Last night I was at dinner with people from my publishing house. We were celebrating 500,000 copies of my latest book in the US market. The now famous, bestseller, with the title "An Evening at the Opera: In the Décolleté of Virginia Woolf". I prove on my bookshelf that Virginia Woolf was not only ahead of her time, contrary to what all the unaffiliated say, but something even better: she was both ahead and behind her time! And also slightly diagonally left. The reason for this super successful writing of mine was a crazy night I had a year ago, in the company of my then agent, at the Opera. I say "with her then" because she doesn't work with me anymore. Left me. She decided to follow her truth. He now works as an assistant nail clipper operator at a drive-in nail salon just outside of Susanville, California. I will also reveal her first name. Beatrix Klum. Nice huh; Beatrix Lolita Klum to be exact. Anyway, I always called her "Bee". Very sexy baby! A tall woman of my taste, who always wore heels and suits. Suits only. Sometimes they were made of silk and sometimes they were made of wool, with thin faint stripes and white shirts that he decorated with knitted or silk black ties. She walked perpetually haughty, her fine long blond hair thrashing and blowing, like a teenage filly on the drenched Ascot meadows. A real apparition. Anyway. I escaped.
On the night you mention, we went down to the Opera House to attend the premiere of "Perses: A Lesbian Story" by the super-famous and very avant-garde Norwegian director Eddy-Trea Beaufort-Soltz. At first everything was going normally. I greeted acquaintances, drank a negroni or two at the famous Opera Bar, and had a couple of small talk with Betty in the cloakroom about the origin of items and the dress code of the Argonaut campaign and everything seemed nice and cool. The show was okay. Tolerable as long as one can bear boring. During the break, however, things changed. And they changed dramatically! In the foyer, you say, I found myself in very progressive company, with some of the most prominent members of the LGBTI+ community and with a half-full glass of golden sparkling Campania wine in hand, 2009 please, we had a little chat about the play we were watching . I made, I think, a very apt artistic observation that set off a chain of events that was to change my writing karma. "How about the project?" I asked Natalia Lukashenko, the city's most famous art critic and historian. "You know, I appreciate your opinion. Do you think the play satisfactorily reflects the social conventions of the time?" I asked, partly to flatter her, partly to open up a conversation and partly because I really wanted to hear her opinion. What did I want? "I don't know about socio-political conventions," he immediately replied, "but that Virginia Woolf, she must have had two fantastic balls." We all froze. Me, Beatrix, Herr Tumbler, the puritanical director of the Royal Opera House and his handsome husband, a well-behaved curmudgeonly boy with black hair and bony presbyopic glasses. "You mean?.." I asked dumbly to break the tension. "I mean," said the friend very seriously, "that Mrs. Wolfe was not only a disgrace to the bisexual and lesbian community of London, but also her works, and especially this abomination Mrs. Dallaway it reeks of literary rot and a lack of inclusivity.” I shook my head slightly, a serious sign of possible understanding and certain embarrassment. "But, it's pronounced Dalloway, not Dalloway," my other favorite doll, Nadia Schneider, the Royal Commissioner of Pole Dancing who had just slipped into the fray, gushed naively. Natalia shot her a look that contained an equal and respectful dose of hatred and disdain. Keep going. "Not to mention her other abomination, Your Chamber of Devotion. It brought me goosebumps from the first page! Don't tell from the cover!' I shook my head again, forced, since he was only looking at me the whole time he was talking, with the people around us looking at us like spectators. I felt like a protagonist in a horror film: "Confusion And Paranoia In The Foyer Of The Royal Theatre" it would be called, and then, fortunately or perhaps unfortunately, cut the awkward spiritual cord that bound us together, dear Beatrix.
