We will hear Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and Manuel de Falla’s El Amor brujo, a ballet score about a Spanish sorcerer and Gypsy passion, whose title conjures for me the label of a cologne my mother always wears, a black mantilla and a clutch of blooms printed beneath the words Flor de Blas. She’s bought a black mantilla herself, and for special occasions pins it in her hair, dons a jingling trio of thin silver bracelets, fastens a gardenia to her collar and enters my room on a cloud of Flor de Blas, underpinned by the duskier scent of the gardenia, to kiss me good night because they are going…Where on earth are they going? A party for the men who work at the missile sites, dinner in a fancy Mexican restaurant? Everyone is proud that I do not require a baby-sitter; I like to be home alone: there is reading, there are Tarzan movies on TV, or badly dubbed Italian movies about Hercules, always the same: a hero, a princess, a tiresome comic dwarf. At some point Hercules will be tortured, which is the best part: strapped to a table or tied to a tree, oiled and naked but for a loincloth or a short white pleated skirt, the hero will ripple and writhe. The best part of El Amor brujo is called “Ritual Fire Dance,” a sexy appellation redolent of Hercules or Yma Sumac.

I have discovered masturbation, or at least a prepubescent version thereof. My parents have a back massager, a black contraption with a red rubber tip shaped like a suction cup; plug it in and switch it on and the cup vibrates back and forth so rapidly you can’t really see it move, just a blur at the tip. They keep it in their bedside table, in a drawer beneath the alarm clock with its glowing radium dial and its frame of blue-tinted mirror glass. When they’re gone I go and get it, plug in the long black cord, and then hold the head of it in my lap, right up against myself; the vibration, through the cloth of my pants, produces an irresistible pleasure, the perfect accompaniment to the travails of Hercules. This delight ends in a crescendo suddenly almost too intense to stand then turns to pain: Ritual Fire Dance. I’m too young for an ejaculation, but something’s happened, a peak and culmination. Now hide it, quick, put it back in exactly the position you found it.