The time of our lives, p.13
The Time of Our Lives, page 13
Andrea had never heard of Sir Francis Younghusband or the World Congress of Faiths, but she knew perfectly well who André was. Gide did precisely what he wanted to do without anxiety. His appetite for sexual satisfaction may have eventually weakened, but even in his sixties it was easily excited. He went to Fez for the first time in 1932, for example, and ‘gorged’ himself on it for seven days until he was no longer ‘thirsty’. When he got home from Morocco, he told the friend who had first suggested he might like it, Robert Levesque, that ‘one ought to be able to go and spend three days there every couple of weeks to purge one’s mind and body’. (In those days Fez was too far to go for a sexual escapade and nothing else. Nowadays it’s just two hours from Cannes or Nîmes.) ‘To purge one’s mind and body’ is a curious way to describe what you’re aiming for in a bout of debauchery (of a kind, by the way, that most of us would now consider exploitative). Exactly what was purged from his mind and body is not explained here, but for Gide, sex—unbridled volupté—meant the release from some ‘insane, sadistic taskmaster’, not subjection to one. Which taskmaster was Gide escaping in Morocco? I suspect it was monotheism in all its manifestations. His sense of rapturous release in Fez reminds me, oddly enough, of the wave of ecstasy washing over the kampung in Java at Eid-al-Fitr when the sighting of the crescent moon signals the end of Ramadan and the breaking of the fast. The spirit and the body come joyfully back to life. After weeks or months or even years of fasting, an orgy—for some of us, both men and women—restores a balance. Quite simply, as Ogden Nash put it: ‘Home is heaven and orgies are vile, but you need an orgy once in a while.’ In Fez today sex is still offered until nightfall in the bustling cobbled laneways of the medina amongst all the mosques, the hammams, and the myriad shops and stalls, especially along Talaa Kebira up where the air smells of cedarwood, although not on the bland boulevards of the nouvelle ville. What’s offered is usually touted as a ‘massage berbère’. To this day Moroccan men seem remarkably at ease about taking pleasure in sex with whomever they fancy, whatever the lawbooks might have to say about it.
Despite waning desire, almost twenty years after this trip to Fez, now eighty-one, Gide was contemplating yet another trip to Morocco, to Marrakech this time, to purge his mind and body again. The spirit was still astonishingly willing, but the flesh now really was weakening fast. Again, it was Robert Levesque who had whetted his appetite for erotic adventure. Levesque, now teaching at a lycée in Fez, wrote to Gide as winter set in to persuade him to come down to Morocco again, dangling first Tangier in front of him (‘a quite indecent town’, he called it enticingly) and then Marrakech.
I still put Marrakech at the top of the list … This is because, despite the fact that it’s so easy to come by, sex there has kept its idyllic charm; you breathe it everywhere you go, you meet it at every step, no day is ever gloomy because every single moment is festooned with caresses … Everyone is on the prowl, offering himself; in the torchlight, eyes and lips shine; everywhere you glimpse the outline of bodies coupling …
Just Gide’s sort of thing, of course, but within weeks, before he could make the journey south, he sickened and died.
Not afraid of the ire of some peevish god, nor seeking to escape the cycle of rebirth, Gide was free to take pleasure in living out his fantasies of sexual intimacy until there was no Gide. We may deeply disapprove of how he did this, but the point I was making to Andrea was that some men take pleasure in sex until a very advanced age. Gide would have thought, as Diana Athill thought of her own affairs with married men, that in enjoying himself as he did he wasn’t harming anyone at all.
Athill, who died not long ago at 101, is a particularly articulate example of those many women who hanker after more than a nice night out now and again in the autumn of their lives. Two particular women friends of mine popped into my head, both love-struck anew at seventy-five, writing daily love letters to their beloveds—their loves, their inamorati, their objects of desire. ‘Lovers’ seems too colourless a word for the swains (both married men, although not, I gather, on active duty) who have brought them alive in a surge of passion when all seemed lost. My friend Barbara’s mother Nancy was still enjoying a busy love-life when she was well into her nineties: one Saturday afternoon in recent memory she was still pushing one gentleman caller out of the laundry window at the back of the house as the next one started jiggling his key in the door at the front. All the same, Andrea’s sense of a burgeoning new life as their sexual obligations fall away strikes me as common.
