Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires

by Gilbert Adair

  There was monkey-faced Barbet – claimed he was fourteen but he was fifteen if he was a day. He picked me up at the Deligny open-air baths one sunny afternoon (he was playing truant from school) after noticing how transfixed the roving handheld camerawork of my eyes had become by the precocious bulge of his wet trunks which, preceding him by a full three inches as he sashayed, the rubbery little rapscallion, along the poolside, revealed as much as it concealed of his face’s roughneck relative from the wrong side of the waist. In the mildewy cubicle we shared for no more than ten minutes he instantly took charge – today the Deligny, tomorrow the world! – sitting me, all but pushing me, down on to the cold, damp bench, pulling those trunks of his to his knees and, like Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, slapping me across the cheeks – paf! paf! paf! paf! – with his lively, snaky, literally laugh-out-loud-amusing penis. There was Cleanth, a sinisterly jovial, bearishly hirsute American, twenty-nine, bushy sideburns, a horrendous scar – the result of some motorcycle accident – stretching down his woolly spine from his neck to his buttocks, who asked me if I was up to swallowing what he called, with ghoulish gusto, a ‘fudgesicle’. Not sure what it was but recoiling from the sound of it, I declined. There was a myopic English-speaking, Cambridge-educated Egyptian boy, twenty, whose name I never quite caught (Suliman? Soliman? Solomon?) and whom I permitted to give me a blow job even though he was in the snivelly throes of a bad head cold (he pronounced the word ‘underpants’, not altogether unjustifiably in his own case, as ‘udderpants’). There was Edouard, twenty-eight, a journalist on the magazine Gai Pied, with long tapering fingers stained by a writer’s inky stigmata and liquid brown eyes that were less obscured than set in relief by a pair of rimless glasses. Good, affectionate, conventional sex, nothing kinky, saw him three times in all. There was Achille, eighteen, a typical Left Bank moocher, who resembled Ralph Macavoy a little if I half-shut my eyes, not in the least if I didn’t. ‘Ah, vous autres Anglais! Quelle tristesse dans le plaisir!’ he had the nerve to say after a strenuous hour-long fuck. There was Ian, a Liverpudlian, twenty-six, one of those beer-bellied compatriots of mine whose sole frame of reference is soccer, snooker and the Sun and who, when sober, behave as other nationalities behave only when drunk. I encountered him at the Café de la Paix, where he was having difficulty ordering a pot of Earl Grey from a bloody-minded waiter – sex satisfying enough in a brutish British way. And there was Consuelo from the Berlitz, just for the heck of it. Wilde was right. Cold mutton.

  There was fey, squeaky-voiced Maud, a boy, real name Roger, twenty, very swishy, as close to being a transvestite as you can be without actually wearing a skirt, in fact sexier clothed than naked, for he had an ignoble putty-coloured prick as puny as a penny-whistle. There was Ivor, South African, middle-aged, a balding balletomane with a gorgeous Greek lover in tow. It was the lover, Yannis, nineteen, whom I naturally fancied and, after having had to put up with Ivor’s insufferable chatter on the terrace of the Flore (directed to what I was privately glad to observe was a sullen and rebellious Yannis, it was all ‘Tell Gideon about the perfectly lovely Peter Pears recital we went to at the Wigmore’ and ‘Tell Gideon who it was we saw camping it up in the interval of La Bayadère’ and ‘Tell Gideon what Peggy Ashcroft said when you asked for her autograph’), it was Yannis I finally got when he and Ivor had a fearful public row about how loud the latter was speaking. There was Gaetan, a French-Canadian airline steward, thirty-one, pretty if ravaged – the debauched choirboy look – the pockets of whose chic linen, slim-lapel jacket were filled with matchbook covers on which his many, many lovers had jotted down their telephone numbers (homosexuality, the love that dare not speak its name but doesn’t mind leaving its number). I accompanied him to his room in a hotel off the boulevard Raspail, the Istria, where, beneath snapshots of Foujita, Man Ray, Marie Laurencin and the like, who had all shacked up there when it was called the Hôtel de Grenade, he fucked me so ferociously that, back at the Voltaire, I found blood-red skid marks on my underpants. There was Julien, twenty-two, a labourer, his cute cuticles caked with plaster, like clean white dirt, whom I met, the very day after my night with Gaetan, when we were both queueing to buy kebabs in the Latin Quarter. A nice, impressionable boy, no conversation, his head enhaloed by a frizz of blond pubic hair – the sex fairish, not truly memorable, except that I still find myself wondering what’s become of him. There was Thadée, twenty-three, a masseur by profession but also an aspiring concert pianist, spotted reading an unusually little book at a lonely café table. Before we settled down to make very decent love, he played Debussy’s Clair de lune on my naked shoulder-blades (omoplates – my favourite French word). And there was Jake, an American, twenty-five, whom I accosted at midnight just outside his hotel in the rue Bonaparte when I heard him drunkenly cursing his ‘fucking so-called boyfriend’. He took me to his third-floor room up an ill-lit stairway as precarious as a rope ladder, switched on the light, turned round to look me properly up and down and, before I myself had time to follow him inside from the landing, said, ‘Sorry. My mistake. No hard feelings?’ – speak for yourself, buster! – and closed the door in my face.

