[.] In the beginning there was Andrea. With Andrea I discovered America and saw Paris, call it what you will, at the age of nineteen. She was about twenty-five, I think. Quite simply, I liked her and one day she took me off and gave me what I wanted. I wouldn''t even have dared look at a woman six years older than me - a real woman, as it were. My contribution was modest: I moved my two hands, as rigid as brooms, over her nicely arching back and made a pleasant sperm donation. I repeated the manoeuvre a number of times, registering satisfactory progress.

I had discovered, for example, the efficacy of the erogenous zones: I even used to imagine them as secret buttons under the skin, which you had to identify, like in a computer game, getting closer and closer, and which, once activated, quickened her breathing, made her voice hoarser, knocked the stuffing out of her. After a while, roguish lad that I was, I set myself the task of getting a shrill out of her. But for that I needed a larger collection of buttons, a bit like you used to need an entire collection of stamps to cut a figure in the neighbourhood. I decided to enrich my collection by going out with other girls. Especially since I had the experience now, didn''t I? I pulled Laura. She wasn''t a beauty, but I reckoned that she must have erogenous zones. I didn''t manage to ferret out many buttons, because I was barely at the stage of holding her around the waist and kissing her when a common acquaintance told Andrea that she had seen me slobbering over some girl down a side street in town. Things ended lamentably.

Andrea was very firm: she didn''t want to be mixed up with a bastard like me, while I didn''t really have any explanations to give her. My performance in that situation was woeful; when I remember it, I feel like thrusting my head inside my shirt for shame. I began by promising solemnly that it would never happen again, the same as I used to do in front of my parents whenever I put my foot in it, and I ended up pleading, with tears in my throat, for us to a least meet one last time, in token of farewell, blah-blah. I think that by the end I even had the cheek to tell her that she didn''t know what she was throwing away. With Laura it was something else. We were both students and I pulled her in a bar. In the meantime I had seen Paris a few times, or America, however you want to call it, but that wasn''t what she was primarily interested in. She was a tomboy and we used to drink elbow to elbow.

We were happy in our way. Lord, how much we supped together - I get a shiver down my spine when I think of it now! We used to drink in the rooms of the student hostel, in grotty bars, on park benches, on the shore of the lake, in the bus, up trees, and even in the scoop of a mechanical excavator. After a while, she convinced her old folks that she couldn''t go on living in the hostel, where the conditions weren''t conducive to studying, and they rented her a bedsit, where we used to drink as though we were demented. We had no shame in front of each other. Heavy drinking and above all hangovers create a special intimacy. At first, what I felt when I was with her was the same as if I had been with the lads at school drinking liquor on the sly, and towards the end of the year we spent together we felt like two decrepit veterans, who had gone through no end of scrapes together. Of course, what brought us together the most was the final period, when we practically cohabited in a ménage-à-trois: me, her, and the booze. A bottle of booze was in no wise ever lacking.

It was our staple foodstuff. A bottle of beer has calories equivalent to a loaf of bread, as we always jokingly used to hearten ourselves. Or to four eggs, if I remember rightly. We devoured whole ovens of bread; we ate enough eggs for a lifetime. We ruined ourselves shoulder to shoulder, but we felt wonderful. Lord, how much care of each other we took! I would wake up in the night, my stomach griping, when I heard her first retches, and hold the basin for her. I would pat her reassuringly on the back and give her a slug of beer to rinse her mouth. Nor was she any less forthcoming.

In the morning, she would put cold compresses on my brow and make salty coffee. Every now and then she would wash the sheets. She used to buy pickled cucumbers. She would open the tins of corned beef she received from home. I would pour the vodka into the glasses, measuring it out equally to the millimetre, and she would rotate the beers in the freezer compartment, because they didn''t all use to fit at once. I would go out to buy some mustard while she boiled the Frankfurters. We could almost understand each other just by a glance. Sex, although not lacking, wasn''t essential.

