venetian accent, tinged with a light Scottish brogue, was so compulsively sexy. His mischievous, enthusiastic laugh was a very powerful aphrodisiac. Within weeks I had begun to sneak into his Spanish History classes – they were de rigueur for the cognoscenti at Chicago then, and I plucked up the courage to ask him to dinner.
“Only if you marry me!” was his reply.
Our wedding took place in Barcelona’s Santa Maria Catedral a
nd until now we have had five years of happiness, the like of which most married couples might only experience for a couple of weeks during their honeymoon. He is very proud of his chair at the University in Barcelona. “I am a Scottish Italian ice-cream maker’s son, for Christ’s sake! Who could have guessed that I would become the foremost authority on Catalan history?” And he takes his responsibilities there very seriously.
He also has a powerful homosexual charisma and he relishes my harmless flirtatiousness as much as I enjoy the outrageous way in which he uses his sexuality to charm his young collegiate in the classroom. Of course we have secrets. Of course we flirt with others. But the notion of infidelity has never once entered my head and I am absolutely certain that Archie decided to completely curb the promiscuity of his complicated love life in Chicago after we became lovers. We made an early pact to reduce long confessionals about the sins of our past lives.
Who could resist a man whose idea for a weekend birthday treat to London involved a costume re-enactment of Pushkin’s duel on Hampstead Heath, a swim in the mixed pond there, picnic lobster lunch, sex in Claridges and This Is Spinal Tap at the Everyman?
What I adore about Archie is that he can abandon his flamboyance without ever losing his sense of humour. My birthday present to him last year was a new bicycle. He insisted on joining a tourists’ bicycle tour of the city pretending to be, by tactful arrangement with the organisers, the tour guide. Never for a second either pretentious or patronising, he explained to the lucky, unsuspecting throng of backpackers that the new bike was his birthday present and this tour was the perfect way to break it in. He explained that if they felt dissatisfied with his services, which would include Catalan, Castilian and English translations, they would receive a refund. Little did they know how erudite and expert a guide he would prove to be. We used their enormous tips to buy a celebratory brunch at The Arts.
Our small apartment in the Montjuic overlooking the Barcelona harbour is a haven for our very select circle of special friends and our sanctuary, away from the pressures of our professional lives. I rarely discuss my work with Archie and he never asks me about the time I spend away from him, except in the most superficial way. (For instance, he knows about my Platonic friendship with Robert, and knows that I have a favourite breakfast café in the Barri Gotic from which he is barred). In all other respects, we have separate lives during the working week. I live a somewhat schizophrenic existence, embroiled as I am in the complexities of my patients’ minds. He combines his work at the University with his passion for Spanish art and his beloved Pre Raphaelite painters about whom he knows more than the most anal of Victorian art historians.
As such, our marriage is primarily acted out and enjoyed when we are cocooned in the haven of our apartment or when I make the rare forays into Archie’s academic world at those university functions involving wives and families. More often than not, the ensuing socialising revolves around the politics of the university, and almost always involves people of Archie’s generation and status. I play the part as much as I can, but Archie is usually smart enough to know that he can’t take me for granted. He never insists that I pitch up or participate in much of the conversational banter and so is always forgiving when I bow out or sneak off early for an evening on my own at home. I would feel much more selfish about this if I didn’t compensate with my ‘hostess with the mostest’ persona, which I provide when we entertain his friends and academic colleagues at home. I stay quiet when they hold court, and reconciliatory when the inevitable after-dinner philosophical discussions descend into the aggressive banter which can lead to fisticuffs at dawn. And when they have gone, I love to unpick the subtext of our guests’ lives for Archie’s considerable amusement using my analytical skills, spinning sometimes fanciful theories about people we hardly know. In that sense it has all been working rather well, but recently I had begun to realise that outside of my group of patients and Elvira, I had made no new friends in Barcelona of my own age, and I seemed trapped, anachronistically, in a world of a bygone era when it comes to our social life. Even our evenings at home alone tend to be dominated by his obsessions.
The plethora of experiences which Archie has always so generously shared with me tend to revolve around his subjects – European and Spanish history. In recreation, his fields of expertise and passion are again in elitist and rarefied arenas – Victorian art and baroque opera. At first, there was an exoticism which fascinated me about all these subjects, which were so refreshing and diverting for a woman caught up professionally in the neuroses and dysfunctions of her clients’ lives. I relished it all and gobbled up all the knowledge I could, gratefully and lovingly; Archie is so entertaining in that sense. But something has recently begun to bother me. What had previously been almost magically alive was becoming stale and dull. Everything Archie was interested in seemed to be rooted in the past. And, of course, his own terms of cultural reference as a young man were all hinged in an era at least two decades before I was born. I had increasingly noticed that I was completely out of touch with the cultural tastes and fads of my own peer group, my generation. In a round-up in the foreign edition of The Guardian of films, music and novels created by artists of my own age, I was appalled to discover that I had almost no knowledge at all of the names of the creative people who were part of my generation, let alone any exposure to their contemporary work. This niggled me, frustrated me. But there was also another suppressed and alarming new phenomenon about my life with Archie. And a potential catalyst for a disaster I was determined to avoid.
