This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

S — Sex

And then there are the other ladies, I don’t mean the ladies left over, the leftover ladies. The ladies of yesteryear whom François Villon evoked with a nostalgic beauty and precision that forever renounced the new encounter with the woman we love and who was: the ladies left behind, never the leftover ladies, who will forever remain, like restless ghosts, complicit in what once was and could have been. “Dites moi où, n’en quel pays / est Flora la belle romaine. . ?”

Eros first manifests itself in girls, in my case two classmates in Washington with whom I slowly came to discover who I was, in the marvelous penumbra they offered me: one of them had old-fashioned Mary Pickford ringlets while the other was a dauntless, freckled little thing, like Nancy or Mafalda in today’s terms. In those dimly lit apartments free of parents, they were the first women to reveal themselves to me, and to themselves as well. We were but nine years old, and they did it with a kind of shameless innocence. Why, then, had they felt obliged to reveal our delicious secrets? Nobody had caught us unawares, ever. Yet they had had to confess it, expose it and make themselves vulnerable — it was almost as if they had wanted to be punished. And the punishment was that I would never be able to see them again. In Santiago de Chile, however, at twelve years of age, I had the misfortune of falling in love with a neighbor, a girl with a neat fringe, wild eyes, and a father who was a high official in the Chilean air force. When he discovered us together, he not only ended our puppy-love affair but drove my family to move to another house. And then, at age fifteen in Buenos Aires, after refusing to attend the fascist schools of the Minister of Education Hugo Wast, I discovered that at eleven in the morning, the only people in our apartment building on the corner of Callao and Quintana were me and my upstairs neighbor, a beautiful actress with a long mane of hair and silvery eyes. And so my very first sexual strategy consisted of going upstairs to her apartment with my copy of the radio magazine Sintonía, ringing the lovely lady’s doorbell and asking, “Who will Eva Duarte be playing today in the series Celebrated Women of History, Joan of Arc or Madame Dubarry?” I still remember the half-open eyes of my illusory silver goddess when she answered, “Madame Dubarry. Less saintly but far more entertaining. Won’t you come in?”

The Mexico of the 1940s was an adolescent’s sexual waste-land. Saintly little girlfriends handed over their sweaty, cakelike palms in the movie theater, and little else. The Mexican brothels, on the other hand, were exciting, garish, melancholy, and quite varied in style. The majority of the madam’s “pupils,” so to speak, were poor girls who had either migrated to the capital or been recruited from the slums, though all were inevitably trained to tell you, “I come from Guadalajara,” as if hailing from the capital of Jalisco gave the world’s oldest profession some kind of cachet. They never allowed you to kiss them on the mouth and before sex would solemnly cover up the inevitable picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe lurking nearby. Very rarely would you ever encounter a belle de jour type, the thirty- or forty-year old woman incapable of hiding two things: her innate dignity and her insatiable sexual appetite. No, they were more maternal with us, taking it upon themselves to educate us. The cathedral of brothels was the Casa de la Bandida — that is, the House of the Bandit Lady — and was run by a lady composer of revolutionary corrido songs who was rumored to have been the lover of Pancho Villa. Insurgentes was a theatrical brothel that specialized in lesbian shows. Darwin was a refuge of decent women in search of love, while Centenario was a spot where exotic women would waft down marble staircases under the light of fin de siècle chandeliers. And Meave, with its open windows overlooking the fish market and its incongruous combination of aromas, its linoleum beds set inside office workstations without ceilings, and its temptation of latent crime. . such austere discipline the morning maids displayed as they cleaned those sheetless linoleum chaises.

Sexual graduation consisted of finding a married lover, a woman who presented problems no more complicated than those of discretion and stealth. Serious girlfriends, on the other hand, were increasingly more beautiful and independent. On occasion, religious hypocrisy would get the best of them and send them headlong into other, more conventional marriages. On other occasions, distance would slowly erode a love affair with some unforgettable woman who emerged from a tropical lagoon with a face shining like dawn and dusk. A woman like Venus, of course, the star of both moments of the day. These loves were followed by a lengthy list of women whom I hesitate to include in my catalogue of Don Juan exploits because they were women of whom I never took advantage; I accompanied them and I experimented with them always as a couple, with all the rights and obligations that go with being part of a couple, and we gave equal intensity to our relationship, certain that we were united in the search for lasting emotion even though we knew that our union might only be temporary. Looking back, one by one, I can recall cases of erotic passivity, occasionally even submission and servility on the part of one or the other, but I also remember complicity. I remember moments of sudden exasperation and other moments of lasting gratitude. Sometimes stimulation would lead to anguish and at other times, abundant plenitude. In the end, to know sex is to know the harbinger of the words of love, and to not know what follows because the harbinger is enough and interrupts the very thing it promises.

