by John Irving
I passed a coffeehouse, also on the Calle de Gravino, with some older, stylishly dressed lesbians sitting at a window table--to my limited knowledge, the only lesbians I spotted in Chueca, and almost the only women I saw anywhere in that district. But it was still early in the evening, and I knew that everything in Spain happens late. (I'd been in Barcelona before, on translation trips. My Spanish-language publisher is based there.) As I was leaving Chueca--for that long walk back to the Santo Mauro--I stopped in at a bear bar on the Calle de las Infantas. The bar called Hot was packed with men standing chest to chest and back to back. They were older men, and you know what bears are like--ordinary-looking men, chubby guys with beards, many beer drinkers among them. It was Spain, so of course there was a lot of smoking; I didn't stay long, but Hot had a friendly atmosphere. The shirtless bartenders were the youngest guys in the place--they were hot, all right.
THE DAPPER LITTLE MAN who met me at a restaurant in the Plaza Mayor the following night did not immediately summon to mind a young soldier with his pants down at his ankles, reading Madame Bovary in a storm at sea, while--on his bare bum--he skipped over a row of toilet seats to meet my young father.
Senor Bovary's hair was neatly trimmed and all white, as were the short bristles of his no-nonsense mustache. He wore a pressed, short-sleeved white shirt with two breast pockets--one for his reading glasses, the other armed with pens. His khaki trousers were sharply creased; perhaps the only contemporary components of the fastidious man's old-fashioned image were his sandals. They were the kind of sandals that young outdoorsmen wear when they wade in raging rivers and run through fast-flowing streams--those sandals that have the built-up and serious-looking treads of running shoes.
"Bovary," he said; he extended his hand, palm down, so that I didn't know if he expected me to shake it or kiss it. (I shook it.) "I'm so glad you contacted me," I told him.
"I don't know what your father has been waiting for, now that your mother--una mujer dificil, 'a difficult woman'--has been dead for thirty-two years. It is thirty-two, isn't it?" the little man asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Let me know what your HIV status is; I'll tell your father," Bovary said. "He's dying to hear, but I know him--he'll never ask you himself. He'll just worry about it after you've gone back home. He's an impossible procrastinator!" Bovary exclaimed affectionately, giving me a small, twinkling smile.
I told him: I keep testing negative; I don't have HIV disease.
"No toxic cocktail for you--that's the ticket!" Senor Bovary exclaimed. "We don't have the virus, either--if you're interested. I admit to having had sex only with your father, and--save that truly disastrous dalliance with your mom--your dad has had sex only with me. How boring is that?" the little man asked me, smiling more. "I've read your writing--so, of course, has your father. On the evidence of what you've written about--well, one can't blame your dad for worrying about you! If half of what you write about has happened to you, you must have had sex with everyone!"
"With men and women, yes--with everyone, no," I said, smiling back at him.
"I'm only asking because he won't ask. Honestly, you'll meet your father, and you'll feel you've had interviews that are more in-depth than anything he'll ask you or even say to you," Senor Bovary warned me. "It isn't that he doesn't care--I'm not exaggerating when I say he's always worrying about you--but your father is a man who believes your privacy is not to be invaded. Your dad is a very private man. I've only ever seen him be public about one thing."
"And that is?" I asked.
"I'm not going to spoil the show. We should be going, anyway," Senor Bovary said, looking at his watch.
"What show?" I asked him.
"Look, I'm not the performer--I just manage the money," Bovary said. "You're the writer in the family, but your father does know how to tell a story--even if it's always the same story."
I followed him, at a fairly fast pace, from the Plaza Mayor to the Puerta del Sol. Bovary must have had those special sandals because he was a walker; I'll bet he walked everywhere in Madrid. He was a trim, fit man; he'd had very little to eat for dinner, and nothing to drink but mineral water.
It was probably nine or ten o'clock at night, but there were a lot of people in the streets. As we walked up Montero, we passed some prostitutes--"working girls," Bovary called them.
I heard one of them say the guapo word.
