Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires Read online

  Buenas Noches Buenos Aires

  GILBERT ADAIR

  for Bernardo and Clare

  En Espagne, on orne la rue

  Avec des loges d’opéra.

  Quelle est cette belle inconnue?

  C’est la mort. Don Juan l’aura.

  (In Spain, they deck the streets

  With opera seats.

  Who is this beautiful senorita?

  It’s death. Don Juan will meet her.)

  Jean Cocteau

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The account which I’m about to write

  It was on the second of January, in 1980, that I settled in Paris

  My father is a solicitor by profession

  For the next few years I had three types of sex

  I arrived in Paris, as I said before interrupting myself

  The time has come for me to speak of the Berlitz

  The doyen of the English staff

  If Schuyler was, as I say, the colleague most present in my life

  The third of my Musketeers was an Englishman

  And so we come to Ralph

  Though there was, as you would expect, a high turnover

  Those classes now

  Such were my days

  If there were no such thing as happiness

  When I got back into my room at the Voltaire

  It may be a strange thing to say

  The incident inaugurated a new era

  I wrote earlier of three occasions

  So my life settled into its routine

  It was two weeks later when the subject arose again

  When perceived from a certain angle, living in a city is like living indoors

  Meanwhile, news of the gay cancer was beginning to filter through

  To return to those halcyon, ostensibly halcyon, days

  To return to those halcyon, ostensibly halcyon, days

  Except for the cranky night porter

  But I wrote above that there had been one exception

  To my everlasting shame I forgot all about Ferey’s appointment

  To whoever is reading me

  For me, there was to be one unforeseen consequence

  One night, after a session at the Flore

  After Ferey the second of my gay acquaintances to depart the common room

  And then, another three or four months later

  He left the Berlitz soon after

  The gathering was held inside a disaffected, gasometer-grim atelier

  From that very evening on, I was assailed by the most fantastic of apprehensions

  It was in a bookstore that I met Kim

  This next conquest was Mathias

  It was then that began my systematic exploration

  And there, reader, you have the end of my story

  As for me, all I can do is await the inevitable

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The account which I’m about to write and you’re about to read, an account, half calendar, half collage, of certain events in my past, which I’m typing out on a small olive-green Olivetti typewriter, is likely to be the last opportunity I’m ever going to have, before the brackets of my life are closed, to ask myself who I am, who I’ve been these past twenty-four years. Except for Dennis, I’ve never told anybody what happened to me and it will be his decision and his alone whether and when to publish – to try to publish, I should say – this text. If you, whoever you are, are now reading what I’m now writing, then it must mean that it has been published. So be it. I want you to understand, however, that whatever it may say on the cover this is not a novel, not even one of the so-called playfully postmodern type. Everything you read in the next hundred and fifty pages is true. Absolutely everything and absolutely true. This is a true story.

  It was on the second of January, in 1980, that I settled in Paris. At the end of the previous year I had already made a four-day trip to the city to attend an interview for a teaching post at the Berlitz School on the boulevard des Italiens and, if the interview prove successful, which it was, to prebook for myself accommodation on the Left Bank. I chose a top-floor attic room in the Hôtel Voltaire, overlooking the Seine. Baudelaire had not only once lived in it – above the hotel’s entrance there’s an impressive brass plaque to that effect – but had written some of the poems of Les Fleurs du mal there. I was, as you can imagine, over the moon with Paris, with my new job, my attic. I purchased a copy of Les Fleurs du mal to read on the ferry taking me back to England and, when the boat-train steamed into Victoria, I used as a bookmark the embossed business card given me by Madame Müller, the hotel’s owner, inserting it between its seventeenth and eighteenth pages. And there, so far as I know, for I must still possess the book even if I haven’t set eyes on it for years, that bookmark is to this day.

  My parents, who live in a pleasant two-storey house in Oxford – the Siamese twin, joined at the spine, of that to which it’s semi-detached – neither approved nor disapproved of my leaving England. Frankly, they seemed little to care. The only thing we had in common was our blood kinship.