“As if you want to teach love lessons. That's how you sound," she said, not knowing if her words were laced with irony or approval. "Mrs. Wolfe was as far ahead of her time as you are behind yours!" he filled steadily. No, it wasn't an endorsement. I felt – as the word says – cold sweat on my forehead. I could see them both sticking out their claws, ready to sneer at each other as to whether or not gyosa Virginia was a pioneer. “Whether I am behind my time, my dear, is not for you to judge, Miss Klum, but for history. Unless, of course, you've come back from the future and seen it. You have got;" "Yes I have!" mine replied in a girlish tone. "And everyone says how behind your time you were!" he added bravely. "Truth;" Lukashenko asked ironically. "Truth!" Bee said. "And another thing... Everyone says you didn't have any boobs at all. Your cleavage is a joke.” Natalia blushed with anger. Aman, my mother! “What did you say baby? And what are these?' she roared and lifted up her blouse revealing to the stunned artist two wonderful - I must admit - fleshy melons. Things had apparently gotten out of hand. Herr Liebitz went to say something along the lines of "ladies.. please" and waved his hands, but he didn't have time. Natalia had already turned to him and blasted him: "Silence you! Silence! Do you think I don't see how sweet you look when I come to your office?' Liebitz rolled his eyes and made an invisible desperate gesture that meant nothing. I couldn't take it anymore. I took action. "Does anyone know how long the match ended?" We were playing away from home against Paris" I said quickly and cutely - to my horror - to change the mood. "At half time we were 2-0 down" I added with feigned glee and genuine disappointment. They all turned to look at me. "We turned it around! At ninety! 2-3!” came the enthusiastic voice of the waiter, who, walking around with a plate of appetizers, had happened to be next to us. "Come on baby team!" I burst out spontaneously. "Where we were; Oh yes. So girls listen up" I said, after I had clearly encouraged.. "You both have great cleavage. How do we do it; You have visors. Actually, if you'll allow me, the size of the boobs doesn't count. It is the very idea of the breast that counts, strictly Nietzschean speaking. So let's at least agree—I continued gravely—that Virginia Woolf was and in front and behind her time. And also, that we have a great chance to win the cup." "Come on baby omadara! Let's go!” said the waiter, overriding my slop. The third bell rang, signaling the end of the alarm. Fortunately, my Panagitsa! We smiled a lot of fake politeness at each other, left the tall, sweaty crystal glasses on the white linen tablecloth of the huge wooden buffet, and left for our seats.
I didn't see the second part of the show at all. I had my mind on Virginia Woolf and the poetry in the foyer. Was it really as Natalia Lukashenko said it was? A mobile embarrassment? I couldn't concentrate on the Persians at all, not even on the famous third act, "To Shower With the King." I had my mind there. To sexy aunt Virginia. Beatrix was frozen. I could feel that she felt that I clearly took Natalia's side and that, for some incomprehensible reason to me, had annoyed her. I leaned down next to her and whispered, "Seriously, are you so bothered that she can't digest Virginia Woolf?" "Yes, it bothered me," he said. “And, I thought,” he continued, “that you remembered that she is my favorite author. She got me into publishing. "Virginia.. And her tits," he added warmly. Aman with those Wolf's tits! What was unique about them? The whole story had really upset me. And it had also opened up my writing appetite. What if indeed, I thought, Principal Wolfe's cleavage had some metaphysical transformative power? What if her breasts were made of some kind of fleshy kryptonite that made all the dolls around them go berserk? Could it be, I wisely extended my thoughts, that there was no Virginia Woolf but only her lusty space-twins – her tits, I mean – playing among the lilies, as the hymn says? Could it be, I asked myself again, that the essence lies in the famous Achaemenis, the inventor of the bra?
Then, the work that up to that moment seemed a bit uninteresting to me, offered me a religious level education! In the fourth act, in the scene in Darius's palace, where Atossa, his nymphomaniac wife, spreads her lovely legs on the table, with those black stiletto heels glittering, there came to my nostrils the smell of the glue from the "Panini" cards, with the figures of football players, which we used to buy in droves. It was clearly a fetish memory. Like the heels on her shapely legs. So, it's logical to conclude, Woolf's heels, football figures, and swags are connected through a fetishistic memory-adolescent web, in the broadest, again, Freudian sense, if you know what I mean. If not, that's okay. I understood. And this was the reason for me to start writing. That same evening, late at home, after half a bottle of our beloved Burgundy Pinot Noir and a couple of rolled cigarettes, I had already written the first twenty pages, diving deep into 'Virginia Woolf's Cleavage', clutching them, with the widest, as always, hyperrealistic sense of the term.
The rest in the book.
*Cover photo: Helmut Newton's Private Property Collection “Bulgari Fitting, Paris” original fine art taken in Paris, 1980.