L'ANIMALE MORENTE

Philip Roth.

 «L’unica ossessione che la gente cerca: l’amore. Pensano, le persone, che innamorarsi sia come diventare parte di un tutto? L’unione platonica delle anime? Non per me. Sei una cosa unica prima di iniziare. Poi l’amore ti frantuma. Sei tutto intero, e poi finisci spaccato».....

.... «Riesci a immaginarla, la vecchiaia? Naturalmente no. Io no. Non ci riuscivo. Non avevo idea di che cosa fosse. Non ne avevo neanche un'immagine falsata: non ne avevo alcuna immagine. E non c'è nessuno che abbia voglia di fare previsioni. Nessuno desidera affrontare queste cose prima che venga il momento. Come andrà a finire, tutto? È di rigore l'ottusità.»

Un  libro sincero e senza pudori che ti rimesta nel  profondo. Si tratta di una meditazione  condivisa,  più che una narrazione, sul sesso, sulla vecchiaia, sulla morte che  ti stimola  a fare il punto sullo stato della tua più nascosta intimità.

David Kepesh – alter ego di Roth - non nasconde  il fatto di portarsi a letto le ragazze più  attraenti del suo corso, senza curarsi dei limiti deontologici del suo ruolo.  Spesso, a dire il vero, sono le ragazze che si portano a letto lui. È ciò che succede con Consuela Castillo, meravigliosa ed elegante ragazza, figlia di immigrati benestanti cubani anticastristi.

Consuela appartiene a «una generazione di ragazze che tiravano dalla loro figa le conclusioni sulla natura dell’esperienza e sulle delizie del mondo». Quest'uomo che supera la sessantina, che ha sempre vissuto intensamente e liberamente anche nel privato, di fronte  al declino, alla vecchiaia imminente, si trova ad affrontare  improvvisamente qualcosa di inaspettato: scopre la gelosia. Consuela ha qualcosa di straordinario che attira morbosamente questo uomo. La sua sensualità mascherata dietro al perbenismo, una consapevole femminilità alla quale appare indifferente. Ma soprattutto Consuela è un'occasione (l'ultima) per rivisitare  il proprio passato, e la sua ossessione per la sessualità e il rapporto con le donne. Dalla memoria emerge la ricchezza non sempre felice di una vita, insieme alle menzogne e meschinità, delle sue storie con le donne. Mentre si accorge per la prima volta in tutta la sua vita che non è più padrone totale dei sentimenti, delle passioni e degli impulsi, da questo amore nasce il dramma, e si passa dalla normalità la tragedia. La vecchiaia incrocia imprevedibilmente la malattia della sua giovane amante nel gioco crudele e straordinario dell'esistenza. Un romanzo tragico che racchiude tutta l'essenza dell'opera di Roth. 

The body contains the life story just as much

as the brain.

—edna o'brien

The Dying Animal

I knew her eight years ago. She was in my class. I don't teach full-time anymore, strictly speaking don't teach literature at all—for years now just the one class, a big senior seminar in critical writing called Practical

Criticism. I attract a lot of female students. For two reasons. Because it's a subject with an alluring combination of intellectual glamour and

journalistic glamour and because they've heard me on NPR reviewing books or seen me on Thirteen talking about culture. Over the past fifteen

years, being cultural critic on the television program has made me fairly well known locally, and they're attracted to my class because of that. In the

beginning, I didn't realize that talking on TV once a week for ten minutes could be so impressive as it turns out to be to these students. But they are

helplessly drawn to celebrity, however inconsiderable mine may be.Now, I'm very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody's defenseless against something, and that's it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else. They come to my first class, and I know almost

immediately which is the girl for me. There is a Mark Twain story in which he runs from a bull, and the bull looks up to him when he's hiding in a tree, and the bull thinks, "You are my meat, sir." Well, that "sir" is transformed into "young lady" when I see them in class. It is now eight

years ago—I was already sixty-two, and the girl, who is called Consuela Castillo, was twenty-four. She is not like the rest of the class. She doesn't look like a student, at least not like an ordinary student. She's not a demi-adolescent, she's not a slouching, unkempt, "like"-ridden girl. She's well spoken, sober, her posture is perfect—she appears to know something about adult life along with how to sit, stand, and walk. As soon as you enter the class, you see that this girl either knows more or wants to.

