L’Avventura: an Erotica

Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960)

I.
Sometimes, we urban people need to flee.

Need to qualify each words of the above sentence. I have time at my disposal. “…to flee”, from what? Urban drudgery, corporate time, daily doses of earning yesterday’s money, daily frowns of how to pay tomorrow’s bills…oh, you know it all! Cliches and beaten phrases, probably I am lying because I am so comfortably numb with these all, you are too. A solid unique answer to that question desired: well, that’s it, need to flee from this lead-heavy pressure to find something really unique.

The car is not leaving the city. The billboards shift behind, we are not leaving the city. Look at the skeletal multistory highrises rising, the rumble of buildings being built, the gigantic sad cranes raising their weary heads like a brachiosaurus-neck. Look how their slender lengths of shadows are invading the not-cities (villages? countrysides? what do we decide to call them?)

“…need to”. Or ‘want’, or ‘desire’? What do I need from you now, in the next hours before we return to what we are leaving behind? Here now we are sharing a joke, each burst of laughter of yours is pleasant slow mutations from smiles of the demure to giggles of a girl-who-was…is a new kind of laughter, the increasingly spontaneous, the progressively alluring a kind of disrobing or a kind of dressing yourself up? Do I need you, want you, desire you? Three different words; shouldn’t they mean three different ideas? Are they verbs?

We are not leaving the city. Urban bridges, urban highways penetrates the plains, sucking arid all that was moist in a greenish lowland. Long, slithery Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. The grassy, marshy, pungent paddyfield-Bengal landscape. The air is too urban as our car glides relishing a liberation from its quotidian downtown traffic overkill. The dust is reddish, grasses are red too. Highways are long, cars shoot out. The male smell filling up feminine lowland.

“We urban…”. Just a man and a woman; ain’t we just that? Are we trying to forget certain markers? Divorced man; engaged woman… You now tweaking your engagement-ring with your fingers which I considered slender and graceful, noticing that they look pale and skinny too. Anorexic fingers. We. I and you do not make a ‘we’, I and you know that, don’t we? Who is the ‘and’ between ‘you’ and ‘me’? No being, just a space which is breathing like someone slowly dying, the intervals increase bringing apprehensions that the last was the last, and the next appears. Ah, a wrong perception of things! The breathing is slow but regular, earlier you heard the breaths, now you are being acutely aware of the between; that is the between between you and me: the ‘and’.

“Did you notice?” You said. “That the countryside never comprise perfect straight lines?” The trees, the marshes, the rural homes or the serpentine roads which change shapes along with human footsteps. Yup, no straight lines. But look at the highrises now in the horizons, the telegraph-poles, the wire-lines extending for miles. Urban straight lines are invading the rural. We are not leaving the city, we are bringing the city out here.

“Sometimes”. Whose time? Is time yours or mine, if we cannot make a we? That means we don’t have a our times. Will we have another again? Our times? One more?

II.
An empty churchyard with a car. An empty churchyard without a car. A closed window which does not respond. I honk the car-horn loud, not a soul is startled as you clasp your ears and giggle. When I laugh too I was nervous.

You saw the cross when our car was crossing the fifth truck abandoned in the highway. “A church! A church! I will visit the church!” Funny isn’t it, an urban Hindu lady excited over a rural Bengal church? Yes, there are Christian communities here; people who were low-caste hindus decades ago or centuries, converted by missionaries or exasperated by upper-caste hindu henchmen. I am vaguely interested on their Bible, because I know they don’t retain their rudimentary knowledge of English anymore. It is not exotic, lady, I think as you recollect your early missionary school days (even I have my share), the choirs and the christmas, the piano and the gospels, memories of our English-medium childhood. But it is so urban, my lady! Nothing similar here; even the Christ and the Madonna look like such cheap calendar arts. It is not the church you always wished fairy-godmother will take you too, the ceiling is flat you discovered.

An empty churchyard with a car. An empty churchyard without a car. What’s the difference between these two sentences? A ‘out’ lingering somewhere, clinging to a ‘with’… I was uneasy, not because I am an Hindu, but because I am a non-believer. Your enthusiasm was so embarrassing. I stopped at the door, you pulled my hand. “Nope, shoes on”. But isn’t that a hindu way of doing things, not entering a temple with shoes on? I have goofed it up, though I knew you didn’t notice that. And when I saw you kneeling at the altar, had a sudden lump near my throat. Not because you have momentarily reached your childhood which I cannot (tried to when you pulled my hand) but because I was watching the back of your knee and your rear. What am I gulping, pure christian guilt? Sin? I recall the erotic splush in my juvenile body when I watched our unadorned goddesses.

