When I think of those who have called me a whore–– lovers, liars, taxi drivers, strangers, men who knew me but didn’t, women too. In a rage, my father, my mother. Those grasping for the scourge that will always find its mark.
Is it my body, or my soul, that they accuse of sin? With that one terrible, confused word, they destroy themselves, without ever touching me. No, that’s not true. They hurt, they sting and annihilate with their cruelty.
And now you, you. Why? What part of our pleasure did you not enjoy? I’m not a coward like you. I know the price of pleasure and I pay, every last black penny. And I don’t bargain either. Or listen to those who murmur I’ve paid too much, too little, never enough.
It is a bitter and exacting cost–– living and dying according to your own season, even if that season is an illusion. I am the dark tipped flower that opens at night, not at the will of sun, or moon, but by my own volition. I am the ship that flies her black sails in the mist, lost.
A flame flickers on my forehead, where you whip and lash me with your reins. Is this the last pleasure for you? To blame and hate me for what you do.
All right then, maybe I am a whore. Only tell me, what is a whore?
A woman who doesn’t love, or loves too much, too many? A woman who suffers and moans, and writhes and shrieks, who loves her pleasure, or tries to forget? A woman who knows how to use her body for her pleasure, or for the pleasure of others? Or a woman who doesn’t? A woman who fakes? A woman who hates, resents, her body and can’t stop herself abusing it? Letting you burn her with your smoking fingertips. A woman who neglects herself, lies in bed, and cannot rise from its dark waves.
If that is a whore, then who is not a whore?
I’ll tell you what a whore is. A whore is a woman who frightens you.
I am a whore then, yes. Because I desire, I am dangerous. But, it is not you, or even myself, I was born to please.
I was in a midnight garden, its darkness flitting with white moths, the first time I heard myself called a whore. Adolescent, in sparkling dress, in the sudden moonlight, at a party I was brave to go to, knowing hardly anyone. Standing amid hedges pricked all over with fragrant white blossoms whose odour made me dizzy as the moths, on the trail of light, of stars and melting candles. Two scruffy young men talking in the blustering tones of boys trying to impress one another. Ones like that, he said cocking his head slightly toward me, are good only as whores. Yea, sneers the other, I know.
I fled, full of shame and hatred. And that shame ran after me like a pack of wild howling dogs, for years. Until now, when I cut the throats of those men, with this pen. Swords, scimitars, maces, axes, knives–– tonight my pen will do.
“Hold me, mama,” I beg, waking in my mother’s bed, a child. And she does, loving and nuzzling me, in the sweet nest of morning beds. Now she comes in dreams, carrying a plate of maroon mangoes and cherries, talking of scandal. My mother has called me a whore, and my father too, albeit not in so many words. “Have you counted how many men,” she screamed like thunder, vengeful.
She loves, and is ashamed of, my body.
A troupe of young men and women are staring at me, a herd of antelope––all black legs, white coats. At thirteen, I am frightened, shivering, naked. A silver-haired doctor tells me that I mustn’t mind, they are learning. As they turn to leave, he remarks on the flicker of hair below my navel. “Are all women of your country like that?” he asks my mother, smiling. “Oh no,” she shivers. “She gets that from her father!” Some of the youths glance back at me, behind the old doctor. They look with a vague quivering gaze. I felt sordid, humiliated, horrified. Betrayed by my mother, in a jungle.
I have lain in strange beds, in strange ways. Who hasn’t found themselves like that, in the sad hours? It is the nature of being flesh, of having blood course through your veins, river to an unknown sea. In the shipwreck of now, it comes to us all, to consider. If I hadn’t lain weeping on wild shores, I would have accused myself of worse–– of not having had the courage to live, to adventure. Calling myself a coward, that is a worse crime than being called a whore.
“Look at yourself, look at yourself! Tell me what you see!” snarled my father, pulling my head back, forcing me to look into the mirror. “I’ll tell you what I see,” he said, calling me such a string of vile, filthy abuses that if only to get him to stop, I smashed my fist into the harrowing mirror and our faces shattered into a rain of shards. I threatened my father with one of the shards in my hands that I gripped like a dagger, gripping it until my palm bled. It felt good for a change to feel a pain that wasn’t in my heart. “Leave me alone,” I screamed, my voice hoarse. When he saw the blood, and the knife of glass, he fell back, into the darkness, crying.
I felt power, and it felt like pleasure, and like being torn apart from every nerve and sinew. He had wanted an angel for a daughter and had wound up with a demon, a whore. And when he called me those things ––bitch, slut, nympho–– I cried back at him. “Who else would the devil give birth to?”
Now in nightmares, he chases me through doors and doors, till I try to smash myself into pieces, to escape. But I can’t control myself. I can’t be like they are, or their imaginary daughter, or pretend to be. I can’t lace myself up so tightly. I come undone. In my dreams, my mother sits in flaming pyres, my father runs away with the gypsies.
A woman can kiss who she wants, suck who she wants, fuck whoever and however she wants–she is not a whore. There are no whores on this earth, no virgins either. Nothing but living and dying, and an infinite variety of failures and pleasures.