The way she dresses. It isn't exactly what's called chic, she's certainly not flamboyant, but, to begin with, she's never in jeans, pressed or unpressed.

She dresses carefully, with quiet taste, in skirts, dresses, and tailored pants.

Not to desen-sualize herself but more, it would seem, to professionalize herself, she dresses like an attractive secretary in a prestigious legal firm.

Like the secretary to the bank chairman. She has a cream-colored silk blouse under a tailored blue blazer with gold buttons, a brown pocketbook with the patina of expensive leather, and little ankle boots to match, and she wears a slightly stretchy gray knitted skirt that reveals her body lines as subtly as such a skirt possibly could. Her hair is done in a natural but cared-for manner. She has a pale complexion, the mouth is bowlike though the lips are full, and she has a rounded forehead, a polished forehead of a smooth Brancusi elegance. She is Cuban. Her family are prosperous Cubans living in Jersey, across the river in Bergen County. She has black, black hair, glossy but ever so slightly coarse. And she's big. She's a big woman. The silk blouse is unbuttoned to the third button, and so you see she has powerful, beautiful breasts. You see the cleavage immediately.

And you see she knows it. You see, despite the decorum, the

meticulousness, the cautiously soigne style—or because of them—that she's aware of herself. She comes to the first class with the jacket buttoned over her blouse, yet some five minutes into the session, she has taken it off.

When I glance her way again, I see that she's put it back on. So you understand that she's aware of her power but that she isn't sure yet how to use it, what to do with it, how much she even wants it. That body is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime.

And she's aware of something else, and this I couldn't know from the one class meeting: she finds culture important in a reverential, old-fashioned way. Not that it's something she wishes to live by. She doesn't and she couldn't—too traditionally well brought up for that—but it's important and wonderful as nothing else she knows is. She's the one who finds the. Impressionists ravishing but must look long and hard—and always with a sense of nagging con-foundment—at a Cubist Picasso, trying with all her might to get the idea. She stands there waiting for the surprising new sensation, the new thought, the new emotion, and when it won't come, ever, she chides herself for being inadequate and lacking . . . what? She chides herself for not even knowing what it is she lacks. Art that smacks of modernity leaves her not merely puzzled but disappointed in herself. She would love for Picasso to matter more, perhaps to transform her, but there's a scrim drawn across the proscenium of genius that obscures her vision and keeps her worshiping at a bit of a distance. She gives to art, to all of art, far more than she gets back, a sort of earnestness that isn't without its poignant appeal. A good heart, a lovely face, a gaze at once inviting and removed, gorgeous breasts, and so newly hatched as a woman that to find fragments of broken shell adhering to that ovoid forehead wouldn't have been a surprise. I saw right away that this was going to be my girl.

Now, I have one set rule of some fifteen years' standing that I never break.

I don't any longer get in touch with them on a private basis until they've completed their final exam and received their grade and I am no longer officially in loco parentis. In spite of temptation—or even a clear-cut signal to begin the flirtation and make the approach—I haven't broken this rule since, back in the mid-eighties, the phone number of the sexual harassment hotline was first posted outside my office door. I don't get in touch with them any earlier so as not to run afoul of those in the university who, if they could, would seriously impede my enjoyment of life.