  Did we even have that? I wondered. From my early adolescence on, I’d catch them peering at me as though they literally didn’t know where I could have sprung from. (And, yes, I’m using the word ‘literally’ figuratively.) For them, as for their set of acquaintances, I was a real maverick, not bad-looking, it’s true, and never downright unpopular, but a bit too ungiving and old beyond my years. Even my teachers, desperate as they all claimed to be for a spark of life from their lethargically sprawling pupils, probably felt I erred in the opposite direction. They found me too opinionated, aloof and judgmental for their own peace of mind, and I’m pretty sure they were secretly more comfortable with the loutish elements in the school who disturbed only the peace of their classrooms. (The fortnightly essays I would hand in to my English master, eccentrically punctuated and footnoted in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, à la The Waste Land, never got the high marks I felt their originality deserved.) I was a throwback, said my father – but to what? A loner, said my mother – yet I did have a fair number of friends, though I was conscious I sometimes alienated even them. A timid soul, was my report card’s conclusion, an appraisal that had me spluttering with rage. Something of a poseur, was the overall view. Which I suppose I was, except that, if you imitate something for long enough, you eventually turn into it.

  In fact, that smart-alecky standoffishness of mine, the irreconcilability in my public persona of a brittle carapace with the runny soft centre only I seemed to know lurked within it – all I wanted was to like and be liked – was the source of most of my subsequent troubles. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  My father is a solicitor by profession; so I have to suppose he isn’t a stupid man. Mark Twain wrote that, when he was sixteen, he was appalled by his father’s ignorance and, when he was twenty, he couldn’t help but marvel at how much knowledge that same father had succeeded in acquiring in just four years. When I reached twenty, I regarded my father as no less an ignoramus than ever, not to mention – it’s a cliché, I know, for the younger generation to think so of its elders – a sexless, emotionless robot. An only child, I was amazed that this man who spoke so softly and so seldom I can now barely conjure up the sound of his voice, who read one book a year (which is, I liked to say to my pals, why he joined the Book-of-the-Month Club) yet spent whole Sundays poring over the Sunday Express from the first to the last page, news, sports, advertisements, Gambols and all, had even just the once aroused himself into the requisite state of physical excitation to produce me.

  My mother I could still recall as youthful – relative, at le
ast, to my own age – a living tree to whose warm tweedy bark I would cling like a koala bear while she chatted to some acquaintance of hers at a bus stop or else whisked me along the dazzling aisles of our local new mini-supermarket. (I had no matching memories of my father.) But the years had taken their toll, and she now appeared to me if anything the more melancholy of the two. It was almost as though she were relieved no longer to be young. (But she was only fifty-one or two at the time.) My callow conjecture was that, like most of her contemporaries, she had no sex life whatever, whereas, two decades before, they had had one – and she hadn’t even then. Now that everything was levelling out, and would level out further as they all got older still, her jealousy of these contemporaries, of which as an adolescent I’d been aware, had started to subside. There are advantages to being old – and even dead.

  I was to learn, in my late teens, from one of my two terrible twin cousins, Lex and Rex – obscene names I’ve ever after detested – who, eavesdropping on their own parents’ conversations, would gleefully pass on any secrets which concerned me, that my father and mother had recently come close to divorcing but had decided to postpone the separation till my grandmother’s death. (For some years now she’s been what is called a ‘vegetable’, and I was once smacked at table for refusing to eat courgettes which, I protested, couldn’t be good for you if vegetables were also wrinkly, smelly old people who wet their knickers.) It would be nice and novelettish to report that the marriage was to gain a new intensity from the enforced delay of an ancient parent’s demise, for, as I write this, grandma continues to hang on in there; alas, it was not to be.

