Spain 1984 - 3

It might have been that night in Waterloo, but definitely on that trip to Spain, that I discovered sex as a narcotic, quick, furtive, anonymous sex as a balm for deep anxiety. Every city in those days had wooded and other areas where men could meet each other for relief; not “gay” men either, necessarily, because men are the same in the flesh and no one asks questions in those places. The mechanics of the fleeting sex encounter -- the signaling and fondling, heaving, spurting, and darting away -- adhere exactly to Masters’ and Johnson’s “stages of arousal” in the lab: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution, these and no more, clinical but limitless.

This is what Erica Jong called the Zipless Fuck. I had them all the time. Driving to Spain from Belgium, I got in the habit of stopping when I saw men standing idly in public parks and rest areas, as if they were waiting for something, as if they had nothing else to do in Lille, Orléans, Angoulème, Pau, and even Lourdes, where I ran into an array of exposed erections not 300 meters from St. Bernadette’s grotto. I don’t know why it surprised me — it would be no different at Disney World. And it was better than drinking, I told myself. At least I wasn’t drinking.

I was depressed, but I didn’t know it. Why was failure so humiliating? Why couldn’t I just tell people that Pasionaria didn’t work out? There would be other projects, other glories. Why didn’t I believe it? How long would I need to stay in Spain to convince everyone I had tried?

It was the same thought I’d had on the day I got married, to be honest, when the bride disappeared from the receiving line and left me standing there by myself. She was the haughtiest of women when she was disturbed, a veritable Juno on Olympus. I found her behind the barn — we were married in Vermont — smoking cigarettes, which she rarely did, and smiling -- no, beaming -- at a male cousin she’d once slept with. For all I knew she was still sleeping with him and I asked myself, on our wedding day, “How long do you have to stay married before everyone agrees that you gave it your best shot?” I shook it off and headed for the bar. But I watched myself do it. I knew what lay in store.

Now, for several weeks, I wandered in Madrid. I toured the Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, went to galleries and to the movies, loitered in bookshops, sat in cafes, drove through the mountains, and took overnight trips to Ávila, Segovia, Salamanca, and the Escorial. I spent the longest night of my life in Salamanca, embraced by a large man who snored, on a bed that felt like a tilted fruit stand stacked with melons. The days were endless, divided by meals: desayuna, almuerzo, comida, and so on. I developed a taste for white judías, garlic soup, and roast suckling pig, but got so tired of eating at eleven at night, in the Spanish style, that I sometimes resorted to Chinese takeout and Burger King. Everything was baked in sunshine, pounded by the heat. I thought about going to a bullfight but knew I couldn’t bear it, and that if I went I’d only be lusting for the matadors in their tight little pants. I went to saunas and sex clubs instead.

“You do your best thinking naked,” I told myself. “You need sex every day, like any man.” One morning at a bar, munching on churros, I saw how a group of electrical linemen, utility workers, began their day with espresso and brandy, smoking, laughing, arguing, tossing their heads back, each of them vehement, each of them right, each of them king in his own tiny castle. The Spanish have a saying for this: “¡Viva yo!” -- Long live me! It means, roughly, that the king himself, the real one, has no higher rights of manhood than the janitor does, and that Spanish men can do as they please on their own turf and time. I was overcome by the passion of the specimens in front of me and blew two of them in the servicios before they went to work. At my hotel, I got on my knees and prayed, although I don’t know to what.

I was starting to feel sick from something other than microbes in the water. My ordeal with diarrhea had given way to a severe sore throat, localized on the left side, that no antibiotic was able to relieve. I saw another doctor in Madrid.

“Well, then, it’s viral,” he said. He was a handsome man, recommended by my hotel, but he practiced from a trailer in the northern suburbs and smoked cigarettes throughout the encounter. I had quit smoking six months before. I told him the story of my throat and intestines and blurted out, “I’m gay! Do I have AIDS?”

I had never said it out loud before.

“Oh, no,” said the doctor. “AIDS is very complicated. This is probably a travel thing. You’re a stranger in Spain.”

I left the trailer relieved but not convinced. I knew a lot about AIDS already, more than most. Three months earlier, Margaret Heckler, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services under Ronald Reagan, had announced the discovery of HIV, the human immuno-deficiency virus and undoubted culprit in AIDS cases. They called it HTLV-III at the start, when the virus was new and seemed to be affecting only Haitians, hemophiliacs, and homosexual men with “multiple sexual partners,” sometimes running into the hundreds and thousands.