The fly in the ointment for those of us, men or women, who are still open to amorous entanglements is that, while you may desire a whole slew of others (the gangly, let’s say, or the brown, the angelic, the sporty or anyone Egyptian), few are likely ever again to desire you. Virtually nobody at all on the face of the planet will desire you in the way you dream of, whatever the internet-dating sites might promise. Why would anyone desire you like that? Lovable—yes, desirable—not really. You can forget the Kama Sutra, you can put the Crow Position and the Position of a Herd of Cows right out of your mind, and concentrate on less athletic forms of intimacy and affection. (By the same token, to be scrupulously honest, a quick read-through of the Indian classic, especially if your copy is lushly illustrated, as mine is, can sharpen the memory deliciously, leading at the very least to more adventurous biting, kissing, pressing and scratching with the nails, if that’s your thing. Hitting is also possible.) I am intrigued, might I add, since the subject has come up, by the way Hindus seem not to object to carnal pleasure as such—indeed, it’s a duty to indulge the passions, according to the Hindus, so long as you carry out your other duties (to your family, for instance, and to freeing yourself from rebirth—eventually, that is, there’s no great hurry). Women’s duties seem more burdensome than men’s. Lasciviousness seems not to be a sin as such, however. In fact, sin seems not to be a Hindu concept at all. It is the Middle Eastern deity (‘I am the lord and there is no other’) who jealously threatens violence like an abusive father if we love as we wish and not as he has commanded.
‘But these sites,’ said Andrea, catching my drift, but ignoring India, ‘for mature …’
‘… players. Yes. And their admirers. A pig in a poke, as a rule,’ I said, ‘although you never know. Have you ever given it a go? It depends what kind of love you’re looking for, of course. No strings attached, long-term monogamous, taste it and see …’ I cast an eye around at the dozen or so ageing customers in the art gallery café. On a weekday afternoon, nobody there was under sixty, although on the whole it was a sprightly, smartly-dressed crowd. Nobody looked to be on the prowl, though. Fizzier than the ViaVia café in Yogyakarta, but any fizzing that was going on was very low-key.
‘What I love now, I think, is dalliance,’ I said after a pause, as a young man labelled cesar briskly cleared the table. Cesar was very well-presented. ‘Thank you, Cesar,’ I said.
‘No problem, sir,’ he murmured. Was he Colombian?
‘What is dalliance exactly?’ Andrea asked, oblivious of Cesar. ‘Isn’t it just a posh word for having an affair?’
‘Oh, no, it’s got nothing to do with having an affair. An affair is serious and quite often a betrayal, while a dalliance is a game, it’s never a great love. It may even be chaste. There are rules, of course—times, places, moves.’ The ViaVia every Saturday night from six to eight, for instance, upstairs. ‘At its best, at its most skilfully and dangerously pursued, I really believe a dalliance is more delicious, more exciting, more … oh I don’t know … rejuvenating than anything else on Earth. And you can dally almost anywhere, too—at the back of a bus or on national television—I’ve seen Stephen Fry do it on QI with the whole world watching.’
‘Is that what that’s called …’ said Andrea.
‘Perhaps that was more coquetry, now I come to think about it. Take Lord Krishna, then—blue-skinned Krishna, the god who sported with all those milkmaids, sixteen thousand of them. Flirted, dallied. I’ve got him up on my living-room wall at home—do you remember? With six maids, too, and twenty-six cows.’
‘Of course I remember. Gouache on linen. The blue, that blue, that royal blue skin of Krishna’s, almost midnight.’
‘The thing is, every single one of those milkmaids has already transcended the flesh. They’re dancing with a god, they’re dallying. It’s erotic, but not sexual.’
‘Heavenly. So it’s a sort of middle way for you between passion and nothing at all.’
‘A third way, let’s say, rather than a middle one.’
‘The young don’t dally at all these days, do they.’
‘They hardly need to. They copulate for a bit and then start a long-term relationship. They don’t last, as we know, these LTRs—I mean the floods of dopamines to the brain and the dilated pupils—but they last long enough to enlarge the gene pool, so Venus is happy. Dallying comes later, I think. Don’t you really ever dally nowadays, Andrea? Not at the behest of any taskmaster, obviously, but just for the life-enhancing fun of it?’