Most of the time, we wouldn''t even be able to remember how it was we woke up undressed one next to the other. "You were a beast last night," I would tell her, with my tongue like felt. "You were nothing less too," she would reply affectionately, casting her eyes around for a bottle that might still contain some dregs. I won''t dwell on the embarrassing moments we went through together because of swinish binges, nor on the odours we reciprocally offered each other. It was lucky that we separated after a year. I''m sure that we would have ended up a banal couple of alcoholics. That year, I barely managed to scrape through my exams. She didn''t even turn up, and her father withdrew her from the faculty.

He had had enough of pouring money down the drain. We wrote each other e-mails for a while. But without the salutary warmth of alcohol, our relationship no longer had any zest. That''s why Marga, with her way of being, left me mouth agape. [.] I think it was three days after we crossed paths, Marga and I, that I witnessed a scene that for me was strange. It all happened in the bedsit where I was living at the time, not the same one where I used to have drinking sessions with Luana. A more modest and relatively outlying bedsit.

I spend almost a year and a half there with Marga, although, at the moment we got together, I was on the point of leaving it. I couldn''t keep abreast of the expenses, even though the rent was way below the going rate. I put off leaving only because Marge turned up. For that I was obliged to borrow money from friends. I couldn''t carry off my meteorite - because she had effectively fallen out of the blue - to a room in a bachelors'' hostel, which is what I had been planning for myself. After the night of the drinking binge, we began to see each other daily, even to spend a good many hours together. After a week, she moved in with me, without, however, giving up the two-room flat she shared with a girlfriend. Around three days later, as I was saying, she turned up at lunchtime with a chic little suitcase, in which I could have fit my entire wardrobe.

I thought that she wanted to give me a surprise, bringing her clothes. As a sign that our future was now to be shared. She carefully laid it on the table and we began to chat. We talked about everything under the sun, without once mentioning the name of Tudor. Unexpectedly, she started to undress. Without interrupting the conversation. The same as any normal man''s, my blood began to race, like a formula one engine. And with good reason! Up until then I hadn''t seen her naked from any distance, but rather bared her skin in portions, caressed it by chance; we had frolicked in semi-darkness.

I knew the mentholated taste of her saliva, had sniffed the perfumed lobe of her ear, and had discovered the scent of her favourite deodorant, but I had not had the chance to enjoy an overall image of the nude. As the fabrics peeled away, like in those electronic strip-poker games, I went weak at the knees. She was gorgeous! A real corpse, as they say at the newspaper office. Smashing from head to toe, from heel to crown. I even wondered how such a looker could have landed in my ramshackle bed-sit. Maybe she had wandered into the wrong neighbourhood by mistake. She was quite tall, almost as tall as me, and had glossy skin. The same sandy colour was uniformly distributed over her whole body.

She had snub breasts, with nipples like two mulberries. When she moved through the room, it was as if her bones were dancing beneath the skin, as if they were somehow musically floating. I had only ever seen the like on the small screen. Luana, even though many was the time that she had seemed appetising, was a cartoon compared to what was now presented to my eyes. And it wasn''t something on a screen or on glossy paper, but rather sat square on my threadbare blanket. To feel her pulse I only had to reach out my hand. Exaggerating, I can say that I didn''t even know whom it was I slept with. She had seemed beautiful to me, but not dangerously beautiful.

Of course, in time I got used to her charms, but back then I goggled like an idiot. She went on talking calmly, carefully placing her blouse over the back of the chair or meticulously inserting one bra cup into the other. After a moment of paralysis, my heart leapt back into place, I approached and clasped her waist. "It''s not the right moment yet, Andi," she told me in an off-hand voice and headed toward the bathroom. I heard the shower flow and thought with horror about my Lilliputian and ramshackle bathtub, about the patched-up showerhead that hissed and spat in all directions like a toothless old codger. Then I looked around my room and got the urge to do a quick bit of tidying up. I gave up the idea, realising that it was stupid, given that Marga had already seen very clearly what a disaster there was in my den. If I think about it, both the embarrassment about the bathroom and that subsequent urge were not at all in my nature and had only arisen against the backdrop of the confusion caused by her presence.

In fact, they were a homage. A homage of which I was not conscious and of which she had no idea. I moved aimlessly about th.