Adam in Eden

Chapter 14

When we move from our bed to the world at large (from the bedroom to the boardroom in my case), we become aware of the price we must always pay for any joy we’ve experienced in our love life. Nobody willingly deprives himself of love (except, to an extent, masochists, who, after all, love their proud singularity; and sadists, who take their pleasure to extremes that might be harmful to others). Sometimes, love happens naturally without abuse or hardship. We have been together since forever. Both our families predetermined our love. Who else would I marry but the saint of a girlfriend I’ve gone out with forever? Through my Holguín connections, I know of marriages reminiscent of traditional Hindu practice, arranged when the bride and groom were still children. There are ugly young women who supposedly arrive at the wedding altar as virgins. There are others — I’ve surprised them behind curtains, in the backseats of cars, camouflaged by trees — usually with their official boyfriends, sometimes with men I don’t know, who introduce themselves, sometimes proud, sometimes embarrassed, all of whom rush into nuptials and marry with their fictitious virginity intact.

Because a woman is supposed to be a virgin, whereas a man is not. The stud who shows up at his wedding as a virgin is more of a dud. We suspect him of being impotent, or of being gay and passing, or of convincing himself that he’s straight; he could be latent, he could be a mama’s boy. He could simply be chaste, shy, or unaware of a priestly vocation. On the other side of the aisle, the young woman who does not arrive a virgin is a shameless hussy. There are no excuses. The double standard is the standard. In any case, there are arranged marriages and love-matches that are paid for with undesirable consequences in social life. The horny teenager sleeps with the maid, but it never occurs to him — nor would he be allowed — to marry her. Besides, she would not be comfortable around people she was accustomed to serving, although there are cases, oh yes, there are cases. . There are “distinguished” men married to women who are un-. When asked, they give carnal excuses — she satisfies him like no other woman can — but rarely social ones — she grew up poor, but thanks to me she has been elevated to a higher class.

In a conventional marriage like mine, there are no surprises. As I’ve already pointed out, Priscila is clueless; she says things she shouldn’t say when she should say something else, or to play it safe, remain silent. I have already given enough examples to establish her lack of a compass. And whoever is listening to me already knows that my life with Priscila is a masquerade that I put on in order to become, in my public life, what I am not — nor do I care to be — in my private life. In a moment though, you’ll learn how such a reliable situation can lead to unreliable situations.

Then, to repeat what you already know, there is my life with L, an extended pleasure that can be interrupted by spontaneous speeches that return me to non-erotic reality.

For example, L returns stoked from a Luismi concert at the National Auditorium. L’s admiration for the singer is at once singular and plural. What L tells me about Luismi — he’s so handsome, he sings so well, he sure can move — is all the more significant because ten thousand spectators felt the same way. I understand these collective frames of mind, they are also part of politics, and if in a Luismi concert they are harmless, they become dangerous when instead of a singer, there is a politician holding forth from a balcony and offering a crowd hopes as illusory as those Luismi whispers:

Lie to me

Lie to me some more

Because your wicked ways make me so happy. .

I listen to L and congratulate myself on my own political discretion. Start adding up what you already know: I live in my father-inlaw the King of Bakery’s house; I have a long marriage with Priscila, the deposed Queen of Spring; I go from the house to the office and from the office to the house; I rarely attend social events. .

I extend this discretion to my love life with L — private, satisfying, unmentionable — despite the occasional oddities that threaten to affect it but turn out to be no more than passing swallows.

“Why don’t you shave under your arms?” L asked.

“What?”

“You could shave your armpits.”

“What for, L?”

“To be just like me.”

“But I want to be different.”

“You mean you don’t want to be like me?”

“I like you, understand? That’s enough for me.”

“But you don’t want to be like me.”

“No, I totally prefer the difference.”

“It’s a whim of mine. A tiny whim. This small.”

“I can just picture myself with shaved armpits and then shaving my hairy chest, arms, legs. .”

“And your back, bear cub, don’t forget your back.”

And then we kiss, and the argument is done.

Other times the fault is mine, usually a result of my legal training, which seems to confuse as much as to clarify. A surgeon cannot make a mistake: if he operates for appendicitis on a man with a toothache, his license is revoked. A lawyer, on the other hand, can lie in the sense that he knows his arguments are based on a fallacy that is useful to win a case, to deceive a fool, or to confuse an enemy.

“Where were you on Friday the ninth at six o’clock?”

“Friday the sixth at nine o’clock?”

“You’re lying. .”

“I mean, Friday the ninth at six?”

“You’re contradicting yourself.”

“You’re confusing me, counselor.”

“Why are you confused all of a sudden? What are you trying to hide?”

“Nothing, I swear.”

“Keep your story straight. Why are you trying to deceive me?”

“I. .?”

That is why I can say to L, when I stand up for my right to ejaculate, that semen retention is toxic. I don’t even abstain from saying it in Latin:

Semen retentus venenum est.

L doesn’t care about my Latin expressions. L believes that the retention of semen causes an intense internal orgasm that is far more satisfying than my external spurt.

“Besides,” L ventures, “to retain semen is a mark of sanctity.”

I make a face of feigned surprise: “How would you know that?”

“Saints have semen, but they restrain themselves.”

“You and I are no saintly couple, L. And about saints one can—”

“We can aspire to—”

“You’re so boring.”

“Humor me.”

“Okay. Although I assure you that. .”

I mention these little spats so that you’ll understand what a good relationship I have with L and how we overcome all our differences without ever fighting. Have we done something wrong? Are arguments between couples the spice of love, the prelude to making up? Sex can either free or imprison the eternal savage that we all carry within.

