HE WAS WAITING FOR HER in the living room. Sitting on the couch with a glass of scotch in his hand, Marco listened to a classical piece by composer Kodaly Zoltan about the hussar who renounced everything to be with his sweetheart. The Fairy TaleBegins. Since Marco had just come out of the shower, his hair was still wet and the black T-shirt clung to his slightly damp torso. He took a long draft of the whiskey swimming in ice. Autumn arrived bringing back the height of summer, in one of those typical São Paulo mood swings. In normal temperature and pressure conditions, the thermometer would not be registering ninety degrees in the shade.

She pushed the door and entered, tossing her purse onto a chair. Dressed in a low-necked beige top and bandage skirt, she swayed her hips as she circled the coffee table to reach the sofa. She asked what they would be doing that evening. Marco pointed to a white shopping bag at the feet of the couch, bathed in the dim light of the side lamp. With barely restrained curiosity, she picked up the bag, laid it on the table and studied the contents. She lifted the items one by one, examining them with a critical eye. Her interest faltered.

"What's this?" she asked in disconcert.

"Didn't you say you wanted to try new things? I bought it for you."

She evaluated the web of black leather strips and metal rings. After thinking for a moment, she returned it to the bag with a brusque motion. She didn't like that. When he asked why, she grew irritated:

"Why can't we be like normal people?" Her breathing became fitful . "This is... this is wrong."

Her hands trembled-it was hard to say if her reaction was triggered by indignation or by fear of herself and what she was capable of doing. Marco just held her hand. He made her sit on the couch and poured her a glass of whiskey with a generous amount of ice. He reassured her they would only do what she felt like doing. She took a sip from the glass, a bit calmer, while he sat next to her.

"Don't you enjoy our games?" Marco put his arm around her shoulders and held her chin, making her stare at him. She tried to avert his gaze, but he insisted: "Don't you like them?"

She nodded, her own admission making her feel a sting of humiliation.

"Then trust me," he said.

"What if the situation gets out of hand? I don't want to lose control, Marco..."

That would never happen, he assured her. Didn't she understand? Marco studied her face. What he saw was a pair of inquisitive eyes as she moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. That same tip devoid of answers.

No, she did not understand.

"This is a trick of mirrors," said Marco, pausing to give his words a chance to sink in. "But in order to grasp its essence, you need to look past the surface. Mirrors are multifaceted, and not everything is as obvious as it seems."

"Sometimes you talk through riddles, Marco. I don't get it."

"I'll put it another way. Have I ever done anything you didn't like?"

She brought her lips close to the brim of the glass, shaking her head in a short motion. After a moment of hesitation, she left the glass on the table. Her fingerprints slowly blurred on the cold crystal.

Marco gazed at her with a smile in his eyes. He ran his index finger across the curve of her shoulder, going up to the neck, tracing the jawline until it reached her mouth. There, it lingered in a caress. She couldn't suppress the shiver that followed the gliding of Marco's finger.

"Things are relative. You arouse me and then satiate my desire. Now who's the active and who's the passive?" he asked, his voice as soft as his caress. "The game is ruled by your will and your boundaries. Now who's the dominator and who's the dominated?"

She opened her mouth and closed it again, unable to respond.

"Sometimes I think you're a strange man, Marco," she uttered at last.

She looked at him and superimposed the image of the first time she saw Marco. That day, she had the sensation a serpent was coiling around her and dragging her to him. She wanted Marco. His body, his smile, his words. She wanted him complete. In the beginning she thought they had a connection. But the truth was she couldn't grasp him. It was like watching a coin flipping: when you glimpsed head it was already tails, and the coin would continue the spin without revealing itself as a whole. She recalled when they went to the park, Marco's breezy taste of vanilla, playing with a dog that passed by, reciting Haikais as they walked around the lake. Then, in the bedroom, he would darken and become strong, thick liquor that triggered dizziness. He dived into the games almost with furor, as if he sought something, as if he wanted to investigate the bottom of the abyss-the bottom of himself? The die keeps things on track, he had said. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe he was running away. She knew Marco carried the marks of a broken marriage. She wanted to make him forget them.

