The Sacred Beasts

by Bev Jafek

  Her second day living with Sylvie was a repeat of the first, utterly blissful and productive. Alex began to feel that Sylvie was ravishing her throughout the day. Each time Sylvie left her to return to work, Alex thought, good-god, this woman does not care what anyone sees her doing or what anyone might think of her! Alex always blushed deeply, though the greater part of it was pleasure.

  In the evening as they had dinner at a sidewalk restaurant, Sylvie became interested in Alex’s dissertation. As the cooler night air came in from the Mediterranean, Alex said, “It’s on the subject of Spanish women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, up to the present. They’ve gotten a raw deal from nearly all the critics, who see the twentieth-century up until Franco as a ‘great period’ in Spanish poetry, all written by men. The Spanish women poets in this time period are, in my opinion, every bit as striking and far more original than the highly celebrated male poets. Feminist critics have observed some of this, but my book will go much farther. It will include contemporary lesbian poets in Spain, too, who are also very original, I think.”

  Alex was silent, considering how much of herself she really wanted to reveal, then decided to be honest. “That’s why I can quote so much poetry from memory. I’m reading the poetry written by Spanish women all the time I’m working. So, I’m actually not the great genius the Mujeres Libres labeled me as being, though I did let them think so.” There now; you’ve told her, Alex thought. Of course, she had allowed Sylvie to think so, too.

  Sylvie smiled, realizing that this was a modestly guilty confession. “I’m still madly in love with you,” she said. “But please continue; tell me another secret, something really shocking. I will reciprocate, if you wish.”

  Alex appreciated Sylvie’s playful mood but was alarmed at the prospect of a genuine secret from a woman as uninhibited as Sylvie. She began to advance on shaky ground. “I was once . . . watching a nature show on TV, and there was a section showing a tigress that lived in a Siberian forest. A helicopter flew past, part of the group that was filming her, and she climbed up a tree very fast, raced up it, really, to threaten the helicopter. She was huge, beautiful, and powerful. Her paws were enormous, and she actually reached out to the helicopter and threatened it from the top of the tree, roaring all the while. If the helicopter had been closer to her, she might have brought it down with her paw. God, she was so ferocious, proud, and gorgeous! She actually attacked something as big and noisy as a helicopter because it was flying in the air over her forest, her territory. Instantly, I loved her. In fact, I thought that if I could make love with her and not get myself killed in the process, I might just do it.” Alex blushed furiously and looked up at Sylvie. “There. Was that juicy enough for you?”

  Sylvie laughed uproariously. “Oh, yes,” she said. “That was utterly unexpected. Actually, I can easily imagine it. I’d love her, too.” She continued to smile and stare at Alex in deep appreciation. I know you, Alex thought. You’re thinking that you’re the closest thing to that tigress I’ll ever have. But Sylvie was actually thinking, how you please me, lover! She continued to smile at Alex, whose tension began to mount at the prospect of a confession from Sylvie.

  “I don’t have anything really shocking, I’m afraid,” Sylvie finally said. “But since you’ve said you want to live with me in Paris and even marry me, you should know that I want to have a child at some point. Not now. I would have to be in a better position economically, and there’s plenty of time. But at some point, I will want to have one and that means my lover will have to want the child, too. How does that make you feel?”

  So that’s it, Alex thought. She has been trying to tell me this for some time; that’s why she brought up secrets. “Do you know the father? Would you be close to him?”

  “No, everything would be anonymous. I don’t want any men complicating my life.”

  “How would you see me relative to the child?” Alex watched Sylvie in fascination. She had never seen her look so disturbed. She’s afraid of losing me, she thought.

  “As father or mother to the child, too,” Sylvie said. She was suddenly terrified at the prospect of Alex rejecting the idea, for that would ultimately mean losing her. “As my husband,” she added.

  A smile of startled delight passed over Alex’s face, simply by the words, husband and father, relative to the woman she adored. Something fell far down into the bottom of her mind and stirred deep waters. She was silent in astonishment for a long time, thinking about a child of Sylvie’s and a life with it. Sylvie watched her face very carefully. “I never knew I wanted a child,” Alex said softly, almost whispering.

  There was something new in the world, again.

  WHEN ALEX AND Sylvie returned to the house, the regular group meetings had ended, and a number of women stayed behind, as usual, to talk uninhibitedly together and enjoy the last of the evening. Since their conversation had been very intense, Alex and Sylvie didn’t feel like continuing their work, and they sat with the group to hear the discussion, which seemed to be on the subject of the Spanish media and who it was reaching and influencing.

  “Do Spaniards actually buy and read newspapers?” asked a factory worker. “Everyone is pinching pennies.”

  “Yes, they read the free ones,” answered a media professional. “With paid news, one person buys a copy and maybe half a dozen others read it. You have office newspapers, even park bench newspapers.”

  “But so many people watch TV instead,” said a senior. “La caja tonta, the idiot box, is the ultimate voice in the dark of night.”

  “But they don’t actually watch it,” said a student. “It’s only background sound, white noise.”

