‘I have no idea what happened to her that last day.’ Your voice was helpless, despairing. ‘When I came to this flat I found her painting a mural across the entire wall. I had no idea when she’d found the time to obtain all the paints and brushes. She’d only been here for a couple of months. She looked lovely, in a short pink skirt and a white blouse. Her face showed clear signs of fatigue. I might have mistaken her for a schoolgirl had those breasts so familiar to me not been conspicuously pert, had I not noticed the shapely calves and knees – which had nothing girlish about them, they were every inch a woman’s – and the thighs that had accommodated men’s tears. She looked beautiful. Her hair was gathered at her neck. The paintbrushes were tucked into her waist. Pots of paint were scattered over the floor. She’d been painting both sitting and standing, shifting the chair around as needed. My regret over the disfigured wall was fleeting, and I began to enjoy the scene. The painting gradually came to life on the enormous wall.

‘She painted a life-sized couple – man and woman – on the huge blank canvas of the wall. The couple were making love, in an unusual pose. Strangely, the impression was one of both extreme sexuality and total detachment. As though she was trying to say that sex is a form of self-discovery, and that the immediate aftermath involves tearing oneself away at the very moment of this discovery. Because you’re constantly striving to get to that someone else inside you – and no sooner has sex afforded you that sensation than it isolates you, like the seed spat out by the exploding fruit. This post-coital loneliness is the root of all despair. You desire to be conjoined, it’s all you want – you cannot ask for anything more divine. To be joined with someone within you – this is the only demand that remains constant throughout a human being’s life. We eat, sleep, engage in conversation, but a part of our minds remains submerged in sex all the while – there, sex is constantly being enacted, a penis enters a vagina, touches its soft muscles, life touches life, returns, goes back, returns again, goes back again …

‘As she painted she became increasingly aroused, and kept inviting me to make love to her. So I did. She screamed as she climaxed, “I love it, I love it,” so loud it made the walls shake. At one point our skin seemed to fuse together.

‘It was late at night by the time she was done with the painting. That was the first time I stayed over so late. I stayed, I was able to stay, because all the doubts in my mind had been extinguished by then. I’d decided to tell everyone about her. My elderly mother, my children, my siblings. Everyone. And I’d decided to tell her, ten days later, on her birthday – to tell her what she’d already told me, over and over again as she clung to my arm. I would say the words and watch the surprise jump into her eyes. She would either burst into tears or stare at me in silence, but then she would jump up and cry out, “We’ll get married? We’ll get married? Will there be music all day and all night?”