I teach each year for fourteen weeks, and during that time I don't have affairs with them. I play a trick instead. It's an honest trick, it's an open and above-board trick, but it is a trick nonetheless. After the final examination and once the grades are in, I throw a party in my apartment for the students. It is always a success and it is always the same. I invite them for a drink at about six o'clock. I say that from six to eight we are going to have a drink, and they always stay till two in the morning. The bravest ones, after ten o'clock, develop into lively characters and tell me what they really are interested in. In the Practical Criticism seminar there are about twenty students, sometimes as many as twenty-five, so there will be fifteen, sixteen girls and five or six boys, of whom two or three are straight. Half of this group has left the party by ten. Generally, one straight boy, maybe one gay boy, and some nine girls will stay. They're invariably the most cultivated, intelligent, and spirited of the lot. They talk about what they're reading, what they're listening to, what art shows they've seen— enthusiasms that they don't normally go on about with their elders or necessarily with their friends. They find one another in my class. And they find me. During the party they suddenly see I am a human being. I'm not their teacher, I'm not my reputation, I'm not their parent. I have a pleasant, orderly duplex apartment, they see my large library, aisles of double-faced bookshelves that house a lifetime's reading and take up almost the entire downstairs floor, they see my piano, they see my devotion to what I do, and they stay. My funniest student one year was like the goat in the fairy tale that goes into the clock to hide. I threw the last of them out at two in the morning, and while saying good night, I missed one girl. I said, "Where is our class clown, Prospero's daughter?" "Oh, I think Miranda left,"

somebody said. I went back into the apartment to start cleaning the place up and I heard a door being closed upstairs. A bathroom door. And Miranda came down the stairs, laughing, radiant with a kind of goofy abandon—I'd never, till that moment, realized that she was so pretty—and she said, "Wasn't that clever of me? I've been hiding in your upstairs bathroom, and now I'm going to sleep with you."

A little thing, maybe five foot one, and she pulled off her sweater and showed me her tits, revealing the adolescent torso of an incipiently transgressive Bal-thus virgin, and of course we slept together. All evening long, much like a young girl escaped from the perilous melodrama of a Balthus painting into the fun of the class party, Miranda had been on all fours on the floor with her rump raised or lying helplessly prostrate on my sofa or lounging gleefully across the arms of an easy chair seemingly oblivious of the fact that with her skirt riding up her thighs and her legs undecorously parted she had the Balthusian air of being half undressed while fully clothed. Everything's hidden and nothing's concealed. Many of these girls have been having sex since they were fourteen, and by their twenties there are one or two curious to do it with a man of my years, if just the once, and eager the next day to tell all their friends, who crinkle up their faces and ask, "But what about his skin? Didn't he smell funny? What about his long white hair? What about his wattle?

What about his little pot belly? Didn't you feel sick?"

Miranda told me afterward, "You must have slept with hundreds of women.  I wanted to see what it would be like." "And?" And then she said things I didn't entirely believe, but it didn't matter. She had been audacious—she had seen she could do it, game and terrified though she

