The Blue Guide (11 page)

I don't have any choice but to say yes, though I'm not into perfume or aftershave at all – I much prefer the human body
au naturel
, within reason.

‘Paco take me to Liberty's on the way home last night,' she explains. ‘The beauty hall is
amazing
. He buy incredible massage oil with sandalwood and – what it called? – patchouli and geranium in it. I dripping in it when he finish with me.'

I don't respond, don't even look at her. I don't want to know, I think sulkily.

But she's obviously in the mood for sharing, and there's nothing I can do to stop her without being rude. Or without changing the subject. Nothing comes to mind, however, and afterwards I wonder whether this is probably because, deep down, I
did
want to hear all about it.

She's reclining against the seat of the taxi, legs crossed, tapping her foot against the floor as she talks. I suspect she notices that the taxi driver, overhearing a few words, gradually turns down his radio and is now listening in. Afterwards, I think, he'll probably have to try to find a quiet sidestreet where he can wrist himself off.

‘Paco always wonderful lover,' says Carlotta. ‘But last night he on fire. I so tired, so tired.'

She senses me look at her and raises her eyebrows meaningfully. ‘We get home,' she says, ‘and he pull off my clothes and take me right there, on the floor in the hallway. He like a man possessed. We leave our clothes there and he carry me into bedroom and lay me down and massage me for hours. And then just as I falling asleep, he turn me over edge of the bed and start fucking me so hard from behind, I not sure if I can take it.'

She closes her eyes, swoons back. Her hand is between her legs now, and I look at her with dread, afraid she's going to start openly masturbating right here in the cab.

‘I keep coming and coming and coming,' she says. ‘And still he not stop.' She opens her eyes, grabs my hand besides hers. ‘Until you have a man like Paco,' she says, looking at me, ‘you don't know what sex is.' She
blinks, affords me a pitying little smile. ‘I know I very lucky woman,' she says.

I want to tell her to shut up now, but I'm fascinated, too, by what I am seeing through this unexpected window onto her and Paco's sex life. And, most peculiarly, there's a damp bloom in my knickers where I'm getting more than a little turned on. I can't stop thinking about how it felt when Paco mounted me on the chair, drove himself into me like – as Carlotta describes it – a thing possessed. I
have
to have him again. Just one more time. And then I'll keep my promise to Jess.

‘So I hardly get any sleep all night long,' says Carlotta.

Now I come to think of it, she does look a little peaky, a little less fresh than yesterday.

‘He just not leave me alone,' she goes on. ‘It is exhausting . . . and beautiful. He is extraordinary lover. I hope you experience man like him one day, Alicia.'

I'm biting my tongue as we pull up behind the Tate Modern, where I hand the driver his fare and a large tip. On our way inside, I try to take my mind off the subject by telling Carlotta about how the building was converted from an old power station and explaining that the artworks are arranged thematically rather than, as in most galleries, chronologically. She says that sounds interesting and that she's looking forward to the visit.

It's at this point that I realise I have absolutely no idea where to begin, and I ask her what kind of art she likes and what she would like to see.

She looks a little sheepish for a minute, and then she replies: ‘You think I have just one thing in my head,' she says, ‘but I like to see some nudes.'

I nod a little too earnestly. ‘We can do that,' I say,
pointing towards the escalator. On the fifth floor, I remember, are the Nude/Action/Body galleries. There should be plenty there to tickle her fancy.

We come out in front of Rodin's
The Kiss
, on the threshold of the galleries, and stand to admire it. Carlotta studies it from several angles, says she doesn't know a great deal about Rodin or sculpture in general but loves the way the bodies appear to be melting into each other, that that's what she feels when she's kissing Paco – that they are becoming one.

She wonders aloud if I have ever felt like that and I think for a minute and I say, ‘Yes, just once.' I don't tell her any more than that, but not because it's Paco I'm thinking about – his lovemaking was far too vigorous and carnal for that, for me at least. No, I'm thinking about Daniel and the morning after our second night together, when I lay awake in the dawn light, just looking at his face as he slept, and then he stirred and turned to me and, as he held my face between my hands and kissed me, his cock slipped into me without any need for lubrication, and I came with the sheer joy of it, and felt, yes, like I was melting into him.

