The Confessions of Noa Weber Read Online Free PDF Page B

with two fingers. The girl gets up and goes to him, he lights her a cigarette, and they both disappear into the kitchen.
    Love can be described as compulsive thinking. The thought buzzes and buzzes like an insect stuck to a wet picture. And in the days to come I would be stuck on two gestures from the opening scene:
    The man signals “come here” with his finger, and the girl gets up and comes. It’s the kind of gesture with which you beckon a child. Or a servant. Or a waitress, if you haven’t got any manners. Is the girl not aware of this? And how she is. And nevertheless—oh, the shame of it—she gets up. Not “in spite of” the gesture but because of it. Let’s admit that the nonchalant movement of the finger turns her on, as if it’s moving between her legs.
    The foreign man looks into her eyes, and with a foreign gesture he lights her cigarette. And afterwards too, in the kitchen, he keeps on watching her and offering her a light, instead of giving her the lighter so that she can light up herself.
    Compulsive thinking latches on to details and dwells on them as if they hold enormous significance which cannot be grasped in a moment. It keeps returning to them again and again as if there is still something left to understand. The more I think about the meaning of these gestures the sicker I get of my thoughts and of myself for thinking them. Mulling over the subtleties of gestures and their erotic nuances like some idiotic character in a genteel English romance.
    You won’t find any such absurd courting rituals in my Nira Woolf stories. No
luuuve
and no brooding thoughts. Not with Nira. Since she’s my character and I invented her, obviously I constructed her according to my taste: my heroine would never go in for such nonsense as “and then I said to him” and “and then he kept quiet and didn’t say anything.” And nobody would beckon my heroine with his finger—“come here.” Because if anyone ever uses that gesture in my books—and I don’t think anyone will—it will only be Nira herself. She’ll beckon and the man will come, and they’ll fuck on the carpet before anybody can say Jack Robinson. And she won’t spend too much time thinking about it afterwards either, because my James Bond with the perfect female body has more important things to think about.
    Nira Woolf conducts herself according to my beliefs, and I don’t conduct myself according to them, and although I can argue in my defense that at the age of seventeen I didn’t know what I believed yet, that argument lost its validity a long time ago.
    I can imagine Nira Woolf listening to my “he looked at me” and “he went on looking at me,” stroking one of her monstrous cats under its chin, flexing a muscle in her arm and yawning with boredom. At some point she would cut me short and say: “Okay, okay, okay, I get the point, so what happened? Did you fuck on the carpet?”
    Yes, I went to bed with Alek that night, not on the carpet but in his carved wooden bed that I still sleep in to this day.
    I could have written that in the way my heroine would have approved of, in other words, wittily. I could have mocked him and the foolish girl I was until Nira Woolf split her sides laughing. But that’s not the reason why I sat down to write.
THE MARKETPLACE OF ANECDOTES
    The temptation always exists to be flippant at your own expense in the marketplace of anecdotes and then to go around with your hat and collect the laughter. Everything’s a joke nowadays, everything’s a laugh, it’s the fashion. So that feeling seriously has become utterly and completely pathetic. A kind of social impropriety which only a real blockhead would be guilty of. You won’t usually catch me making this kind of
faux pas
, because I am a polite person, I have self-respect and I don’t want to cause embarrassment either. And since I’m such a classy gal, everything about me is classy too. In other words, in the framework of the anecdote and the shtick,