Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I enjoyed it, and was pleased when this young man mentioned a Spanish-language film that was playing at the weekend and had become some sort of underground hit. El Topo, ‘The Mole’ – could an underground film possibly have a better title? The director was Mexican, so the delivery of the dialogue wouldn’t be what we were used to, but we thought we could survive for a couple of hours without the ‘Castilian lisp’.

  Strange film. It turned out to be an existential Western or something of the sort, perhaps an allegory, with lashings of startling imagery. Pretentious? Of course. I tried to keep my eyes away from the bottom of the screen so as to take in the dialogue without help, but I couldn’t altogether manage. In any case, El Topo can boast one of the great subtitles of all times – ‘When you came within 250 yards of my boundary fence, my rabbits started dying.’ That has to rank with the all-time greats. I’m thinking of the neighbour saying, ‘Look what eating nettles has done for her’ after the maid has started to levitate in Theorem, or the hero of Hour of the Wolf saying, as he (literally) walks up the wall, ‘Don’t mind me, it’s only my jealousy.’ The acknowledged classics, the ones on everybody’s list.

  I sat tight while the film meandered luridly on. Of course I noticed that there was a lot of symbolic deformity involved, and that there was a strong element of brutality meted out to the wrongly shaped or oddly sized. I took it in my stride. I’m all for hostility against the disabled coming into the open. Let it show itself. It’s not me that’s going to be shocked by it. I signed up for normal life, and I don’t expect to be feather-bedded. I didn’t find it all that hard to disconnect from my everyday responses, and to take pleasure in this welter of punitive glory.

  My escort, though, wasn’t just trying to blot out the subtitles but the whole of the screen. I could feel the misery pouring out of him. He winced and gave a little moan at the cruelty of each fresh tableau. In the darkness his lips were being chewed without outside assistance. Cruelly he raked the plump tissues with his teeth. I don’t know why he took it quite so personally – did he think I’d suspect him of dragging me to see this film specifically to cause me pain? Paranoia was mother’s milk in those days, but it was hard to believe that anyone had supped so deep. Perhaps it made things worse for him that (in a spirit of gratitude) I had paid for the tickets. The Spanish side of him had shrivelled away to nothing, and he was Englishness itself in his experience of social pain. The English feel embarrassment the way other peoples experience anger or desire.

  So in a spirit of charity I groped him, leaning precariously over to interfere with his person. Anything to take his mind off his discomfort. More than discomfort – agony, really. Now if he wanted to cling to his paranoia he would have to suspect me of dragging him to see this film specifically so that I could knead his private parts. I confronted taboo with taboo, then we were quits. I’d rather take advantage, however feebly, than be lumbered with the rôle of injured party. It’s not natural casting.

  It lets you cry

  I began to think I had been slow to notice the way that invisibility could work in my favour. Spectators chose not to notice the most outrageous groping liberties being taken, when the groper was me. So after that, I started to become more reckless. It was hardly likely there would be any drastic consequences. What were the authorities going to do – send me down, rusticate me? It was much too late for disciplinary measures. And if I didn’t know where I would be living in a few short months’ time, then the authorities would have to hew out my place of exile first, before they could send me there.

  It was already established that I had a certain amount of hypnotic talent, a personality magnet or minor force-field which could work wonders when properly aligned. The hypothesis was confirmed on a daily basis. I had a way with young males particularly. By this time I had found that I could use a little tug on a metaphysical sleeve to get a young man moving in the desired direction. Sometimes there would be no resistance at all, sometimes just a little, but no one was ever moved to say, ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ It’s a spell, of an elementary sort. Most people can work small enchantments, it’s just that they don’t know it, or they have more direct ways of getting what they want.

