We had been separated for nearly thirty years by this point, we were just distant acquaintances. And when we were together, he had come to bitterly resent my success as a public speaker and celebrity. He was jealous of my books, and he resented the fact that I had written about his own achievements as conscience of the world. He felt, I supposed, that I was stealing his soul.
He was a sour, begrudging man, and our breakup had been an ugly and painful affair. Twice Andrei had tried to sue me for a share of my earnings as a writer and academic. He told friends that I had undermined him and belittled him. He spread the rumour that I was a poisonous Machiavellian sociopath, and a promiscuous sex addict with a drug problem.
This is the kind of thing you can expect, when you choose to stop flattering a man.
But why did I stop flattering him? When did it all go wrong for us? Perhaps it was just a gradual thing, a drip at a time eroding the cliff until one day the whole cliff falls down.
Or perhaps…
Yes. That may be it.
I do recall one particular occasion. It’s coming back now.
Ah, yes…
It was the day when Andrei won the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work with the poor and dispossessed. He seemed taller that day, his face was flushed, he had the air of a god who had just received his invitation to Olympus. And I kissed him and congratulated him, and felt a pang of jealousy, and he felt that pang and interpreted it as pettiness.
“Of course I’m glad for you. I’m very glad,” I told him, soothingly.
He glared and glowered at me. What I said wasn’t enough. My words lacked awe. My play-acting was off.
That night we had sex without the Death, and Andrei was impotent for the first time in ten years. I was gentle with him and played with him in my mouth but nothing happened. I laughed and said it didn’t matter, but it did.
So he went to the toilet and he had a loud piss. Then he came back in, cock still damp, and asked me to carry on. But I got offended. I refused to use my mouth again, until he cleaned his cock properly. So he went back and cleaned it properly, but when he returned to the bedroom I was pretending to be asleep. I could hear him, standing there, breathing heavily, watching me pretend to be asleep, wondering if he should pretend to believe that I wasn’t pretending. I wondered if he was touching himself. I felt a shudder of contempt for him. What kind of man was he, if he couldn’t sustain his desire in the presence of a woman as attractive as me?
In the morning, Andrei was all smiles. He made me pancakes. I gave him oral sex at the breakfast table, still with the taste of lemon juice in my mouth. But suddenly, I felt a wave of nausea, and I spat his juices on to the kitchen floor.
And he slapped me.
I should have shouted. I should have reproached him. I should, and possibly could, have beaten the living fucking daylights out of him. But instead, I accepted the slap without a murmur. I think I even smiled. And Andrei visibly relaxed. A glow came upon him. He was himself again.
And that’s how it began, and how it continued. From that moment on, our love was doomed. Because every day, he slapped me. Just once, never more. But it always happened, and I always accepted it without complaint. He never beat me, or seriously hurt me. The slaps were nothing compared with the genuine pain I experienced at sparring sessions in the dojo. But they served a function. They reminded Andrei of the source of his manliness – his power over Woman, his contempt for Woman.
We sold our house. We moved to a villa on Lake Como. We were both fluent in Italian. We started to dabble in Italian politics. Andrei decided to become a sculptor, and bought a ton of marble from Carrera, which he hacked and hacked away at until it was a mass of boulders stained red with the blood of his finger nicks. So he sold the marble, and bought a power boat. I loved to swim in the lake, as he roared the boat around me in large circles, smashing my body with the waves.
In the evenings we’d sit on the terrace. He’d nuzzle me, caress my breasts, rub my hand against his soft cock. We often made love on that terrace, basking in the smell of olives and the taste of red wine. I would turn and face him, my head tilted back, the infinite stars above me. And I would stand there, wait for him, letting his ardour grow as his eyes drank in my body. It always took a while, like a tank filling up. But eventually Andrei would become erect beneath his trousers.
And then he would slap me. Not straight away. He often made me wait, five minutes or more. The shock of it was like plunging into an ice-cold lake after a sauna. It was a blow that jolted every atom of my being – yet it caused no lasting hurt. No bruises or marks.
But for all that, it was a slap. Not a caress. Not a kiss. A physical blow.
And after the slap, we would both take our clothes off and make love on the wooden table. Our cries cut the night. The locals would smile and laugh when they saw us, they knew us as the couple who fucked all night. We inspired, I like to think, a number of marriages.
And we were content, for a while. We no longer played the Sex and Death game. And as long as Andrei had slapped me at some point in the day, he was fine. His impotence didn’t return. And he was good-humoured too, always laughing and joking. He was genuinely, engagingly, adorable.
I dreamed that one day he would slap me and I would gouge out his eye and eat it.
But that never happened. And I never even, to be truthful, asked him to stop.
And after a while, I realised that he was slapping me because he thought that I wanted it.
And after a longer while, I realised that I did want it. I was locked in some crazy masochistic cycle. The slapping was Andrei’s sin, it was an unforgivable and callous act of brutality and bullying. But the slapping was my sin too. I wanted to be disciplined, to be tamed, because in my heart I saw myself as a beast.
For I am a beast. A whore, a nothing, a worthless piece of… I deserve everything I get! I am a… a…
What am I? What really am I?
I find this hard to write about, to think about, to talk about. It’s so not me. Not everything I stand for. Everything I am. It’s a jarring anomaly in my character arc. Me? Battered? A victim? Please!
But the slapping, I must tell the truth here, continued for several years. Morning, slap, noon, slap, night, slap. I never called the police, I never told my friends. I didn’t, to be honest, regard it as strange. It just felt like another kind of normal. Was he hurting me? No. Was I afraid? No? Did I consent?
Did I consent?
Yes, of course I did. Yes. So I can’t blame him. I blame myself.
Yet you see, though I may have said a few moments ago that this was the thing that doomed our love – yet perhaps I’m wrong. For in many ways, this whole period was the best of our relationship. We were the perfect couple. I was happy. Relaxed. Fulfilled. We were funny, witty, we had great times, we talked about life and literature and politics, or at least he did, and I listened. And I couldn’t have been more happy – except for the fact that, once a day,
Slap.
So what’s so wrong with that? What No. Stop. It was wrong. Do you think I’m a moral imbecile? I know it was wrong. And eventually, I stood up to him, and I told him, I told him No, that never happened. I’d like to think that one day I woke up and realised that I was acting like a fool, that I did not deserve this treatment.
But it didn’t happen that way. No moral stand. No defiance. Instead, gradually, love corroded. How? Why? Why then, not earlier? I simply do not know.
All I know is that the time came when I found myself waking up each day with a taste like ash in my mouth. Everything was right; then nothing was right. I was happy; then I was not.
On the lake one day, while swimming, I was engulfed in a storm. Lightning ripped the sky and water poured down on me as I swam. Then a rainbow sprang through the air and spanned the gap between the mountains.
It was the most extraordinary moment of natural beauty I had ever experienced. I was cocooned in water, my face crushed by pouring rain, as the heavens themselves erupted in colour. It should have been the purest epiphany.
And yet I felt nothing. Just ash. And drabness.
Day followed day. Night followed night. My body trudged through it all. I had lost my ability to feel emotion. I concealed this skilfully, but Andrei could tell something was wrong. I stopped flattering him around about then I