  “They watch when there’s sex,” said a journalist. “Remember the last episode of A Day is a Day on TV-3 in Barcelona? The host asked the whole cast and audience to take their clothes off in front of the camera. I heard they did it.”

  “I heard they didn’t,” said a professor.

  “There, you’ve proven my point!” said the student. “Nobody watches—that’s why you’ve heard two different versions.”

  “My TV favorites were those early sex shows in the 1990s,” said a lawyer. “There was a quiz show with strip teasers on one channel and then a talk show with strippers on another channel. I used to watch it with my little brother, and we’d shift between the channels and laugh all night about them.”

  “For a while, I got caught up in the Latin American soap operas,” said a writer. “There was one about a chemist and another about a family doctor. I loved them.”

  “I know plenty of women who became doctors and chemists after watching those shows,” said a doctor.

  “That makes me wonder how many became strippers on talk shows and quiz shows,” said the writer.

  Everyone laughed. Protests of “aaugh” and “no one!” were uttered.

  “My favorites were the early celebrity scandal shows,” said a senior. “They were raw enough for Pilar, weren’t they, dear? If they didn’t have any scandals to report on, they created their own. I loved that night when an interviewer ran down an alley to catch up with a bullfighter’s mistress so he could find out if his penis was bigger than the bullfighter’s. ” Everyone laughed, then there was the sound of many women talking at once.

  “Then the government hired a couple of women to clean up all those shows,” said a journalist.

  “Why must women always be the ones to clean everything up?” asked a senior.

  “Men are congenitally irresponsible or dirty—unless they’re both, of course,” said a writer.

  “Spaniards listen more to radio than anything else, I think,” said a professor. “The older generation only listens to radio and reads free newspapers.”

  “Radio moves information faster than any other medium except the Internet,” said a journalist. “It really came through for us after the terrorist bombings, when Aznar was defeated.”

  “I love the pirated radio stations,” said a writer. “Late at night, I never kno
w what I’m going to hear. Lately, there’s some guy on at around three am with the softest voice who talks really dirty. My mother can’t go to sleep without him.”

  “I like the obscene woman on at four am,” said a senior. “She wakes everybody back up again.”

  “I’ve heard crazy people on those pirate stations,” said a student. “A guy once said he was broadcasting aboard a UFO with a bunch of aliens.”

  “I’ve even heard a little old lady who goes on and on about what great paella she makes,” said an artist. “She’s non-stop!”

  “That’s my mother-in-law!” said a factory worker. “We always tell her to shut up about her damned paella! Is she on radio now?”

  “Listen up, friends,” said a journalist. “It’s starting to sound as though you’re really fast asleep in those wee hours of the night and dreaming all this stuff! Are you sure all these radio pirates really exist?”

  “I got up to take a leak around four and heard the little old lady with her paella,” said a writer. “Also, you have no sense of humor!” Everyone laughed, and several women began to speak in smaller groups.

  “Ladies, very raw ladies, just as I love you!” Pilar said in a loud voice, and the group was quiet again. “I have an idea for you to consider. Libre and I recently learned how to pirate a radio station. Our friend, Alex, knows a lot about technology—she does the web site and Facebook page for the house—and she showed us how to pirate a station. So, we had two ideas for a radio series, to be broadcast as far as we can go. Libre lived in American—San Francisco—for several years, and she said Americans love movies and TV shows about people who can see and talk to dead people, ghosts. They say they ‘whisper’ to them, apparently, and ‘whisperer’ often gets into the title. Well, we wanted to apply this idea to the Spanish gay community with a show called ‘The Dyke Whisperer.’ All these gay people will die, as everyone does, without resolving their issues with lovers, friends, and family and need desperately to speak to them. So, a dyke medium will be able to communicate with the dead and be asked by all the poor neurotic ghosts of gays to talk to their lovers, families, their cats and dogs, their goldfish, everyone. It would, of course, be a farce, though Libre says the Americans actually believe this kind of thing and even make serious films about it.

  “So, that’s one idea. The other is an idea I heard here—a woman wakes up one day covered with orifices; and, the world being what it is, she will instantly attract many fools, mainly men but some women, too. As they all try to use her for all the foolish and obvious purposes we can so easily imagine, you will hear a parade of all the obsessions, obscenities and general fatuity that flesh is heir to, etc. So, what do you think of these two ideas for a pirate radio series?”

  The group was silent, appalled, then burst out laughing. “It’s certainly no worse than late-night sex talk and paella,” said a senior.

  “The ideas are ingenious,” Alex said, “and, like many ingenious ideas, they are probably better in concept than in execution.”

  “Meaning what?” growled Libre, her mohawk hair a vivid blue.

  “Meaning that it will be funny for an episode or two and then fall flat,” said Alex. “A series requires a substantial idea, and this may only be a clever one. But then, I could be wrong. Maybe you will be able to make all kinds of witty, hilarious permutations and combinations out of it.”

  The group was silent.

  “Perhaps we should be discussing not the media but whether the arts in Spain are some of the most bizarre in the world,” said a professor.

