Intercourse (12 page)

And the answer is no, no she did not; she loved him, and she wanted him to love her. Love is more complicated than a psychological cliche: “‘Well, maybe there’s something in everybody that likes to be debased, but I don’t think life’s that simple. ’”
²⁶
Leona wanted love, not pain; her loyalty, her faith, could not conquer or heal hatred. There is no analysis of Leona’s life in the book, not what drove her or why, except that her humanity, her capacity to love, comes from what she has already suffered; her bravery in surviving her husband, her family, the loss of her child, leaving the South to try to make a new life, trying to love, a hard case, a black man whom she has been taught she should hate, but she never believed it. The man she loved was too far gone, and could not be pulled back, not by devotion or compassion, not by her endurance or her pleading. There is a value placed on suffering here, not a distinctly female suffering, in this case a suffering that goes up against hatred and can never win because hatred is stronger than anything else, and it kills. Baldwin’s view is that she loves, not as a masochist, which is a near synonym for female, but as a human being.

“I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering, ” he writes in an essay, “... but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. ”
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This suffering, however, is not done in a protected environment or inside the delusions of the middle class. There is no foregone conclusion, no last-minute rescue, no great and inevitable triumph of good over evil. Survival is not guaranteed, or even likely. One loves, one suffers, one strives to use what one knows; but none of it stands up against enough hate. In his fiction, both men and women suffer as human beings, a tragic suffering with an inner dignity, the dignity of having been worth more than this cruelty, more than this trouble and pain. No one deserves brutality because of what they are, their condition of birth, including being born female; and the women in this book are not asking for it—instead they are risking as much as any man risks to live, to love. In the nonfiction, it is black men who suffer because of the social cruelty that they must every day confront, face down, live through:

That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable.
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Leona too has, in her love for Rufus, the conviction of someone who has been forced to snatch her human identity out of a fire of human cruelty; she will love, she will use what she knows from before, do right what she did wrong, love enough this time, be there for him and with him, endure him to help him endure himself; and she does not survive. The fire has already destroyed her lover.

“If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, ” writes Baldwin, “one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. ”
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This explains the bewildering resignation and self-destructive impassivity of those who are hurt, maimed in fact, by social cruelty and intimate brutality; they are sometimes immovable and have a suicidal patience with pain. It is in this framework of values that Baldwin asserts Leona’s choice as human per se, not inherently female or personally pathological.

In sex there is the suffering of those who can love, and the more terrifying despair of those who are loveless, empty, those who must “narcotize themselves before they can touch any human being at all. ”
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These are the people who are the masters in a social and sexual master-slave hierarchy, and what characterizes them is that they “no longer have any way of knowing that any loveless touch is a violation, whether one is touching a woman or a man. ”
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In the United States, the cost of maintaining racism has been a loss of self-knowledge (and thus love) for those who refuse to know what they have because others suffer. What they have includes a sense of superiority that substitutes for a real identity. Maintaining racism has required an emotional numbness, a proud and fatal incapacity to feel, because that is the cost of purposely maintaining ignorance: one must block life out—the world around one and one’s own emotional possibilities. For that reason, in this country there is “an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep” that most Amerikans lack “the most elementary and crucial connections. ”
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Missing especially is the connection between sex and the complexity of identity; a vital connection without which the fuck is an exercise in futility, going from nowhere to nowhere, no one fucking nothing. Even the youth seem “blighted, ” “a parody of locomotion and manhood. ”
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Despair and violation (each no less terrible for being unconscious) and narcotized touch predominate; and the young appear “to be at home with, accustomed to, brutality and indifference, and to be terrified of human affection. ”
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This is the sexuality of those who risk nothing because they have nothing inside to risk. “Of rending and tearing there can never be any end, ” thinks one character in
Another Country
about life in this country, “and God save the people for whom passion becomes impersonal. ”
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Passion becomes impersonal when there is no person inside, no complex human being who is willing to know and to feel. It is not knowledge of someone else that makes passion personal; it is knowledge of oneself. Self-knowledge creates the potential for knowing a lover in sex.

Escaping identity, abandoning it—being absent from one’s own passion, one’s own history, the meaning of one’s own need—allows for ‘“fever but no delight. ’”
³⁶
In
Giovanni's Room, a young, white man named David is running away from himself, this time from Brooklyn to Paris. He is especially running away from the emotional necessity, which is his, of loving men. One night, as a teenager, he made love with his best friend, then abandoned him the next morning, not able to face the friendship after the tenderness and sensuality, the emotional resonance too, of the lovemaking: “We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. ”
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That night it had seemed to him “that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love. ”
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But shame and fear, driving him toward ignorance, overcame sensuality and love.