“Don’t have sex with anyone from New York or San Francisco,” said my London boyfriend. “Don’t sleep with anyone who’s been to a bathhouse since 1980.” I had done both and wasn’t capable of not worrying. There was a lot of talk then about heavy drug use being the decisive factor in AIDS cases, and some early statistics, pathetic in their optimism, which suggested that only a small percentage of infected people would go on to develop “full-blown AIDS.” Something called ARC -- AIDS-Related Complex – lay in between, but seemed to be tolerable and of course would be treatable soon. No one had died from ARC yet, had they? Safe-sex campaigns were just getting started. A cure was on the way.

But the emphasis on numbers still scared me, the definition, in my own case, of “multiple” sexual partners. How many were too many? Fifty? A hundred? Where was the cutoff? I had come to Spain with the blessing of a veteran of the Stonewall riots, a New York ad executive, who urged me to use his own mantra for sex adventures: “Quantity is quality.” Was I dying now? What had I done?

A journal I kept in 1984 records six sex encounters in New York by July of that year, three in Brussels, two in Paris, and more in Barcelona and Madrid. A note added later says, “Don’t forget Zurich,” and I didn’t. I couldn’t. The pain in my throat got worse every day. I heard the words of the Spanish doctor in my head — “It’s viral, viral” — and blushed with shame one late afternoon at a sauna near the Atocha station, when I made love to a young man from Samoa and realized that I, not he, was the trick to avoid. It would be a year before I met anyone with an AIDS diagnosis, and three after that before my own friends began to die. But in Madrid I knew for certain: AIDS was real, and I would get it.

I want to say something poetic. Words don’t capture the dread that came over me in Spain that summer and stayed for two decades, on and off, hot and cold, through better times and worse. It came in waves and lightning strikes. It was like ice rising from the stomach in flames. Margaret Heckler had promised a vaccine for AIDS within two years, and I clung to that hope with the men I met in bars and parks and swimming pools, and back rooms and saunas, and on the docks and riverbanks of Europe’s capital cities. I watched myself as always, wondering what I was doing, why I ignored the warnings, how I came to treat myself and other people with such wanton disregard. In the end, my sore throat turned out to be caused by an infected wisdom tooth. But I was already trapped, unable to get out. I had nightmares on nightmares but I couldn’t let go of the wheel.

---

In August my friend B came to Spain from Vermont and together we left Madrid. She was my closest friend in those days, a companion from childhood, with whom I now had a kind of marriage that included long separations and no sex. B was straight, and while she often predicted that one day we’d sleep together, she never pressed me into it. She had a sex life of her own. We shared a condo in Vermont and other quarters in Brussels and Paris. It was the perfect arrangement, intimate and full of fun, marred only sometimes by my need to fall in love and B’s to run my life. We joked about that: how she was “practical” and organized, while I was prone to any folly. This was the basis of our lavender union. I was lost without her.

“Remember,” B said, “we have a pact.” It was to be together always no matter who else came around. She saw me through upsets, lovers, mad ideas, and recurring bouts of frustration and anger – “nerve storms,” we called them. She was my anchor and confessor; I loved her and owe her a great deal. I didn’t know that chaste partnerships are liable to the same disappointments and hammerings of time that wreck conjugal ones. But I said I wouldn’t be cheerful on this Spanish trip, and I wasn’t.

We drove to the Algarve first, in Portugal, where our hotel was barely furnished and our room faced scrubland, not the ocean. There was a small shopping center nearby, a golf course, a restaurant, and a lot of wind on the beach. Richard Burton died. I saw it in newspaper headlines and felt sorry for his wife, the last one, who would have to concede to Elizabeth Taylor at memorial services. Alone with B, I could be myself, but she wasn’t a starry-eyed queen. B was fun, not camp. I had no one to talk to about Elizabeth Taylor. I felt like a weakling, stripped of autonomy, a fraud. I chafed and moped. The pain in my throat got worse and worse.

