Winning the Game and Other Stories

the brotherhood of swords

I WAS ONCE A MEMBER of the Brotherhood of Swords. I still remember when we met to choose the name of our Brotherhood. I argued, at the time, that for our survival it was important to have a respectable name and purpose and gave as example what had happened to the Brotherhood of São Martinho, an association of wine fanciers who, like the character in Eça de Queirós, would sell their soul to the devil for a bottle of Romanée-Conti 1858, but which came to be known as a fraternity of drunks and, discredited, closed its doors, while the Brotherhood of the Most Holy, whose declared objective is to promote the worship of God through invocation of the Holy Sacrament, remained in existence. In other words, we needed a worthy title and objective. My colleagues replied that the society was a secret one, that in a way it was born (this was said ironically) discredited, and that its name didn’t matter in the least, as it would never be made public. They added that the Masons and the Rosicrucians originally had nice titles and respectable objectives and ended up suffering accusations of every kind, from political manipulation to kidnapping and assassination. I insisted, asking them to suggest names for the Brotherhood, which in the end was done. And we began to examine the various proposals on the table. After heated discussions, four names were left. Brotherhood of the Good Bed was discarded because it sounded like an association of layabouts. Brotherhood of Fanciers of Feminine Beauty, besides being too long, was considered reductionist and aesthetical. We didn’t consider ourselves aesthetes in a strict sense; Picasso was right in hating what he termed the aesthetic game of eye and mind manipulated by connoisseurs who “appreciated” beauty and, after all, what was “beauty”? Our brotherhood was one of Fuckers and, as the poet Whitman said in a poem correctly entitled “A Woman Waits for Me,” sex encompasses everything: bodies, souls, meanings, tests, purities, gentleness, results, promulgations, songs, commands, health, pride, maternal mystery, seminal fluid, all the hopes, benefits, donations and concessions, all the passions, beauties, and delights of the earth. Brotherhood of Roving Hands, suggested by one of the poets in our group (we had lots of poets among us, obviously), who illustrated his proposal with a poem by John Donne—“License my roving hands, and let them go before, behind, between, above, below”—although pertinent because of its simplicity in privileging knowledge through touch, was rejected for being an elementary symbol of our objectives.

Finally, after much discussion, the name Brotherhood of the Swords was adopted. The richest of the Brothers were its main defenders: aristocrats are attracted by things of the underworld, fascinated by lawbreakers, and the term Sword as a symbol of the Fucker came from the criminal world. A sword penetrates and wounds, and is thus the penis as, erroneously, outlaws and the ignorant in general see it. I suggested that if some symbolic name were used by us, it should be that of an ornamental tree grown for its flowers, for after all the penis is commonly known in our language as wood or club, and wood is the generic name of any tree in many places in Brazil (but, correctly, not of bushes, which have a fragile trunk), but my reasoning came a cropper when someone asked what name the Brotherhood would have—Brotherhood of the Woods? the Stalks?—and I had no answer. Sword, according to my opponents, had vernacular power, so once again the riffraff made their valuable contribution to the enrichment of the Portuguese language.