  My father, I know, had no double life. But one day in the kitchen a tennis ball I was bouncing hit a join in the tiled floor and skittered off behind the refrigerator. Lying flat out on the linoleum, extending my arm as far as it would go between the fridge and the kitchen wall, I felt my groping fingertips graze some scrunched-up sheets of paper. I pulled them free, unfolded them (there were three of them) and found myself reading a misspelt photocopied text whose filthiness took my breath away. The author credited was one ‘Onanymous’, a joke I didn’t get at the time, and the text itself was all ‘big jugs’ and ‘throbbing cocks’ and ‘bouncy balls’ and ‘moist cunts’ and ‘yawning arseholes’, an incredible verbal orgy that didn’t shy from golden showers and outright scatology. I read the first page line after line, just glanced at the others, nearly fainted and hastily folded them up again (exactly as once, a dozy child, I had tiptoed downstairs for a glass of water in the middle of Christmas night, had caught sight of a pile of gift-wrapped packages beneath the tree and, well-brought-up middle-class little boy that I was – the presents were not to be unwrapped, not to be seen, until next morning – shut my eyes so quickly I lost my balance on the stairs).

  I shoved the papers back behind the fridge, abandoned my tennis ball for good and, days later, would stammer whenever I had to make direct eye-contact with my mother.

  There was one other factor, probably the most crucial, which prompted my decision to live in Paris. In my mid-teens I had a girlfriend, Carla, the youngest daughter of my English master, a prettier girl than everybody felt a weirdo like me deserved, of whom what I most vividly remember was her general redness. Her knuckles were red, her fingers were red, her hair was red, even her nose, which she would pick in public with the vigour of a chimney sweep endeavouring to dislodge an awkwardly located build-up of soot, had its reddish tip. I liked Carla, I enjoyed being seen with her, I thought her sexy, I thought her straggly sweater sleeves sexy – sleeves so long they obscured her hands right up to the knuckles – I even thought her redness sexy. (I never got used to the nosepicking, though.) I would take her to the Wimpy Bar on Friday nights, to the cinema on Saturdays and to an occasional school dance.

  In the seventies, being a virgin at sixteen, which we both were – I mean that we were both sixteen and we were both virgins – was nothing special, nothing to be ashamed of. Nobody our age ‘did it’. Or so I believed. Except that, in the light of what I now know about myself, I remember dates with Carla when she would look at me, after I’d kissed her goodnight, with an expression that seemed to say, ‘You know, Gideon, you’re a funny boy.’ Oh, I didn’t have to be told she expected more of me than that kiss, but I couldn’t screw her on her own front doorstep, could I, so what was it she was waiting for?

  The moment of truth came one evening when we were smooching on the sofa in her living-room. Her parents were out and I was allegedly helping her gen up for the following morning’s French test. After little more than five minutes of lip-fumbling, she took my hand, insinuated it into the gap between two top blouse-buttons and left it clamped to her bra. Though I was shocked by her boldness, I dutifully poked about (her breasts felt both soft and hard, both cool and hot, to my touch); and when I realised I was actually toying with her naked nipples, I got as nearly erect as was possible in my tight underpants. But I realised something else as well. We had both fallen deathly quiet and what I realised, half-consciously, was that it wasn’t just Carla’s nipples that were exciting me but the lyrics of a number on a Chordettes’ LP she had put on the record-player before we lay down on the sofa. ‘Mr Sandman,’ it suddenly chimed in, ‘bring me a dream,/ Make him the cutest that I’ve ever seen,/ Give him two lips like roses and clover/ Then tell him that his lonesome nights are over.’

  ‘Make him the cutest that I’ve ever seen …’ I all at once knew, I knew, something about myself which I’d always known but had to be shown that I’d always known. I knew I couldn’t conceal from myself any longer that I wasn’t passing through the famous ‘phase’. The phase was my life.

  Like the Chordettes, I too wanted a boy with lips like roses and clover, a boy like blond, skinny, skinny-eyed, slightly dumb Gary, whom I’d seen one never-to-be-forgotten soccer practice day, wearing only white boxer shorts, hands cupped behind his head, stretched out the full length of a narrow wooden bench in the sports-ground changing room. I had been idly drying myself when another boy came marching up to him and, like a magician whipping a tablecloth off a dinner table without disturbing either crockery or cutlery, pulled Gary’s shorts down about his ankles then yanked them off altogether. It all happened so swiftly I gasped. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Liberated like a genie from a bottle, his penis, which I had never seen before and which I observed was fat (far fatter than mine) and café-au-lait in colour, leapt up into the air and flopped back on to the delta of his abdomen like a trout slapped down on a fishmonger’s chopping-board.