We went to Galicia, on Spain’s northern coast, an eye-popping region of mountains and cataracts, cornfields, vineyards, palm trees, and jutting shorelines. This is “Green Spain,” settled by the Celts, the site of St. James’s shrine at Santiago de Compostela and the end point of the Pilgrim’s Road. We stayed at a hotel on the coast near Finisterre, the Casa del Castro, a Victorian warren of hallways and staircases that seemed to lead to nothing but sharp turns and cul-de-sacs. It stormed the first night we were there. It blew up a gale, and I imagined that we had checked into Manderley or Wuthering Heights. I was reading Dracula, a favorite from childhood. My throat was killing me, and after several days I discovered that I had come to Galicia with crabs.  

Here was something Pepe and Isabel hadn’t warned about. I stood in line at a pharmacy ahead of five old women in black, Spanish abuelas, grandmothers, trying to explain in a language I didn’t know that I had caught lice from a sexual encounter. I had to mime the problem, gesturing to the area below my belt with furious rubbing and scratching motions, and when the pharmacist finally got it and said, “No hay problema, Señor,” I was so relieved I exclaimed in German, “Gott sei Dank!” and turned to smile at the ladies  behind me. Instantly I was someone else, a businessman from Dusseldorf or Stuttgart, maybe, touring Spain with his wife and children and paying the price for a night of tomfoolery. I thanked everyone and left.

At Santiago I went to the cathedral and saw that the votive candles had been replaced by electric bulbs. I felt betrayed, insulted. Had they done it for convenience? How hard could it be to replace candle ends and clean up around the stands? I wondered who had had that job before and decided that it should have been me, that I was a perfect fit for routine work. There were men at the New York Public Library, I knew, who did nothing all day but look at magazines and newspapers and clip out items of interest for the different departments. I should have had a job like that. Or, like Jan Morris after her gender surgery, I should have been “lieutenant to a really great man,” someone’s loyal and self-sacrificing second-in-command. Morris had actually said that — “That’s my idea of happiness” — although her ego was probably as large as any writer’s and coming second wouldn’t have worked.

I was sick of myself. When B left Spain I left too, heading to Morocco to see my father in Meknes, where he was working on a military project for the Moroccan government. It was purely defensive, he told us, as he always did when he took jobs in the Middle East: “It’s purely defensive.” Lately, he had met a woman on the stairs in his office building and fallen in love. Coup de foudre. They wanted to get married but needed permission from her father, as she was much, much younger than mine. For now they were courting, a word with conditions in Islam, and with my sister Barbara as female chaperone we all went on holiday in Agadir.

My future stepmother was younger than I, even, just 29, a bright, fun-loving woman who laughed a lot and bossed my father but spoke only Arabic and French. Dad spoke only English, which meant that when he wasn’t understood he raised his voice and repeated himself. I was their interpreter for two weeks, translating pre-nuptial conversations from French to English and English to French and wondering what kind of planet I had landed on. “Stranger things have happened,” I said to my sister, “but not to us.” At night I met Moroccan men on the seafront and drove with them into the desert. I was dying of suspense.

A picture taken on the beach at Agadir shows me looking almost strapping in a navy-blue Speedo, relaxed and tanned, with no hint of anxiety on my face. When I left Morocco I went to London and turned myself in. I was dropping La Pasionaria, I said. I don’t remember what excuse I gave, that she wouldn’t cooperate or something. I had to keep my seat warm and saw no harm in lying about Stalinists.

And of course I had worried for nothing. No one cared about my reasons. They looked bewildered when I offered them. I don’t remember whose idea it was to recast Pasionaria as a novel, a big, sprawling novel of the Spanish Civil War, but I jumped on the occasion for no better reason than I didn’t know how to do otherwise. I was an Author, a published writer. I spent six months reading and putting notes together and three more trying to concoct a plot that put Dolores Ibárruri into bed with a mash-up of Robert Capa, Vincent Sheean, and me, on the side of the angels. When that collapsed too, I put the Spanish material away and didn’t look at it again.

I started to drift, crisscrossing Europe, sleeping around, hoping that a new book idea might fall from somewhere and knock me on the head. One day I found myself at W. H. Smith, the English-language bookstore on Rue de Rivoli in Paris.

“Forty thousand books in here,” I sighed, “and only one of them by me.” I reported this later to the great Liz Calder, my editor at Jonathan Cape, and she laughed.

“Peter,” she said, “write what you want to write. There isn’t anything else.”

It would be five years before I published another book, the last thing I did before AIDS came down for real.