The Sacred Beasts (29 page)

“Another ominous element is the impoverishment and diminished
effectiveness of the American educational system, since that is the expected
route to prosperity. We need a complete focus on better education and
strengthening of labor’s position relative to industry, but these are in the
steepest decline in memory. Excellent public school teachers are worth their
weight in gold, and they’re certainly not paid, honored and supported in
proportion to their worth.

“At the root of it all is the conflict between liberal and
conservative political parties, and these represent genetic predispositions.
The U.S. has too many conservatives, which might have been useful in its
earlier history but is now completely destructive. They represent two different
forms of justice, and each therefore regards the other as immoral. The
conservatives have all the terrible traits of chimps: true spite and meanness
of spirit, unending male aggression, mendacity, the crudest political
oppression and rigid hierarchy that can only be challenged by violence. This
leads to completely inefficient and non-functional groups and hence the nations
that comprise them. The liberals have more bonobo traits, which are
non-violent, nurturing and far more skillful in groups, creating more
prosperous nations that hold them as citizens. But, liberals are now a minority
that is unwilling to engage in the aggression, oppression and mendacity that
determines the winner in the U.S. As genetic predispositions, the conflict goes
to the heart of destructive human political behavior.

“I’ll write all of this, as I’ve taught it in primatology courses
for decades, but it will only be influential after the first global
catastrophe. It may then be too late for civilization at its best. Civilization
is as fragile as biological life and everything else determined by evolution. I
don’t think I can stand to go on about this.”

“Then it will do no good for you to talk it out. You must write
your book, and if it receives a hostile reception, I’m sure you will answer
questions about your thesis very well. For my part, there’s only one thing I
can realistically do to save you.”

“What on earth is that?”

“I can love you.”

Ruth smiled, relaxed and was silent for a long time. They looked
at one another with the eyes of love and both felt saved. “That’s the best
thing Barcelona has given me,” Ruth finally said. “I should thank every goddess
in the pagan pantheon that you’ve even had the patience to listen to my long
rants. I will gratefully and graciously shut up. Let’s go home, my love! Let me
love you, too.”

IT WAS EARLY evening before Alex and Sylvie awoke. Again, they
were ravenous and had dinner at the same restaurant on the corner, then
returned to Monserrat’s house, where many women’s groups were meeting, and the
atmosphere was as noisy, wild and unpredictable as ever.

“Are you afraid of meeting them?” Sylvie asked.

“Not really,” Alex said. “Monserrat has been in process of saying
goodbye to me throughout the whole thing. She said how happy she was that I was
going out with you and to take a few days at a hotel. So, I have virtually been
pushed into your arms, not that I needed it.”

“Ruth, too. She said I’d throw her over the first night,” Sylvie
said and thought, except that she sort of implied but definitely did not say
it, and I was shocked when it happened. “Have you heard from Monserrat? You’ve
got the cell phone.”

“Oh, yes. She made a big deal about how welcome we are, to take
any room in the house and for us to stay as long as we want to and
particularly, for you to feel free to paint here as long as you want.”

“That’s great because I have to do nothing but paint for many
days, weeks even, all morning, all day, into the evening. I’ve had so many
ideas that I can’t do another thing without it.”

Alex looked distressed. “Don’t worry,” Sylvie said, smiling. “I’m
sleeping with you every night.”

Alex looked relieved. “Actually, it will be perfect. I’ve got to
finish my dissertation. Which room should be ours? Do you want the one
Monserrat gave you?”

Sylvie suddenly looked very calculating. “We can use that to store
our stuff and we can work there. It will officially be our room. But, I must
sleep with you tonight in the room I shared with Ruth; and tomorrow night, you
must make love with me in the room where you slept with Monserrat.”

Alex laughed uproariously. “I never know what’s going to come out
of you! Are you trying to sully the goddesses?”

“Just disrupt them a bit.” She suddenly grabbed Alex and kissed
her passionately. “Don’t you want to?”

“
Now
I do! What will you do if they come in on us like the
Guardia Civil?”

“They won’t. They have a secret place, somewhere you’ve never been
with Monserrat.”