When we first met, sex had also been a delightful part of our after dinner-party ritual. I have always found Archie physically attractive and loved this part of our marriage. Sex had been great, even if, on the whole, it had been somewhat unadventurous and conventional. This had never bothered me. I fancied him and he satisfied me physically. But Archie’s sexual appetite for me during the first few years of our relationship in Chicago had gradually begun to diminish here in Barcelona. It wasn’t as if he didn’t desire me, didn’t want to have sex with me, but when we try now to reach the heights of passion which had so characterised our early relationship, he seems only able to satisfy himself, and I lie there afterwards listening to drunken snores (another unpleasant trait he has developed), feeling somewhat short-changed. I rarely reach my climax, for example – unheard of in the first years of our sexual life – and quite often Archie’s penis is now too limp to enter me. I made a light joke at breakfast once about his homosexual inclinations and he nearly bit my head off. “I am the most heterosexual man I know,” he quipped in an uncharacteristically defensive tone.
Of course, I feel bad but I have begun to fantasise and have cravings for some uncomplicated, compensating balance. I want to shift my fantasies into some sort of comfortable reality which won’t disturb the otherwise perfect aspects of my life here. Too much of my social life revolves around Archie’s friends, and I miss physical interaction with younger, more virile men of my own age. Flirting with Archie’s older friends is hardly a substitute. The opportunity, the need, to discover that life has something else more desirable, some other pleasure to offer, which could be indulged without harming or prejudicing my marriage, has finally become more than just a temptation. It has always been feasible on the practical front. Is it now finally irresistible?
In the context of my experience at the opera house, Xavier and all that he represents could become an exciting complement, and need not be a perverse threat. I can be joyously in control and passionately out of control. Xavier will be my most exquisite secret. A taboo to be transgressed which can reinforce the taboo. In that sense, am I dangerously close to opening that Pandora’s box of the perverted and heightened sexuality which has characterised so much of the deviant lives of my patients? Deviant sexual behaviour, which has until now only been the object of my professional prurience.
Chapter Seven
The night watchman had telephoned the emergency services. He had been asked to look around
for something which might give some tiny clue as to the identities of the victims. On a chair close to their bodies, he found a red document folder. It contained a neatly typed film script. He had told the officer on duty that he could hardly read it. English. He was Catalan. He managed to pick out the words St. Eulalia from the first two lines in very broken English and he read out a Barcelona address which had been printed below the title on the front cover.
Sirens…
At break-neck speed, a strange motorcade sped through the empty streets of the Diagonal – Barcelona’s perfectly proportioned modernista district. Guiding two police cars and two ambulances towards the city’s outskirts, was a lone rider on a Vespa, like a latter-day Horseman of the Apocalypse, also in police uniform. He signalled every direction change, ominously slowing down and waving his arm emphatically, dangerously. At one corner of the industrial estate they had begun to penetrate, he drove his scooter so tightly around the bend that the wheels were touching the ground horizontally. When he finally stopped, he leapt off the bike, gesturing towards the nondescript aquamarine of a small, modern warehouse. At first, nobody knew where to go or what to do. No sign of the night watchman. Inspector Carlos Mendoza, the senior police officer on duty, shouted something in Catalan about procedures. Finally, the younger policeman who had led them there wrenched off his helmet and pointed towards what looked like a make-shift area, partitioned away from the abstraction of the commercial storage units which proliferated the untidy floor of the warehouse.
Underneath the crude temporary strip lighting which bathed the centre of the room they had entered, a blood-soaked futon was positioned on a pallet. Above the futon was a crucifix in the style of St. Andrew’s cross, and nailed to the cross, a beautiful, dark haired and olive skinned boy, no older than twenty-one. Paolo. His mouth was crammed with a blood-soaked cloth. Slumped and tied like an animal at the foot of the crucifix was the limp body of a red-haired girl, a few years younger than the boy. It was Tilly. Next to her tiny frame was an expensive professional digital video camera, a computer, a mobile ‘phone and a smaller amateur camcorder. The room looked like the aftermath of some ghastly re-enactment of a religious scene from a bad Hollywood sexploitation film. There was still no sign of the night watchman.
