Apocalypse Baby (17 page)

I find the Hyena sitting cross-legged on a battered wicker armchair. She's changed into shorts and is speaking in Spanish to a dark androgynous girl with a shaved head. She doesn't sound the same when she speaks another language. She's being remarkably amiable.

‘Have they shown you where you're sleeping?'

Just then another blonde flings herself at the Hyena with a great shout. She's wearing a shabby evening dress, held together down the back by a row of safety pins. I don't know what to do with myself. I wonder whether all these women are lesbians. What a weird idea, to assemble together by sexual orientation.

Leaning against a wall, a girl in combats and and a man's white tank top is is also standing back, and looks at me with a smile. ‘You don't speak Spanish?'

‘No.'

‘And you don't know anyone here?'

‘No.'

‘Come along, I'll show you your room.'

This flat is arranged either side of a long corridor. She opens the door of a tiny boxroom without a window. There's just enough space for a bed and a wardrobe. I fall asleep immediately.

When I wake up, I've no idea of the time, but I'm so hungry it must be late. Coming out of the bedroom, I see that night has fallen. The flat has now been invaded by fauna of both sexes. Party noise, exactly what I hate most. People have been drinking, and they're talking loudly. I don't mind at all that I can't understand a word they're shouting. In the living room, a group is dancing in semi-darkness. I recognize the Hyena
among them. I wouldn't have thought she liked dancing. She's moving her body slowly, eyes shut. She's graceful. Doesn't seem like herself. She looks very young at that moment. I don't dare interrupt her. I try my luck in the kitchen where the girl in combats and tank top is toasting bread and sprinkling it liberally with olive oil, lemon and coarse salt.

‘Want some?'

I take the plate she holds out to me and lean against the sink.

‘So what brings you to Barcelona?'

‘Work. You speak good French.'

‘I lived in Paris for five years. You from there?'

‘Yes.'

‘The French think they're so great, don't they? Can't see why. Nothing interesting's happened there for twenty years. But I like Parisian women. They're good to look at. Want a Coke or some beer?'

She opens the fridge, acting as if she's at home here. A thick leather bracelet round her wrist accentuates the delicacy of her joints. When she smiles, it reveals a gap between her front teeth. Two parallel lines frame her lips. She has delicate skin. She conveys an impression of fragility combined with great capacity for endurance.

‘And you and your friend the Hyena are going to squat here, are you?'

‘She's not my girlfriend, we're working together.'

She smiles, tipping her head back to swallow the beer. ‘Don't worry, anyone can tell right away that you're not one of us.'

‘Oh really? How can you tell?'

I don't say to her that it would never cross my mind to
say to a woman who likes other women that ‘anyone can tell'. She might take it badly and I'd understand if she did. In the next room, someone has turned up the sound and the surrounding noise gets louder. She says her name is Zoska, and disappears. I sit down next to the fridge, on my own amid all the noise, smoking the joint she left me and hoping it'll help me to go back to sleep. I get up to go and tell the Hyena I'm going to bed, although I don't get the feeling she's bothered about me.

In the living room, at first I think I must be seeing things. A mass of naked bodies, scattered in groups, is writhing about all over the room. On the floor, on the couch, under the table. The spectacle is so startling that I find it hard to work out what it consists of. One girl on all fours, clad only in her big boots and her little round red-lensed glasses, with an axe tattooed on her back, is being had by another girl who has short hair and a muscular body. This one is pinning the first girl's neck to the ground, while her hand and part of her arm has vanished inside her.

The woman who was wearing the evening gown has pulled it up to the waist and the demonic Fairy Tinkerbell is leaning over her. A string of saliva leads from her lips to the blonde's face. Her hand is moving between her thighs. The evening-dress girl lifts her pelvis and cries out: from her shaved pubis flows a transparent stream that doesn't look like urine, then they roll around together saying things that make them both scream with laughter. Two fully dressed girls are standing near them, talking, and one of them plants a hearty slap on Fairy Tinkerbell's buttock, without interrupting her conversation.