  The moment it happened, Gary gawped at his exposed genitalia as though he were noticing them for the first time. He gawped, as well, at all of us boys gawping at him. Then he leapt to his feet, snatched a grubby towel from off the floor, wrapped it round his torso and only then – only when his big, fat, uncircumcised, adorably dopey cock, as thick as two planks, was no more than a shadowy protuberance on the towel’s surface – was his lunkish confidence restored.

  I had an erection then, too, I remember – it was a couple of weeks before my evening with Carla – but I told myself that, considering the fascination of nakedness, of anybody’s nakedness, there wasn’t a soul (or, rather, body) in that changing room, whether straight or secretly gay, that hadn’t. I told myself, just as the others had probably told themselves, that if I were a girl Gary was the kind of boy I’d fancy. Listening to ‘Mr Sandman’, though, I understood at long last that I truly did fancy him. There were no ifs about it.

  I certainly wasn’t about to assume there and then the implications of my new self-knowledge. I was confused, fearful of what it would all mean for me. I knew homosexuals existed. I was not so naive as to believe that nobody before me had ever lusted after somebody of his own sex. But the idea that I might one day exploit my desire, that I might actually touch what I’d seen (touching was as high as I dared to aspire), struck me as belonging almost to the domain of the miraculous.

  Carla and I went on seeing one another, but a spell had be
en broken, a fact of which she seemed aware without, I hoped, tumbling to its source. There were to be, by mutual and tacit accord, no more smooching sessions on the sofa and fewer and fewer dates; until, just a month later, they petered out altogether without either of us openly confessing to being glad of it.

  For the next few years I had three types of sex.

  The first was masturbation. With the realisation of my true nature the floodgates were opened. I masturbated night and day until my penis’s blood vessels felt tender and sore and ready to burst. Even if I did buy the odd magazine (always on a day-trip up to London, never at home, as though Oxford, with its God knows how many thousands of inhabitants, were a village so tiny that, no matter in which newsagent’s I procured some sordid rag, news of my disgrace would fatally be relayed back to my mortified parents), the images that worked best for me were those culled from my own memory and imagination. The best of all, the image to which I would consistently return, was Gary stretched out on his narrow bench, his penis popping up into the air and, just as important for the satisfactory climax to my fantasy (why, though?), the look on his lovely face of disbelief that his sprouting animality had abruptly become public property. While feverishly tugging away at myself, I would revive that image of him as regularly as a theatre in need of a quick profit will revive some creaky but infallible old warhorse. It never let me down.

  The second type was contemplation of Gary himself, on whom I had a crush for as long as we were at school together. Since, on his side, there was absolutely nothing, zero, zilch, nada, there was eventually, on mine, not much more than vulgar voyeurism. Though I had never been what anybody would call sporty, I suddenly took up – to the amazement, I must say, of my friends, all of them like me bookish sorts – soccer, rugby and swimming, not because I enjoyed them or was good at them (I didn’t and I wasn’t), but for the thrill of finding myself next to Gary in the changing room, since watching him put his clothes on aroused me now as much as having seen them being pulled off. It’s strange – on the day I wrote about above, he dressed very guardedly after emerging from his shower, wearing a towel throughout his toilette, wriggling his underpants up under that towel and, like a bather on a public beach, removing it only when his trousers had already been drawn halfway up his thighs. Later, however, perhaps because he rather liked the idea that his body no longer held any secrets for us, he would become much more cavalier in the matter of dressing and undressing, cavalier to the point of exhibitionism. He would walk into the showers with a towel about his waist but unabashedly re-emerge with it slung over his shoulder. And there were times, ecstatic times for me, when, standing near me in his white undervest and nothing else, he would nonchalantly loosen up his genitalia with his right hand, jingling them like a pocketful of small change, before slipping into his soccer gear. In no more than a matter of weeks his privates had become his publics.