"She says you're handsome," Senor Bovary translated.
"Perhaps she means you," I told him; he was very handsome, I thought.
"She doesn't mean me--she knows me," was all Bovary said. He was all business--Mr. Money Manager, I was thinking.
Then we crossed the Gran Via into Chueca, by that towering building--the Telefonica. "We're still a little early," Senor Bovary was saying, as he looked again at his watch. He seemed to consider (then he reconsidered) taking a detour. "There's a bear bar on this street," he said, pausing at the intersection of Hortaleza and the Calle de las Infantas.
"Yes, Hot--I had a beer there last night," I told him.
"Bears are all right, if you like bellies," Bovary said.
"I have nothing against bears--I just like beer," I said. "It's all I drink."
"I just drink agua con gas," Senor Bovary said, giving me his small, twinkling smile.
"Mineral water, with bubbles--right?" I asked him.
"I guess we both like bubbles," was all Bovary said; he had continued walking along Hortaleza. I wasn't paying very close attention to the street, but I recognized that nightclub with the Portuguese name--A Noite.
When Senor Bovary led me inside, I asked, "Oh, is this the club?"
"Mercifully, no," the little man replied. "We're just killing time. If the show were starting here, I wouldn't have brought you, but the show starts very late here. It's safe just to have a drink."
There were some skinny gay boys hanging around the bar. "If you were alone, they'd be all over you," Bovary told me. It was a black marble bar, or maybe it was polished granite. I had a beer and Senor Bovary had an agua con gas while we waited.
There was a blue-tinted ballroom and a proscenium stage at A Noite; they were playing Sinatra songs backstage. When I quietly used the retro word for the nightclub, all Bovary said was, "To be kind." He kept checking his watch.
When we went out on Hortaleza again, it was almost 11 P.M.; I had never seen as many people on the street. When Bovary brought me to the club, I realized I'd walked past it and not noticed it--at least twice. It was a very small club with a long line out front--on Hortaleza, between the Calle de las Infantas and San Marcos. The name of the club I saw only now--for the first time. The club was called SENOR BOVARY.
"Oh," I said, as Bovary led me around the line to the stage door.
"We'll see Franny's show, then you'll meet him," the little man was saying. "If I'm lucky, he won't see you with me till the end of his routine--or near the end, anyway."
The same types I'd seen at A Noite, those skinny gay boys, were crowding the bar, but they made room for Senor Bovary and me. Onstage was a transsexual dancer, very passable--nothing retro about her.
"Shameless catering to straight guys," Bovary whispered in my ear. "Oh, and guys like you, I suppose--is she your type?"
"Yes, definitely," I told him. (I thought the lime-green strobe pulsing on the dancer was a little tacky.) It wasn't exactly a strip show; the dancer had certainly had her boobs done, and she was very proud of them, but she never took off the thong. The crowd gave her a big hand when she exited the stage, passing through the audience--even passing by the bar, still in her thong but carrying the rest of her clothes. Bovary said something to her in Spanish, and she smiled.
"I told her you were a very important guest, and that she was definitely your type," the little man said mischievously to me. When I started to say something, he put an index finger to his lips and whispered: "I'll be your translator."
I first thought he was making a joke--about translating for me, if I were later to find
myself with the transsexual dancer--but Bovary meant that he would translate for my father. "Franny! Franny! Franny!" voices in the crowd kept calling.
From the instant Franny Dean came onstage, there were ooohs and ahhhs; it wasn't just the glitter and drop-dead decolletage of the dress, but with that plunging neckline and the poised way my father carried it off, I could see why Grandpa Harry had a soft spot for William Francis Dean. The wig was a jet-black mane with silver sparkles; it matched the dress. The falsies were modest--small, like the rest of him--and the pearl necklace wasn't ostentatious, yet it picked up the powder-blue light onstage. That same powder-blue light had turned all the white onstage and in the audience a pearl-gray color--even Senor Bovary's white shirt, where we sat at the bar.
