previous | next

But such rear guard swagger is pathetic. What matters is what you do then and there; and sometimes I do, in the street, in a museum, take that risk and I feel good, because I have impacted into ten seconds that 'getting to know you' routine that should take much longer. And sometimes it pays off.

To do this, to pick up a woman, (to try!), is ultimately all to do with city. It is the ultimate city act. And given all the variables, all the odds of the city it often fails; and yet even then there is a thrill in returning alone to your hotel room or your flat, defeated by the city streets, your lust exacerbated but unfulfilled by the heat and dust, still drunk on the proximity of beautiful women in the streets. But there is pathos too; and it hurts; and masturbation is a poor consolation.

Sex is human, not animal; it is in the head. It is precisely in the city, with its plenitude (theoretical) of opportunities that there is the greatest gap between opportunity and success. So wide is the gap that sexually the city streets become very abstract. There is dense palpable sexuality in the very rhythm and thrum of the streets. The city is heady with the essence of sex.

In Cairo one of my Egyptian students has been eyeing me significantly, so it seems, for some time; that a middle class Egyptian woman (albeit with big hair, serious lipstick, high heels and ankle chain) should do so is practically unthinkable and I assume it is my imagination; until a little note is handed me: "Meet me at the Roxy cinema this afternoon at 5. The driver will take us to a flat. We will be in there alown." (sic)

I conclude that she is a high-class hooker. Feeling foolish I go to my appointment with a wallet full of the rank-smelling, worn banknotes of Egypt. There is the car, there is the driver, there is Scheherezade. OK, I say to myself, this guy is her pimp; as you expected. Don't back out now. We drive through the whole abominable chaos of Cairo to a street heaving with vegetable sellers, donkeys, motorcycles. The man lets us into a little apartment on the ground floor. We drink tea; the man leaves. No money exchanges hands.

previous | next