  My method worked best with emotionally withdrawn ex-public-schoolboys ill at ease with their bodies, hungering for touch but powerfully estranged from it. There was no shortage of such in the Cambridge of the time – in fact this was a thumbnail sketch of the bulk of the student body. Changing my subject of study brought me in contact with a new crop of such young men. The English Faculty turned out to be a brimming reservoir of the susceptible, as far as I was concerned. Public schools were very much over-represented in the group, though not the household names, more the minor ones. Places with a little bit of history but not too much, a handful of eminent old boys to point to, rather than a lengthy roll-call of cabinet ministers, laureates galore.

  I don’t know what these schools had done to their new old boys, but they emerged blinking into the world (or at least into Cambridge) almost wholly estranged from their own impulses, their emotions not even distinct enough to be called confused. I began to recognise the tribe. Undergraduates, often physically big and actively sporty, who hadn’t been keen to take me on my little trips to the lavatory found it in some strange way liberating. They would come back from our little expedition quietly thrilled, and would settle next to me, holding my hand and mooning at me with a blush of joy.

  I seemed to be a specific trigger, like the music that ‘makes people cry’. It doesn’t make you cry, it lets you cry. But what was stopping you from crying in the first place, if you had some crying that needed doing?

  I suppose it was no more than the famous ‘grounding’, a rush of reconnection with the species after being called upon to help a fellow being on a basic errand. Looking down at those big hands tenderly squeezing mine, their huge paws all warm, it was a shock to realise the fullness of their surrender. They were putty in my hands. For the time being they were under a spell. I began to see how much further I could take it. Under my ever-expanding cloak of invisibility a remarkable amount could be accomplished. I was a naughty Frodo Baggins who didn’t need to fear the searing eye of Sauron on him.

  At some point it became hard to tell my advantages from my disadvantages. They tended to blend. It helps that in these matters keeping my distance has never been an option. Anyone who has dealings with me must get close, and physical proximity puts many of my countrymen into a light trance. By the time either party is fully aware of it, foreplay may have begun.

  It’s true I never managed to coax a startled penis out into the open, while sitting in a pub or college bar, but I wasn’t far off. It was lack of dexterity that stopped me rather than a failure of nerve, but I didn’t deeply mind. An exhibitionist doesn’t really thrive in a setting where the most lurid transgressions attract no attention whatever.

  Geoff. Keith. Simon. Charles. Hugh. It was surprising how many young men were interested in having a lie down at some stage, and a little genteel exploration. I would try to persuade them to leave the door open or at least unlocked. I was always keen to have a witness. I don’t think I ever actually made a dive at a person’s cock, but I’m sure I startled a few folk. When you’re dealing with someone whose very identity is supposed to be the Limited-Mobility Man, then the last thing you expect is a surge of randy purpose.

  I can reach my cock when I really want to. It isn’t comfortable – if God had meant me to lean over, he wouldn’t have given me infantile rheumatoid arthritis – but I can certainly do it. If my organ of pleasure was as remote as my toes I’d be in a bad way, very much in need of acts of corporal charity. It’s just that, all things considered, if I’m going to make the effort, I’d rather touch someone else’s than my own. So it makes sense to wait for some susceptible person to have a kindly impulse and put his hand on my groin. Then I return the favour, groping happily away.

  Perhaps some of these young men felt sorry for me. I felt sorry
for them, come to that, if they needed to go to such lengths to gather up the scattered parts of their personalities. Obviously they weren’t virgins, but they had managed to become sexually experienced without developing the slightest emotional expressiveness. D. H. Lawrence would have understood perfectly. They were Gerald Criches to a man, even if one or two of them had probably read every word Lawrence ever wrote. As a minor university Birkin, I sometimes seemed to have my work cut out to make them whole.

  After our little bit of fumbling, my playmates couldn’t wait to be gone, babbling excuses as they beat their retreat. It was sweet that they imagined I wanted them to stay.