One girl standing up, whom I can only see in profile, is pulling on white latex gloves and putting some gel on them. With the other hand, she's holding the shoulder of a slight brunette, and with her knees is pushing her legs apart. Behind her, a dark girl pulls her head back by the hair. Across the room, I recognize Zoska, with her back to me, leaning over a bare-chested man who has muscular shoulders and taut abdominals, with chicano tattoos on his arms. A swallow on his chest. He has large, almond-shaped eyes and cupid-bow lips. She slowly traces a line on the top of his shoulder. A thick red scratch mark appears. He turns his face towards her, with a faraway ecstatic expression. He reaches up with his mouth, she kisses him voluptuously, then raises herself up and traces another line under the first. Another boy watches, glass in hand. Zoska looks up, turns to him and beckons. The blonde whose flat it is joins them, she's holding hands with a dark-haired girl with pale skin, and gives her a long lingering kiss, then stands back and gives her a loud slap on the face, then another. Suddenly the Hyena is by my side. I'm relieved to find she's still fully dressed, before I realize that she too has a latex glove on her hand.

‘Maybe you'd be more comfortable in your room, Lucie.'

‘Oh don't worry about me, I'm not ten years old, you know. I've been around.'

She looks at me disbelievingly, then shrugs and plunges back into the middle of the scene. The woman with the orange Mohican says something to her and gets her to kneel down.

I turn round abruptly and leave the room. In my bedroom, I shut the door firmly behind me and try, like people do
in films, to block it with a chair. I can't work out exactly whether I'm angry, disgusted or terrorized. I'm still holding the joint in my hand; it's gone out. I light it again and lie on the bed. I'm furious because I feel I've been forced to witness something that has nothing to do with me. But not so disturbed as not to admit that at the same time I'm fascinated. Nothing will persuade me to come out of the room I've barricaded myself into, but there's nothing either to stop me contemplating in the quiet of my room the images I've just registered.

VANESSA WAKES UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE
night. On her pillow is a bundle of feathers, a tiny hooked claw, a beak, and some round white internal organs. It takes a moment to realize that Bel-Ami, the cat, has just vomited there. A pestilential smell makes itself felt. Vanessa opens the window before pulling off the pillowslip and putting it in the washing machine. From a chair, Bel-Ami watches her movements with suspicion. She takes him on her knees, and strokes him under his chin, something she knows he can't resist. Wide awake now, she knows she'll find it hard to get back to sleep. Too many things are chasing round in her head and disturbing her, she lies down again, hoping at least to be able to close her eyes before dawn.

The sun is beating down on the Plaza Real; they're on a restaurant terrace. White cloths on the tables, waiters in black aprons. Two young Romanian girls go from table to table, less than five minutes later a tourist notices that his wallet's gone, he shouts and jumps up, but it's too late. The staff will pretend to sympathize, directing him to the nearest police station, where tourists are queuing up to report thefts. Vanessa, dark glasses, chin in hand, is talking, without looking at her
interlocutor, about a well-known young French actress.

‘She sleeps with all my exes. The lot. But some of them, you know, I wonder what I ever saw in them. Nothing puts her off. Funny.'

Sitting back in his chair, he widens his eyes, but tries to look cool. He's calculating that once he's slept with her, he'll just have to let the actress know, and she'll throw herself at him like a starving castaway. The prospect of this double hit makes him feel dizzy.

Vanessa looks at him out of the corner of her eye. What string of circumstances has brought her to this point? Into this situation which she would still like to think ambiguous, yet in this little man's eyes she can read that he's perfectly sure of himself, and already plucking up the courage to hold her hand. As a precautionary measure, she puts one hand under the table, while the other is occupied by a cigarette, and out of danger. Whenever did she think it a good idea to have a date with this guy? She must have been bored out of her skull. If a woman's pulling power is measured by the quality of her would-be lovers, she's in trouble. He punctuates his speeches with a strident and unattractive little laugh. He hasn't stopped talking since he got here. About himself. Without giving away anything personal – he must be afraid of letting drop something about his wife and children. He's a French musician, who's had some recent success, but he hasn't often had much chance to play away. Now he's explaining the difference between modern art and contemporary art, kindly assuming from the start that she's an imbecile. He's telling her about his tours, and every five minutes he assures her that he isn't impressed by all this sudden fame, but that's all
he talks about. He claims he couldn't care less about meeting celebrities, but he's constantly name-dropping.