may have been while hiding in the bathroom. She discovered how courageous she was confronting this unfamiliar juxtaposition, that she could conquer her initial fears and any initial revulsion, and I—as regards the juxtaposition—had a wonderful time altogether.
Sprawling, clowning, cavorting Miranda, posing with her underwear at her feet. Just the pleasure of looking was lovely. Though that was hardly the only reward. The decades since the sixties have done a remarkable job of completing the sexual revolution. This is a generation of astonishing fellators. There's been nothing like them ever before among their
class of young women. 
Consuela Castillo. I saw her and was tremendously impressed by her comportment. She knew what her body was worth. She knew what she was. She knew too she could never fit into the cultural world I lived in—culture was to bedazzle her but not something to live with. So she
came to the party—beforehand I'd worried that she might not show up—and was outgoing with me there for the first time. Uncertain as to just how sober and cautious she might be, I had been careful not to reveal any special interest in her during the class meetings or on the two occasions when we met in my office to go over her papers. Nor was she, in those private meetings, anything other than subdued and respectful, taking down every word I said, no matter how unimportant. Always, in my office, she entered and exited with the tailored jacket worn over her blouse. The first time she came to see me—and we sat side by side at my desk, as directed, with the door wide open to the public corridor, all eight of our limbs, our two contrasting torsos visible to every Big Brother of a passerby (and with the window wide open as well, opened by me, flung open, for fear of her perfume)—the first time she wore elegant gray flannel cuffed pants, and the second time a black jersey skirt
and black tights, but, as in class, there was always the blouse, against her white-white skin the silk blouse of one creamy shade or another unbuttoned down to the third button. At the party, however, she removed the jacket after a single glass of wine and boldly jacketless was beaming at me, offering a tantalizingly open smile. We were standing inches apart in my study, where I had been showing her a Kafka manuscript I own— three pages in Kafka's handwriting, a speech he'd given at a retirement party for the chief of the insurance office where he was working, a gift, this 1910 manuscript, from a wealthy married woman of thirty who'd been a student-mistress some years back. Consuela was talking excitedly about everything. Letting her hold the Kafka manuscript had thrilled her, and so everything was emerging at once, questions nursed by her over that whole semester while I had secretly nursed my longing. "What music do you listen to? Do you really play the piano? Do you read all day long? Do you know all the poetry on your shelves by heart?" From every question it was clear low much she marveled—her word—at what my life vas, my coherent, composed culturallife. I asked her what she was doing, what her life was like, and she told me that after high school, she didn't start college immediately—she'd decided to become a private secretary.
And that's what I'd seen right off: the decorous, loyal private secretary, the office treasure to a man of power, the head of the bank or the law firm. She truly was of a bygone era, a throwback to a more mannerly time, and I guessed that her way of thinking about herself, like her way of comporting herself, had a lot to do with her being the daughter of wealthy Cuban emigres, rich people who'd fled the revolution.
She told me, "I didn't like being a secretary. I tried it for a couple of years, but it's a dull
world, and my parents always wanted and expected me to go to college. I finally decided to
study instead. I suppose I was trying to be rebellious, but that was childish and so I enrolled
here. I marvel at the arts." Again "marvel," used freely and sincerely. "Yes, what do you
like?" I asked. "The theater. All kinds of theater. I go to the opera. My father loves the opera
and we go to the Met together. Puccini's his favorite. I always love going with him." "You
love your parents." "Very much," she said. "Tell me about them."
"Well, they're Cuban. Very proud. And they've done very well here. The Cubans who came
here because of the revolution had a way of seeing the world so that somehow they all did
extremely well. That first group, like my family, worked hard, did whatever they needed to
do, did well to the point where, my grandfather used to tell us, some of them who needed
public assistance when they first arrived, because they had nothing—from some of them, after
a few years, the U.S. government started to receive checks paying them back. They didn't
know what to do with it, my grandfather said. The first time in the history of the U.S.
Treasury that they'd gotten a check back." "You love your grandfather, too. What is he like?"
I asked. "Like my father—a steady person, extremely traditional, someone with an Old World
view. Hard work and education first. Above everything. And like my father, very much a
family man. Very religious. Though he doesn't go to church that much. Neither does my