"I may look strange to the people you call 'normal'," he countered. "Normality and abnormality, however, are located in different points of the same scale. Between them there's no gap but continuity. Like the color spectrum: on one end you have white and on the other black, with all the remaining palette in between. Colors are not separated, they keep changing into one another. There are normality gradients, the same way there are color gradients."

"What about you, Marco, where do you stand in the scale?" she asked, and curiosity made her quit the defensive attitude.

Think of the gray color, he said. Sometimes it held more black; sometimes, more white, albeit it still remained gray. His life style was unconventional, that's all. There was nothing wrong with exploring the instinctive side. The very survival depended on it. Mankind had the arrogance of believing it was superior to animals, when in reality people were rather guided by instincts than by reasoning. The primitive part of the brain developed along 500 million years. And the rational part? Not even 300 thousand.

"Don't start with those theories," she said, her body stiffening. She saw the coin flipping. Head and tails, black and white. Gray.

"I'm just stating the facts. Anthropologist Desmond Morris has an interesting definition for modern society. And if you thought of a concrete jungle, think again: jungle dwellers live free. We, on the other hand, are confined in our cubicles. No, this is not a concrete jungle. It's a human zoo."

He pondered for a moment before continuing:

"People have lost touch with their instinctive side and, therefore, have lost an important part of themselves. What they call intuition is nothing more than the primitive brain in action, one step ahead of the conscious mind. And what about pleasure? Do you think it's your rational side that makes you want to lie with me? How many pleasures people deny themselves in the name of a supposed rationality?"

"Look, I won't lie, I enjoy what we do. But this iswrong," she replied feebly.

Marco shrugged. Wrong? To whom? To social conventions? Yesterday yellow was customary, today blue was. Did it mean blue was better than yellow? Maybe, or maybe not. There was puritanism and the porn industry, there was right and wrong and debatable, and there was hypocrisy. The establishment needed a mass of maneuver and that was the purpose of conventions-today blue, tomorrow green, the day after tomorrow yellow again. In a world where power had become a compulsion, the motherland was money, and life did not take priority, it was worth quoting the famous marquis who once stated: there was no horror that hadn't been divinized or virtue that hadn't been execrated.

"Everything changes according to context. Moral, religion, the behavior code, all of that is relative. Forget the conventions. The important thing is to be free and respect your own boundaries. I know you better than you think. You have a natural curiosity, so why don't you give it a try? If you don't like it, we'll stop... but I have a feeling you're gonna like it."

"Hmm..." she hummed with an ambiguous air.

"If you're not sure, we better forget about it," Marco said in a firm tone, which then mellowed. "Let's not spoil our evening. Come here, give me a kiss."

He held the nape of her neck with one hand, brushing his thumb on her face. His other hand ran across her thigh, very close to the shadowy triangle hinted underneath her skirt. The gestures were confident, and smooth as a lacey cuff that whispers a caress when it skims on the flesh duplicating the caress of the hand. Now Marco's mouth turned into velvet on hers and disarmed her. He never failed to surprise: in one moment the sternness of steel, in the next, the most delicate touch of all. He never failed to waken sensations that carried her far away in their current.

Gliding, gliding far away in the current. Swept by the waters sheer force. She lost herself in Marco.

His words swirled inside her head, and the hunger she feared unleashed. In her innermost, she could foresee the black vortex sucking her into its epicenter. An explosion of a thousand stars as she plunged into the abyss of no return. Emitting a low moan, she arched her back slightly. She flattened her hand against his chest, at first intending to repel him, and then in a circular motion that was the beginning of a caress. She saw the gap of her own abyss...

"Enough." She pushed him with sudden energy and composed herself. "I'm leaving."

Marco kept silent. His dark eyes darted a sparkle, which barely emerged before it was gone.

She studied him for a moment, wondering if she had dreamt about that gaze. Sometimes she had the feeling she didn't know him at all. She took a few steps toward the door and came to a halt. Turning back almost with reluctance, she stared at him with her face red-hot.

Without a word, she slowly began to undress. Then, bare-naked, she picked up the white shopping bag.

___________________________________________________________

I bet I got you curious now! (The author utters a malignant laugh: ah, ah, ah, ah!)

Get out of the gutter, for goodness sake. There's a perfectly innocent explanation to all that. Not.

Oh, please vote...