And then half an hour later he was gone from my life for good.

I look up at the sculpture and I feel like crying, but Carlotta is moving away into the first room, pointing excitedly at a work that she's obviously familiar with and is happy to have discovered here. I follow her across the room and look at the plaque:
Reclining Nude
.

‘Picasso paint this just weeks before he ninety,' she tells me, and I realise that she's no art amateur after all.

She steps closer to it. ‘Imagine, such old man.' She laughs. ‘Even when ninety he can't – how you say? –
keep it in pants.' She leans into me a little – more, I think, to make me feel like her confidante than because she really doesn't want anyone else to hear. I've already learnt from the taxi ride that she doesn't mind who knows about her bedroom antics.

‘When I artists' model,' she says, ‘I sometimes fantasise I am posing for Picasso. Not that I don't pose for talented men. But they not
him
, you know. And I love to have posed for Picasso, to have been his mistress, to fuck him, even if he treat his muses like shit.' She gestures back at the canvas in front of us. ‘Even as old, old man, I think that would be amazing. He a genius, but more than that, he had big thirst for the world, for painting, for women, right to the end. To be immortalised in painting by him – that really something.'

We stroll through the galleries, stopping to look at pieces that catch our eye, and I listen to Carlotta talk passionately about art and realise that there's much more to her than I'd given her credit for. It's no bimbo, after all, who can knowledgeably discuss nude photography, from Man Ray to Helmut Newton, who can debate whether Surrealism was a sexist movement or not. I'm hanging onto her every word, spellbound both by what she's saying and the ardour on her face as she talks about a subject that is obviously very close to her heart. I'm not surprised when, at one point in the conversation, she lets slip that she has aspirations to be an artist herself, even if her acting career pans out.

One of the last works we see before we head off for afternoon tea is an amazing ‘soft sculpture' by Dorothea Tanning,
Nue couchée
. Carlotta is overjoyed to finally see it in the flesh, as it were: she says she's been a fan of the artist for a long time.

‘She still working now,' she says. ‘She start to work
with Surrealists in 1930s and become famous with topless self-portrait in 1942. She still live creative life.' She lets out a barely audible sigh.

Nue couchée
is a remarkable work – a 3D female nude made up of cotton, cardboard, wool and table tennis balls, covered in pink crêpe. As an artwork, it's incredibly tactile – especially where the rounded protusions of the balls suggest a string of vertebrae and at the swell of the almost outrageously voluptuous hips – and Carlotta can't resist reaching down for a squeeze when she's made sure the guard isn't looking our way.

‘There was once,' she says, ‘an exhibition in gallery in New York, and this sculpture was placed on a low table – plinth, you call it? – and protect by Perspex. Tanning say it remind her of a scene in a adult fairy tale from Victorian time, when hero goes into a cave and finds block of alabaster in which he see beautiful sculpted woman. He bring her to life by singing to her, but it turns out she an evil spirit who nearly lure him to his death.'

She rises from where she was crouching beside the piece. ‘Just look at it,' she whispers reverently. She turns her head to me and then back. ‘Only a woman truly know a woman's body,' she says, and there's wistfulness in her voice.

I can't help but risk a glance at her face. She's still looking down at the piece, but her thoughts are clearly elsewhere. Whoever she's thinking of, it's not Paco, no matter what he did to her last night, how many times he made her come.

A rumble from her belly breaks the spell, and we laugh and agree that it's time to refuel. We descend to Level Two, where the lunchtime crowds have thinned out and we can look out over the Thames and see the shiny Millennium Bridge stretching over to St Paul's
Cathedral like a silver spinal cord. We order chocolate muffins and lattes, and I confess to Carlotta that I forgot that Paco had told me she'd been an artists' model.

‘I was young then,' she says, with a half-smile of nostalgia. ‘I start when I was seventeen and go on for about two years. It was wonderful, most times, but I very naïve. I am . . . taken advantage of, in many ways.'

‘Do you regret it?'

‘Not at all. But artists are – let say, egomaniac. Everything revolve around them and their work. In the end, you just a piece of flesh.' She sighs. ‘You never get away from that.'

‘Sounds like you had some hairy moments,' I say.