She met him at a dinner party with some French friends, he was spending a few days in Barcelona because he wanted to work with flamenco musicians. He shadowed her all evening, and because she wasn't keen to talk to anyone else in particular, she allowed him to. Then he got her email address out of their hostess, claiming he wanted to invite her to the premiere of an Almodóvar film, followed by dinner with Javier Bardem. If it hadn't been for what turned out to be a lie about the dinner, she'd have sent him packing directly. As it was, she'd had the evening from hell, sitting on a hard seat. When she found out that the dinner was nonexistent, she walked out on him as soon as the credits rolled, saying she had a plane to catch next morning.

But he hadn't given up. When had she given in to some morbid urge and allowed herself to be drawn back in? At first she'd found it rather touching to see his naive way of strolling into town, like a cowboy. People who've recently acquired celebrity status go mad with joy, dazzled by their good luck, and they think they've made it now, everything's going to be OK. They're as happy as baby turtles, waddling clumsily over the sand, convinced they'll reach the sea, while up in the sky the cunning raptors are circling. The pathetic pride with which he boasted to her about his thirty-square-metre apartment he's just bought near the Gare de l'Est in Paris. He calls it his bachelor pad.

Why hadn't she just made a break for it? Her failure to do so bothers her. Only women who are ugly or fat or old allow themselves to be lulled into acquiescence by someone
else's intensity of desire. Never sleep with anyone beneath you, that's the first rule of respect for your femininity.

He talks a lot about the money he's making, while repeating that it's no big deal. He's against consumer society, lives very modestly himself. He's a dropout with a rich daddy, she worked that one out in three questions. Brought up in big houses in exclusive districts, went to top schools before realizing he didn't have the strength of character to keep up the family tradition of success. So he decided to be an artist and a rebel, and to live off the monthly allowance from his papa, he thinks himself amazing for managing on it, and he likes living in downmarket districts, because he will always be superior to them, and knows he can get out any time he likes. When he's fed up with his children seeing the prostitutes hanging around downstairs in his block of flats, he'll change his tune and pick up the keys to one of the apartments his family owns. But for now, he's pretending his weakness of resolve is a subversive choice.

She can do without artists' company. Sportsmen or politicians, yes, they can impress her. But artists – invariably pseuds. And top of the list without hesitation, she'd put writers. Been there, done that. What they offer with one generous hand is grabbed back a hundredfold with the other, the rapacious, mean, and unscrupulous hand. The hand that writes, betrays, crucifies, pins down. The one that sacrifices you. She was married for three years to a novelist. He's put her in every novel he's written since then. And he'd be mighty indignant if she dared complain of the treatment he inflicts on her.

She is really so bored right now… if only this little man had managed to display one or two qualities, she might have
convinced herself that he was worth a try. He has a nice name, Alexandre, quite trendy, she would like to whisper it. And he's taken care over dressing. He's a bit weedy and awkward with his premature paunch and narrow shoulders, but his suit is handmade, otherwise it wouldn't hang so well on him. He has a nice voice, but no idea how to turn a compliment. He's gobbling up his paella, with greasy lips and the grin of a little boy who thinks he's found out something all by himself. ‘You're incredibly beautiful!' Oh really. Nobody else had ever noticed such a thing before he came along, of course. He orders coffee. Shifts on his chair, he must already be thinking about the hotel room and how to go about it. His sausage-like fingers grip his liqueur glass, and he goes on boasting, without noticing that the woman he's talking to is ill at ease. She's considered lying, thinking up some excuse, so as to let him down gently. But she opts for brutality: the sun's beating down, the parasol no longer protects them from the heat. She feels dozy. He deserves to be dropped right now, no kid gloves, because he hasn't inspired any dream in her and isn't even aware of it, because he's been excited since yesterday at the thought of sleeping with her, when he doesn't even know how to make her laugh. She feels him panting with impatience. She picks up her jacket and her bag. He looks up with a start, a little apprehensive because he thinks now he's going to leave with her, the screwing point has arrived, here we go.