Empty churchyard with a car. Wrong sentence: if our car is there, it isn’t empty. Or, it is empty because the car is there, our car signifies the emptiness of the rural Bengal churchyard.

And we walk. Why a long and wide span of grassland? Is it already owned by some civil construction corporation which will build another housing estate when the city encroaches nearby? Or will building the supermarket complex herald the encroachment? Probably someone is arguing that a residential complex should come first otherwise who drives kilometers to shop? An arrogant executive persuades that the market should be large and lucrative enough to trap buyers for hours; only the mart will guarantee the prospective residential complexes. First you create the greed, then you lure them here, then you prove that its too far, then you sell them apartments nearby…things like this. We are walking on the grass. First we create the greed, then we lure us here, then we prove ourselves that it is safely too far from the city, now we can sell us ourselves. Suddenly you slump down on the grass, look up at me, your eyes are smiling, you pull my hand again, I am too eager to agree now (you are not pulling me to kneel me down before the Christ), kilometers of grass surrounding us, then why are you whispering “sit down, here…”, who will hear? A flight rumbles up in the sky, the airport is nearby…can they see us from there, the eyes in the ascending windows?

III.
Your giggles in the air and the clouds beside your hair. I am split into two and I cannot decide which one should be me, the one who touches or the one who watches? Grappling your flesh beneath your textiles, “no dear, can’t take off clothes here” under the blue sky above the green grasses. What do I kiss then apart your face and neck, clothes? I bite you there in desperation above the clothes then, with a fury of a man who wants too chew off and spit out shreds of synthetic cotton. Your peaks are drenched with my tongue as I feel that brassieres beneath don’t taste like cloths, its much too hard as it shouldn’t have been now. I lift my head and I see them drenched, drenched beyond embarrassments…you can’t walk with them honey in the roads, tips of your body jutting out wet with male saliva. You have stopped giggling, as I watch and you see them in my eyes you smile sheepishly. I am touching it what I have ravished wet; I know the rules of the game now, I won’t touch the throbbing skin beneath today…but I am game to grapple all above.

But the one who watches? Watching you blossoming up in wild abandonment? Watching that you seldom close your eyes during making love; watching that your eyes are roaming above, brushing the sky from horizon to horizon as I nibble your earlobe, lick your neck, feel you beneath the cloths underneath…what were you thinking about my love? Not of guilt, not of sin, not of yesterdays not of the hours and days coming when the ‘and’ will breath more heavily between you and me. What do a woman think then, during these moments, when the nerves and bloodstreams send those strange messages across the body within? I could have understood, have I watched you now, in all those porns we boys have watched and read and wrote, we imagined a woman who won’t be able to think during making love. That you will be bestially, corporeally, pathologically, thoughtlessly fleshy during those throes of pleasure, but you will never think, should never do the thinking thing! And only if I could have watched you I would have known that not only ripples of pleasure and pain, but also thoughts of an unknown kind are streaming across your face and you are certainly not thinking about me. Thoughts I can never caress, thoughts I can’t boast of authoring in your sheet-of-a-body. You are enjoying thoughts as if they are like children released from the school-hours finally!

You are just living and existing to the lees, relishing fast the drops of life when I was working furiously to a nervous, frenetic finale while you were inhabitating the ‘and’ between you and me. Girls don’t do that, they don’t slog towards a closure of coming, they live in those moments in the present tense which are not continuous…seconds of foreplay-pleasure don’t lead logically to the next seconds of clitoral-vaginal-ones to mathematically reach the orgasmic resultant. Rather, splinter of feelings, splinters of mindbytes, splinters of life! A magic of moments when a woman is only being a woman without baggages of becoming what she is always expected to be. If I could have watched you I would have known that that’s the best gift of love a lover can give…moments of throbbing life when you are you and you and you, with me but without me. But dear, it is also the ‘and’ between you and me which plagues; ’cause we boys are always connecting things without things, nothings with nothings…something leading to some-more-thing…always desperate to reach somewhere. And you, woman in love, you can live the moment, the today ceasing to be the ‘and’ between yesterday and tomorrow. When I am watching your face being flushed with desire, peeping into those skins which I was so eager to see, touching you there where I always yearned to touch…I know I am grappling the surfaces, the cloths of your soul and can never enter those dungeons of yours where feelings are cajoling thoughts…I was being overwhelmed with sentiments and tears that these will end faster ’cause we are kids afraid under the open sky which is a metropolis looming large over the countryside, that we might not have our time again, that touching you there always bears the shadow of lifting away my body from yours, that bodies meet to part again. But you are there girl, under the clouds and the sky…living to the lees few moments of your day when your body is your mind! Immeasurable floods of thoughts swarming your mind’s sky…