Paul Snoek

Nobody looking at a photo of me would believe it’s more than eight years since I was last touched. Not counting occasional violence and subsequent medical treatment. I don’t count those; I’m talking about other sorts of touch: love, lust, that kind of thing. I’m a natural blond, with dimples in my buttocks and big breasts; they call me Dolly here. That’s not my name. As far as possible I try not to get involved, but that can’t be taken for granted if you look the way I do. The lesbos and machos pay a kind of spiteful, persistent attention to me. 

I like visiting the library, it’s safe there. And quiet – there’s always noise everywhere else; the shrill decibels that all those women combine to produce! 

Our library is of course a grateful dumping ground for the old books that regular libraries or big-hearted do-gooders with rehabilitation ideals no longer want. The small volume ‘Hercules Poems’ by Paul Snoek is one of them, from 1960 – when I was wasn’t even born yet. But on reading that poem ‘A Swimmer is a Horseman’ I abruptly started to cry. That’s never happened to me before. I was given permission to google Paul Snoek. 

I stared long and hard at a grainy black-and-white photo. The poet in full regalia, with bare upper body and open jeans. He was bald, with dark eyebrows and a perfect build. Chest hair between the nipples ran down in a narrow line before, already fuller, disappearing into the trousers. Who wouldn’t want to nestle in there? Square shoulders and hairy forearms, beautiful outlines of collar bones, the vague demarcation of ribs – but it was that belt hanging loose and that wide open zip that drove me a little bit crazy. Eventually the supervisor sent me back to my table. I copied out the poem and returned to my cell. Until my application was approved and the swimsuit delivered, I reread the poem. ‘Swimming is dissolute sleeping in floundering water, is loving with every still useable pore, is being endlessly free and inwardly triumphing’ – I couldn’t wait! 

Today’s the day. My first time. I’ve put my swimsuit on already, back in my cell. It felt like wearing sexy lingerie under work overalls when I walked to the pool, my body invisibly wrapped in a titillating secret.  

I haven’t seen the inside of a swimming pool since my schooldays. Did they build it like a bunker here specially, a prison within a prison? No windows to see the sky outside, the tiled walls white without a dolphin or anything. But the bottom! That colour – turquoise, it took me a moment to find the right word. In prisons concrete is the colour of concrete, steel the colour of steel; even our uniforms are the colour of concrete and steel, and formica here comes in ten shades of vomit. 

I’m allocated lane 2. 

I lower myself into the water. Colder than expected; my nipples shrink. Then I go and lie on my front in that lively light blue. The crawl. I can still do it. Like a knife through butter; no, like a finger through butter. 

The water feels like silk, butter soft, smooth, cool silk. I’m gliding through... silken sheets. Under the sheet, under water, are hands that glide along my whole body, without stopping. Stroked from throat to feet. My goodness. ‘And swimming is feeling solitude with fingers’ – those are the fingers that touch me, soft, smooth, cool fingers, light and fleetingly stroking my armpits, my breasts, my sides, my hips, my belly, my thighs, my calves, my insteps... 

I shut out all the ugliness, narrow my field of vision to the rippling blue sheets – tunnel vision has always been one of my most useful qualities – and still see only the black central line on the bottom: that line is Paul Snoek’s chest hair and I’m following him into the deep. I swim between silk sheets along Paul Snoek’s naked body. My god. I spread my arms, spread my legs wide and kick like a quick frog, endlessly free. 

I must have ordered a swimsuit a size too small; it’s pulled into both my splits. I leave it that way, it applies pressure. Swimming is ‘telling ancient secrets with arms and legs...’ The ancient secret of my blood-pounding, famished, glowing cunt, yes. My cunt throbs in my throat. 

I’ve never learnt to breathe underwater, so I hold my head up, from time to time laying a hot cheek on the cool water, and then I hear myself breathing, panting now, the way you hear yourself panting when you’re lying with your ear on Paul Snoek’s chest. Paul Snoek, I’m swimming, with all my pores wide open, between our smooth sheets, along your long body straight towards your pubic hair. Are you ready for me? O. 

This story is written by Caro Van Thuyne for Het Rode Oor 2019. Het Rode Oor (The Red Ear) is the annual erotic writing contest in the Low Countries, curated by the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren in collaboration with Company New Heroes, Hard//hoofd, ILFU and the Writer’s Guide (to the Galaxy). This story is translated by Liz Waters.