"I have a little story to tell you," my dad told the crowd, in Spanish. "It won't take very long," he said with a smile; his old, thin fingers toyed with his pearls. "Maybe you've heard this before?" he asked--as Bovary whispered, in English, in my ear.
"Si!" shouted the crowd, in chorus.
"Sorry," my father replied, "but it's the only story I know. It's the story of my life, and the one love in it."
I already knew the story. It was, in part, what he'd told me when I was recovering from scarlet fever--only in more detail than a child could possibly have remembered.
"Imagine meeting the love of your life on a toilet!" Franny Dean cried. "We were in a latrine, awash with seawater; we were on a ship, awash with vomit!"
"Vomito!" the crowd repeated, in a unified cry.
I was amazed how many of them had heard the story; they knew it by heart. There were many older people in the audience, both men and women; there were young people, too--mostly boys.
"There's no sound quite like the sound of a human derriere, passing a succession of toilet seats--that slapping sound, as the love of your life approaches, coming nearer and nearer," my father said; he paused and took a deep breath while many of the young boys in the audience dropped their pants down to their ankles (their underpants, too) and slapped one another on their bare asses.
My father exhaled onstage and said, with a condemning sigh, "No, not like that--it was a different slapping sound, more refined." In his glittering black dress with the plunging neckline, my dad paused again--while those chastised boys pulled up their pants, and the audience settled down.
"Imagine reading in a storm at sea. How much of a reader would you need to be?" my father asked. "I've been a reader all my life. I knew that if I ever met the love of my life, he would have to be a reader, too. But, oh--to first make contact with him that way! Cheek to cheek, so to speak," my dad said, jutting out one skinny hip and slapping himself on the buttocks.
"Cheek to cheek!" the crowd cried--or however you say that in Spanish. (I can't remember.) He'd met Bovary on a toilet, butt to butt; how perfect was that?
There wasn't much more to the show. When my father's story, about the love of his life, was finished, I noticed that many of the older people in the audience quickly slipped away--as did nearly all the women. The women who stayed, I realized only later--as I was leaving--were the transsexuals and the transvestites. (The young boys stayed, and by the time I left the club, there were many more of them--in addition to some older men, who were mostly alone, no doubt on the prowl.) Senor Bovary led me backstage to meet my father. "Don't be disappointed," he kept whispering in my ear, as if he were still translating and we were still sitting at the bar.
My father, standing in his dressing room, was already stripped to the waist--wig off--by the time Bovary and I got backstage. William Francis Dean had a snow-white crew cut and the starved-down, muscular body of a lightweight wrestler or a jockey. The little falsies, and a bra no bigger than Elaine's--the one I used to wear when I was sleeping--were on my dad's dressing-room table, all heaped together with the pearl necklace. The dress, which unzipped from the back, had been undone only as far as my father's slender waist, and he'd slipped the top half off his shoulders.
"Shall I unzip you the rest of the way, Franny?" Senor Bovary asked the performer. My father turned his back to Bovary, allowing his lover to unzip him. Franny Dean stepped out of the dress, revealing only a tight black girdle; he'd already unfastened his black stockings from the girdle--the stockings were rolled at his narrow ankles. When my dad sat at his dressing-room table, he pulled the rolled-down stockings off his small feet and threw them at Senor Bovary. (All this before he began to remove his makeup, starting with the eyeliner; he'd already removed the fake eyelashes.) "It's a good thing I didn't see you whispering to young William at the bar until I was almost done with the Boston part of the story," my father said peevishly to Bovary.
"It's a good thing someone invited young William to come see you before you're dead, Franny," Senor Bovary told him.
"Mr. Bovary exaggerates, William," my dad told me. "As you can see for yourself, I'm not dying."
"I'll leave you two alone," Mr. Bovary told us in a wounded tone.
"Don't you dare," my dad said to the love of his life.
"I dare not," Bovary replied, with droll resignation. He gave me a long-suffering look, of the you-see-what-I-put-up-with kind.
"What's the point of having a love of your life, if he's not always with you?" my father asked me.