I was, many times, a passenger of sex, a privileged but fleeting actor among a circle of beautiful women, foreign actresses accustomed to taking on a palatable companion for the brief period of filming. They gave me so much more than I gave them. I remember them as life’s great gifts, impassioned precisely because they were so transitory, goddesses for one season, occasionally cruel enchantresses, always magnificent and magnanimous, and at times vulnerable to the point of death. The dead lover. I remember one, particularly lovely, courted and adored to distraction but always dissatisfied, gripped by an aching void that nobody could fill, and which she herself was never quite able to describe. And then she committed suicide. I remember another, deceitful and delightful, for her cunning, duplicitous antics, which she left transparent and exposed as a testament of her independence. She knew how to exploit her sexual games: two balls in the air at all times but only one true arousal. To share and to arouse alike. The opposite of the marvelously tender, vulnerable woman who was not submissive but simply eager to give and receive pleasure, knowing that I would soon leave her, yet dignified by the manner in which she received the experience; a woman with whom I felt I received far more than I gave on those early mornings in Rome.

Then there are the sexual relationships that I remember with a smile. The feigned suicides. The ideological champions who confused the bed with the pulpit. The superficial ones for whom sex was a social game. But I also remember the intelligent ones, intellectuals who made demands on a man’s brain as well as his sex. The deluders who would write false letters and show them to their friends. The ones who shared and nurtured, waiting and hoping to play the role of wife, mother, daughter, bride. . I looked for them as lovers. I remember them as ghosts.

But there were also those women who so vividly — perhaps inevitably, perhaps in spite of themselves — embodied a desire that transcended them as individuals, and coalesced in my search for one woman who could encompass them all, yet who was at the same time singularly her own woman. I found her and have lived with her for a quarter of a century. With the others, it always ended. Each was a constant reminder of all the things that could never be mine because they were women who engendered so many things that obeyed their own laws, far beyond the confines of the sexual relationship. That was always the moment to leave.

It was also the moment to transform sex into literature. A body of words crying out for the closeness of another body of words. Are these words real? Are they a lie? We all run the risk of falling in love with a woman or a man who, like Swann’s Odette, is not “our type,” who is not right for us, and who is really only a ghostly extension of our own libidos. . We must be grateful to them all. Each represents not only a moment but words, so many words. These, for example, by Lope de Vega: “ Mas si del tiempo que perdí me ofendo / tal prisa me daré, que una hora amando / venza los años que pasé fingiendo.” (And if all the time I lost is my offence / I will move so swiftly that with one hour of love / I will conquer all those years so falsely spent.) One is always thankful for this hour of fleeting, fatal plenitude, no matter how brief it may be. And to invoke the poet-author of La Dorotea once again, we are thankful despite the protraction, the frustration, and the disillusion brought about by sexual relationships that drive us to vilify sex and fervently wish that the crows flying over “the beds of battle, tender ground” would scratch out the eyes of such ungrateful women when in reality the only eyes to scratch at are our own. More bestiarum, in the manner of animals, as St. Augustine described sex, which he enjoyed so much in his early days. Perhaps we would best change the subject, not only because of a man’s need for discretion when it comes to sexual relationships but also, perhaps, because of the secret irony that the English have turned it all, practically, into a proverb: “Pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable,” they say. After all, who on earth would want to renounce, despite its brevity, cost, and position, that radiant center of the world that is the lovers’ bed? And, as we silently arise from it, who wouldn’t want to leave these words by Góngora behind on the pillow: “Aun a pesar de las tinieblas, bella / Aun a pesar de las estrellas, clara” (Even in the face of darkness, lovely / even in the face of stars, luminous)?