father. But my mother does. My grandmother does. My grandmother will pray the rosary
every night. People bring her rosaries for presents. She has her favorites. She loves her
rosary." "Do you go to church?" "When I was little. But now, no. My family is adaptable.
Cubans of that generation had to be adaptable, to a degree. My
family would like for us to go, my brother and me, but no, I don't." "What kind of
restraints did a Cuban girl growing up in America have that wouldn't be typical of an
American upbringing?" "Oh, I had a lot earlier curfew. Had to be home when all my
friends were just starting to get together on a summer night. Home at eight on a summer
night when I was fourteen and fifteen. But my father wasn't some frightening guy. He's
just your average nice-guy dad. Except no boy was ever allowed in my room. Ever.
Otherwise, when I got to be sixteen, I was treated the way my friends were being treated,
in terms of curfews and stuff." "And your mother and father, when did they come here?"
"In 1960. Fidel was still letting people go then. They were married in Cuba. They came to
Mexico first. Then to here. I was born here, of course." "Do you think of yourself as
American?" "I was born here, but, no, I'm Cuban. Very much so." "I'm surprised,
Consuela. Your voice, your manner, the way you say 'stuff and 'guy.' You're totally
American to me. Why do you think of yourself as a Cuban?" "I come from a Cuban
family. That's it. That's the whole story. My family has this extraordinary pride. They just
love their country. It's in their hearts. It's in their blood. They were like that in Cuba."
"What do they love about Cuba?" "Oh, it
was so much fun. It was a society of people that had the best of all the world. Entirely
cosmopolitan, especially if you lived in Havana. And it was beautiful. And they had all these
great parties. It was a really good time." "Parties? Tell me about the parties." "I have these
pictures of my mother at these costume balls. From the time she came out. Pictures of her at
her coming-out ball." "What did her family do?" "Well, that's a long story." "Tell me." "Well,
the first Spanish on my grandmother's side was sent there as a general. There was always a lot
of old Spanish money. My grandmother had tutors at home, she went to Paris at eighteen to
buy dresses. In my family, on both sides, there are Spanish titles. Some of them are very, very
old tides. Like my grandmother is a duchess—in Spain." "And are you a duchess as well,
Consuela?" "No," she said, smiling, "just a lucky Cuban girl." "Well, you could pass for a
duchess. There must a duchess looking like you on the walls of the Prado. Do you know the
famous painting of Velazquez, The Maids of Honor? Though there the little princess is fair, is
blond." "I don't think I do." "It's in Madrid. In the Prado. I'll show it to you."
We went down the spiral steel staircase to my library stacks, and I found a large book of
Velazquez
reproductions, and we sat side by side and turned the pages for fifteen minutes, a stirring
quarter hour in which we both learned something—she, for the first time, about Velazquez,
and I, anew, about the delightful imbecility of lust. All this talk! I show her Kafka, Velazquez
. . . why does one do this? Well, you have to do something. These are the veils of the dance.
Don't confuse it with seduction. This is not seduction. What you're disguising is the thing that
got you there, the pure lust. The veils veil the blind drive. Talking this talk, you have a
misguided sense, as does she, that you know what you're dealing with. But it's not as though
you're interviewing a lawyer or hiring a doctor and that whatever's said along the way is
going to change your course of action. You know you want it and you know you're going to
do it and nothing is going to stop you. Nothing is going to be said here that's going to change
anything.
The great biological joke on people is that you are intimate before you know anything
about the other person. In the initial moment you understand everything. You are drawn to
each other's surface initially, but you also intuit the fullest dimension. And the attraction
doesn't have to be equivalent: she's attracted to one thing, you to the other. It's surface, it's
curiosity, but then, boom, the dimension. It's nice
that she's from Cuba, it's nice that her grandmother was this and her grandfather was that, it's
nice that I play the piano and own a Kafka manuscript, but all this is merely a detour on the
way to getting where we're going. It's part of the enchantment, I suppose, but it's the part that
if I could have none of, I'd feel much better. Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find
women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone of any sex that enchanting
unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you that enchanted by?
Nobody.
She thinks, I'm telling him who I am. He's interested in who I am. That is true, but I am
curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. I don't need all of this great interest in
Kafka and Velazquez. Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, How much more am
I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I go as far as eight hours? Twenty
minutes into the veiling and already I'm wondering, What does any of this have to do with her
