Smyrne's Five Nights

I remember Smyrne going to the Academy because she wanted to model kaolin. It was an unpretentious academy, run by a potter who died early or at least lost his hair; after that Smyrne never came back. In any case, she learned to knead clay enough to fashion a fairly natural phallus, copied from that of the potter, who used to pose for the schoolgirls, since he had no male pupils, and once a week he even took them to dance. Smyrne bought sausages and eggs and, working the clay with her bare hands, she gave shape and volume to a slightly turgid penis complete with a scrotum, or rather two separate testicles, which ended in a foreskin closed in a star shape like a screwdriver. Dissatisfied with this, she continued to manipulate the dough until a phimotic ring came out from which protruded the top of the barnacle complete with meatus. Still dissatisfied, she removed the foreskin and uncovered the glans: something easy to say but the most complicated to accomplish. It was during this creative process that Smyrne became familiar with her teacher.

However, she later confessed to me that the prototype belonged to Her Man, with whom she had only been intimate once in a motel in Northern Italy. Smyrne took a polaroid of him while he slept and didn't stop looking at the picture until it faded. But in her own words "the tuning fork of memory did not cease to vibrate", and not for nothing. How many hours had she not remained motionless, engrossed if not ecstatic, gazing at that slightly turgid penis, with the foreskin that looked like a "floweret" (sic), and the "cute twins" (sic), repeating to herself "how beautiful!"? She meant it, enraptured by the form no less than by the substance of that inert organ yet furrowed by a benign, magical energy. That energy came from her, Smyrne said, not from him, it was she who breathed it into the corpora cavernosa. In itself the penis of Her Man was nothing but a pale and wrinkled "botulus" (sic): it was her breath, her eyes, her desire that made it into "a vibrant, percipient cylinder of flesh wrapped in beige satin" (sic). As she gazed at it, the meaning of Genesis became clear to her and she felt close to God. The idea of modelling clay came to her at that moment.

Smyrne told me about her revelation three or four times, at night, in the dark, in a firm and polite voice, almost like a soprano. Listening to her, I pictured myself a painting: He asleep on a damask daybed, naked, thin, white, and She kneeling in adoration, also naked, her skin reddened, sweaty, her shoulders rounded. The picture faded to the din of trucks trudging over the overpass, but I could see it again if I just concentrated a little. Each time I added new details such as His thick pubic fleece, inky black, and Her sparse, brownish one, less or more visible depending of the position of Smyrne in my pictorial variants. Sometimes I placed her from behind, with her notable fundament in the foreground (indeed not exactly from behind but sideways, so as not to conceal the sleeping idol). Sometimes I made her join her hands on her head, imploring, other times I made her sit ecstatic on the edge of the Pauline. I even tried to stand her up and twist like a maenad, but she didn't have the phisique du role. To my eyes, she couldn't embody a bacchante not because of her paunch, lop-shoulders and flat feet, but because during our five sexual intercourses her limbs didn't ooze lust.

In fact, fornicating (that was the name she referred to the sexual activity) seemed unnatural to her. Smyrne moaned and writhed like a rabbit grabbed by the ears, apparently with the same kind of pain. She squealed and craved in a secretion bath, but woe to penetrate her! Besides she was ashamed, so she never undressed completely (at least she kept on her light blue woolen socks and the cream-colored short-sleeved health shirt). She had beautiful well rounded and firm thighs, the only fresh part of her body, but she kept them closed and, wanting to open them up, imagine the effort. By dint of coaxing, she yielded, but immediately began to struggle between puffs and squeals, just like the said rabbit or a cat; reason why it was better to hasten the times and conclude the assault I won't say in retreat but certainly not in triumph.