I live in my imagination. How beautiful life can be then. Sitting on the sofa, I talk to people who may once have existed, but more often they are inventions of my own.
Sometimes I dream of beautiful women with a penis between their legs, while my partner, in a ridiculous leotard, performs elderly gymnastics in front of our large television.
“At least take off that wig!” I shout, because it already looks like a mop, and all that sweating does not improve it. I immediately receive a malicious reply.
“The whole world has known me as a woman for forty years, and you still can’t accept that in your ridiculous uniform. Why don’t you wear something cheerful for a change? Do you ever hear me complain that I am condemned to spend the rest of my life in a bad war film?”
I want to say that those people who have known her as a woman for forty years never knew her… him… as a horny blond boy with a fine Aryan face, a tight jawline now hidden behind folds of skin resembling used tea bags.
That blond boy who so enjoyed being sternly interrogated by me when he came home at six in the morning from the Argos, his eager lower deck leading the way.
Perhaps that is the beauty of old age. You can stare ahead with the expression of someone who still intends to tidy the shed that very day, while your mind is filled with all kinds of obscene fantasies causing a storm of emotions in head and heart, everywhere except in your incontinence diaper, where everything remains, as the Germans so beautifully put it: Tote Hose.
As for myself, I no longer concern myself with being a woman or a man. I have forgotten when I first woke up with the thought that I would decide for myself what I would be that day. At a certain age, no one is interested in your gender anyway. To most young people I am simply that old butch dyke walking around in a bizarre DDR uniform, in rain, fog, or sunshine.
Of course, I once felt like a woman and lived as one, but it attracted a strange category of sticky men who preferred “a little extra weight” and would happily lick my feet. I already found that absurd at the time, as I weighed 145 kilos, and I rather enjoyed that. I knew I could not rely on my facial features, unlike my partner Broomstick in those days.
I threw away all photographs from that period. I have nothing left from earlier times. I do not like to think about it too often. What a time it was. Being a woman meant resembling Mies Bouwman, Mieke Telkamp, or Jasperina de Jong, and I most closely resembled the sister of a comic character.
I received plenty of attention from men as a voluptuous curiosity, and I genuinely made an effort to look appealing, but you inevitably attract a certain type of man with masochistic tendencies, for whom pleasure consisted of burying their head between your artificial breasts and pressing the implants together so hard that minutes later they would resurface, red-faced and short of breath, only to plant a damp moustached kiss on your mouth. And they always had to say they loved me deeply before putting on their dull raincoat and cycling home. To their wives, who had been boiling sprouts for half an hour.
I had become the woman I always wanted to be, but I derived little pleasure from it. At most the satisfaction that it was primarily heterosexual men who approached me, almost the same types who had mocked and insulted me at school.
It was a burden to be a desired fetish object, though there was some money in it. I posed for art students at the academy. There I learned that respectable people can also be great perverts. All those types with curtain hair and a parting down the middle, panting behind their easels when I turned just a little too suggestively.
That is where I met, long before Broomstick, a certain Harry. He attended evening classes, as he worked during the day at a printing shop producing wedding and birth announcements. You could wake me in the middle of the night and I could still tell you everything about typesetting.
Harry was very different from the day students. Short hair, a slight quiff, a moustache.
“You are my muse,” he would always say.
I had no idea what he meant, but he would get a tremendous erection whenever he said it, so who was I to complain about unusual vocabulary?
He constantly took me on outings. Zandvoort, the Efteling, Madurodam.
I would throw his sketches away as soon as I got home. That always made him a little sad, but a sketch is a sketch, and I was waiting for something finished. I understood at least that much.
One day it happened. Three days before my birthday, Harry arrived with a large panel of masonite on which he had painted the image shown on the left page.
“That doesn’t look like me at all, Harry. And I never owned a swimsuit like that.” According to Harry, I misunderstood. It was a “free interpretation,” or whatever he meant by that.
Time does strange things to a person. Ten years later I had convinced myself that I truly was the voluptuous woman Harry had seen through his artist’s eye.
Perhaps I should take the painting out of the shed after all.
Madame Boissevin
Part of the Madame Boissevin archive →