Mickelle K.
Michelle, then, or rather Gerti. She burst into my life a few weeks ago and swept everything else away, an icy wind, nothing else, just her. I had been looking for an extreme and addictive experience that would make me forget the ghosts of my past, and I finally found her.
To Michelle I allow everything. She is strange, she is crazy, she is perverse, I have never known anyone like her. With Michelle I'm always sick and that's why I can't do without her: she responds to a very deep need in my being. If I understood which one, I would probably run away. 
I am strangely honest with her: I tell her almost everything about myself, without feeling embarrassed. She listens to me with cold attention, twining a lock of hair around her finger, and never comments. I still don't know if she is interested in what I tell her or if she is simply trying to study me like a feline crouched in the grass watching for prey. 
The fear of not being good enough makes me regress to childhood. Sometimes I want to beg her to take me in her arms, but I would make her laugh: she is completely lacking in maternal instinct. So I resist stoically and occasionally take my little revenge. 
A few days ago, while going to the bathroom after a shag, I noticed, in a kind of niche in the wall, a large painting covered with a green velvet drape. I usually avoid asking questions, but this time the curiosity was too strong. I asked her what was the point of keeping a painting in the house that could not be seen.
That's the way it has to be, she replied neutrally.
Who is the author?
Nobody.
How nobody?
He cannot be named.
I asked no further questions. Suddenly she smiled sibylline.
Do you want to see it? 
I said yes. She lifted the drape and I instinctively jumped backwards. 
According to the plaque under the frame, the life-size painting depicted Joan of Arc shortly before she was burnt alive at the stake, but according to all evidence, the hollow-eyed creature in front of me, ghostly, asexual, bald, greenish, could only be ectoplasm or something similar. The source of inspiration for the unnamable had certainly been a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition.
I looked at the nameplate:
Sorry, didn't you say that the painter cannot be named? Here it says the name: Christian Rosenkreutz.
Gerti looked at me black, empty:
Honey, are you in or are you out?
If there's one thing I can't stand it's making a bad impression on her, which happens to me a little too often. Then, if she called me honey, it meant that she was classifying me as an idiot. I decided to pursue the subject alone and on the spot I called her bluff:
Yeah, how stupid: it's a pseudonym.
She watched me in silence with folded arms, ça va sans dire. I kept feeling like a jerk.
Curious, I said at the end, Christian is my middle name.
Really? If I were you, I'd go by Chris, or rather Kris with the K. It's more Dutch and sounds better than Emmanuel.
I can't stand diminutives. Besides, I like my name.
For a moment I felt offended. She looked at me with distant pity and turned her eyes to the painting:
Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
She does not have a good pronunciation of Latin. I also read the book and, in some distant geological era, took lessons from a good teacher. I corrected her:
Prìstina, not pristìna. The adjective pristìnus means 'of the Whale' in the sense of the constellation, and I do not think that is what Umberto Eco meant.
Gerti stared at me expressionless:
Bitchy, you know where you can stick your whale?
Bitchy is very different from faggy. The barometer showed a storm.
No, tell me.
Where your little communist friend used to shove it.
She turned his back on me.
Cover the painting.
My eyes filled with tears: I felt outrage, shame, pain in a chaotic and furious mix. She shouldn't have alluded to Antonio, not in that vulgar way that had nothing to do with our story, not in that tone of mockery that caricatured my role in that story, making me look like a cheap whore picked up on the pavement by a pervert. And this despite having enough culture to understand that ours had been a Greek-style relationship between a young man and his ephebe, not to mention that it was not fair of her to use my confidences against me. But yeah, the idiot was me confiding in her: only an imbecile could expect loyalty from someone like Gerti. Doubly imbecile because I felt sympathy for someone who hadn't even loved me and cried for him, for someone who was now screwing Elettra after making me feel guilty about my dark horse. And I had stopped because I thought he was jealous of me. Idiot, idiot. My face was flooded with tears, I was unpresentable: I locked myself in the bathroom. 
I stood crying for a few minutes bent over the sink, rinsing my face and eyes with cool water. Anger at my naivety exploded inside me. But suddenly that anger turned into an unexpected instrument of vengeance: I felt a pang of blood go straight to my groin, wiped my face and immediately joined her in bed. If she loses her inspiration, she is capable of putting me out the door saying thank you sweetheart, I can do it myself. I beat her to the punch. I turned on the stereo, spread her legs, grabbed her wrists and squeezed them tight, Frédéric style. A somewhat Ionesco-like dialogue took place between us, which I remember as if it were now and which, all things considered, is not the most unpleasant of my memories.
What the fuck are you doing?
How what the fuck am I doing, I put you on When it's over, aren't you happy? 
It's not my kind of thing.
You'll like it you'll see, trust me. 
If you had to, you could have opted for So young: I prefer it. 
At your command ma'am, I foresaw this and put them in sequence. 
Are you stoned, faggot? Anyway Over the edge isn't bad. 
It's not that it's not bad, it's a masterpiece and the back groups depend on it. 
Does this seem like the time to have this fucking discussion? 
Any time is a good time to talk about music.
Faggot, you can't tell anymore if this is a fuck or a music conference, anyway on the whole you're doing fine. 
