Free Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino

could make all the racket we liked all night long without having the fuzz on our tails like always, and we had to go someplace anyway after they threw us out of that dump in Portobello Road, but it was because they wanted to make these new birds that came after us from Hampstead and we didn’t even have time to see who they were or what they looked like, because we always have a whole swarm of groupies after us when we play somewhere, and specially when Robin breaks into Have mercy, have mercy on me, those birds turn on and want to do things right away, and so all the others begin while we’re still up there sweating and playing and I’m hitting those drums
ba-zoom ba-zoom ba-zoom
, and they’re at it, Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, ma’am, and so tonight, just like the other times, we didn’t do anything with these groupies even if they do follow our bunch so logically we ought to make it with them, not those others.
    So now I get up to hunt for this lousy gas stove to put some shillings in it and make it go, I walk with the soles of my feet on hair asses butts beer cans tits glasses of whisky spilled on the carpet, somebody must have thrown up on it too, I better go on all fours, at least I can see where I’m going, and besides I can’t stand up straight, so I recognize people by the smell, our bunch with all that sweat sticking to us is easy to recognize, I can tell us from the others who stink only of their lousy grass and their dirty hair, and the girls too who don’t take many baths, but their smells mix with the others a little and are a little different from the others as well, and every now and then you run into some special smells on these girls and it’s worth lingering a minute and sniffing, their hair for example, when it doesn’t absorb too much smoke, and in other places too, logically, and so I am crossing the room, smelling some of these smells of sleeping girls until at one point I stop.
    As I say, it’s hard really to smell one girl’s skin, especially when you’re all in a big tangle of bodies, but there beneath me I’m surely smelling a girl’s white skin, a white smell with that special force white has, a slightly mottled skin smell probably dotted with faint or even invisible freckles, a skin that breathes the way a leaf’s pores breathe the meadows, and all the stink in the room keeps its distance from this skin, maybe two inches, maybe two fractions of an inch, because meanwhile I start inhaling this skin everywhere while she sleeps with her face hidden in her arms, her long maybe red hair over her shoulders down her back, her long legs outstretched, cool in the pockets behind the knees, now I really am breathing and smelling nothing but her, who must have felt, still sleeping, that I am smelling her and must not mind, because she rises on her elbows, her face still held down, and from her armpit I move and smell what her breast is like, the tip, and since I’m kind of astride, logically it seems the right moment to push in the direction that makes me happy and I feel she’s happy too, so, half-sleeping, we find a way of lying and agree on how I should lie and how she should now beautifully lie.
    Meanwhile the cold we haven’t been feeling we feel afterwards and I remember I was on my way to put shillings in the stove, and I get up, I break away from the island of her smell, I go on crossing among unknown bodies, among smells that are incompatible, or rather repulsive, I hunt in the others’ things to see if I can find some shillings, following the gas-stink I hunt for the stove and I make it work, gasping and stinking more than ever, following its loo stink I hunt for the loo and I piss there, shivering in the gray light of morning that trickles from the little window, I go back into the darkness, the stagnation, the exhalation of the bodies, now I have to cross them again to find that girl I know only by her