She chuckles throatily. ‘You can say,' she says, taking a nibble from a muffin. She stares out across the river. ‘I not say names,' she says, ‘but there is one time, I am posing for a quite famous artist in his sixties. He painting giant canvas of me, going up to ceiling of his studio, so he has to use ladder. It take forever, because he climb up, and look back, and find something not right and come back down and change me. I am just dying of boredom after few days. And I am cold, and hungry, and just smoking until I hoarse.'

She picks up her cup, blows on her latte. ‘After about two weeks, he up his ladder and happy painting, for once, and because I say he must bring in electric heater for me, I'm all warm and I don't know it but I'm falling asleep. Then I wake up, and he standing on ladder with trousers around knees, staring down at me like he dreaming. He got his cock in his hand and he going at himself like madman.'

I've just taken a bite of my muffin, and I'm trying not to splutter it all over Carlotta. ‘What did you do?' I croak.

‘I lie there, shocked. I not know what
to
do.' She lets
out a guffaw. ‘And then,' she goes on, tears of mirth springing into her eyes, ‘there is a noise outside, and at the same time we know it must be midday and his wife is bringing our lunch. My famous friend start wobbling on ladder and falls down, with his ass out.'

‘His wife saw?'

‘Oh yes. She see. And that the last time,' she smirks, ‘I model for
him
, and the work is never finish.' She looks thoughtful. ‘Shame,' she adds almost ruefully. ‘It could have been something.'

‘So it wasn't all glamour and starlight?' I say.

‘Not at all,' she replies. ‘It boring, most of time.' She smiles. ‘There are good parties,' she says, ‘and I learn a lot about craft of painting. But . . .'

‘Why did you do it?'

‘Well, there the money, which I use to pay for my own art lessons. And then I maybe, I not know – maybe I think of myself like Anaïs Nin, or Françoise Gilot – she also a painter when she meet Picasso. But I not know, then, about other side of coin. Like Victorine Meurent, who model for Manet's
Olympia
. She said to be his mistress, and die a drunk on streets of Montmartre, where she performing with a monkey to get money. This after having some of her own paintings displayed in a Salon that reject Manet a few years before! Then there Louise Weber, a – how you say? – laundry maid who become a Moulin Rouge dancer and who is in one of Toulouse-Lautrec's most famous paintings. They call her
la goulue
or ‘greedy girl' because she always take other people's drinks, and she get too fat to dance can-can and gets sack.'

‘Is that why you stopped?' I say.

She laughs. ‘Maybe I would have end up a fat drunk,' she says. ‘But no. I stop because I meet Paco, and he not want me to show my body to other men any more.'

‘Didn't you put your foot down? He doesn't
own
you, you know, just because he married you.'

Her brow creases. ‘I not have time anyway,' she says, a little defensively, I feel. ‘We travel all time, I not commit myself to any project. And then –' she doesn't look convinced by what she says next ‘– then I decide I'd like to try acting.'

I gaze at her. I can't imagine Carlotta would cut the mustard as an actress: she's too upfront, too open, I suspect, to playact. Her feelings seem to be written all over her face, inscribed in every movement of her lovely body. Most likely it's Paco who suggested she become an actress, as a diversion, knowing full well nothing would come of it.

‘Anyway,' she says, ‘I not miss it at all. It was like being a doll. A life-size doll, like one of Alma Mahler.'

I look at her questioningly. ‘What was that?' I say.

‘You not know story of Oskar Kokoschka's doll?'

I shake my head.

‘Well, when he come back from First World War, the artist Kokoschka find his mistress, Alma – she was earlier wife of Gustav Mahler and later of Bauhaus architect Walter Gröpius – has left him because their passion for each other too tiring. His revenge is to get made a life-size doll of her, with it own special clothes and underwear by best Parisian houses. Some people say Kokoschka even took doll to opera, although he say that was a wild tale by his maid. So everyone say he must be fucking it too; I suppose that what he want them to think. He draw about thirty portraits of it, and several paintings. That how he exorcise Alma. Then he behead her – the doll, I mean – at a champagne party in his garden.' She giggles. ‘I think she a better model than me. At least she never fall asleep on him.'