It's our relationship that's like that, darling, I replied by pushing her hands above her head and tying them with one of her stockings to the bedpost. 
Darling you tell your sister.
I have no sister, and I can't call my brother sister because he's not gay. 
At least one normal one in the family. I see you looped it, bunny, 
assuming it's needed; please, Rabbit, turn your warmers down. 
You see doctor, there was something surrealistic in my relationship with Gerti: even tragedy had light tones, she never went below the level of the epidermis. It was like dancing a waltz among the graves in a cemetery, and it mattered little if the funeral was your own. The atmosphere with her was quite similar to that of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Mia Wallace collapses in an overdose under Vincent Vega's eyes while the stereo is blaring 
There's nothing dramatic, it's all resolved on an aesthetic level, you die but nobody cares: the important thing is that your death is beautiful to look at. After all, it is Tarantino himself who says: 'violence is an entirely aesthetic subject'. If only it were possible to live like that, like in a comic book.
Anyway, to go back to that time, I sank my thumbs into her wrists, picked up the rhythm of the music and didn't stop until I heard her scream, and not in pain. She rebelled at first, biting wildly at my arms, bellowing in rage, trying to free herself from my grip; at one point she managed to slip her hands out of the knot of her stocking and began scratching my back with her sharp black-lacquered claws, staring at me with hatred, but after a few minutes her face lit up with a strange light: she stopped wriggling and accepted my game, going along with my movements with those of her pelvis and panting in synchrony with me. 
The heart-rending riff of that song has always moved me to tears, and this time, overwhelmed as I was by the tension and by the long layers of ascending chords up to the irresistible crescendo in distortion of the finale, my eyes began to weep without my noticing it: the tears mingled with the sweat running down my face and I didn't understand why I was crying, whether of humiliation or anger or useless passion. I caught myself begging her "please come, come with me": then she started laughing, throwing her head back, a chilling laugh that for a moment froze the blood in my veins; then she opened her shark-black eyes, her laughter turned into an indescribable smile and immediately afterwards her face took on an expression of demonic bliss that I will never forget: she closed her eyes again, continuing to laugh softly and repeating yes. We flew together I don't know where, I don't know for how long.
In the end she didn't believe it either, her faggot was able to make her come to pleasure. 
I was exhausted, felt painful happiness and I still badly needed to cry. For the avoidance of doubt she grabbed me by the hair and said:
Don't let it go to your head kid, you fucked like a god, but it's just sex. 
Then she got up to sit on the bed and gathering her hair at the nape of her neck with an ivory clip she commented:
Music's your blood, bunny. I bet you listened to it when you fucked him too.
I refrain from explaining that my relationship with Antonio was essentially intellectual and that music united us for quite different reasons.
Yes and no, I answer her evasively. He listened to very different music, stuff from the seventies.
Oh God, that horrid meatloaf of rockprogressive metalprogressive psychedelia acid-rock raga-rock and whatnot?
No, he had very good taste. He liked Soft Machine, for example.
Paleozoic tastes, your friend: communist and militant sixty-eight, we're doing just fine. But there is something good in their repertoire.
I will not add anything: I am waiting for her to say it.
Moon in June, for example.
I smile resignedly: I had no doubts.
I don't think I could fuck someone like that, she says thoughtfully.
No, I confirm with a half smile, you really belong to two different species.
Was he nice?
Yes, he is a handsome boy, tall and dark.
Then I could: just shut his mouth. 
I can't help bursting out laughing:
Shutting him up? You don't know what you are talking about.
Ah, so he's the kind of pain in the ass who, if he doesn't pontificate ex cathedra, doesn't feel accomplished?
More or less, yes.
How the fuck could you stand him, faggy?
I admired him. And then he knew how to make it up to me.
I can imagine.
No, it is nothing like you imagine. 
After all, if I fuck you and you fuck him, by the transitive property I should also be able to fuck him, she concludes, a great reasoner, satisfied to have added a possible variation to her repertoire.
I don't reply anything: until a month ago I would have laughed, at least in my heart, at his cynical and vulgar outburst, but now I don't exclude that Antonio would be capable of that too. A sudden and poignant melancholy takes hold of me: I promise myself, for the future, to avoid any close relationship with that damned first name.
 However, we must repeat the experience, she concluded, and got up to go to the bathroom.
Yes, I was really great that time. I just have to avoid adolescent naivety: it is unforgivable with her. Days ago, for example, shaken by yet another insult, I attempted a kind of rebellion:
Sorry, but if you don't give a shit about me, why do you want to keep seeing me?
She stared at me strangely, as if I had asked her something deeply stupid:
I get irritated by rhetorical questions. There aren't many around with your physical means.
Is that all?
That's all, he says. 
You mean you find me sexy?
Oh my God boy, what planet are you from? You don't say sexy, you say hot.
Do you find me hot? 
I like you, you turn me on, I always want you: does that seem little to you?
It's the same for me. I always want you too.
She looked down on me from a height of immeasurable superiority:
No honey, it's not the same thing. I have wants, you have needs. There's a big difference.
God how stupid I am. I must learn to shut up.