Sorry Roberto, do you mind if I call you back later? I'm in bed with Emmanuel. Yes, the one you would bang too. No, a threesome is premature at the moment. Do you think Patrick would be ready? It can be talked about. I hear that he is there with you, say hello to him. Oh, remind him we have to try the padedeux, there was some smudging. And tell him to shave his armpits, the story that this way we're more natural with me doesn't stick. Now excuse me, it's not like I can spend an hour here on the phone explaining things to you. Yes, good fuck to you too.

She hangs up and pulls the plug in order not to be interrupted again.

She turns to me:

Where had we arrived?

Her long dark hair brushes my face. I've been seeing her for a couple of months now, but every time I look at her I'm enchanted by the perfection of her face: she looks like Perugino's Maddalena, but with something disturbing in her gaze that recalls Leonardo's women. At first glance, the expression in her eyes in no way betrays her true nature, but observing them better, those eyes have a strange opacity, an impermeable fixity beyond the veil of irony that shields them.

Does the soul exist, doctor? I know, it's a question I should rather address to a priest. Personally, I've always been convinced yes, before I met Michelle. That woman challenged all my beliefs. She doesn't have a soul, I'm sure of it.

She caresses my body.

A little more definition on the pecs wouldn't hurt. But yeah, you're only seventeen, there's time.

Almost eighteen.

It changes little. For the rest, congratulations to mother Helena, a really nice job. Have you ever thought about being a photo model?

No.

It has never occurred to me to use my body for such purposes, and it is significant that she does not understand this.

Too bad, she concludes, and lies down waiting.

I lay down next to her with my eyes closed.

As my grandfather would have said, the world is small: I discovered that Michelle is the daughter of family friends. Her parents belong to the Roman upper class, but her father is of Alsatian origin and by some strange combination he knows my father. Obviously her parents are more highly placed, so my family shows them deference and respect. The result is that I can hang out with the most dangerous woman in Turin with the blessing of my parents.

In her house, in addition to Italian, German and French are spoken fluently, two languages that I detest in equal measure. She can afford not to work and therefore dedicates herself full time to her passions. The main one is dance: she is the soloist of Magma, a rather famous city group, and that is why she moved to Turin. She's rich, spoiled, used to taking everything she likes: so she took me too.

She lives alone in an apartment near the Eremo, a spectacular open space with practically no furniture, with the floor covered with ancient Persian carpets; in the center there are a stereo and a bed with purple silk sheets; in front of the bed a huge mirror, like the ones used in dance schools, with two erotic posters of Egon Schiele hanging on the sides. Privately she wants me to call her Gerti, like the painter's sister. I think her name is beautiful, but she says it's too much Beatles.

Usually, when I visit her, she wears a black satin robe over her bare skin with a gold snake embroidered on her back, the same one she got tattooed on her groin. They tell me that she belongs to some esoteric sect of the many that exist in Turin: she must be its priestess or something like that. In any case, she keeps me completely out of these experiences, for which I am grateful, not having the slightest inclination for the occult. Her boyfriend, Roberto, is an angelic-looking pervert: it seems that he is part of the Illuminati and that he organizes black masses in his house; but you know, people talk a lot of bullshit.

She shares my musical tastes and is ahead of me in certain explorations: this at the beginning, doctor, had me under the illusion that there was a certain spiritual affinity between us. It's a common misconception: taste in music doesn't mean anything, but I didn't know that then. I still bore the scars of my story with Antonio, in which music had played both good and bad, and I was convinced that it was fate that had put in my waya woman who thought exactly like me about contemporary music. I repeated to myself that, if nothing else, I would no longer have to be on the defensive passively undergoing the aesthetic dominance of a person who claimed to know more than me: it was time to stop regretting him, I could finally go back to being myself. 