  There was naughty Enrique, Spanish, nineteen, as untiring as a pet pup with a slobbery tennis ball that, a session of throwing and fetching and throwing and fetching and throwing and fetching having finally come, from the human point of view, to its long overdue end, treats his exhausted master – in this instance, me – to a ‘That’s it?’ moue of doggy ingratitude. There was Barrie, Schuyler’s Barrie, whom I ran into by chance at a Francis Bacon exhibition at the Petit Palais and who, now in funds, stood me to a scrumptious dinner at the three-star Grand Véfour, a treat I felt obliged to reciprocate the only way I could afford. Sex dire – ‘quipped’ an apologetic if unembarrassed Barrie, God’s little wiseacre, ‘When I was your age, honey-chile, I’d wake up limp all over and stiff in one place. Now I wake up stiff all over and limp in one place.’ (I did discover, however, that his advances to Schuyler, made two decades earlier, had all been rejected.) There was Italo, Italian, twenty-seven, melodramatically flaring nostrils, a coal-black kiss curl on either side of his brow, a raven’s wing forelock that every five minutes would flop forward into his eyes, a clean-shaven pubic area that interested me strangely and a bottom-drawer collection of von Gloeden’s photographs. There was Paul, just twenty, a fragile, tickly, nail-biting creature as confused about his sexuality as I’d been at sixteen. In the Voltaire, where I had him, I sucked his purplish penis as cautiously as a Murano glass-blower, desirous as I was to avoid spilling the tears that seemed about to lap over on to the lashes of his opalescent eyes. There was rich Sumner, forty-two, a Boston rentier with a champagne-coloured toy poodle that primly trotted ahead of us on points like a baby ballerina. Though he was the Paris-is-my-playground type of American I despise, he was not only staying at L’Hôtel, the hotel in which Wilde died, but also in Mistinguett’s room with its glass Art Deco bed, a dual temptation I couldn’t resist. As the sex was even direr than with Barrie, though, I’d have nodded off had not a multiplicity of glinting reflections of Lolita, the poodle, snoozing fitfully at the foot of the bed kept me awake long enough to see her master surreptitiously don a frilly black sleeping-mask and a hairnet. And there was Didier, finally a Didier to call my own, twenty-two and a tad too tattooed for my taste, but, oh my lord, what an athlete, what an acrobat! First, he would stand before me, starkers, cock and balls tucked out of sight behind his closed thighs, the bowdlerised edition of a boy. Then he’d stretch out on the bed, double-jointedly drawing his now arched thighs back over his head and spreading his buttocks, with their high, Gene-Tierneyesque cheekbones, as far apart as they’d go. Then he’d knot his feet behind his neck and curl the palms of his hands round their soles, so that the tumerous mushroom of his balls sprouted from the crack in his backside like a single orb so neat and spherical and bursting with goodies you wanted to topknot the whole delicious doodad with a pretty pink velvet ribbon. And then, with an almost maternal
gentleness and grace that was the very last thing I expected from him, he would ease us both into the soixante-neuf posture, my cock sliding like a thermometer into his mouth, his simultaneously into mine, as though our bodies were a pair of adjacent pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or a do-it-yourself kit to love.

  During this busy period I was screwed on leaky, punctured, discoloured mattresses laid out any old how on uncarpeted floors (lots of these); in chintzy double beds whose Habitat bedspreads were topped off by the same three suede cushions in lozenge-patterned symmetry – grey, beige and buff-yellow; in tiny, cramped cots shoved into corner nooks of chambres de bonne; in bathtubs; on the carpet; in Mistinguett’s bed, as I said; under a poster of a moody Jimmy Dean mooning along a rainswept New York street one blurry dawn a long, long time ago; on the lower berth of a multicoloured barge moored near the Seine’s mini-Statue of Liberty; in a curvacious, queen-sized lit-bateau over whose polished cherry-wood head glowered a big black Soulages; once on a hammock; a half-dozen times atop that chafing San Andreas faultline that can never quite be smoothed over and forgotten about when hotel twin beds are pushed together to create what you hope will feel like a single one; on a sofa made from, of all things, Turkish saddle-bags (my dear, how too madly sweaty!); on many ordinary sofas; on the kind of outsize brass bed – my wrists and ankles roped tight to its four posts – against which, in satin scanties, Liz Taylor was once to be seen steamily draping herself on the poster of a Tennessee Williams movie; and, but always as a last resort, in my own snug little hotel-room bunk.

  And there, reader, you have the end of my story, more or less. It’s exactly fifty-six days since I started writing it – the first was the day after my night with Didier and today is the fifty-seventh. When I complete the few paragraphs I need to round it off, I shall send the manuscript to my cousin Dennis. I wouldn’t entrust it to Mick, who, if I know him, would subject it first to a major ‘creative’ editing job, especially where his own portrait is concerned. Nor to my parents who, like most nice people, hold horrible views on the subject of homosexuality, regarding it as merely a less malignant variety of Aids. For them, as a gay man, something they must realise I am, I already have Aids. It just hasn’t manifested itself yet. No, as I made clear in my very first paragraph, it will be up to Dennis to decide whether or not to try to get this memoir published. It won’t be a quick or easy decision for him to arrive at. After all, he himself makes a brief cameo appearance in it under his own name – a cameo, Dennis, I’d rather you didn’t censor – which means that, if it’s to come out in book form, he too will be forced to ‘come out’ along with it. If, then, it happens at all, it may not happen for some time.

