oneThat first euphoric swirl

that blossomed between her thighs shook her bony, nine-year-old body as she watched an old episode of Tarzan on TV.

Wearing a loincloth, toasted by the sun, with eyes as green as the jungle and skin oily with tropical sweat, Tarzan had fallen into a thick swamp. His naked torso writhed in his efforts to escape drowning, and his arms flapped like the wings of a pterodactyl.

Lucía didn’t know what came over her. Tremors shook her from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair. It was a different thrill from the one on the slide or the seesaw, and she knew she could not tell anyone about it. She spent many afternoons scouring reruns, but the swamp episode never aired again. It was as if the gentlemen in charge of programming had censored it for her own good. She recreated the scene over and over in her imagination, but only achieved a faint imitation of the thrill.

She lost her virginity nine years later outside her nation’s borders, when she spent a year at a finishing school for young women in Montreux, Switzerland. The school’s motto was “Initiative. Imagination. Independence.” She had gone out with her friends to a bar in the small town. The lounge was decorated like a science lab, with white tiled floors and a bar made of frosted glass. Bartenders in white coats poured flavored martinis into test tubes.

Sprawled on a black leather couch, Lucía and Ximena, her best friend, chain smoked and drank Bellinis as they marveled at the efficiency, cleanliness, punctuality, and modernity of the Swiss. They stood up to dance with some of their classmates, because dancing with other women was normal in Europe. The lights in synch with the beat made everything turn orange, red, or purple. The effect was baffling, as if she were transported to a new spot every time she blinked.

A tall young man with thin lips was leaning against the bar, watching Lucía dance. She stared back at him, a flush spreading across her cheeks. In one feline movement, he strode across the room and stood beside her. His dark, slanted eyes smiled. He introduced himself as Enzo and explained in English that he was from Turin and was there for a master’s degree in economics. The moment he heard a slow song, he took her by the waist and started to oscillate with the fluidity of a metronome. He smelled like booze. She struggled to rest her head in the nook between his chest and his armpit, because she couldn’t reach his shoulder. She felt like she was made of strands of Oaxaca string cheese. The moment the music picked up; Enzo led her off the dance floor.

“Put on your coat and let’s go,” he ordered.

“Where?” said Lucía.

“To my place.”

“Why don’t we go out to get some air?” said Lucía.

“In this cold?”

Lucía and Ximena had a tacit agreement to encourage each other’s conquests. Ximena complied without a second thought. She went to join the ‘nuns’ that were gossiping on another couch, criticizing Lucía.

Enzo and Lucía pushed themselves against the February winds to reach the tram stop. Under the white light of the tram, Enzo seemed a bit lugubrious. He was not as handsome as the loud and gesticulating Italian youths she had seen on the streets of Rome when she and her friends went to mass at St. Peter’s. One of those Italians had given her a loud smooch right in her ear halfway up the Spanish Steps.

Lucía comforted herself imagining that they would just chat in the living room. Enzo would kiss her. They would make out cozily by candlelight. He would take her back to the dorm, and that would be that.

But that wasn’t that. There was no living room. Enzo guided her to his bedroom. A Buddha smiled placidly on a shelf above a mattress laid directly on the wooden floor, its sheets in disarray. Enzo lit a candle and played an unpredictable saxophone tune on the stereo. He laid Lucía down on the mattress. He took off his shirt. His torso, creamy like the marbles at the Vatican, was sprinkled with a constellation of moles. Lucía kissed him around the nipples and on the collarbone. He unbuttoned her blouse and undid her bra. He whipped his belt loose and got naked with the same economy of movement he had displayed all night. Terrified, Lucía peeked at his thick, hard, red penis. She had never seen one up close. Enzo undressed her.

“May I?” he asked.

“No,” she answered.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m a virgin.”

He smiled for the second time that night. He rummaged with his hand beneath a pillow, took out a condom, tore the wrapper, and put it on.

Lucía crossed herself mentally. This is it. There’s no going back. Que Dios te agarre confesada—May God have mercy on your soul.

Enzo opened her legs with his and tried to get inside her. Lucía screamed.

“Relax. It will only hurt more if you don’t.”

Lucía closed her legs and squeezed her narrow vagina, trying to keep him out. He burrowed in. She covered his panting with a howl. He silenced her with a heavy, salty hand over her mouth.

Lucía became very docile and tried to breathe like the sweaty women she had seen in labor in the movies. She prayed he’d finish soon. She could not arouse the slightest hint of pleasure, never mind orgasm. To her surprise, he came in a heartbeat compared to the eternity it took him to get there. She breathed with relief when he got off her. A strange emotion pierced her body. She shed two silent tears. Enzo got up and she stayed in bed, in shock, while her organs rearranged themselves beneath the sheets. He came back with two glasses of a transparent liquid that smelled like oranges.

