Por Anna Zalewski

A girl's love affairs often vary in intensity and duration. One never knows at the outset how long one will remain in the perpetual state of bliss that infatuation brings. Better not to question and accept without inhibition what few moments one has with the object of one's blooming affection.

So it was with me and the octopus. We met I don't know where in an epoch of my life now long forgotten. He was lean in his purple coat, studded with cheeky little suckers. An impossible combination of puckered and smooth. The way he wound himself around the plate was practically obscene. A sight to see.

I knew immediately that he was more basic need than fickle fancy. A calling, one might say, if one were to classify such a thing rhetorically. And he knew what he was about. No question. A girl couldn't help herself, really.

One look at his glistening tentacles and I was on him in a second. The fact that I wasn't the first (nor the last) didn't really matter in the heat of the twisted orgy that was our first encounter.

I had never tasted anything like him before. He was no sweet scallop hanging on a rock by the shore. No pretty prawn with little more ambition in life than to be dipped in a rosy cocktail sauce. No sleepy mussel, bearded for lack of will to swim. No pale imitation squid cousin. No dullard fish. No, no, no, no, no. None of them. Not at all.

The octopus ruled these creatures with a silent, cerebral authority impressive in its reach. Maybe because he tasted so much of the sea. Not the mild Carribean with its frothy waves and salty kisses, but the Jules Verne depths of the open sea. A sea that swallows entire ships and buries sailors in graves over which black seaweed sways. A sea that patiently extinguishes the glowing embers of battle blasted galleons and takes their treasures to its watery vault. A sea that eats the night.

How can a girl resist such power, especially once it has her in its multi-limbed grasp? She can flee or recoil before it, at first. But once it has a hold on her, she must give herself over whole and go to her perdition.

So it was with us. Following those nights of helpless ardour, the octopus would disappear for months at a time. He never said good-bye much less told me where he was going. I could imagine, I suppose, but I didn't want to.

I kept the memory of our nights intact, unsullied by the absences. That's not to say that the memories remained discrete. No. They grew one on top of another, a polymorphic, shifting, living mass of sensuous delight: his slight saltiness, the white pink violet red look of him, his soft sea smell, the give of his elasticity, even the softly smacking sound of him. Memories studded with the green hats of pungent capers, rigid bites of purple onion, wilting arugula, crisp ciabatta, tart drops of sunny lemon, reflecting pools of golden oil, hard pinched grains of black pepper and shimmering crystals of salt.

He often came to me in dreams–floating on dark ocean waves, part taut, part loose, tempting me. His pulsing mass would submerge itself in the waves and reappear again on the horizon, beckoning.

How I wanted the octopus in those first days of our love. And want him still.

The only thing that's changed is that I know where to look for him now –and when. The morning market stalls of studied fish mongers will often bring him out unadorned. Sometimes he's modestly turned out for a lunch special at a small restaurant by the sea. In the evenings, he's often reeking of paprika at the local tapas bar. And by night, he revels in the glitz of a hot supper club, caught up by a trend. One might say that he gets around.

I've learned to look for him on his good days, too. Days when he won't disappoint me with a stiff reserve or, worse yet, the repulsive tang of his on-shore dissoluteness. There's a fine line between slightly sea-inebriated mouthfuls of him and the putrid stench of his descent into the depths of wanton deterioration. I prefer to avoid him then, knowing he'll repent and return in his full glory eventually.

Nobody ever said that loving him was easy. I won't even try to pretend that it hasn't cost me. But the price I've paid hardly matters compared to the oceans of pleasure he's brought me night after infatuated night. What pleasure, what wonder, what tentacled sea.

 

 

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