Accuse the wild beasts, call them promiscuous. Queen bees, antelopes, sparrows and swallows. By whose reckoning would they be whores? Yours? Parrots, snails, even an eel––the proclivities of any of those females would make even the most voracious Roman empress admit defeat. If the males of their species rush, it’s not to call them whores. That is not why the drone flies to his queen, the stag to his doe––
The black Dresden shepherdess, shattered now. She was not a shepherdess at all, but a courtesan, holding out her hand to one courtier, glancing at another.
War tries to make whores of women, wars fought with weapons of all sorts. Slavery, savagery, poverty. The addictions the soul is heiress to. The woman who doesn’t speak your tongue, is the easiest whore of all, in her castle of unreckoned silence. Women in veils and wimples, in bazaars, in doorways, brothels, and balconies. Wrapped round a pole, glittering. The woman who throws a rose at you from her window, the woman who wants want to forget you. Every one of them has been called a whore, behind her back or to her face, by history or the lack of it. One way or another.
Whatever you think of my body, or my soul, it is not yours. Even in death, pulled out from the sea–– cut into pieces, in a trunk tied in chains, I elude you. As does the girl on the road, turning back to glance at you, bending, hand against wall, in the narrow sunlight of an alley, to adjust her sandal.
Such things last, a shimmering eternity, brief, cosmic. I, in the dark garden of moths, go on, in wavering uncertainty.
The strange relationship that I have with my past, as everybody has, I suppose. It changes all the time. The beasts of incidents, of everyday cruelty, that I kick away, hunt me down at night. My body is hurt, as my spirit is. When the manacles are loosed, what damage I do myself, in secrecy. In dreams, my eye is missing from its socket. My teeth are knocked out. My feet have gone black, and they tell me I have Saluki dog sickness–– I have not run, I have not leapt over fences, so those feet must now be cut off. I dream of my suicide, blasted out of lead canons, falling off sapphire peaks, eternally. Or my body, caught in the teeth of the fox trap, in red snow. I know how to punish myself.
I walk out the door, and the two dogs I’ve got on leashes go in opposite directions, winding my legs up in the leather straps. I laugh at that, and the men on the street too–– and that’s enough that for them to try and take me out for a drink. What I want is to be left alone. “What do you want me to drink?” I ask, fed up. And they look at me, bitter. A third man, slouching under a lamp post raises his eyebrows at me, provocatively. But there’s only you.
Do you know why I loved you? I loved you because you fucked me so well, so beautifully. You deciphered my body, as if my breasts, my flesh, the pink of me, was covered by hieroglyphs that you could read. You held me down, held yourself back, and then, then…
You marked me, bites all over my bod until I was unmistakable as a jaguar, in the prowling heat. No, there’s only you to fuck me like that, only me to be fucked like that by you. No one else will do. I only want you. I want to stay with you, to feel you love me. Without that, I feel dead– but desperately so, a shuddering, frantic ghost.
In how many beds have I searched for you. Tempted to take as many lovers as night would hold, to forget you. I didn’t care what happened to me, where they took me, what they did or said to me, when they took me to their dark rooms in latin quarters, or seaside slums. The voluptuous hotels with vases of mocking, indolent roses, the writhing bars, the student and red light quarters, the rotting parts of town. Once even in a nunnery, with bars on the windows, overlooking the snowy garden. The silver doors open and close…
I let myself be fucked. Not made love to, not went to bed with, but fucked. Fucking, the thing you do to forget, or to try to remember–– how alive you are. How the deadness hurts. The things ecstasy dims.
Like a whore, I gave myself. I’m not afraid of any part of myself anymore.
Their fingers in my hair, they kiss my unflinching eyes. They stroke my breasts and my waist, and they caress my legs, kiss my feet. They love the way I move, and they can’t see through my eyelids to know that it’s not them, never them, I’m thinking of. Sometimes they take what they want without giving anything in return–– those are the bastards, the fools, the clumsy devils, the sexually illiterate.
I gave my corpse into their hands. And slowly I began to come alive. Not like the earth covers itself with flowers in spring, but like the dead rise. Never underestimate pleasure, even if its root is despair, especially then. Nothing deceives like pleasure, except love.
A woman is advised to hide these things about herself, her past. Be a hermitess, let her wild animals hide in her forests, forget, deny. But I won’t, I can’t. Why should I? When I can turn myself into anything I want to be, I find I want only to be myself. Throw me, as the ancients did, into the serpent pit of this seething world, so I remember who I am.
In crisis, all falls away. Exit, gods. The demons possessing me find different forms. The devil–– and who better than the devil’s whore to tell you–– nightly changes shape, a flame. I am the devil’s whore, at last kicked out of the devil’s house. I belong in my own hellfire. No one else’s will do.
“Its cold as hell!” exclaim the headlines. On the road, a disheveled young man carrying a small, polished wooden harp under his arm, its burlap wrap flapping in the wind. He smiles at me. “Aren’t you afraid it’ll crack in this cold?” I ask. He seems such an unlikely angel, this man with the harp, shivering in his black jacket. His sensuous face with locks of dark dirty hair falling over it, into his eyes.
My heart defies its misery, lifting as a flock of birds at red dusk. We walk on, together, not yet touching.
I am in hell but I know who I am.
