The Write Thing

So off we went, my friend L and I, to Palermo park (we both agreed that translating “Bosques de Palermo” into English was an impossible task using equivalent words in the language of Shakespeare) on a Sunday morning that was sunny and only slightly chilly, a mild prelude to winter. Our bikes were perfectly in shape, and so were we. She, a gorgeous Valkyrie in her Teutonic splendor. Me, the cute chick I am, with beauty and class — as my friend Norm (a self-declared lesbian man) once put it. And we rode, and rode, until we decided lunchtime was around the corner. We stopped at the corner of Libertador and Bulnes, and had our lunch there. The sun was already playing hide and seek with the sky, and we were engaged in the most interesting conversation. L was saying that she did give her own lesbian inclinations some thought a few years ago, and wondered if she might not just go for the heterosexual life, given that she can also be with men. Assenting, I simply rephrased her words into something like:

Well, yes, because you like men.

To which she replies:

I like having sex with men

It was then that I burst into laughter, and was literally on the verge of crying out tears of amusement. She looked at me in dismay, and a few seconds later followed this with a good-hearted laugh. In her correction of my words, she had said everything. Sex can indeed be great with men.

She: You know what? You tell a man to leave, and he leaves….
Me: Whereas a woman tells you not to call her, and if you don’t, then she’ll ask why you didn’t…

Probably that is why we lesbians love women…because we’ll never understand them, and we won’t be able to help feeling what we feel towards them.

I have been meaning to write a posting on this for quite some time, but have kept postponing it unnecessarily. Yesterday, as I finished watching the second part of Portrait of a Marriage, a magnificent BBC miniseries first broadcast in 1990 depicting the tumultuous relationship and ill-fated elopement of Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis in the 1920s, I decided to materialize my intention. The story is a peculiar one. Both Vita and Violet were married to loving husbands, but bound by the tempest of a love for each other that completed them and destroyed them with equal force.
One day, I may discuss Woolf’s Orlando on these pages at length, and attest to its literary value as much more than the “longest love letter in literature” from Potto to charming Donkey. However, tonight I would like to give some room on this screen for Violet to express her feelings, those of a sixteen-year-old child in love. She originally wrote the text of the letter quoted below in French, but Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage reveals it to us in an English translation. Even despite (or because of) the English, her words resound to me as a manifest of bold, relentless, full and passionate love. Let’s read it for Miss Keppel:

I love you, Vita, because I have had to fight for you so hard. I love you because you never gave me back the ring I lent you. I love you because you will never capitulate. I love you for your fine intelligence, for your literary ambition, for your innocent flirtatiousness. And I love you because you never seem to doubt my love. I love in you what I know is also in me, that is, imagination, a gift for languages, taste, intuition, and a mass of other things. I love you, Vita, because I have seen your soul.

She: You see? What do lesbians do when you are bleeding?
She: They wait six days.
She: You are a little full of yourself, aren’t you?
She: Why? I was just saying how long my periods last.
She: Well, I was trying to show how handy strap-ons can be.
She: (pauses) Two arguments that I do not find to be mutually exclusive at all…

Ah, les nonnes auraient bien rougi confrontées à un dialogue pareil! Ou bien, elles auraient souri en connivence….