I didn't know what to say; I was quite at a loss for words.
"Be nice, Franny," Senor Bovary told him.
"Here's what women do, William--small-town girls, anyway," my father said. "They find something they love about you--even if there's just one thing they find endearing. For example, your mother liked to dress me up--and I liked it, too."
"Maybe later, Franny--maybe say this to young William after you've had a chance to get to know each other," Mr. Bovary suggested.
"It's too late for young William and me to get to know each other. We were denied that opportunity. Now we already are who we are, aren't we, William?" my dad asked me. Once again, I didn't know what to say.
"Please try to be nicer, Franny," Bovary told him.
"Here's what women do, as I was saying," my father continued. "Those things they don't love about you--those things they don't even like--well, guess what women do about those things? They imagine they can change those things--that's what women do! They imagine they can change you," my father said.
"You knew one girl, Franny, una mujer dificil--" Mr. Bovary started to say.
"Now who's not being nice?" my dad interrupted him.
"I've known some men who tried to change me," I told my father.
"I can't compete with everyone you've known, William--I couldn't possibly claim to have had your experience," my dad said. I was surprised he was a prig.
"I used to wonder where I came from," I told him. "Those things in myself that I didn't understand--those things I was questioning, especially. You know what I mean. How much of me came from my mother? There was little that came from her that I could see. And how much of me came from you? There was a time when I thought about that, quite a lot," I told him.
"We heard about you beating up some boy," my father said.
"Say this later, Franny," Mr. Bovary pleaded with him.
"You beat up a kid at school--rather recently, wasn't it?" my dad asked me. "Bob told me about it. The Racquet Man was quite proud of you for it, but I found it upsetting. You didn't get violence from me--you didn't get aggression. I wonder if all that anger doesn't come from those Winthrop women," he told me.
"He was a big kid," I said. "He was nineteen, a football player--a fucking bully."
But my father and Senor Bovary looked as though they were ashamed of me. I was on the verge of explaining Gee to them--how she'd been only fourteen, a boy becoming a girl, and the nineteen-year-old thug had hit her in the face, bloodying her nose--but I suddenly thought that I didn't owe these disapproving old queens an explanation. I didn't give a shit about that football player.
"He called me a fag," I told them. I guessed that would make them sniffy.
"Oh, did y
ou hear that?" my dad asked the love of his life. "Not the fag word! Can you imagine being called a fag and not beating the shit out of someone?" my father asked his lover.
"Nicer--try being nicer, Franny," Bovary said, but I saw that he was smiling. They were a cute couple, but prissy--made for each other, as they say.
My dad stood up and hooked his thumbs into the tight waistband of his girdle. "If you gentlemen would be so kind as to give me a little privacy," he said. "This ridiculous undergarment is killing me."
I went back to the bar with Bovary, but there would be no hope of further conversation there; the skinny gay boys had multiplied, in part because there were more older men by themselves at the bar. There was an all-boys' band playing in a pink strobe light, and men and boys were dancing together out on the dance floor; some of the T-girls were dancing, too, either with a boy or with one another.
When my father joined us at the bar, he was the picture of masculine conformity; in addition to those athletic-looking sandals (like Bovary's), my dad was wearing a tan-colored sports jacket with a dark-brown handkerchief in the breast pocket of the jacket. The murmur of "Franny!" passed through the crowd as we were leaving the club.
We were walking on Hortaleza, just past the Plaza de Chueca, when a gang of young men recognized my father; even as a man, Franny must have been famous in that district. "Vomito!" one of the young men cheerfully greeted him.
"Vomito!" my dad happily said back to him; I could see he was pleased that they knew who he was, even not as a woman.
I was struck that, well after midnight, there were throngs of people in the streets of Chueca. But Bovary told me there was a good chance of a smoking ban making Chueca even noisier and more crowded at night. "All the men will be standing outside the clubs and bars, on these narrow streets--all of them drinking and smoking, and shouting to be heard," Senor Bovary said.