tits and her skin and how she carries herself? The French art of being flirtatious is of no
interest to me. The savage urge is. No, this is not seduction. This is comedy. It is the comedy
of creating a connection that is not the connection—that cannot begin to compete with the
connection—created unartificially by lust. This is the instant conventionalizing, the giving
us something in common on the spot, the trying to transform lust into something socially
appropriate. Yet it's the radical inappropriateness that makes lust lust. No, this just plots the
course, not forward but back to the elemental drive. Don't confuse the veiling with the
business at hand. Sure, something else might develop, but that something has nothing to do
with shopping for curtains and duvet covers and signing on as a member of the evolutionary
team. The evolutionary system can work without me. I want to fuck this girl, and yes, I'll
have to put up with some sort of veiling, but it's a means to an end. How much of this is
cunning? I'd like to think that all of it is.
"Shall we go together to the theater sometime?" I asked her. "Oh, I'd love to do that," she
said, and I didn't know then whether she was alone or had a boyfriend, but I didn't care, and
two or three days later—this is all eight years back, in 1992—she wrote a note saying "It was
great to be invited to the party, to see your wonderful apartment, your amazing library, to
hold in my own hands the handwriting of Franz Kafka. You so generously introduced me to
Diego Velazquez ..." She included her phone number along with her address, and so I called
and proposed an evening out. "Why don't you join me to go to the theater? You know what
my work is. I have to
go to the theater almost every week, I always have two tickets, and perhaps you'd like to
come."
So we had dinner together in midtown, we went to the play, it wasn't at all interesting, and
I was sitting next to her, glancing at her beautiful cleavage and her beautiful body. She has a
D cup, this duchess, really big, beautiful breasts, and skin of a very white color, skin that, the
moment you see it, makes you want to lick it. At the theater, in the dark, the potency of her
stillness was enormous. What could be more erotic in that situation than the seeming absence
in the exciting woman of any erotic intention?
After the play I said we could go for a drink, but there was one disadvantage. "People
recognize me because of the television and, wherever we go, the Algonquin, the Carlyle,
wherever, they may interfere with our sense of privacy." She said, "I noticed people noticing
us already, at the restaurant and at the theater." "Did you mind?" I asked. "I don't know if I
minded. I just noticed it. I wondered if you minded." "There's nothing much to be done about
it," I said, "it comes with the job." "I suppose," she said, "they thought I was a groupie."
"You're decidedly not a groupie," I assured her. "But I'm sure that's what they thought.
'There's David Kepesh with one of his little groupies.' They're thinking I'm
some silly overwhelmed girl." "And if they did think that?" I asked. "I don't know if I
like that so much. I'd like to graduate college before my parents find their daughter on
Page Six of the Post." "I don't think you're going to be on Page Six. That's not going to
happen." "I truly hope not," she said. "Look, if this is what's bothering you," I said, "we
can circumvent the problem by going to my place. We can go to my apartment. We can
have a drink there." "Okay," she said, but only after a serious, quietly thoughtful moment,
"that's probably a better idea." Not a good idea, just a better idea.
We went to my apartment and she asked me to put on some music. I generally played
easy classical music for her. Haydn trios, the Musical Offering, dynamic movements
from the Beethoven symphonies, adagio movements from Brahms. She particularly liked
Beethoven's Seventh, and on succeeding evenings she sometimes would yield to the
irresistible urge to stand and move her arms playfully about in the air, as though it were
she and not Bernstein conducting. Watching her breasts shift beneath her blouse while
she pretended, somewhat like a performing child, to lead the orchestra with her invisible
baton was intensely arousing, and, for all I know, maybe there was nothing the least bit
childish about it and to excite me by way of the mock conducting
was why she did it. Because it couldn't have been long before it dawned on her that to
continue to believe, like a youthful student, that it was the elderly teacher who was in
charge did not accord with the facts. Because in sex there is no point of absolute stasis.
There is no sexual equality and there can be no sexual equality, certainly not one where
the allotments are equal, the male quotient and the female quotient in perfect balance.
There's no way to negotiate metrically this wild thing. It's not fifty-fifty like a business
transaction. It's the chaos of eros we're talking about, the radical destabilization that is its
excitement. You're back in the woods with sex. You're back in the bog. What it is is
trading dominance, perpetual imbalance. You're going to rule out dominance? You're
going to rule out yielding? The dominating is the flint, it strikes the spark, it sets it going.
