Carla Van Raay - The Price of Passion

CONTENTS

For Aaron

Love is an inescapable reality

that knocks you

senseless

takes your breath away

and leaves no heart beating

but its own

Nirmala, untitled poem

The Price of Passion is the eagerly awaited sequel to Carla van Raays international bestselling memoir, Gods Callgirl.

A former nun and prostitute, Carla van Raay thought she had come to terms with her traumatic past. But then she received a phone call that threatened to upset the balance once again.

Carla had first met Aaron at a tumultuous time in her life. She had left a convent after 13 years of bitter cruelty, lost her virginity in a brutal fashion to a man she barely knew, and then hastily got married before giving birth to a beautiful daughter. Now Aaron was back. And whats more he wanted to resume a relationship that had been intense, yet short-lived. But so much had happened since then. Carla had left her husband and, after years of repression in the convent, had turned to prostitution.

The Price of Passion is a very personal story written with honesty and raw emotion. It is the story of two people who have tried to overcome abusive pasts embarking on a new, yet equally challenging, journey; but neither could have foreseen what lay ahead.

Carla van Raay was born into the Catholic south of Holland and emigrated to Melbourne, Australia with her family in 1950, when she was twelve. After an abusive childhood, she entered a convent at the age of eighteen. She finally left in 1969 when she was almost thirty-one. She married and had a daughter. When her marriage ended and she found herself alone and with a child to support, she turned to prostitution. Her bestselling memoir Gods Callgirl is a heartfelt and gripping account of her life. Carla now lives in Perth, Western Australia where she continues to write.

My name is Aaron and I am Carlas partner in this story. I am proud of Carla for writing about our journey for you to read.

We are all human beings who struggle to live separately and together within our relationships. We can have lives of indifference and aloneness. Or we can challenge ourselves to overcome our fears of being open and expose our rich and sensitive lives a complex waterfall of endless moments.

I prefer to take a shower in the waterfall of my life. I spent too long worrying about what I thought of myself, and made myself depressed and defeated and tired in many ways. I dont want that to be my whole life.

I am looking for light. I am looking for kindred spirits to be my friends. Carla was a spark of life and light in my early manhood. The cogs and wheels of life brought her back to me after thirty years as a bright torch to help me look into my dark places. I am looking for closure in those dark places.

This is Carlas story, from her point of view. She is a brave woman. I am challenged by her openness, her innocence, her fearlessness at revealing herself so nakedly.

This story is also about my nakedness.

Nakedness isnt really so bad after the fear has evaporated. What may be left is the very fine and noble soul. We all, in our own way, tap into the same kind of inner life that Carla has. We all fall down and we all try to get up again. I hope you enjoy realising this I truly have.

Love can come, love can go. Only the love you give can remain.

May you all enjoy sharing Carlas story as much as I have.

Gods love to all.

Aaron

My first book, Gods Callgirl, was the frank story of my journey from sexual guilt to radiant innocence. What has happened since the publication of that book is even more extraordinary: it is a love story of the kind that wrings awe from my heart. The divine intelligence that I surrender to every day showed itself to be more compassionate, more creative and more astonishingly loving than I could dare imagine. This book is the story of one womans blossoming into true love. I am sixty-five as I write. May this be an inspiration to all who know that to love is the only way to live, and that it is never, ever too late.

When I was growing up, sex was everywhere lustful, hurting. Its yellow, dirty light darted from the eyes of my grandfather, my fathers brothers, my father himself, and some of the men in my neighbourhood. I felt it warily. I had to be on my guard always, so as not to be taken by surprise as I was so often as a child.

At eighteen, I chose to become a nun and made a vow of chastity: that would take care of sex, wouldnt it? No, it did not! It refused to go away. I even experienced spontaneous orgasms, and in such awkward places as the convents chapel.

I left the convent and married, still without knowing what sex was all about. Then I experienced irresistible chemistry and all-engrossing sex with a much younger man not my husband. This was the catalyst for me wanting to explore my sexuality through prostitution, and Gods Callgirl was born.

The Price of Passion is about sex in a relationship such as Gods Callgirl never experienced. Life arranged for me to meet up again with the man who introduced me to real sex: Aaron. He was nineteen and I was thirty-four when we first met. Thirty years later, we found that the energy between us was still the same, and we continued where wed left off only this time we were so much older, wed experienced different pasts, had built up different habits of thinking and doing. The relationship became a powerful healing for both of us. We discovered that wholesome sex can heal the deeply ingrained attitudes that develop from hurtful experiences and less-than-enlightened choices.

Passion has a price. It may be paid gratefully or not, but it has to be paid. This fact is one of the many lessons within this story.

May you, the reader, share in my journey. I hope my story will inspire you to immerse yourself in any healing your soul longs for.

Carla

Easy is right. Begin right

And you are easy.

Chuang Tzu

EVER SINCE THE publication of my first book, Gods Callgirl, the story of how I became a nun, then a prostitute and healed from both those choices, Id sensed a sea change coming on. What it would look like, or what area of my life it would touch most, I had no idea.

I left my safe haven in Denmark (Western Australia) my secure one-bedroom unit with a glorious garden built up over ten years, my cosy lifestyle with friends I love, my spa in the backyard to answer a strong pull towards the city of Perth. First I was offered a friends house to look after for three months; then came an invitation from two good friends to share their newly built home. I lived there for a year until the house was sold. My next move was to a mansion on the river at Applecross, as a live-in housekeeper. I had my private living space at street level and worked three mornings a week upstairs. I had been there for about a year and a half when my quietly regulated life suddenly changed.

A couple of weeks after an article about Gods Callgirl, with my photo, appears in the local Sunday newspaper I get a message on my answering machine. A male voice: If youre the Carla I think you are, and you have a daughter called Caroline, then Id like to talk to you. He says his name is Aaron, and he leaves his phone number.

You know that strange feeling you get when you see a phone number and youre sure youve rung it sometime in the past, but have no idea when or who it belongs to? My eyes gain focus the way eyes do when they travel back through time and connect the phone number with an address I knew thirty years ago. A rush of memories comes.