  Mother of plastic

  Once and only once I was able to play out a romantic scene in full, though it was necessarily of an unorthodox sort. I was sitting sideways in this young man’s lap, and both of us were cradled by the Parker-Knoll in its lowered configuration. In itself this didn’t count as an especially intimate position. It was comfortable. Geoff and I had been discussing (in anticipation of the Tragedy paper) the idea of dual determination, whereby people freely choose what has been laid down for them, so that there is no conflict between fate and free will. I had been wondering whether to mention my own conviction (gleaned from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, an otherwise unenlightening read) that I had chosen Mum’s womb in the endless moment of clarity between lives, so that I had accepted in advance what I would freely choose. It seemed better to keep quiet about that, both during the exam and in casual conversation.

  I was paying a lot of attention to Geoff’s shirt, though no more than it deserved. It was made of cheesecloth, in a pattern of tiny blue houndstooth checks. It was cut loosely, in emulation of a peasant smock. The collar was soft, and softly rounded. The material was held together under his Adam’s apple by a row of little buttons, miniature discs with a granular shine – not so much mother-of-pearl as mother-of-plastic. They were set so closely that each disc almost touched the next.

  I fiddled with his buttons, those many buttons, and I talked as I fiddled. He watched me with a warm wariness through glasses that made his eyes seem oddly defenceless behind that corrective barrier. I could smell his long hair, no longer clean but faintly musky.

  I had time to consider the buttons closely. They fastened the shirt not by going through a buttonhole but by being lassoed instead, with a little noose of thread. That was what my fingers were trying to do, to slip the little cotton nooses from round the buttons and release them. ‘Do you know which is older,’ I murmured, ‘buttons or buttonholes?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ he said, after a pause. ‘Is it a riddle?’

  ‘Well, it’s not like chickens and eggs. We come to university in search of knowledge, but how rarely do we get it, eh? There’s a definite answer here, and the answer is this: buttons are thousands of years older than buttonholes.’

  ‘Thousands of years? How is that possible? I don’t get it.’

  Buttons and buttonholes seem so obviously designed for each other that Geoff can’t really be blamed for being puzzled. It must have sounded as if I was saying there was a time when there were men and no women. ‘It’s a fact of textile history. There’s no serious disagreement among the experts.’ I’d listened to enough second-rate lecturers doing their stuff to be able to assume their flatly intense manner. ‘The button comes relatively early in the history of clothing. The first button was probably a piece of bone. Buttons don’t have to be regular in shape, you know. The wooden toggles on a duffel coat work perfectly well without being symmetrical. In fact you could say that the toggle is the most atavistic form of button, the fastening that keeps alive the deep memory of clothing, all the way back to the Ur-button. The primordial toggle.’

  All this time I was working away at the ridiculous task of undoing the numberless buttons on his shirt. For me it was an enterprise on the scale of a fairy-tale task, counting all the leaves in the forest, say, plucking a scale from every fish in the sea.

  He didn’t reply immediately, and his voice was oddly thick when he did. It had changed in character and also somehow in texture – no longer single cream, now double and potentially even clotted. ‘And how … how did buttons work before there were buttonholes?’ My personality magnet had mysteriously come into play.

  ‘That’s what makes the shirt you’re wearing so educational. It’s a history lesson in itself. The first buttonhole wasn’t a buttonhole as we understand it at all, merely a slit in an animal skin, then (with the invention of sewing) a loop at the edge of a piece of cloth. To make an actual buttonhole requires a much higher level of needle-work, as I’m sure you understand. Nowadays buttonholes are sewn by machines, but your garment with these excessively numerous loops – which are giving me a lot of trouble, incidentally – is a throwback in its own way. Just as cheesecloth is a peasant fabric enjoying a vogue among those who are not peasants, so these button-loops, sewn perhaps by small children, represent for the customer the dream of escaping from an industrialised present.’

  ‘And all for £1.25 from the market,’ he said. He was playing along wonderfully well.