Then what? Listen. You'll see. You'll see what dominating leads to. You'll see what
yielding leads to.
I would sometimes, as I did that night, play a Dvorak string quintet for her—
electrifying music, easy enough to recognize and to grasp. She liked me to play the piano,
it created a romantic, seductive atmosphere that she liked, and so I did. The simpler
Chopin preludes. Schubert, some of the Moments Musicaux. Some movements of the
sonatas. Nothing
too hard, but pieces I'd studied and didn't play too badly. Usually I play only for myself, even
now that I'm better at it, but it was pleasant then to play for her. It was all part of the
intoxication—for both of us. Playing music is very funny. Some things come readily now, but
most pieces still have a stretch that's trouble for me, passages that I never bothered to solve all
those years when I was playing by myself and didn't have a teacher. When I ran into a
problem back then, I figured out some nutty way to solve it. Or didn't solve it—certain types
of leaps, movement from one part of the keyboard to another in an intricate way, that was
kind of finger-breaking. I didn't yet have a teacher when I knew Consuela, so I did all those
stupid improvised things that I invented as solutions to technical problems. I'd had only a few
lessons as a kid and, until I got a teacher five years ago, I was mostly self-taught. Very little
training. If I had seriously had lessons, I would spend less time practicing than I do today. I
get up early and spend two, if I can two and a half hours at daybreak practicing, which is
about as much as one can do. Though some days when I'm working toward something, I have
another session later on. I'm in good shape, but I get tired after a while. Both mentally and
physically. I have a huge amount of music that I've read through. That's a technical term—it
doesn't
mean looking at it like you look at a book, it means at the piano. I've bought a lot of music, I
have everything, piano literature, and I used to read it, and I used to play it, badly. Some
passages maybe not so badly. To see how it worked and so on. It wasn't good in terms of
playing, but I had some pleasure. And pleasure is our subject. How to be serious over a lifetime
about one's modest, private pleasures.
The lessons were a present to myself on my sixty-fifth birthday for finally getting over
Consuela. And I've made a lot of progress. I play some pretty difficult pieces. Brahms
intermezzi. Schumann. A difficult Chopin prelude. I chew a bit off a very hard one, and I still
don't play it well, but I work on it. When I say to my teacher in exasperation, "I can't do it
right. How do you solve this problem?" she says, "Play it a thousand times." Like all
enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it, but my relationship to music has
deepened and that's essential to my life now. It's wise to do this now. How much longer can
there possibly be girls?
I can't say that my making music excited Consuela about me the way her conducting
Beethoven in jest excited me about her. I still can't say that anything I ever did sexually
excited Consuela about me. Which
was largely why, from the evening we first went to bed eight years back, I never had a
moment's peace, why, whether she realized it or not, I was all weakness and worry from then
on, why I could never figure out whether the answer was to see more of her or to see less of
her or to see her not at all, to give her up—to do the unthinkable and, at sixty-two, voluntarily
relinquish a gorgeous girl of twenty-four who hundreds of times said to me, "I adore you,"
but who never, even insincerely, could bring herself to whisper, "I desire you, I want you
so—I cannot live without your cock."
That was not Consuela. Yet that was why the fear of losing her to someone else never left
me, why she was continually on my mind, why with her or apart from her I never felt sure of
her. The obsessional side of it was awful. When you're beguiled it helps not to think too much
and just to let yourself enjoy the beguilement. But I had no such pleasure: all I did was
think—think, worry, and, yes, suffer. Concentrate on your pleasure, I told myself. Why but
for the pleasure do I choose to live as I do, imposing as few constraints on my independence
as possible? I had the one marriage, in my twenties the bad first marriage that so many have,
the bad first marriage that is as bad as boot camp, but after that I was determined
not to have the bad second marriage or the third and the fourth. I was determined, after
that, never to live in the cage again.
That first night we were sitting on the sofa listening to Dvorak. At one point Consuela
found a book that interested her—I forget which one, though I'll never forget the moment.
She turned around—I was sitting where you are, at the corner of the sofa, and she was
sitting there—and she twisted her torso half around, and with the book resting on the arm
of the sofa, she started to read, and because of the leaning, the bending forward, under her
clothing I saw her buttocks, saw the shape clearly, which was one whopping invitation.
She is a tall young woman in a slightly too narrow body. It is as if the body doesn't quite
fit. Not because she's too fat. But she's by no means the anorexic type. You see there
