The last day of her life, the legendary popular singer Vine Apsara woke sobbing from a dream of human sacrifice in which she had been the intended victim. Baretorsoed men resembling the actor Christopher Plummer had been gripping her by the wrists and ankles. Her body was splayed out, naked and writhing, over a polished stone bearing the gravies image of the snakebird Quetzalcoatl.
The open mouth of the plumed serpent surrounded a dark hollow scooped out of the stone, and although her own mouth was stretched wide by her screams the only noise she could hear was the popping of flashbulbs; but before they could slit heartthrob before her lifeblood could bubble into that terrible cup, she awoke at noon in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, in an unfamiliar bed with a half-dead stranger by her side, a naked mentis male his early twenties, identified in the interminable press coverage that followed the catastrophe as Ra Paramour, the playboy heir of a well-known local construction baron, one of whose corporate owned the hotel.
She had been perspiring heavily and the sodden bed sheets stank of the meaningless misery of the nocturnal encounter. Raul Paramour was unconscious, white-lipped, and his body was galvanized, every few moments, by spasms which Vine recognized as being identical to her own dream writhing.
After a few moments he began to make frightful noises deep in his windpipe, as if someone were slitting his throat, as if his blood were flowing out through the scarlet smile of an invisible wound into a phantom goblet.
Vine, panicking, leapt from the bed, snatched up her clothes, the leather pants and gold-sequined bustier in which she had made her final exit, the night before, from the stage of the city’s convention centre.
Contemptuously, despairingly, she had surrendered herself to this nobody, this boy less than half her age, she had selected him more or less at random from the backstage throng, the lounge lizards, the slick, flower-bearing suitors, the industrial magnates, the aristocrat, the drug under lords, the tequila princes, limousines and champagne and cocaine and may be even diamonds to bestow upon the evenings star.
1. Why was Vine perspiring when she woke up?
Vina was perspiring as she had just woken up from a fearful nightmare. However she was perspiring also because she had woken up at noon in the city of Mexico, where the St. Valentine’s Day may be expected to be hot at that time. There seems to be a connection between the heat of the atmosphere and the internal heat of her excitation.
2. What impression do you get of Vina’s profession?
The profession of a popular public figure such as of Vina has been exposed with ruthless precision in these passages. Not only being a popular singer she cannot hide from the public eye, but she cannot also share with them her loneliness. Thus she is wary of both the public and herself and treats both of them with contempt. Vina’s behaviour may seem only natural when juxtaposed with the real life story of many popular female singers in the West, and that is how she becomes a representative of her profession.
3. Comment on the term ‘aristocrat’.
The word “aristotrash’ is a portmanteau word, a word formed by fusing two words with different meanings into one, in order to pack both their meanings into one word. Here the word also bears severe compression of both Vina’s feeling of contempt for such people and a comment on their moral disposition.
4. Comment on the significance of Vina’s dream.
Vina’s dream is not only a reflection of her anxiety, her feeling of insecurity and her loneliness, but also an intuition of her imminent death. Moreover, its erotic suggestions indicate that her I dream is also a reflection of “the meaningless misery of the nocturnal encounter”. If can be observed from the very appropriateness of this phrase to describe both her sexual act with a stranger and her experience of the nightmare. A similar parallelism between death and sexual act (or love making) can be seen in the fact that the day of reference is both “St. Valentine’s Day” and “the last day of her life.”