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old and ugly, their technique is unsurpassable. When I told my friend Kerstin about the Lucky Hole, she burst out laughing. ‘Just imagine there’s an earthquake in Tokyo one day,’ she said, ‘the nightclub collapses and one of the clients discovers he’s just come in his own mommy’s hand!’ As for me, I can’t help wondering what images go floating through the old woman’s mind as she deftly, professionally brings off her invisible clients…Yes, women, too, fantasise—thank goodness!
    Go on, Subra murmurs, listening to Rena’s spiel as intently as if she were hearing it for the first time.
    Oh…the day Xavier took me with him to Dublin’s National Gallery and we spent a full hour in front of Perugino’s sublime Lamentation Over the Dead Christ… Sam Beckett was fascinated by this work of art, with its ‘lovely cheery Christ full of sperm and the women touching his thighs and mourning his secrets’. And it’s true—Christ’s fleshly nature is particularly palpable in this painting. Staring at it, I couldn’t help wondering why Jesus’s experience of humanity had been limited to suffering, why it included bleeding wounds and dark temptations but not erotic swoon, not the marvellous tingling waves of desire that begin in your genitals and flow all the way to your toes and fingertips. The Perugino came back to me that same evening in a pub, as I watched the crablike movements of a musician’s left hand on the frets of his banjo. I felt as aroused by the sight of the banjo-player’s fingers as Martha and the two Marys must have been by Christ’s naked body—and so, with the taste of Guinness on my lips and the sound of words like sperm and chrism in my brain, I began to imagine how those hands would move on my hips, breasts and shoulders…When the set ended and Xavier rose to leave, I motioned to him to wait for me outside and, leaning forward, said to the man in a low voice, ‘I love the way your left hand moves on the neck.’ His gaze swerved to meet mine and he toppled headfirst into my eyes. As he sat up straight, grabbed my hand and asked me my name, the warmth in his voice told me that he was already rock hard. ‘Rena’, I replied, delighted to be able to say it in English for once, not retching the R the way the French do. ‘I’m Michael,’ said the man. Then, realising that I was about to walk out of his life as abruptly as I’d walked into it, he asked with frantic hand gestures if I lived close by, if he could get in touch with me, and I answered, also gesturing, that no, I lived far, far away. Then, leaning towardshim again until our faces all but touched, I bade him good night.
    My blood was fairly simmering with the fire of that brief exchange, the electrically erotic touch of the man’s hand on mine. And what caused me to swoon the following morning, when Xavier set me on my knees in our hotel bed and reared up behind me, was not just the view in the mirror of our two bodies gilded by dawn’s first light and his member moving in and out of me, but also an intoxicating mixture of Jesus Christ, Sam Beckett, and Michael the banjo-player.
    No one can punish us for such joys. Even women who live behind burqas in Afghanistan continue (I hope!) to swing up onto their dream horses and canter off through the clouds, clutching their mount’s creamy mane in both hands, feeling the violent shudder of its flanks between their thighs, panting, gasping and crying out in pleasure. Every woman contains a cosmos—and who can prevent her from welcoming into it those male or female guests who know exactly how she needs to be loved, or from loving them back with a vengeance?
    The Kodak chapter has come to an end.
    Once she has set the couple safely on their way to the hotel, where they’ve agreed to meet up at eight, Rena heads off on her own. Within the minute, she recovers her body, her rhythm, her elasticity.
Dante
    A pocket of calm on the Borgo degli Albizi. Rena photographs the chiaroscuro