As a member of the Brotherhood of Swords I believed, and I still believe, that copulation is the only thing that matters to the human being. To fuck is to live, nothing else exists, as the poets know very well. But was a Brotherhood needed to defend this absolute axiom? Of course not. There were prejudices, but they didn’t interest us; social and religious repressions didn’t affect us. So what was the objective in founding the Brotherhood? Very simple: to discover how to obtain, fully, orgasm without ejaculation. The queen of Aragon, as Montaigne relates, well before that ancient realm united with Castile, in the 14th century, following mature deliberation by her private counselor, established the rule, keeping in mind the moderation demanded by modesty within marriages, that the number of six copulations per day was the legal limit, necessary and suitable. In other words, in those days a man and a woman copulated, in a suitable and modest manner, six times a day. Flaubert, for whom “une once de sperme perdue fatigue plus que trois litres de sang” (I spoke of that in one of my books), thought six copulations a day humanly impossible, but Flaubert was not, we know, a Sword. Even today it’s believed that the only way to come is by ejaculation, despite the Chinese for over three thousand years affirming that a man can have several consecutive orgasms without ejaculating, thus avoiding the loss of the ounce of sperm that is more tiring than hemorrhaging three liters of blood. (The French call the exhaustion that follows ejaculation “small death,” which is why one of their poets said that the flesh was sad, but Brazilians say that the flesh is weak, in all senses, which strikes me as more poignant; it’s worse being weak than sad.) It is calculated that a man ejaculates on average five thousand times during his lifetime, expelling a total of a trillion spermatozoa. All that for what and why? Because in reality we are still a species of monkey, and all of us function like a rudimentary genetic bank, when it would be enough for only some to operate that way. We of the Brotherhood of Swords knew that man, by freeing himself of his simian atrophy, backed by the peculiar virtues of his mind (our brain is not, I repeat, that of an orangutan), could have consecutive orgasms without ejaculating, orgasms that would give even more pleasure than those of the seminal kind, which make the man merely a blind instrument of the instinct of preservation of the species. And that result filled us with joy and pride; we had succeeded, through elaborate and difficult physical and spiritual exercises, to achieve the Multiple Orgasm Sans Ejaculation, which became known by the acronym MOSE. I cannot reveal what these “exercises” were, for the vow to maintain secrecy prevents me. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t even mention the subject, even in this limited way.

The Brotherhood of Swords functioned very well during the six months following our extraordinary discovery. Until the day that one of the Brothers, like me a poet, called for the convening of a General Assembly of the Brotherhood to relate a matter he considered of the utmost importance. His wife, noticing the nonoccurrence of emissio seminis during copulation, had concluded that there could be various reasons for it, which in summary would be: either he was saving up the sperm for another woman, or else he was feigning pleasure when in reality he was acting mechanically like a soulless robot. The woman even suspected that our colleague had an implant in his penis to keep it always rigid, an allegation that he easily proved to be groundless. In short, the poet’s wife had stopped feeling pleasure from copulating. In reality she wanted the viscosity of sperm inside her vagina or on her skin; to her that white, sticky secretion was a powerful symbol of life. Sex, as Whitman would put it, after all included seminal fluid. The woman didn’t say so, but surely the exhausting of him, the male, represented the strengthening of her, the female. Without those ingredients she couldn’t feel pleasure, and, this is the worst part, if she felt no pleasure neither did our Brother, for we of the Brotherhood of Swords want (need) our women to come too. That’s our motto (I won’t cite it in Latin in order not to appear pedantic; I’ve already used Latin once): Come by Making Come.

At the end of our Brother’s explanation the assembly fell silent. The majority of the members of the Brotherhood were present. We had just heard disquieting words. I, for example, no longer ejaculated. Ever since I had succeeded in dominating the Great Secret of the Brotherhood, the MOSE, I no longer produced a single drop of semen, even though all my orgasms were much more pleasurable. And what if my wife, whom I loved so, asked me, as she could at any moment, to ejaculate on her alabaster breasts? I asked one of the doctors in the Brotherhood—there were several doctors among us—if I could go back to ejaculating. Medicine knows nothing about sex, that’s the regrettable truth, and my colleague replied that it would be very difficult, in light of the fact that I, like all the others, had created a strong dependency on that physical and spiritual conditioning; he had already tried, using every scientific resource to which he had access, to counteract that process, without success. All of us, upon hearing that frightful reply, became extremely dismayed. Immediately, other Brothers said they had encountered the same problem, that their wives were beginning to see as unnatural, or even frightening, that inexhaustible ardor. I think I’ve turned into a monster, said the poet who had raised the problem for our collective consideration.

And that is how the Brotherhood of Swords came to an end. Before disbanding we all swore a blood oath never to reveal to the world the secret of the Multiple Orgasm Sans Ejaculation, which we would take to our graves. We go on having a woman waiting for us, but in constant rotation, before she can discover that we are different, strange, able to come with infinite energy without shedding semen. We cannot fall in love, for our relationships are ephemeral. Yes, I too have turned into a monster, and my sole desire in life is to go back to being a monkey.