Short
Ettore Garofolo
by Hugo Tespest
I think I have experienced ten to fifteen truly erotic moments in my life, by which I mean moments during which I felt a strong sexual charge that was both entirely plausible and entirely uncorroborated.
One of these moments happened earlier this year, in a West German hotel. It was an evening in early March. The hotel stood right opposite the town’s main railway station, so it boasted train paraphernalia along with turquoise bannisters. It was all quite unpleasant except for its sauna, hidden away on the third floor. White-tiled, bright and sparse, it advertised an attitude to advertised a health that was uncomplicatedly wholesome. Entering its antechamber, I found a man already in there, resting on a plastic lounger. I wanted to leave immediately, but instead undressed as fast as I could, seeking shelter behind a voluptuous artificial plant. I wrapped a white towel around my waist and walked into the sauna feeling both proud of my courage and lucky, as though I was getting away with something. I took a seat in the middle row. To my right, a cuboid panel beamed out rapidly changing colours – orange to red, magenta to purple to green, like a stoned Tesla car roof. The sounds it was making were equally trippy – splashing water and bird calls I couldn’t name.
Soon afterwards, the man came in to join me. He sat down in the middle row too, albeit around the corner from my perch. Almost right away, he started talking. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Is this your first time at this hotel?” I'd never been approached so directly like that by any man, let alone at the sauna. “Yes”, I answered, lowering my voice and raising my chin in what I hoped was a confident gesture, “I have been here once before”. As I watched torrents of sweat trickling down onto my mastectomy scars, I did not mention that my last visit had also been the first time I had said out loud that I might not be a woman.
I felt light-headed. Surely, judging from the relaxed way the man was resting his arms on his thighs and his friendly eyes, it was all OK – I was passing. I asked him a few questions in return (“How many rounds have you done in here today?”). But I also knew that from the minute we started speaking, I had been wondering if he was hitting on me – and whether in his mind, he was hitting on a twink, a strange girl or an ambiguous in-between body. I don’t mind admitting, now, that each of these possibilities turned me on. I was getting hot for him. What would it take for me to fuck, I wondered, right here, right now? I had always avoided dwelling on erotic thoughts at the sauna. It seemed improper – likely to make me vulnerable to sexual trespassers, or worse still, become a trespasser myself. But what if the veneer of civility keeping me from giving in to lust was only paper-thin? What if that veneer could be shattered by the subtlest of movements – a raised eyebrow, perhaps, or a flick of the hand – making way for an unstoppable encounter, unstoppable enough for me to gingerly touch a penis for the first time in a decade, for me to be fucked like a regular, horny guy? Maybe I had become a perpetrator. Or maybe my sexual desire had become a force to be surrendered to. Or maybe I was just stoned.
I left the sauna and stepped into the shower. I dried off quickly. I imagined my own back, toned by relentless hours at the gym and so, so many push-ups, imagined someone’s gaze lingering as I stretched my arms above my head like Ettore Garofolo from Pasolini’s early movies, the twink whom the director found working in a restaurant and turned into a star in Mamma Roma; Ettore, tortured but free. On my way out, I glanced back into the sauna. The man and I gave each other a friendly wave.
Back in my room, I read a story about an old guy fucking a young woman in a sauna. I came hard. I don’t remember whether the man in the sauna appeared in my fantasies. I don’t remember the colour of his eyes or the size of his cock, or if I looked at his cock at all. All I remember now are the middling high-rises outside a hotel room in a West German town in late winter.