All in all I was a miserable idiot, Doctor, because it was true that I shouldn't have regretted him, but for quite another reason, namely the fact that he hadn't loved me. The way he had suddenly pushed me aside, with a clean cut and without second thoughts, had made it clear to me that there was not the slightest affection on his part: I had only been a hiccup in the existence of a heterosexual rationalist. On the other hand Michelle was totally unaware of the meaning of the word love, and made no secret of it, so only an imbecile could have slipped into her trap like a rat. The fact is that at that moment, Doctor, I wanted just this: that the sharp claws of a cat would tear me apart, leaving me dying on the floor, and that from time to time the feline would come and see if I was still alive and give me a pat with the paw. I have already classified as cupio dissolvi this phenomenon; but it wasn't vulgar and vapid as with Electra: there was a sacredness in the way Michelle tore me apart, and it gave me intense pleasure. Don't ask me why, the psychologist is you.

I take this opportunity to open a parenthesis that serves me as a momentary distractor. I forgot almost everything of my time with Gerti and I wouldn't want to recall even a minute of it, if you didn't force me to do it for mysterious therapeutic purposes; however, I keep distinct the memory, I would not say regret, of our chats between one fuck and another while we listened to music and were still semi-lucid: even after some time they seem to me to be among the most interesting conversations I've had in my life, the only ones she put her soul into.

One thing I will never stop thanking her for, despite everything, is the fact that she definitely converted me to vinyl: she hate CDs and doesn't even have one at home; she has a great player, a Marantz CD5400, but she only uses it to host my cds. Gerti owns a formidable stereo system: like all true connoisseurs, she hates multifunctional devices and has opted without fail for a personalized assembly of the most expensive and exclusive components of different brands, chosen in the light of their particular technical characteristics. This system also houses an imposing Studer reel-to-reel recorder: the sound quality of those tapes is astonishing, and this is very important to her, a professional dancer. I had already noticed how much warmer and more enveloping the sound of vinyl is than that of a CD, thanks to Antonio's excellent stereo system, another analogue sound lover. In reality, he himself explained to me that the presumed superiority of vinyl is only a myth and that the audio CD has more frequencies than vinyl: for this very reason it is too metallic and strident to listen to; the problem could be solved with a skilful work of equalization, but it's quicker to put it on a vinyl.

Not all of Gerti's musical legends were within my reach; thanks to her, for example, I met Mary Timony's Helium, a group for connoisseurs that I really appreciate; on other bands, like the Swans, I still don't follow her: they are too gloomy for me, maybe I will need to mature a bit to understand them. But mostly in the musical field we understood each other wonderfully.

I remember hours of talking about our favorite bands, especially the long discussions about Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore's role in Sonic Youth. We were both convinced that the group was unsurpassed in its genre, a very powerful synthesis of antithetical genres, angry, hallucinated, disturbing; we both thought that the greatness of the group rested on the magical and difficult balance between two opposite personalities, not only musically; but while she considered Gordon's role to be predominant, with her hypnotic and repetitive bass lines, her Warholian culture and the whispers of her icy voice that perfectly expresses the alienation of the American metropolis, I, on the other hand, was convinced that the real revolution of the group lay in the sound and style of Moore and Ranaldo, a heretical style that exploits the physical component of the guitars to the extreme, not so much in the purely experimental noise parts, as in the melodic parts, where their guitars tuned in an improper and anomalous way create ramshackle effects, dissonances and unpredictable scales, with a tribal and primitive rhythm inspired by Native American dances, accentuated or denied by the percussion of their phenomenal drummer, Steve Shelley, and enhanced by the erotically adolescent voice of Moore. 

I remember long discussions with Gerti about this duality, especially one in which she cornered me and forced me to acknowledge that one of my favorite songs, Inhuman, was built on the pulsating rhythm of the bass: Take that bass off, she said, and the song collapses. I, who wanted to seem like a know-it-all, answered her: A bit like Death To Our Friends leans almost completely on Shelley's drums. And she, looking at me with neutral eyes, said to me: What the fuck does this have to do with the duality Gordon-Moore? 

One of the many cases in which she made me feel like an idiot.

To return to the enigma of Sonic Youth, the point in my opinion is that in their music the coldest New York intellectualism and the most elementary sensuality coexist, which are polarized precisely in the figures of Gordon and Moore, companions in life and not just in musical adventure. The contrast between these two figures could not be more striking: she woman, adult, cultured, committed, self-possessed, Apollonian, cerebral, icy even in sensuality; he Dionysian puppy, eternal adolescent, naturally endowed with what Gerti defined as teenage eroticism, with the risk of being seen more as an eternal toy-boy than as the extraordinary artist he is: an irritating and unjust underestimation. Personally I was convinced that the situation was too conflicting and the balance too delicate to be able to hold up at a distance, but up to now I have been proved wrong by the facts. 

