Talk twenty two.
Bali, 28th December
- I’m fed up with those surprises!
- What? Don’t you like that tropical climate here with frequent downpours? Is rain on Bali in December a surprise?
- After one day of the rainfall here everything is flowing!
- In the streets of Seminyak flows a river in which cars move bumper to bumper and around each of them circulate about twenty motorcycles.
- That’s why those five kilometres from our Laki Uma Villa, to which we came back for the last three days on Bali, took an hour by taxi to take us to Seminyak.!
- Mahendra came to Laki Uma riding on his little scooter wetted to the skin.
- I gave him my underwear, so that he didn’t get a cold. He arrived on time because he’d agreed to come to see us!
- I’d been exchanging e-mails with him for some months before we came here.
- Why with him?
- In spite of his young age his writing was mature. As a young man is well educated, speaks very good English, and he doesn’t meet tourists looking for adventures.
- That’s what it looked like in your mails. Often is the reality different. He’s twenty five but looks much younger. Why did he want to meet us?
- He looks like a boy but intellectually he’s got much of a man. He said that being Polish, we were extremely exotic for him and he liked our sincere exchange of e-mails.
- He is Indonesian but his roots are Chinese. Did you write about sex in your mails?
- Yes, we did. I’d clearly written about our reasons for meeting local men. He knew we didn’t hunt for sex. Mahendra dreams of going to Europe. He’d like to be a male nurse. His sister is already a student in Germany.
- What about his profession?
- As a graduate in economics in Bali he doesn’t have much to look for outside the country.
- What was Mahendra looking for spending his time with us?
- He may’ve liked us. It was so nice of him to have brought some Indonesian delicacies for our last dinner at Laki Uma.
- I liked the beautiful t-shirts with „ I ♥ Bali” he gave us as presents.
- It was the first time when we got something from a local person. It was obvious from Mahendra’s stories that he had rich parents, and he himself made good money.
- Why did you let him stay with us for the night?
- I consulted the issue with you, didn’t I?
- He’d talk about his loneliness the whole evening.
- He’d also tell us about his feelings that it was impossible for him to make anybody attracted to him, since he at all wasn’t sexy.
- That’s a matter of opinion. Did someone persuade this to him? Did anybody hurt him?
- I wouldn’t know that. He said he’d been longing for a moment when he’d meet his man.
- But it mustn’t be an Asian. It must be a Caucasian! When I asked him what was wrong with Asians, he’d answer with his index finger going deeply into his open mouth...
- So, he’s in trouble. Fortunately, on Bali there are many representatives of the white race originating from Australia.
- Not necessarily in the role of fiancés or candidates for husbands for the Balinese.
- His determination is very strong. He’d confess how much he needed sex. With one partner or even with two at a time.
- Was that a suggestion?
- Yes, it was. Not a suggestion. A request. A request to let him stay with us…
- I must’ve missed that part of the conversation.
- … to let him stay in bed with us. To let him cuddle up to us. Not to cast him off. And we, in turn, could do what we wanted. We could go to sleep. We could be touching him. We could make love to him. We could have him „in a sandwich”, as he put it. We could do nothing. He just couldn’t be alone that night.
- I can tell that Mahendra could sooner turn me sexually on than Seth, for example.
- I wish you’d said this earlier. As gently as I could, I was trying to explain to him that we didn’t do threesome sex and our denial had nothing to do with his idea not being sexy enough .
- Was he sexy for you?
- Unfortunately, not. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He may be extremely sexy for many guys, may he not?
- Of course. We were sleeping three of us in our huge bed the whole night without any hanky panky.
- Who was sleeping, was sleeping well. I was waking up every now and then controlling the time. Mahendra had to get up before five in the morning to get on his bike and get home before dawn.
- Before the parents would wake up.
- They treat him as a young boy. I think they know his preferences and try to protect him from something which is inevitable, anyway.
- Well?
- From leaving the home nest for good.
- There’s a question that bothers me. Why did your relationship with Jarek fail?
- It didn’t, it didn’t. Would you call a failure four years spent together? Considering great differences in our characters.
- The differences weren’t evident when you first met?
- They must’ve been. The question remains whether I wanted to see them. After a dramatic period of the years 92/93, I wished to enjoy every moment of my life. It eventually came to my mind that the carpe diem life approach – a sentence from Horace’s poetry: "Seize the Day, putting as little trust as possible in the future", makes sense. Enough of pain, enough of pretending that I had been enjoying life.
- Pretending? I heard that you always used to look happy. You used to be smiling all the time.
- I did, I did. There used to be problems with that smile of mine, too. What could make me smile? Was I satisfied enough with myself? Never. Was I satisfied with my life? From time to time. I’d smile to everybody because such approach to people I’ve got in my blood. The approach got fixed during my travels abroad, mainly in the USA. I didn’t feel like parading around with my trouble showing sad faces or deep frustration.
- As most of the Poles do.
- Our countrymen consider smile as something suspicious. Joy should be obscured because it’s subject to envy. Poles think that there’s little to enjoy in life. Sadness is a symptom of seriousness and an honest approach to life.
- Did anybody make any comments?
- I’d repeatedly hear: You are the lucky one! You don’t have any problems! What wonderful life you have!
-Thanks to whom?
- At the beginning I’d answer saying that everybody had their right to have problems of their own, but not everybody needed to notify about them the rest of the world. And my life’s been my own creation especially as far making it fun is concerned.
- What took that smile off your face?
- Extinguished it. Saying it in a more poetic way. Some professional and personal experiences did. They mainly consisted of contacting thousands of people who influenced my functioning in private and professional life.
- What exactly happened?
- The question has to wait for its answer. Now I’m only prepared to cite one event which despite its innocence made me think. Well, when PROGRESS still would share premises with one of private schools, there always was a big traffic of students on the staircase. One of those young, very well dressed ladies, passing me commented loudly: He must be a strange guy. “Whenever I see him, he always smiles”.
- Did it worry you so much?
- No it didn’t. But it sounded for a long time in my mind, and I kept the comment as a reference point for my forthcoming life considerations.
