THE FIRST LOVE
It was snowing. Copiously. And the cold was an ordeal.
Through the cloisters of the monastery, ancient, and now a boarding school where nearly eight hundred girls suffered the discipline of the nuns, day and night, the icy wind howled across. I heard it, like a she-wolf, from my bed, in the bedroom on the third floor, in the complete darkness filled with the poorly syncopated breathing of nearly twenty-five sleeping inmates. Our dorm supervisor had just walked by with the flashlight on, shining it into the eyes of the sleepers. She didn’t notice that I was awake. She walked past, silent.
She thought, with her eyes closed, of a photo that she had seen in a large art book, in the library. It was from Donatello’s David. A David very different from that of Michelangelo: a David who looked like a girl, with long hair on his shoulders and exquisite features. She looked like her, and now David, now my beautiful friend, they entered and left my feverish mind, ghostly, while, under the sheets, avoiding being noticed, I masturbated.
He loved her already, having met her that very day, with a burning desire, but cold, like the ice of the summit. He wept thinking of her beautiful lips, of the honeyed light that pierced, from her soul, her amber irises. And in her wavy, blonde hair, so different from mine.
What he really loved about her, almost enviously, almost suspiciously, since he lacked such a quality, was that freedom that was evident in everything about her. She was like a mountain cat, passionate and cruel at the same time. He was born to lead, and he did indeed have her band of stalwart followers. She loved them and mistreated them. She kissed them and hit them with the same violence. They proudly displayed the mauve marks of their kisses or their slaps.
***
That day I had not attended the morning classes, without caring that they punished me afterwards. I walked along the bank of the river that crossed in front of the monastery, among the bare trees, without thinking about anything, seeing how the fast water flowed between pieces of ice. Suddenly I heard voices. A group of students, at the entrance to the birch grove, were beating a large dog with white fur, which was moaning painfully. They hit him with long stakes, laughing, until the dog fell on the snow, dying. From his nose, staining the snow red, blood spurted in torrents.
I had hidden behind a tree to watch without being discovered, but one of the girls had made a detour and stood behind me: suddenly her strong hand covered my mouth, hurting me.
“Son of a bitch,” she whispered in my ear. “That dog we killed is Sister Agnes’s, she’s a bitch, and she deserves it. If you want the same thing to happen to you, go and say what you have seen.”
I gasped in fear. She violently grabbed my hair and brought her face very close to mine. Our eyes met and for the first time in my life I admitted that I was pleasantly disturbed to be treated this way. If it was someone like her, I didn’t mind being her victim. Her serene gaze, like cold water, shamelessly sank into mine and, out of the blue, incongruously, she sank her tongue between my lips. Just as abruptly, she pushed me away from her and walked away from her into the snow. Certainly, she possessed the grace and lightness of a roe deer. The group disappeared as it had appeared, leaving the corpse of the dog lying in the snow, and me, surprised and plunged into a kind of lustful sadness, shivering with cold.
Of the following nights, there was not one that was not haunted by the memory of Emilia. Her kiss, the first truly sexual kiss she had ever experienced, replayed painfully in my memory, and I dreamed that she was next to me, and that she sank my tongue between her strong thighs, wetting them with tears. She had become the center of my existence, and nothing else mattered to me. I even liked to imagine that we died together, in the snow, up in the mountains, in the domain of the wind, away from the nuns, from our parents, from all the crap that surrounded us and from which she seemed so remote. And it is that, with the clairvoyance of girls in love, I already knew that the object of my passion would not live long. No being of such beauty, of such a free spirit, remains long in the world.
I was never a member of their band of savages, nor did I participate in any of the misdeeds that made them notorious among all the inmates. But she, aware of my shyness, took the initiative and visited me at night. No one ever discovered us. But throughout that icy winter, in the old boarding school located in the heart of the Asturian mountains, in the wild solitude, surrounded by snow, silence and stone, we intertwined our bodies and souls, and we were one person, over and over again.
The beautiful Emilia, the strong and cruel Emilia, never stopped behaving with me as if I totally belonged to her, and I never wanted her to be otherwise. But in her indomitable soul there was both nobility and rebellion, and she failed to see that in mine, submissive and complex, much more driven by vulgar feelings, there emerged, along with the almost suicidal love I professed for her, the need to undo her, to free myself from her to continue living as a normal being, but without losing her. Soon the deadly jealousy, the resentment, the envy, surfaced in the same love that she professed for him. And I looked for ways to hurt him.
I searched for the instrument of her destruction. And I easily found it on her desk one afternoon when all the boarders were at recess. It was a little book in which Emilia had made innumerable drawings, all very beautiful, and had written her thoughts in a kind of diary. There was mentioned, over and over again, something atrocious, that I had not even suspected: Sister Agnes, the owner of the murdered dog, used Emilia as her sexual slave. There were descriptions of the shameful things the nun perpetrated on Emilia’s body in the solitude of her cell. There were exclamations of horror in that diary, written by Emilia herself, in which her sense of guilt and her hatred for that sadistic nun throbbed. And there was my own name, scrawled violently, surrounded by bleeding hearts pierced by pins and thorns.
I went to the rector of the boarding school with the book. To my knowledge, no action was taken against Sister Agnes. But it soon became common knowledge that Emilia had had sex with nuns in exchange for money and good grades. One day she came to see me, pleading, since I had already broken up with her, not wanting to be involved in her shameful reputation. I remember that I cruelly enjoyed that moment. I disowned her. I almost didn’t say a word to him. She was staring at me, her beautiful face twisted in pain. Absurdly, she asked me to go together, far away from there. Everyone despised her, I couldn’t stand it- I simply turned my head so I wouldn’t see her anymore and, in the mirror in front of me, I kissed my own image on the lips, leaving the cloud of my breath on the cold glass. . Emilia understood: she no longer loved her, she no longer needed her. And leaving me, she looked at me longingly, as if, despite everything, she still loved me.
A few days later, Emilia’s drowned body was recovered from the river.
Original Story / Post by Vidal Alkolea Pulgar, at Blogspot.com on December 01, 2013 / Translated / Edited by Naccarato on October 6, 2022
Post Image: oil painting, Untitled, Vidal Alcolea
copyright: Vidal Alkolea Pulgar, 2022