  ‘For you, the dream. For little children, the nightmare – the pricked fingers, the education forfeited, the eyesight that fails …’

  As I fiddled and talked, sexual excitement became as real as cloth and as elusive as tiny buttons. There is no task to which my fingers are less suited than the undoing of tiny buttons. Since I was sitting in Geoff’s lap, he had the position of control, and my explorings were only under licence. I couldn’t have undertaken this rare dalliance against his wishes.

  I wonder where I learned all that about buttons. I can’t have been making it all up, can I?

  He had started rocking me on his hips – it’s an action deeply engraved in the nature of hips, and not hugely compromising. Being rocked might make me into a baby, I suppose. He might not even have been aware of the movement he was making.

  Mole stable

  The ridiculous glory of the scene was summed up by one silly fact, that the buttons were essentially ornamental. They didn’t go all the way down but ended in a placket. So however many buttons I undid, this shirt would never lie open before me. I could hope to unveil him as far as the breastbone, but actually taking the shirt off would involve lifting it over his head, something that was far beyond my powers. For all my studious fiddling, this manly boy or boyish man would have to undress himself without my help, or stay inside his clothes.

  The vocabulary of sexual attraction is on the narrow side, and was even narrower then. At CHAPs meetings no one admitted to anything as flighty as ‘fancying’ anyone else. Everything seemed fraught and problematic, the acts, the feelings and the words. Sex seemed to be some sort of duty, either sacred or grim. George and I had evolved a code word for those we found attractive: mole stable. Not much of a code word, I grant you, since it was really only the word ‘molestable’, rather arch in itself, split into two parts and jocularly pronounced, in the same silly spirit that makes people say picture skew for picturesque. Geoff in the cheesecloth shirt was definitely mole stable.

  His sexual availability was more or less a fiction, thanks to the limited coöperation offered by his cheesecloth shirt. But it wasn’t a fixed quantity. We had arrived at a finely balanced moment in psychological terms, and a balance can always be upset. His shirt was now sufficiently open for one nipple to be on show. It was less than a foot away from me.

  Gently I blew onto it from my little distance. I sent out a column of air to do my caressing for me. The air was warmed from being taken inside me, though it must have felt cool on Geoff’s chest. The centre of his nipple raised itself above the surface. It puckered into life under the influence of exhaled desire.

  Geoff’s eyebrows went sharply up, and then slowly settled back down. The pucker in his nipple, too, slowly subsided. He had kept his balance, and it was time to raise the stakes.

  I launched myself forward, in what was the equivalent in my range of motion of a trapeze artist swinging in
to the void, and made a grab for his glasses. For an instant Geoff could do either of two things, either defend his glasses and risk me falling, or reach to hold me safe. He had to choose, and he chose to hold me.

  His legs were suddenly rigid with tension, now that I had made a decisive move. His eyes, naked without glasses, registered the depths of his dismay, the wavering of male privilege. He was no longer in charge of what was happening.

  But was I? I was holding his glasses, that was all. He had only to take them back. But the balance had tipped just the same, and he badly needed to take back the initiative with a new action of his own. And so he did the only thing he could, by lifting me up and carrying me to the bed, as if that was what he had been planning all along. He lost face if he let me seduce him, but there was no embarrassment about being the seducer. And how could I resist him? He was lovely.

  But was he free at the moment he made his choice? Here was dual determination all over again, but with a slight difference. I was determined enough for both of us.

  It would have been nice to talk such things over with my peers at a CHAPs meeting, but it was never on the cards. Sex with straight men was an issue with more than its fair share of disquiet attached. On the one hand we maintained that there was no such thing as a straight man, and it was part of the revolutionary agenda to overthrow the ramparts of the patriarchy with cannonades of pleasure. On the other hand, anyone with an actual preference for heterosexual partners had internalised a lot of self-hatred and was thoroughly suspect. In any case nobody ever asked me at meetings if I had ever had anything in the way of a sex life, and it was simpler not to speak up. In fact, the single institution which has come closest to making me shut up was Cambridge’s independent forum where issues of sexual and political liberation could be freely discussed and worked through.