The Write Thing

An erotic proposition, when it brings uneven numbers into the question, is always a tricky one and therefore more exciting. Two young European girls arrive in Buenos Aires and decide they want to open their relationship to another player. They reply to her ad.

A few days later, they meet the potential candidate. First, there is dinner in Puerto Madero, and casual talk over a well-done lamb and three varieties of potatoes as a side dish. Wine is of course the obvious companion. Then there is the decision of going somewhere else for a drink, perhaps a disco, or maybe just a bar. There happens to be one nearby, a straight and cool lounge where they continue to talk…this time about the juicy stuff, sex, clubs, erotica and all the rest. They define their candidate as queer, and they seem to like the coolness with which she talks and expresses her mind. The night unfolds, and they are all a little drunk by now; tired, but not as much as they were before, when the conversation was much less spicy.

Looking at the young couple, it is obvious that their connection has all the elements of lesbianhood. They are totally out, as one of them prides herself in saying while she caresses her companion’s hand and plants her a soft kiss on the lips in front of an admiring crowd. They are kind of hot together, each keeping the boundaries a little open as they play their butch and femme versions of themselves. One of them leads, and this transpires in the long time it takes them to decide what food to order, or where to go. The leader will always have the last word. She later will voice her convictions about the gay community, with her militant past and her vast reading on gay-related issues as a banner of authority. Her partner will remain cool, her eyes betraying a certain admiration for her lover, which immediately precludes any counter-argument on her side (although she does have it). Meanwhile, their incidental guest is amused by the husband and wife scene, and she cannot help thinking that the subject will be a suitable platform for angry sex later on, a perfect remedy to efface the violence of the discussion and set the counter back to zero. In any case, it is already 4.30 am, and the three are too tired to solve the plights of the gay world in one night.

The game remains open for a next time, although some of the cards may have already been played. The potential candidate gets into her taxi and heads home, pondering on the power of classification as a form of security, the eternal dichotomy of men vs. women, gay vs straight, butch vs femme. A little disappointed, she sighs and right there vows that, even if it is a mammoth task, she will still be looking for that soul capable of escaping labels, that woman who will refuse to go by accommodating titles, the human being that will want to evolve beyond the typecast role of Blanche DuBois or Lara Croft. Il faudra continuer à chercher la femme, my dear, a voice seems to say…and a new day begins.

When are we dying? Are we dying when doctors diagnose a fatal disease, or are we already dying even when no tumors are threatening our cells with a conquest that sooner or later will happen? There is death in life. It may not be easily perceived because we still breathe, and we go about our daily chores with nonchalance, as if death could never happen to us. But it is still there, lurking.

There is too much death, or possibility of death, around me this year. I have seen a child die, and people I once knew diagnosed with serious conditions. I have even flown close to my own chance of making it to the surgery room, although it did not happen. Of course, I have also seen the death of a form of love…although I think it was more the abortion of a possibility. How frail life is! We sustain it with infatuation, work, food, trips abroad, and we think it is worth it in as much as we can keep all that circus going. Now, you scratch the surface a little, and it gets really scary. People around us are touched, regardless of their age, and there is no explanation. When a doctor comes out of an operating room telling you bad news, you really want to think that it will not happen to you because you did things differently. I don’t know, perhaps you did not eat so much fried food, or you drank less wine, or you woke up at normal hours or you simply…were lucky.

That is it. You were lucky, and it still did not happen to you. So you take the hand of the woman next to you, the one you have chosen to love, and you hold it tight, thanking life for not dying on you for real. Or you go and accept that proposition of two 30-year-old European women who simply want to have sex with you in a threesome. Or you write your blog, because it makes you happy. Or you go to bed promising yourself that you will treasure tomorrow twice as much, because now you know this is all it is about… living (or dying) day by day.

Love waits.

I have only recently started to learn Swedish, as I think I mentioned in passing a while ago in this blog. It is fun to learn a new language. I have always found that cracking a different code, diving into a new culture in the way of words is a good means of shedding our skin to become someone else. Even a person’s voice changes when they speak a foreign language. My Spanish voice differs from my English voice. I don’t know…it could be the tone, but I guess it’s more the character. Yes, that must be it. It is as if we were actors on a stage, performing in a new play. Language is a vehicle to connect with another side of ourselves. I don’t know if I would make a good viking, probably not, but there will be this particular slant to the new sounds that emerge from the complex postures my tongue is forced to find, this moment of bliss when I will discover that a word is only “that” word in “that” language, and it is untranslatable. Well, being a translator myself, I should be perhaps worried about the impossibility of rendering one word into its counterpart in another system. Oddly enough, I am not. I feel that being unable to put a word into another language is just sublime, a unique experience. Believe me, I have never been able to translate enjeu from French into Spanish, English, Italian or even Swedish (I should find out, though, maybe I can break the spell).

Kärleken väntar. I think it means something like “love waits”. I took it from a song by Kent, a Swedish pop band. Indeed love waits. We have to wait for love to be love, because at its very beginning it is only what we would like it to be, a collection of expectations, cravings and desires, above all. It is only when we can wait that it becomes what it should be, when it relaxes, when we understand it as we understand the soul we have chosen as our mate. This is perhaps, only in a way, similar to learning a new language. We only know we have grasped it, that our love for the language is there, when we cannot tell whether we are reading in our vernacular or in the newly acquired friend. We only know that we love someone when we do not have to think who she is, because we simply know her.