Dulce's friends
I came into my room in the middle of the night.
The window was open, the moon light showing the contours of shapes sleeping on
the floor and on my bed. Dulce's done it again. I asked her not to bring people
and she's done it again. But it is not in me to throw a strop in the middle of
the night and cast people on to the street. So I stepped over the sleeping
bodies and crawled into my bed... and there was this female body shape there,
dressed only in a panty. An attractive body, a tall woman with long dark hair. I
couldn't see her face, as she was facing towards me, away from the window that
let in the moonlight that allowed me to see the ghsotly shape of her body on my
bed, the fan that whirred trying to cool the air in the room. I undressed as
silently as I could, could her the long regular bereathing of someone who is
fast asleep coming from that shape occupying half of my bed. I lied there,
staring into the darkness in the ceiling. Then she turned and threw her arms
around me, still in her sleep. I touched her bare skin, silver in the moonlight.
She stirred but didn't wake up. I sighed. It was going to be a long
night.
I first saw Dulce in Sabana
Grande on the High Street while I sipped coffee at one of the pavement cafes, on
my way to or from lessons. She was very young, 17 perhaps; she had the sort of
striking 'angel in the mud' beauty of someone who you know on sight is doomed.
You only had to look at her, to hear her speak, to know. She had the milky eyes
of someone who is more often than not on drugs, the shifting eyes of someone who
lives on the street and has had to learn to survive in it. And yet, at the same
time there was a sort of candour, of innocence in those eyes. Maybe it was part
of her defence mechanism, in the same way that kittens and lambs are fluffy and
have big eyes that pull at the strings in your heart. She moved gaily between
the tables of the cafe. Was she begging? I can't remember, it is probable. I saw
her a few times after this and, inevitably since I always seem to have walked on
the periphery of the sub-cultures, one or other of my hippie friends introduced
me to her. And then I learnt the usual story of family abuse and break up and
running away from home, of getting involved with the worst of society, the
drugs... she had avoided, she proudly told me, to fall into prostitution, but
that didn't seem to me quite so bad an outcome compared to living on the streets
and ending up living and dying as a junkie, as her fate clearly
was.
This is the time shortly after my
parents died and I found myself living on my own in a house with six or seven
empty rooms. I had rented a room to this guy who was at the conservatoire where
I studied music; he'd turned out to be a strange house-mate, with undefinable
difficulties and weirdnesses. He'd finally left, shortly after the contemporary
music audition at the Instiute of Sonic Studies, where he'd done a performance
in the course of whicih he'd trampled on his guitar and reduced it to
smithereens. It was not safe for me to live in that house on my own. Another
friend moved in, at my invitation. He was a cellist from Bogota, idiosyncratic
but much more reliable and trustworthy and who ended up being a friend, to whom
I still have the vague dark feeling that I may have betrayed him... but that is
another story entirely.
Dulce belonged
to another of those worlds I inhabited without entirely belonging to. I
described her as an angel in the mud. Angels would have to be streetwise,
illiterate and a little slow on the uptake on other respects then, perhaps. She
was beautiful and fresh and, much as in the case of Luis E., I felt that it
would be a pity to allow her life to go to waste. Except I sensed this would
happen anyway, whether I intervened or not. There was, probably, a certain
amount of sexual attraction. I mean, I never thought to myself that I wanted to
have sex with her, never had any such thought but... on the other hand, would I
have done the same for a bloke I'd seen on the street in a similar situation? I
wonder. In any case, I made Dulce the offer of lodging in my house, much in the
way L.E. did, that is contributing towards the bills with whatever she could but
otherwise free. The only condition I gave her was that within so many months
(perhaps three months or six, or one, but this was so long ago and memory, alas,
is fragile) she had to be either in education or in employment. I had an
intuition of what would happen but thought it was worth the
try.
Dulce wouldn't sleep in the room
that I had, as it were, assigned her. She would only sleep at the foot on my
bed, like a dog would -and there was something of the blind, love of a dog,
non-judgmental, a bit clumsy and
embarrassing...
So it was that one
night I came home very late to find there were a number of people sleeping in
my room. She didn't have any covers on, her skin glistening silver in the moon
light. It was a warm night and they had left the fan on, I lied on the bed,
looked at the ceiling, sighed. The girl, the complete stranger lying next to me
turn around and threw an arm around me....
Posted: Tue - December
7, 2004 at 09:29 AM