  I still teach at the Berlitz but, except for the source material that it’s provided me with for this memoir, it’s ceased to offer me much more than paid employment. To be sure, there’s still Schuyler, inescapable, irreplaceable Schuyler, now presiding over a common room of teachers fewer and fewer of whom he knows, and fewer and fewer of whom know either him or even what the noun ‘doyen’ means. Schuyler, I say to myself as I contemplate him, you at least never change. If only that constancy of yours, that presence and permanence, that physical and mental homogeneity, could rub off on the rest of us. Good health, unfortunately, is not contagious, which is perhaps the single thing most amiss with the world.

  Ferey has gone for good. Is he still in France? Alive or dead? Nobody can tell me. Ralph Macavoy too. Just like that – one day there, the next not. (It shames me to admit it but, along with my genuine sorrow at his disappeance, as well as my sincere anxieties about the state of his health, I was chagrined to have to acknowledge to myself once and for all that I was never now going to know how well-hung he was.) And, or so Schuyler informed me, Peter, the garrulous, shaven-headed American whose good fortune it was forever to reside next door to the best charcuterie or boulangerie in Paris, has returned to the States to enter some sort of a Catholic retreat in New Hampshire. An ominous sign, I think.

  Mick and I continue to see each other. Occasionally, when he’s too exhausted to attend one of those ever more frequent meetings of his, usually held in a dilapidated church hall or youth club backroom out in some distant, dingy, double-digit arrondissement (every time I accompany him, it feels as though we have to travel farther and farther from the city centre), he’ll invite me to spend an evening at home with him in his rue Daguerre apartment. We’ll turn off all the lights, place a couple of candlesticks on the floor just out of elbow-shot, switch on TV (French television – putrid, but who cares), and, he stretching along the sofa on his tummy with his plate beneath him on the carpet, I resting my feet on the comfy and surprisingly sexy small of his back, we’ll end up weeping into our linguine while watching, let’s say, some whiskery old Gaby Morlay mélo or a dubbed BBC documentary about orphaned baby orangutans.

  Though fading, Mick hasn’t yet given up the ghost. He once quoted Madame du Barry to me. ‘Just a few seconds more, executioner, please!’ she was said to have pleaded on the scaffold. Even in the shadow of the guillotine life is better than death.

  As for me, all I can do is await the inevitable. I can imagine what lies ahead for me, but I remain curiously unafraid and, when all is said and done, I asked for it. So much of my life heretofore has been a sham that I’d welcome even a fatal dose of reality.

  If you find that hard to credit, you should know that it was actually at the very height of my sexual spree, my libidinal binge, that I first let my mind play over the implications of the risks I was quite consciously running. Such at any rate were those I’d already run by then, I could no longer doubt what their consequences would be. And there were nights when – after my current bedmate (whichever one he was) and I had slaked our thirst for one another’s body and, incapable of sleep, I’d continue to feast on his slumbering, unsuspecting nakedness, sniffing his armpits, drawing a beguiled finger through the dank, shit-scented snarl of his ass-hair, stroking his shrivelled post-coital cock and feeling it wearily stiffen to my touch – there were nights, I say, when I’d catch myself rewinding in my head the chronology of all my fugitive encounters, straining to fashion a mental image of my partners’ family tree, as it were, trying to figure out which one of those partners (and I had a few theories) was likeliest to have, like a card sharp, palmed the ace of spades, the ace of Aids, off on me.

  The exercise, of course, was foredoomed to failure. And I was reminded of a tango I used to hear on the Soledad’s tinny hi-fi system (the Soledad was one of the discos I mentioned earlier, to which I was taken by Ferey). It was a derivative little melody, slower than most and of low priority in the pre-recorded medley of numbers whose unaltered sequence I grew as familiar with as the succession of tracks on some repeatedly listened-to LP. Its title was ‘Buenas Noches Buenos Aires’ and it told the tale of a lonely sailor reminiscing about the many women he’d bedded in the eponymous city and wondering which of them would bear him the son who would, in turn, bear his name when he died, as he was persuaded he one day would, at sea. I recall thinking how much I resembled that sailor, save that it’s I who have been – as I’m certain I have been – impregnated (a word, I assure you, reader, that I weighed long before using). I resemble him, too, in having absolutely no regrets.

  So – Kim, Edouard, Didier, Enrique, Gaetan, Barbet, mes semblables, mes frères, all those members of the only set, the only family, the only brotherhood, to which I’ve ever felt I truly belonged or wished to belong, all those of you with whom I’ve been privileged to share the splendours and miseries, grandeur and servitude, of the homosexual condition, let me salute you fraternally, wherever you are.