‘Oh, not seriously, no.’
‘Dallying doesn’t have to be serious.’
Andrea thought for a moment, then asked: ‘Do you know Diana Athill? You must know Diana Athill … lovely writer, literary editor at André Deutsch.’
‘Yes, I do, as it happens, I was just thinking about her.’ Diana Athill’s sharp-witted views on sex and growing old had been an inspiration to me. She gave up on romantic love in her forties, but loved for sixty more years, in many cases, as I’ve said other women’s husbands—harmlessly, as far as one can tell. She had a penchant for black men.
The spirit was still willing, Diana Athill wrote about sex in her eighties or thereabouts, but the flesh was weak. Her boyfriend at the time—Sam, who was Caribbean—felt much the same way: sex was a lovely idea, he agreed, but the body does indeed eventually go against it. She said that being forced to fake what had been such an important pleasure in her life was more depressing than doing without sex altogether. She was, of course, a woman with a voluminous inner life.
‘Well, the marvellous thing about life beyond sex for Diana Athill,’ Andrea went on, ‘is that you have so much time for other things—for thinking about other things as well as doing them. And do you remember my friend Greta? Greta loves sex, but even Greta—who has a fabulous new boyfriend, by the way, reminds you of whatshisname, Clive Owen, but with class—even Greta says that sex three times a day is fine for a day or two, but then you really want to get on with other things. I know exactly what she means—not that I’ve ever, you know … I actually find that, as sex ebbs, the wider world gets more and more fascinating. Even dallying takes up time you could be spending on more interesting things.’
‘Like what?’ It was a serious question. What? Not quilting or taking classes in Chinese, presumably.
‘This, for example—sitting here with an old friend. A thousand other things—when sex stops hogging the limelight. With sex out of the way, you can let little things in your life grow into big things and a couple of big things shrink till they’re little. I’ve gone back to the piano again, I’ve taken up bonsai, I read whatever I want whenever I want, I don’t try to keep up, I fly up to Madang whenever I feel like it …’
‘Madang, yes,’ I murmured. I had vivid memories of Madang.
‘Obviously you can learn the piano and have sex at the same time—in fact, the piano is perfect for setting the mood, the flute will get you nowhere—but disentangled from sex, all sorts of things that were stunted grow up tall and strong and put out shoots.’ She was waving one hand around in a way I liked. A delicate silver bracelet on her wrist flashed in the light. ‘But friendship, I think, in my case, is what I enjoy having more time for now, above all for my old friends—people I just love.’ I nodded. That was precisely it. Friendship. The love that can never be bought. You had to be worth making friends with in the first place, that was a given, but Andrea was. You ventured into her inner world at your peril, but once safely inside you could revel in its abundance. In our times, it’s our friendships—affections, attachments, understandings and intimacies, some long-lasting, some momentary—that knit us together, fashioning our very selves for us, making each one of us utterly distinct. What a vast patchwork of colours, shapes and sizes these friendships form! Once upon a time in Europe it was probably more the way it still is in Java: it was your family, your religion, your ‘people’ (your suku) who made you so singularly you.
When the celebrated astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote that for infinitesimally small creatures such as we are, the vastness of the universe is bearable ‘only through love’, I can imagine he had in mind not just a mother’s for her child or a married couple’s for each other but a kaleidoscopic panoply of possible loves—passionate, pitying, playful (some friends are simply play-friends, a bit of a lark), and also amorous, tender, ethereal, muscular, mystical, animal, blissful, businesslike, blindly jealous or just blind, a virtually boundless web of intensely felt, vivifying attachments. Chillingly (since love is so fragile, so quick to dry up or disappear, leaving an infinite emptiness behind), I think Sagan was right, which is why the night sky is terrifying to the point of ecstasy sometimes. And of all these loves I think friendship is the most difficult and most rewarding kind. Souls you love as your own soul. There won’t be many of these souls—a handful will do—but each will be as big as the moon. (Not that we believe in souls.) Yes, affairs or even just being dizzy with desire, like one of Krishna’s milkmaids, can blind you to a whole array of other kinds, less sensual kinds, of intimacy.
