I didn’t know how to make love when I first got married. Although I loved my wife, I didn’t know how to make love with her or, let it be said, with anyone. In the years we were married, I tried to learn, and my wife tried hard to educate me, but the truth is that I failed. I’m slow, I’m dull, I’m hopelessly stupid. That marriage survived a few years, it took us on our honeymoon to Paris, it left us two beautiful daughters, it inspired quite a few poems written on bar and airplane napkins, and when it ended, I still didn’t know how to make love.
The problem, to put it bluntly, was that I made a fool of myself in bed. He was not a timid, indolent, apathetic lover. All the time I wanted to get involved with my wife in the games and fevers of love, in the skirmishes and guerrillas of eroticism, in the friction, the enjoyment and the pose. And my wife, a few years younger than me, knew how to accompany me in passion, she didn’t leave her body behind, she responded with the vigor of an Amazon. She really knew how to make love. She had learned it very young, in Paris, with a Frenchman who, when she left him, cut his wrists, but did not die, or not completely. The problem then was not a lack of desire or curiosity on my part. I truly loved her and wanted to prove it to her night after night, like a tireless colt. It was not, however, a colt. He was, to tell the truth, a brief, almost epileptic lover. I slipped into it, I shook in a tense, rushed way, as if I was in a hurry, as if I had to finish as soon as possible, suddenly shaken by tremors and earthquakes that moved the tectonic plates of animal desire, and I shook, convulsed and bucked as if a powerful electric shock were being applied to my testicular sac and on my nipples and, in a few seconds, my eyes popped out, my tongue Outside, my hair disheveled, without knowing who I was or what my name was, I would give out visceral screams as if possessed by the devil, sometimes speaking in other languages, languages I did not know, and immediately I would collapse, faint, die viciously, my head spinning, my body shaking, lashing its tail like a viper when its head has been cut off.
That’s why my wife, in private, called me Agilito, Fosforito, Calambrito. I was a nervous wreck, a pressure cooker, an erupting volcano, an electric lover and, in the end, electrocuted. Before she started, I was already done. Brute, insensitive, selfish, he left her unsatisfied, making no effort to give her the pleasures she deserved. Agilito turned his back on him, Fosforito prayed contritely with his eyes closed, and Calambrito remained burned, smoking from his ears, trying to fall asleep. The problem then wasn’t that I didn’t love it, but that it didn’t last, since I was exhausted before reaching the first minute. The problem was not lack of love, but lack of skill in possessing my wife. Although falling in love was an indomitable passion, a mighty river, a noble zone of the spirit, it also required the mastery of a more or less elastic gymnastics that I, from a very young age, had been unable to learn.
Before getting married, my knowledge of physical love, of arduous amatory gymnastics, was burdened by a number of more or less traumatic failures. Being a teenager, they took me, without my wanting it, to a brothel on the outskirts of the city and, naked in front of the prostitute, trembling with cold and fear, as if I were facing a squad that was going to shoot me right there, I didn’t know what to do, where to start, how to feign a dirty desire, how to lower myself to a groping, how to govern that region of my body that, flaccid and chilled, inhibited and comatose, became He refused to respond, displaying to said woman an unmitigated failure, the failure of a man without pants.
That failure left me hurt, confused, terribly insecure, doubting my abilities as a naked lover. If I liked women, why hadn’t I been able to demonstrate it in front of that plump, elderly lady who looked at me impatiently, without compassion, disgusted because my body declared sedition and refused to honor her? Even if I hadn’t found that lady attractive, shouldn’t any naked woman inflame my desires, if I was a proper man? I returned alone to other brothels and failed again, I failed every time. My body mutinied, rebelled, gave me a coup d’état, subjected me to disgrace and dishonor. My body refused to love women that I did not love in any way, women that seemed sad, heartless, punished by bad fortune. He didn’t have the instinct of the hunter or the predator. Next to those women, I also felt like a sad, heartless woman, punished by bad fortune. I saw them as my colleagues. That’s why I couldn’t ride them.
It’s true that, before getting married, I had a couple of very pretty girlfriends, first cousins to each other, both intellectuals, much more intelligent than me. It is no less true that, due to my insecurities as a stunned, self-conscious man, those were chaste, repressed, ashamed loves. I was terrified of getting naked in front of them. I didn’t know if my body would respond appropriately, as I would have wanted, or if I would fail again, as I had failed before the prostitutes I tried to love and couldn’t. I kissed my girlfriends, I caressed them over their clothes, but, when push came to shove, I was reluctant to take off my pants, for fear that they would see my sword sheathed, my spear surrendered, my pistol holstered, my flag lowered. He was then an intellectual lover, who expressed love by speaking corny words and writing poems on napkins in bars and airplanes, but who, in practice, did not know how to make love, nor did he know how to learn.
After divorcing that French wife who called me Agilito, Fosforito, Calambrito, and to whom I still felt indebted for having been such a slimy and sloppy lover, I tried to learn to make love not with a woman, but with a man, which was perhaps what I liked the most. I was, so to speak, an intellectual gay, someone who wondered if it wouldn’t be better, more complete, more intense, more enriching, to make love with a man. Well I tried. I had a boyfriend who put up with me for seven years, meaning he persevered in his obstinacy of loving me. I think we were reasonably happy, especially because we did not live together, since we were nine hours away by plane, so the meetings were always desired, expected reunions. That said, the truth is that neither I learned to make love, nor did he learn with me. We both failed miserably. I was an intellectual gay who was content with a few kisses and caresses and was not interested in making love to him. And he, a sensitive, delicate, reading gay, did not want to attack me like a pirate and, rather, offered me some treasures that I did not want to plunder. As it was, we were happy watching movies and traveling to distant cities, but I still didn’t learn how to make love.
At a rather late, almost autumnal age, I came to fall in love with the woman who is now my wife. What united us powerfully was not only the erotic desire, but the willingness to share our failures, confess the most hidden secrets and tell each other, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, everything that in our lives went wrong and screwed up, what promised to turn out well and went bad, what at first glance looked fresh, vigorous, healthy, and then turned sour and ended up rotting. She told me about her forbidden, failed loves, and I, without sparing details, confessed my defeats and frustrations, my thousand lost battles. Only then, when we dared to bare our badly wounded souls and were able to tell each other in words who we really were and who we would never be, was I able, without effort, to make love in a way that seemed unusual to me, luminous, dazzling, with full control of actions and emotions, with the certainty that I had arrived at the dreamed place, with the patience to wait for her to reach the heights of pleasure before myself, and with the amazement that perhaps I had learned to make love. finally.