  Everyone laughed and a few cheered. A new irreverent discussion was born.

  “There’s that Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao built to look like a fish,” said a factory worker. “Bilbao is so rainy and dull that a fish might want to vacation there, but I can’t imagine anyone else taking a trip to see the thing.”

  “Well, there’s the matter that Spain is the only European country to have a real phantom of the opera,” said a musician, “and, like Spain’s most bizarre architecture, it’s here in Barcelona. The Teatro Real may look stable now, but my aunt, who sings opera, told me that it was destroyed by fire several times and once blown up. Then, when they tried to rebuild it, the architect died from heart failure as he was giving his plans to the media. After that, the centerpiece, a chandelier weighing more than two tons, fell to the floor and the builders went bankrupt.”

  “But now, it’s a great opera house,” said a doctor. “I’ve seen many wonderful productions there.”

  “I have never set foot in it and never will,” said the musician.

  “What are you, superstitious?” asked a lawyer. “Galician?”

  “No,” said the musician, “a student of Spanish history forced to believe that our phantoms are unusually nasty ones.”

  “But the phantom has left,” said a student.

  “Even a phantom can become embarrassed. It may have left for America, a perfect home,” said the musician.

  “There is also the matter of how Spain got the art on display at the Villahermosa Palace,” said an artist. “I read that there was an open worldwide competition for it since it was considered to be the most important private art collection in Europe, the Thyssen collection, owned by a Dutch steel tycoon. All the VIPs from different countries went to him to plea for their country as a setting for it. Prince Charles was sent by Britain to get it for the Tate. It was Spain that won it, and you know how? Our art ambassador was a former Miss Spain. The steel tycoon was overwhelmed by lust and gave it to her. So, there it is, Spain’s property, on view in the Villahermosa Palace.”

  “I don’t find anything particularly bizarre about that, just realistic,” said a lawyer. “Since when has Spain not been a great place to fuck?”

  “Let’s remember that it was a distinguished and brilliant woman, Pilar Miro, who single-handedly created the conditions for Spain’s current renaissance in cinema,” said a professor. “When the Socialists came to power, they made her the government controller of the film industry. She got rid of censorship and initiated a system of government subsidies for art house films. Spain made little but sex farces before her intervention; now our films have international renown. The first director to benefit from her system was Almoldóvar.”

  “There are many important women in the arts,” said another professor. “There are sculptors, Susana Galano in the 1980s and now, Cristina Iglesias. In ballet, there’s Tamara Rojo. There are several internationally famous opera singers—Monserrat Caballé, Teresa Berganza, Maria Bayo. Of course, they primarily perform abroad, since Spain can’t finance many complex musical productions.”

  “I was moved that Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ returned to Spain from New York after democracy was restored. That made great sense.”

  “But now, we are coming to the conclusion that Spanish arts are not bizarre, and I won’t concede that,” said a writer. “What about Spain’s first national ballet? It completely disgraced itself when two dancers attended the German reception in drag. So, that production was the beginning and end of our national ballet.”

  “That makes the Germans and the audience more bizarre than the performers, in my opinion,” said a lawyer. “Let the queens have their night out.”

  “Someone said that we now have a great international cinema, but how do we evaluate it if some of its most famous productions concern themselves with physical paralysis, nervous breakdowns, transsexuality, dementia, murder and ghosts?” asked a professor. “It is still bizarre.”

  “No, it’s just an improvement for a country previously known mainly for bullfights and drugged gypsies performing flamenco,” said a student.

  Everyone laughed, gave up the quest for truth, and started talking in smaller groups. It was the end of another evening at Monserrat’s, and they were tired.

  RUTH AND MONSERRAT woke up together in late morning light. They had made love long into the night. Now, they were caressing one another, wordless.

  I never knew it could happen again,
Monserrat thought, but here it is. Here you are, intimate goddess of my life. Maybe you’ll make a pagan of me, too. What an unvirginal vestal I’ll be.

  How soft yet sure, bold yet beguiling, such ease in the erotic and all the other wonderful contraries there are in you, Ruth thought. You are limitless. You are my adventure. Sylvie was all the intensity of young love, which has its own bright infinities. But, you are the depth and richness of love.

  How at ease we are, Monserrat thought, hardly needing to speak. Without words we say, you are everything as long as my life lasts, my love, my so husbandly woman.

  There is a speech purely of the body, Ruth thought. When did I stop talking? Last night, I thought I was swimming with you underwater. We had to be in the sea, for the gravity of the earth was gone.

  We have said everything, Monserrat thought. Now there is the everything unsaid. You know what I feel like second sight. Is what I say, even think, irrelevant entirely? Almost!

  They rose and looked out at Monserrat’s panoramic view of their city, the beautiful city on water with buildings that sprang up from the hand of a wild fantasist. They could see the great bulbous hive of the Agbar Tower, buzzing with kinetic red, blue and yellow tiles of color. Yes, Ruth thought, buildings seem to be creatures, living things here. “Well, our city has a multitude of words,” she said, “even if we don’t.”