In Paris, he is engaged to a woman; when he wants to marry, she has doubts and goes away to think. While she is away, he starts living with Giovanni, an Italian immigrant in France, a bartender in a gay bar. Giovanni deeply loves him, but David is determined not to love, not to be loved, not to acknowledge Giovanni as the measure of all love for him:

I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this
is
your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought, but I am happy. And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him touch me again. Then, when he touched me, I thought, it doesn’t matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.
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He abandons Giovanni for the woman, who has decided to marry him; and slowly, he starts to hate her: “and when I entered her I began to feel that I would never get out alive. ”
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Giovanni, in despair, mortally wounded by the desertion, its cruelty, its cowardice, starts a descent downward into a netherworld of trading in on sex; and commits a robbery and a murder. On the night before Giovanni’s execution, David confronts himself, his great failure of courage and love: “I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed... ”
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Shame, like hate, can kill love; make it dirty; but if one is brave, one will love and that will defeat shame. Shame, unlike hate, can be defeated. One older French homosexual, an exploiter at home in the underground world of gay bars and gay boys, has tried to tell David that he must love, or shame will triumph; the sex “‘will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his.... You play it safe long enough... and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body forever and forever and forever. ’”
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The sex this man has is shameful, he himself says,
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“[b]ecause there is no affection... and no joy. It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light. ’”
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And Giovanni, tormented by David’s inability to love, wants to escape from his inner life of passion, from the commitment and the involvement and the pain; he wants
^4U
to escape...
je veux m’evader—this
dirty world, this dirty body. I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body. ’”
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He is anguished because he loves; and using the body in fucking without love, with indifference and mere repetition, would mean escape from pain. For Giovanni, the fucking expresses who he is, has been, can be, what he wants and knows, his passion for his own life and his passion for David: passion is personal. David cannot love, refuses to be touched (changed, committed). And Giovanni accuses him:

“You have never loved anyone, I am sure you never will!... you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe
diamonds
down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody
touch
it—man
or
woman. ”
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An inner chastity, an emotional rejection of the tangle of physical love that implicates (and therefore compromises) the whole person—not being touched, not being at risk, not being contaminated by what Giovanni calls
⁴
“the stink of love’”
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— is a way to avoid the kind of pain that Giovanni is in; and instead of pain, Giovanni too wants the numbness, the ignorance of self, that the coward in love has (however lonely it makes him); Giovanni wants to sleepwalk through life, habitual sex during which, because of which, the insides do not bleed; he wants not to suffer from a consciousness and depth of feeling that permeates his physical existence now, when he does love, his existence inside sex with sex inside him: the way he loves, which is with and through the body and fucking. What he wants but cannot have—because he loves—is perhaps best described by Eric in
Another Country:

And the encounter took place, at last, between two dreamers, neither of whom could wake the other, except for the bitterest and briefest of seconds. Then sleep descended again, the search continued, chaos came again.
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But Giovanni never escapes his ability to feel; his identity. Being able to love, rooted in self-knowledge, only makes love possible, not inevitable; not happy; not reciprocal; never safe or certain or easy.

With the destruction of identity, fucking as love is destroyed, because, as Baldwin says, “to make love to you is not the same thing as taking you. Love is a journey two people have to make with each other. ”
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Those who are able to know themselves must then find “the grace” that enables them to conquer the fear of that knowledge, “[f]or the meaning of revelation is that what is revealed is true, and must be borne. ”
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With this grace, fucking can be communion, a sharing, mutual possession of an enormous mystery; it has the intensity and magnificence of violent feeling transformed into tenderness:

Everything in him, from his heights and depths, his mysterious, hidden source, came rushing together, like a great flood barely channeled in a narrow mountain stream. And it chilled him like that—like icy water; and roared in him like that, and with the menace of things scarcely understood, barely to be controlled; and he shook with the violence with which he flowed towards Yves. It was this violence which made him gentle, for it frightened him.
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The tenderness is the inner violence transformed by love and self-knowledge into complex and compassionate passion; and the passion is gentle in that it does not destroy.

Fucking as communion is larger than an individual personality; it is a radical experience of seeing and knowing, experiencing possibilities within one that had been hidden. Vivaldo, the white lover of Ida, Rufus’s sister, has sex with Eric that brings him, finally, face-to-face with a truth he has denied, and this enables him to face his other failures of love and courage:

He felt that he had stepped off a precipice into an air which held him inexorably up, as the salt sea holds the swimmer: and seemed to see... into the bottom of his heart, that heart which contained all possibilities that he could name and yet others that he could not name.... He moaned and his thighs, like the thighs of a woman, loosened, he thrust upward as Eric thrust down.
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