female flesh, and it is good flesh, abundant—that's why you see it. So there she was, not
openly lying across the sofa but, all the same, with her buttocks sort of half turned to me.
A woman as conscious of her body as Consuela and doing that is, I concluded, inviting
me to begin. The sexual instinct is still intact—none of the Cuban correctitude has
interfered. In that half-turned ass, I see that nothing has gotten in the way of
the pure thing. All that we'd talked about, all that I'd had to listen to about her family,
none of it has interfered. She knows how to turn her ass despite all that. Turns in the
primordial way. In display. And the display is perfect. It tells me that I need no longer
suppress the wish to touch.
I started to caress her buttocks, and she liked it. She said, "This is a strange situation. I
can never be your girlfriend. For every possible reason. You live in a different world."
"Different?" I laughed. "How different?" And right there, of course, you start the lying,
and you say, "Oh, it's not such a lofty place, if that's what you're imagining. It's not such a
glamorous world. It's not even a world. Once a week I appear on TV Once a week I'm on
the radio. Every few weeks I appear in print in the back pages of a magazine read by
twenty people at most. My program? It's a Sunday morning cultural program. Nobody
watches. It's not much of a world to worry about. I can bring you into that world easily
enough. Please stay with me."
She looks to be thinking about what I've said, but what,sort of thinking can it be?
"Okay," she says, "for now. For tonight. But I can never be your wife." "Agreed," I said,
but I thought, Who was asking her to be my wife? Who raised the question? I am sixtytwo
and she's twenty-four. I merely touch her ass and she tells me she can't be my wife? I
didn't know such girls continued to exist. She is even more traditional than I imagined. Or
maybe more odd, more unusual than I imagined. As I would discover, Consuela is
ordinary but without being predictable. Nothing mechanical about her behavior. She's at
once specific and mysterious, and strangely full of little surprises. But, in the beginning
especially, she was difficult for me to decipher, and, mistakenly—or perhaps not—I
chalked that up to her Cubanness. "I love my cozy Cuban world," she told me. "I love the
coziness of my family, and I can tell already that's not something you like or want. So I
never can really belong to you."
This naive niceness in combination with her marvelous body was so enticing to me
that I wasn't sure even then, on that first night, that I could fuck her as though she were
another cavorting Miranda. No, Consuela was not the goat in the clock. It didn't matter
what she was saying—she was so damned attractive that not only could I not resist her
but I didn't see how any other man could, and it was in that moment, caressing her
buttocks while she explained that she could not be my wife, that my terrible jealousy was
born.
The jealousy. The uncertainty. The fear of losing her, even while on top of her. Obsessions
that in all my varied experience I had never known before. With Consuela as with no one
else, the siphoning off of confidence was almost instantaneous.
So we went to bed. It happened fast, less because of my intoxication than because of her
lack of complexity. Or call it clarity. Call it newly minted maturity, though maturity, I would
say, of a simple kind: she was in communion with that body in the very way she wished and
wasn't able to be in communion with art. She undressed, and not only was her blouse silk but
her underwear was made of silk. She had nearly pornographic underwear. A surprise. You
know she has chosen this to please. You know she has chosen this with a man's eye in mind,
even if a man were never to see it. You know that you have no idea what she is, how clever
she is or how stupid she is, how shallow she is or how deep she is, how innocent she is or
how guileful she is, how wily, how wise, even how wicked. With a self-contained woman of
such sexual power, you have no idea and you never will. The tangle that is her character is
obscured by her beauty. Nonetheless, I was greatly moved by seeing that underwear. I was
moved by seeing that body. "Look at you," I said.
There are two things you notice about Consuela's body. In the first place, the breasts. The
most gorgeous breasts I have ever seen—and I was born, remember, in 1930: I have seen
quite a few breasts by now. These were round, full, perfect. The type with the nipple like a
saucer. Not the nipple like an udder but the big pale rosy-brown nipple that is so very stirring.
The second thing was that she had sleek pubic hair. Normally it's curly. This was like Asian
hair. Sleek, lying flat, and not much of it. The pubic hair is important because it returns.
Yes, I pulled back the covers and she came into my bed, Consuela Castillo, superclassically
the fertile female of our mammalian species. And already, that first time, and at only twentyfour,
she was willing to sit on top of me. She wasn't sure of herself once she was there, and
till I tapped her arm to get her attention and slow her down, she was obliviously overenergetic,

caroming about with her eyes shut, off in a child's game of her own.