In The Conformist, her character is quite aware of her power, and when she needs her admirer’s help she merely slips down her ballet leotard so he can see her breasts, small, pink-nippled, perfect. If the erotic power of her image on the screen did not fade with time for me, something unexpected happened that made the effect of the passing of time on desire throw me into a spin.
I met her.
●
Pour Son Amour
The ninth injection, last week, did not require a conversation with the doctor. I merely went to the office, waited my turn, and bared my ass to the nurse who had been shooting me up with hormones all along. My medical experiences over the past years had made me lose what little modesty I had left and I made a joke about my monthly southern exposure to this young woman. The injection hurt more than usual, but once it was over I pulled up my pants and forgot about it.
Until the fatigue and the hot flashes set in. For most of the week I had little energy and had to interrupt my writing by going to bed and watching TV or napping. The hot flashes are hard to cover up. Fortunately, I live in a hot climate where breaking into a sweat is not unusual. Unfortunately, this is already winter, tropical winter, when it’s only mildly cool and sweating is unusual. Sometimes someone notices. I pay little attention. Women I know who are going through menopause are not embarrassed about saying they’re having a hot flash. But I feel weird about it. Perhaps because they’re the same hormonal upheaval as a woman’s, male hot flashes are just not macho.
The hypersensitive male ego. What a burden. But does that ego reside in my testicles? It would seem so by all the talk about cojones. Or does it reside in my penis? Impotence can lead to an ontological crisis. I can’t make my cojones or my cock work, so I must not be a man. And if I’m not a man, then I am nothing. I don’t exist.
But my testicles are still there, albeit nonfunctional. So is my penis, albeit nonerectile. I often thought the most tragic love story of all was that of Abelard and Heloise. How it saddened me that the man was castrated. Had he just been killed, he would’ve been just one more star-crossed lover. But castrated? That meant he had lost his ability to consummate his love. Or perhaps love at all. Can I love? Can I still be a lover?
Technically, I can still engage in the varieties of lovemaking I have practiced all my life. A woman can have orgasms with the help of my hands or mouth, even if I can’t. But do I want to? At the beginning of hormone therapy, I most certainly didn’t. I don’t feel like it, I thought. I’ve been cut off from libido, just like Abelard. Now, I’m not so sure. Some part of me longs to suck on breasts, but so far I’ve felt a strange timidity about it, different from that early adolescent timidity, which was, after all, a sheer layer of fear over a raging fire of hormonal combustion. No combustion this time. The timidity is about starting something that I may not want to finish. Many a time—and I think most men will recognize this and so will most women—I have started a lovemaking bout, usually a first time, and early on or half way through realized this was not as pleasurable as I thought. For some reason, the chemistry between the two of us was off. Still, I soldiered on, as do women who think, what the hell, I’ve come this far, might as well fuck him, even if it’s for the first and last time.
But even the thought that I may want to begin the beguine is new in this strange passage of my life. Could it be that my manhood does not reside in my genitals, but elsewhere? That I am libidinous beyond libido? I have not turned sweeter since my chemical castration (neither did Abelard, for that matter). I feel fatigued by the shots, but I don’t walk down the street any more or less badass than before—not that I often tried on that persona. And I feel as capable of harm as ever, perhaps even more so because the ordeals of the past six years have stripped me of layers of fear. I could join the army, go kill like any good old boy. And sometimes, when my condition sparks in me not the self-pity that leads to suicidal thought but the anger that leads to homicidal ones, I wish for war, for an automatic weapon in my hand and an enemy target I can annihilate. Fortunately, I don’t think this way for long.
Like Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City, I am a lover, not a killer. Where is Susan Sarandon and her heavenly breasts?
●
Screen Test
Angelic. In those movies where I desired her, installing myself in the position of the male protagonist—a confluence of what Roland Barthes called desire in the text and desire of the text—Dominique Sanda looked like an angel, even more because she had an edge of the perverse, which in The Conformist is more than an edge. And just like one can never possess an angel, this hapless spectator could never possess her angelic beauty. Or so I thought in the days when I toiled as an academic, far from cinema’s glamour, though admiring it as a lifelong viewer—addict may be a better word—and an occasional scholar and professor of film criticism. A professor of desire.
But then my career changed. I became a cultural journalist and began meeting those demiurgic creatures of the entertainment media, like musicians and actors. In most cases the meetings were professional: I was interviewing these people for newspaper or magazine articles. In a handful of cases, the meetings grew into warm acquaintances and even friendships. And always, at least while the interview lasted, I did my best to make a brief friendship of it. Some of these meetings were with attractive women, and I steered my libidinous impulses toward the work of connecting with my subject. It was a kind of flirtation, all the more exciting because there was no acknowledgment of anything but work. Still, I couldn’t help notice that Spanish actress Assumpta Serna, for example, was wearing no bra under her light and loose summer blouse when I interviewed her. When it came time to write, I harnessed my desire to my keyboard.
However, meeting an angel is something I never imagined. And meeting a post-angelic angel, well, that was, as Gabriel García Márquez said in another context, beyond imagination.
The very Assumpta Serna I had interviewed in 1986 apropos of her leading role in Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador, played the seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Maria Luisa Bemberg’s 1990 biopic Yo la peor de todas (I the Worst of All). That year, the film was shown at the Havana Film Festival, which I was covering for a magazine, but Serna was not in attendance.
Director Bemberg was there, as was the actress, older than Serna, who played her Mother Superior: Dominique Sanda. Frankly, I was not paying much attention to this film—I confess I have yet to see it—and was interested, instead, in Sidney Pollack, whose movie Havana was premiering in Havana. I got myself invited to a glamorous luncheon for some of the movie directors and stars attending the festival. And that’s how, at an outdoor table in the Marina Hemingway, an unabashedly sybaritic yachting playground in socialist Cuba, I found myself sitting close to Pollack, whom I would corner later for an interview, and across from his fellow director Paul Mazursky, a genial fellow who asked the woman seated next to me, “How is Bernardo?”
I forget how she answered the Bertolucci query because I was struck dumb by the fact that the woman next to me was the cinematic love of my life, Dominique Sanda. Years had passed since she had driven both Jean-Louis Trintignant and me mad with desire in The Conformist. She had aged, though not badly. Her body was still lean and taut, her face appealing. She was, I must say, a beautiful woman in early middle age.
But she was no longer an angel. Gone were the soft baby cheeks, that perfect face that only Raphael could have conjured. I could not see her eyes for she was wearing sunglasses, as was I under the tropical sun. I did my best to ignore her, to stop thinking, fuck, I’m sitting next to Dominique Sanda! So I paid attention to Mazursky’s chatter, a kind of hip Borscht Circuit wit, and I pursued Pollack, with whom I managed to spend the rest of the afternoon.
Still, I was haunted by the two Sandas. The perfect beauty on the screen, with her angelic face and nipples so enchanting they could turn a man to Fascism and murder. And the older yet still beautiful woman about my age sitting next to me. Despite my efforts to ignore her, I heard things she said that went straight into the file in my brain where details that have a bearing on sexuality are kept. She was, I realized, quite aware that she was no longer the world’s most beautiful woman. She commented—to Mazursky, not me—that this morning she had felt quite sure of herself, she felt strong and beautiful,