“Congratulations,” he toasted. “I like you because you didn’t cry.”

The sweet and bitter liqueur relaxed her, but as she got up to use the bathroom, she saw the bloodstained sheets. She had imagined that the rupture of her hymen would reveal itself as a little red dot. This looked like a homicide.

She remembered the grotesque words of Sister Márgara, the Prefect of Discipline of her high school, a nun with a face like a rancid olive: “You can’t copulate during menstruation for the simple reason that men smell the blood, like the stallions smell the mares, and the bulls smell the heifers, and the dogs smell the bitches.” That is what the nun said to quell the rumor that ran through the school about not being able to get pregnant if you did it during your period. Imagine the Sister’s face if she saw her now.

“Don’t worry, they can be washed,” Enzo said, bundling up the sheets.

In the bathroom, more blood mixed with other liquids poured out of her. She felt like peeing but couldn’t. Her inner thighs were smeared with dried blood. She wet toilet paper in lukewarm water and cleaned herself up, unable to stop shaking. She came back to bed and laid next to Enzo, who was already snoring. Lucía gazed at his massive shoulders and put her hand on his back, but it felt like a fake gesture, so she took it back. She felt proud and ashamed, happy, and lost, liberated and anguished. Her thoughts fluttered like moths around a flame. The first one she caught was very simple: “Such a big deal... over this?” Despite the pain and the fright, it seemed to her the most natural thing, like the birth of a calf she had once witnessed at a farm. It didn’t seem so sinful. “I’m sure they all fuck, but they don’t talk about it,” she thought.

The heavens did not part and the wrath of God did not descend upon the face of the earth. Lightning did not cleave her in two, the earth did not swallow her, and when Sister Márgara’s ghost appeared to condemn her, Lucía obliterated it with a sigh. “No means no” was a phrase that did not occur to her until several years later, when she found herself in a similar, but much less ambiguous, situation.

Her mother had warned her more than once that men only wanted one thing and that once they got it, they lost respect for you, and that she and her father expected her to be a virgin on her wedding day. She also told her that the first time for a woman was sheer torture and anyone who believed otherwise was an idiot. Thanks to those little pearls of wisdom, Lucía knew not to expect much. It was because of her mother that her first time had not been the biggest letdown of her life. She thought that if the nuns at school would have warned them about how much it hurt, perhaps fewer girls would have gone for it. But what did the creepy nuns know about this bizarre glory?

She wanted to take a shower, but she was embarrassed to wake Enzo up and ask him for a towel. She got dressed quietly and when she opened the door to leave the room, it creaked and woke him.

“Where are you going?” he mumbled.

“To the boarding school. I’ll call a cab.”

“It’s almost five a.m. Stay.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“I have to sleep in the dorm.”

Enzo could not believe her childishness. What is the etiquette for a situation like this? She had been taught not to put her elbows on the dinner table, to say please, excuse me, and thank you, but they hadn’t told her what to say to the guy who pops your cherry and wants you to wake up next to him on his mattress on the floor. She felt an urgent need to get to her room, put on her pajamas and go to bed, praying that the headmistress would not be waiting for her, and that Ximena would be asleep. The shower would have to wait. Enzo called her a cab.

“Ciao,” he said, standing at the door naked. He gave her a minuscule peck on the lips.

“Thanks for everything,” she said.

She pressed her forehead to the icy cab window and watched the town go by. She felt like everything around her was more intense. The fog of dawn. The chemical breath of the car’s heating system. The driver’s abetting silence. She would have liked to shout her news to the four winds and wake up the entire town: “I have passed the trial by fire. I am not the same as before. Grítenme, piedras del campo”.

She got out of the cab distracted but alert at the same time. The porter, a mustachioed and temperamental Turk, eyed her suspiciously. The school’s administration had decided that it was preferable for the girls to come in and out the main door instead of sneaking out of the windows after hours and breaking their ankles and shoulders. When she arrived at the gate, Lucía’s fist unfurled, revealing 10 Swiss Francs. The porter let her in.

She put on her long flannel nightie in the dark, hid the incriminating panties under the mattress, and got into bed.

“Where were you? What happened?” Ximena whispered.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Lucía answered. For now, she had no words.

“Are you okay?” asked Ximena.

“I’m perfect. Goodnight, Xim.”

A moment later, little birds announced a new day.