I sometimes think that we are born savages who, if left to our own devices, would act like animals who want nothing more than to survive and to satisfy our instinctive, immediate desires. The philosopher of nature tells us there is no such creature, because natural man lived a life of kindness, whereas every step forward in society is a step toward crime, sin, and the need for prohibitive rules of conduct designed to tame the natural savages that we have been since our beginning.

It seems to me that as soon as he leaves behind the sylvan life to enter society, the savage murders his father and fornicates with his mother. Oedipus usually symbolizes this passage, which, regardless of what happens, imposes on us rules of conduct that we accept with heads hung in shame, because to break those rules would lead us to jail, the gallows, or at least social ostracism.

This myth, though, does little to explain the vicissitudes of love in society and its relationship to such dissimilar aspects as fashion, feelings, aesthetics, or aspirations. With Priscila I cater to the first and last of these requirements. When I go out with her (rarely, as you already know), I submit to fashion and to social aspirations. When I stay in with L, feelings and aesthetics prevail. With L, first I see, and I like and am excited by what I see. Sometimes I am first seized by excitement, and only later do I surrender, gratified, to the contemplation of L’s beauty, tranquility, and beatific gaze, glowing with satisfaction.

The little savage inside me is thus tamed by the pleasure I experience with L. I believe that I also control the intimate beast when I live with Priscila in her father’s house or when we — very, very rarely — attend some high-society event as a couple.

Judge me if you must. Perhaps I was inspired by the freedom of expression allowed to the liberated part of my being (which coexists with L). I might also have been spurred on by the political aspects of another side of that same liberated part of my being (which I use among my business associates — why did they greet me in sunglasses?). For whatever reason, at a seated dinner of twelve people, I reacted impulsively when Priscila, always inappropriate, took advantage of an angel’s passing — an awkward silence at the table — to disturb the peace with a wind of her own.

That release of intestinal exhaust was a single wind in three distinct movements. Priscila first let out a thunderous fart, as if to attract attention, followed by the sound of a succession of bubbles, and ending with a — silent but deadly — gas that reached every nose and spoiled the red snapper that we had just been served. Priscila’s odors were stronger than those of the capers, onions, tomatoes, and fish.

I broke the awkward silence that followed the fart attack by repeating aloud a secular mantra:

“Shut up, Priscila. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The conversation resumed. Tom talked about the fluctuations of the exchange rate. His wife, about the rising costs of groceries. Dick said that he’d covered the Mexico City-Acapulco highway in record time — two hours and fifteen minutes — though nobody noticed and he was awarded no trophy. Mrs. Dick said she’d just returned from Houston with all the latest fashions you just can’t find in Mexico. Harry complained about the price of gasoline, and Mrs. Harry about the vicissitudes of finding good domestic help.

That’s how, among opinions about money earned and money spent, Priscila’s unwelcome airs were dispelled. She didn’t realize I had been responding to her, and answered my statement, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” with a lively, “Tomorrow is Sunday, a day of observance. Hooray!”

I wonder why I said what I said after my wife’s olfactory and aural attack? To divert people’s attention from Priscila’s noticeable passing of gas in a way that would bring us back to the conversation initially interrupted by the proverbial passing of the angel?

My mantra was something of an unforgivable sequel, here and now, to my free and playful conversation with L, making use of the conversational style that I always save for our time together. I don’t usually reveal in public, as I just had, my sense of humor. Likewise, as a reflection of my regular bureaucratic habit of bringing a situation to an end with a sentence that is at once abrupt, gracious, and indisputable, I said, “The sun rises every day.”

Worse, saying “Shut up, Priscila. You don’t know what you’re talking about” was an inappropriate airing of my bad relationship with my wife. My unacceptable faux pas must have made me seem, at the very least, a rotten person to the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. My exclamation, “Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” implied a lack of necessary control over my wife and her explosions, and my own lack of discretion and self-control when the skies thundered, though (and only at the expense of poor Priscila) I had shown my presence of mind in covering up the situation and moving on to something else. As a result, I inspired admiration for my quickness, but also surprise that my reaction was a veiled chastisement of Priscila, known for flouting the law of cause and effect.

“Tomorrow is Sunday.”

Because I don’t accompany her to many dinners in society, I can’t be certain if Priscila’s flatulence is rare or part of her normal digestion at such events. How often has Priscila challenged the environmental purity of a dinner like this one without any reports reaching me? Do they hear her? Are her sonorities lost in the midst of animated conversation? Are they heard and ignored? Do people comment with sarcastic giggles, “Counseler Adam Gorozpe’s wife is Queen of the Fart?”

Feeling, despite myself, like a latter-day Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, I withdrew, complimenting myself on own ability to turn physical nastiness into literary reference.

For, back in the Golden Age of Spanish literature, in the seventeenth century, did not the great Quevedo write that the glory of the asshole is evident because it is “round like a sphere,” and “its place is in the center, like that of the sun,” and that “as it is such a necessary, precious, and beautiful thing, we keep it hidden away in the safest part of our body, protected between two soft walls. . so that even light can’t touch it,” explaining “why we say: ‘Kiss me where the sun don’t shine,’” and adding “that joy reigns between the buttocks,” especially in the case of “the fart. . which is a merry thing, because whenever a fart is cut, laughter and joking ensue, bringing down the house,” even if the other guests at the dinner table don’t accept that thesis when they ignore Priscila’s sonorities, forgetting (or ignoring) Quevedo and his pun: “Between a rock and a rock, the apricot booms.”

I then evoked the aromas of a sliced lime with its juice dripping, fresh-cut grass, and a foamy cup of hot chocolate: smells that go directly to the pleasure centers, avoiding the obstacles of reason, smell as a reminder of emotion.