Fiction for the theme Secret Life
the sex dreams of Nuns are perfect
I think the sex dreams of Nuns must be perfect. They are unpolluted by experience. Their love to god is not confused by commands to love and obey men who do nothing but hurt them either . I came to Shanghai because I support my husband (I made a promise before god that I would). Yet still he fucks his little bimbo Cinese and does not think one thought for me. I found her picture on his phone spread open like a huang pu mussel and even then he denies it.
“I don’t know who that is,” he says and turns away. I think he doesn’t even see me anymore. Sometimes I have to order things for delivery just to feel like I exist. The Chinese delivery boys, with their winter coats and cobwebbed lips, see only whiteness but at least they see something.
My name is Maria Castita, I am twenty-six and I have had the same sex dream every night for two years.
It always begins the same, my dream. I am in my bedroom, not the one I have now, or at our old apartment back in Italy, but the narrow loft above my fathers panneteria on the Via di Sant’Agata dei Goti. This is the same room I shared with my older sister for the whole of our growing up. The same bed I slept in for my whole life until then, Isa’s feet on my pillow and my feet on her pillow, like tinned sardines. There is a quilt on the bed in my dream, one which I still have and take everywhere. Even when my husband said we were coming to China I brought it, rolled up tight and tied to my suitcase with twine the colour of bruised lemon rind. It is a simple thing of red and white checks my quilt, but, as old as it is, the reds are still very red, the whites are still white and in my dream I lie naked across it. I am sixteen in my dream, still a year until I will be married, six months before I must meet my husband to be, and it is summer. My sister is elsewhere. Sweat slicks the skin of my neck and stomach. It trickles down between my breasts and to the place where my legs join, a place I have no proper name for. Just the words of my childhood, and of the street, to call it by and I do not like to use either. My mother taught us to call it patatina, the little potato. My hand pinches gently to the eye of my “little potato” and the pleasure which comes after, sent spuming ever outwards only from that small tremor, makes a lie of this ugly, detested and dusty word. Still kneading, I hear the clunk of the oven doors opening below, and pull the smell of fresh bread about myself like a veil.
I know the other words for this place, the rude ones I would never dare to say out loud, from the girls at school and from Matteo, my father’s apprentice, who I think I might be in love with. I chant the words to myself over and over again under my breath – “Fessa, Figa, Fregna, Brogna, Topa” -and I touch myself and think of Matteo. We haven’t kissed yet and never will outside of dreams, but his room is next to mine and at night he talks to Isa and me through the wall, about girls he has had and what he did or wanted to do. I imagine myself as one of those girls, a little puttana lifting my skirt in the alley behind the girls school so he can slip it inside me. Just before I come I hear a noise on the landing outside my door, a small animal noise. I look over and see the door has fallen open and he is watching me, his pale green eyes slits. Some nights I wake myself there and pray, and prayer is enough to relieve me of this burden of lust. Some nights Matteo comes through the door, and closes it, to stare at me with those hard green eyes, and to touch and pinch my flesh with his soft floury hands.
Prayer is no good to me when this happens.
Instead I am rudely woken, shocked from fresh sins, and told to remember that the bread man will be here before seven. A moan escapes my lips. My husband buttons up his heavy woollen coat, “I left the money on the counter,” he says, looking down at his cellphone and not at me.
It is cold in the spare bedroom of our apartment. I only come here to watch my husband leave in the morning and to wait for deliverymen to arrive. Standing on the bed in this room, and cast in the dappled light of the little round window above it, I can see down into the courtyard of our compound. I see the open gate and the bǎo’ān in his booth. He has his gloves hung across his neck despite the cold, and is eating bǐng with thick fingered hands. Over the wall the bare limbs of the plantane trees along Ānfú Lù wave to me.
Then I see him. He pulls up outside the gate on his dusty pink scooter with the green delivery box on the back, puts the kick-stand down and takes off his helmet. Under the red and white checked quilt bunched around my shoulders I am as bare as a baby bird. I jump down and butterflies fly from my stomach, not in guilt but anticipation. God and my husband can go fuck themselves.
I am standing by the door when he knocks and open it immediately, the quilt puddling at my ankles, goose-flesh marching across my torso in the rush of winter air. The delivery boy starts and thrusts his bag of bread at me reflexively. As croissants and cinnamon swirls are crushed and torn between our bodies the smell of them makes the butterflies settle ever lower and start to burn.
“Duìbùqǐ,” he says before I kiss him and “nǐ de yǎnjīng shì lǜ de” across the pillows after we are done.
Author Biography
David Foote is a writer, theatre director and cultural anthropologist from New Zealand, currently residing in Shanghai. His works for the stage have been called “gutsy, intelligent and intriguing” (Hannah Smith 18-03-2010, Salient) and his characters “Wonderful… with all the malevolence of any nineteenth century children’s story.” (Gail Pittaway 20-09-2003, The Waikato Times). He is currently engaged in field research for his Phd, into the Western expatriate community in Shanghai.