We sat happily for a while in a bright shaft of afternoon sunlight, slowly draining another pot of tea and silently considering the intimate relationships that had nourished us over the years, along with one or two that had not nourished us at all. Bit by bit, as the decades tick over (and in this Andrea was quite right), it is intimacy with all its different plotlines, in all its different hues, that sustains us more and more, not passion, which, in her words, can start to look distinctly ‘silly’ at a certain age—untimely and therefore comic.
For all that, generally speaking, in our society these days it’s the kind of love that marriage celebrates that is our highest goal in life. Even some homosexuals see marriage (of all things) as the supreme good. Love is not enough, it appears, nor friendship, in their boundless variety: love must also be hopeful of monogamy and publicly solemnised if it is to be prized above all else. Many males live out their entire lives without any friends at all, just a spouse. Indeed, I doubt my own father, for all his affability and warm-heartedness, had any friends—companions at the bowls club latterly, but nobody I’d call a friend, no one he loved intensely simply because they were who they were and he was who he was (if I might resort to Montaigne’s arresting description of his friendship for Étienne de La Boétie). Yet, until the modern era, if historians such as A.C. Grayling are to be believed, it was friendship in its many forms that was humanity’s highest goal—apart from a love for God, of course, which for the deeply devout made friendship dicey. Marriage underpinned the social structure, obviously, and love for one’s spouse, if it blossomed, made the arrangement much more pleasurable, but it was friendship that gave life its charge, its zest, its exhilaration and its lasting joy. No doubt the modern appreciation of women as distinct beings—beings with an inside to their lives as well as an outside—has enhanced the attractiveness of marriage. As recently as the early eighteenth century Alexander Pope opined that ‘most women have no characters at all’. For ‘character’ men turned to their friends.
There is also the question of one’s Great Love, the man or woman who is neither simply a friend nor a spouse, or even a friend or a spouse, but somebody and something else entirely, something for which we scarcely have the words. Katharina calls it ‘the hearth love’ in your life. This Great Love (and I’ve had two over a lifetime, one at a time) may be your pivot, anchor or keystone, loved as you love yourself, may be all the things a god is supposed to be (not Jesus, obviously, lest I be misunderstood, but a god), yet not everything, of course. Whatever that song may say (I can hear them crooning it in my head), No, you are not my everything.
‘I do like to have a beautiful enemy there, too, somewhere amongst my friends, I must say.’ I was partly talking to myself, just to air the notion, which had fascinated me for years, ever since I’d come across it in one of Emerson’s essays (or, to be honest, in an article about it). ‘It’s the excitement of making mine what isn’t mine at all. Taming him. Or (thrillingly) being tamed. I like friends who are ruby-hard. Friendships like wine or honey are all very well, but the glowing, ruby-hard ones are best.’ Before Andrea (who is more an opal than a ruby) could say anything about beautiful enemies, I added: ‘And sometimes I like an unequal friendship, do you know what I mean? I like to grow close to someone …’ But words began to fail me. I paused and blinked. ‘Not every amour in life, surely, needs to have its roots in a vast, symphonic coming together of minds, souls and bodies.’ I gestured wildly to demonstrate how vast these symphonies could sometimes be. ‘Now and again I like to be intimate with someone who has no interest at all in all those things of the mind I’ve spent my life immersed in, spent it brandishing, really, someone I have nothing in common with but feelings. Just feelings of tender regard. There’s an inner life, but made of different stuff from mine.’ I could see Andrea was on the alert for humbug.
‘A scherzo—I see. But what do you talk about?’
‘We don’t talk much.’
‘I find it hard to imagine you not talking.’
But I really don’t. I just rest in the affection of someone who thinks—I don’t know for what concatenation of strange reasons, who can ever know?—that I am in some real sense ‘beautiful’. In other words, I sometimes take my repose in someone who sees past my words to what I am and wants me for that—wants to be kind to me. Especially in the torrid zones, where (rousingly) I feel I’m behind enemy lines every second of every day, surrounded by adversaries I might call a truce with, just for the afternoon, and rest in. Who knows? Who will tame whom?
