The Great Gordhan


Chapter I

My head was all a-swearing. Maurizio had just come, hissing
between his teeth that he had left his soul inside me, and I replied,
oh well, your soul must be huge indeed if it can all fit into your
dick. To confirm my suppositions, he went, and for good he did it.
What’s this house, a brothel? And what am I to you? You say you like
my asshole, my hands and my tits, precisely, sir. Then why should I
give them for free?
That night I cried myself into sleep. I thought I had to call
an ambulance, a dazzling buzzing box in which somebody could glue the
pieces of my heart back into place. But I didn’t, and the next morning
I woke up dead. Rather: frantic I was, and full of laughter. From
another world.
That was just before the summer.
The month of July I spent at the seaside. What a welcome I got.
The Southern beach was white and groups of people were standing on the
sand, fully dressed, staring at the rough sea. A boy had drowned the
night before and the waves were still toying with his body. They didn’t
feel like handing it in, the naughty girls. And all the other kids were
waiting, like when a ball is thrown too high beyond a wall and no-one
knows if the giggling hussies living there will give it back.
But in the end they did. With a surge of affection they tossed
it into light and thankful glances spread among the waiting crowd. The
boy’s body hadn’t swollen, though. No marine transformation, no coral
cheeks, nor pearls: but black sterile parchment without strain. A hole
in a temple, like a shot: the smack of a rock.
The next day I went to the cemetery to visit my grandparents’
tomb. I walked up the sunny stairs escorted by two rows of cypresses.
While I was going, I noticed a square urn on my left. I read the date
first, to make sure I couldn’t possibly be confronted with freshly
rotting matter, and as it said 1889-1937, I lifted the lid and gave a
quick look at a heap of crumbling reddish bones.
I then decided I had done both with love and death, so I left
for life, that is, for London. I took a plane on the first day of
August. From my window, and far above the clouds, the air which wraps
the world looked like deep water, and all the houses below looked like
the disfigured towers in those old-fashioned souvenirs which fill with
snow when you shake them. Anyway, when the plane started to land I had
already made up my mind: I so badly wanted to take another plunge down
there.

London was still so very much itself, a faithful lover for all
whose main concern is the waste of life. It lavished time, as usual,
and picked your pockets full of pounds at incredible speed. At night, I
reached my bed with lighter heart and purse and could not dream: there
was no need, for fairyland would disclose its gates on the next day
when the cold blasts from the north would meet me in the streets and
the seagulls would ship the odour of the sea in Tottenham Court Road.
No sign of decay, though people certainly led a decadent life. Plump
and rosy cheeks did not betray the hundred pints of beer which filled
the stomachs of the passengers in the tube. Smiling kids showed no
trace of crack and pot. Youth triumphed everywhere: immortal. Hospitals
did not work; doctors scratched their bellies all day long. This strong
race would never die of fun. Livers where tougher here than everywhere
else. Centuries of common sense had left bodies defeated; and now that
people had finally decided to have a good time and forget about
sterness and morals, they couldn’t resurrect. The victory of the mind
was genetically declared: no limb, no gland would ever react against
its will.
I couldn’t help setting free my own fount of amusement. Who
cared? I only wanted to shine with folly and seduce the world. My body
felt neither pleasure nor pain; the only thing was that to stock my
soul with carelessness I had to give something in return. Men fucked me
for a joke. They laughed me into bed. I wanted their company, they
wanted my cunt. At a pub I met a violinist who hadn’t had sex for two
years. My wife is an ice-cube, he whimpered. No wonder, I thought, she
is from Iceland, isn’t she? Him, I didn’t shag, though. He was too
sciagurato.
Only Gordhan, the man who gives his name to this book, restored
in me a moral sense. Why are you throwing yourself away, he said, for
god’s sake? If you want to go back to your boyfriend, I don’t mind.
What can I do? But if you don’t, what will happen to your life? Cool
down, honey, cool down.
But who was he to tell me off like this?
Gordhan was great. If personality is a name, then he was the
phoenix rising and rising again against all odds. Nay, he was the
sacred Garuda, Visnu’s bird of prey, Laksmi’s sweetheart, chance’s pet.
Gordhan was my friend, first, and one rainy day, when London was washed
anew, he laughed me into love again.

He had been born in Uganda in 1955 but his parents were from
Bombay. His father owned twelve lorries and twice as many lorry-drivers
and enough servants to suit a lord. Ravi – this was his name - went
hunting for sport. Gordhan’s mother, Serla, was tall and slim, as
refined as an Indian princess. It was a perfect match, as it were; they
happened to fall in love with each other without choosing each other,
helped by almighty Fortune, who, as everybody knows, is blind and
doesn’t give a damn about freedom. Someone falls in love before
marriage, someone after it; someone never, neither sooner nor later.
The same thing which had happened to Gordhan’s parents had happened to
my parents, too. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always made as many
mistakes as I would have made if my father had said: girl, you take
this man, willy-nilly. But as I lived my youth in the last three
decades of the twentieth century and, definitely, after 1968, I’ve
always been first willy and then nilly. Until I met Gordhan of course,
that is when chance, not me, started to behave herself.
However, as I was saying, Gordhan’s family was thriving: Ravi and Serla
had five children, systematically, one every other year. Gordhan was
the youngest. Three loving sisters and one puzzled brother had wondered
on his cradle. They had never seen anything so small and cute and live.
As soon as they set eyes on him they decided they would protect him for
life. But who could protect him from life? Nobody could do that, and
thank god they didn’t, because who can be called great who has never
been humbled by life?