Thanks to Michelle I also deepened my knowledge of the Pixies, who I had always considered mere precursors of the music I love. Nothing more wrong. However my relationship with her ends, at least I owe her this: she introduced me to one of the most important groups of alternative rock. Theirs is a complex communicative code, which requires commitment to be fully understood, full of esoteric implications and at the same time ironic and irreverent: all translated into adrenaline-pumping, bewildered musical inventions and of immediate impact, not to mention the fact that they are extraordinary instrumentalists and vocalists : no one manages to modulate the voice in such a ductile, acid and schizophrenic way as Black Francis, except perhaps his great forerunner David Thomas of Pere Ubu. It's strange that I needed Gerti's mediation to notice this: I should have figured it out myself, at least because Kurt has always admitted his debt to them.

You'll think I'm beating around the bush, doctor, and indeed I am: no male likes to talk about his sexual failures, and failing at seventeen with a beautiful girl is nothing short of worrying. A future of impotence awaits me.

I close the parenthesis and return to the story.

After the first few weeks of euphoria, the emptiness of my relationship with Michelle began to embarrassingly affect my sexual performance. She was not at all forgiving in this respect and feeling under scrutiny only made it worse.

One day, while we were in bed, she licked me all over while whispering some unrepeatable obscenities: she's the kind of girl who likes to do it, she enjoys seeing me blush; my shyness excites her, but it has disastrous physical effects on me. She sat up to look at me and said, look beautiful, hurry up, all right you're a cool guy to fuck standing up, but I'm not bad either, did you see me right? Of course I assured her that she's the most beautiful girl to fuck I've ever dated, well, I didn't really tell her that, but that was exactly the gist, but she wanted me to prove it, and some things just cannot be controlled.

Look, faggy, she concluded dryly, we're not there.

The snake grazed my wrist with thin golden fangs as she slipped off her robe; I instinctively withdrew my arm; but she, taking between her thumb and forefinger the key that she kept hanging around her neck with a gold chain, opened a drawer of the bedside table and turned to look at me with a smile, don't be afraid, let me do: people are trivial, if they don't see holes on arms they don't notice it.

I let her do, and not just once.

My thought comes and goes, something sucks me in, it's already like having sex. She looks at me and sees the wave rise.

She puts the Pixies on, always the same song on a loop, and we begin.

Fucking to the rhythm of Into the white with that stuff in my body is an indescribable experience, even now, if I think about it, the blood rises to my brain. Kim Deal with her solitary, monotonous singing, ominously persuasive like that of a killer schoolgirl, stands out in the center of the scene as immobile as the primordial Om, surrounded by the masculine sabbath of the acoustic guitar which merges and allies with the aggressive snatches of the electric literally grated by Joey in the chorus, while the increasingly hysterical drums explode in an orgasmic crescendo that simulates an angry and interrupted coitus.

I try to rationalize as I write, but it's not easy; to be honest, I'm ashamed: nothing of this speaks in my favor. After all, no worse than many other things.

A series of orgasms that have little to do with what I'm doing begin to race up my spine; now I no longer have any doubts about the fact that pleasure comes from the brain and not from the genitals, as I had already understood with Antonia. In these moments everything disappears, my mind is empty. I can't describe exactly what happens, everything is confused; I only know that pleasure can't free me from excitement, I only stop to start again and in the end I feel a cramp in my lower abdomen and I no longer know if it's pleasure or pain.

I think I was good, assuming that word makes sense in context. She gets out of bed satisfied.

Did you see, little fagot?, She says to me, There is a remedy for everything.

She always leaves me alone in the end.

I wrap myself in the sheet like a shroud and remain immersed in our body fluids, while the music ends and the flash reabsorbs itself backwards with a sensation of emptiness. I'm shivering with cold and the blood is pounding in my temples, I have a strange tachycardia, my back feels broken.

Couldn't get any lower, and that's exactly what I needed right now: Michelle is the perfect metaphor for my life.