Alex looked at her in wonder and thought, how many secrets do you
have, my love? They both smiled broadly. “Well, I’ll take you anywhere,
anytime. In front of them if you like.” They both laughed.

“No, not that,” Sylvie said. “Did Monserrat say anything about
Ruth?”

“They’re together and very happy.”

Sylvie’s face looked conflicted, then angry. “Did you answer? Wish
them well?”

“Oh, yes! I’m really happy for them.”

“Did Ruth say anything?”

“No, the message was from Monserrat. Ruth’s cell phone is probably
still locked in the glove compartment with yours.” Alex could see that this
disturbed Sylvie and said nothing else about it. They moved their luggage into
Sylvie’s room, and Sylvie began to dress. She wore another colorful,
deep-necked dress that frankly revealed her body as well as low heels.

Alex watched her, astonished again by her beauty, which seemed to
show new facets and dimensions in different rooms, situations, and even times
of day. Today, she was an Arab woman; yesterday, she was South Asian. At night,
she was a European bombshell. “I don’t know how to tell you how beautiful you
look,” Alex said. “You’ll have those people following you around again.”

“I’m dressing for you,” Sylvie said, simply. “I’ve been camping
all summer, and I feel like it.” She suddenly took Alex’s arm for support as
she straightened the heel of her shoe. The words and the gesture were so
effortless and natural that Alex closed her eyes, overwhelmed by joy. It was
this, she thought, that she had wanted so desperately all along. When all the
confusion was done, and Sylvie would say words like these and take her arm
without thinking.

The world suddenly vanished in a silent ecstasy. When Alex
returned to the room, she was smiling and Sylvie was smoothing her dress in the
mirror. Sylvie noticed her silence and turned, smiling; the smile with that bit
of challenge and play and sex and so much love now, and Alex knew she would
always love Sylvie with a rare intensity. Why was it so different, this time,
she wondered, and then she knew: because there were no limits. Anything could
happen. It was pure adventure. That was what she really wanted from love, work,
life, everything. The world suddenly vanished again.

When Alex returned, she thought, of course, I had to fuck my way
all over Barcelona to get it.

She continued to smile and realized that her body felt different.
It was as though she could feel all parts of it more distinctly, and it had more
force, somehow, in a resting pose. She was not waiting for something; she was
there. She had now made love many times in the streets of a city she adored.
The city felt different. It was more intimate. It was hers now. She was no
longer a foreigner. The city was hers and her body lived there in simplicity
and peace. Her body had its needs, and they were to be satisfied. Her body, her
life, had a dignity they had not before.

There was something new in the world.

When they rejoined the others, it was late and the individual
groups had ended, leaving a collection of women sitting around, enjoying the
last of the evening together. Another animated discussion was going on between
them, ranging freely over sex, prostitution, and women’s rights.

“At the Catholic girls school I went to,” said one of the
journalists, “they called the penis ‘the diabolical serpent’ and the vagina,
‘Satan’s den.’” No wonder so many Spaniards are screwed up sexually.” Everyone
laughed.

“Under Franco,” said one of the seniors, “there was a powerful
priest who said that cinema ‘was the greatest calamity to have befallen mankind
since the Fall of Adam,’ worse than ‘the Flood, two world wars and the atom
bomb.’” The group burst into laughter.

“Prostitution is more blatant now,” said a journalist. “When
you’re driving along a highway in the countryside and you come to one of those
big country houses all lit up with neon, it’s always a brothel.”

“But that’s what AMELA’s for,” said a student. “Prostitution is
legal but pimps are not. It’s illegal for men to make money on women now.”

“So what’s the result?” asked a writer. “Now we’ve got pimps who
are protected by the Mafia and prostitutes who are sex slaves from Eastern
Europe.” A cacophony suddenly sounded in the room, everyone talking at once.

Finally, the voice of a professor was the loudest and the group
listened. “There was even more prostitution under Franco. But today, eighty
percent of prostitutes are foreign. Spanish women aren’t doing much of it.”

“You know, when they break up one of those Mafia brothels,” said a
senior, “they have cute little rehabilitation programs for the foreign women,
teaching them how to speak Spanish and do gardening. What wife would want a
flower like that in her backyard?” Everyone laughed.

“But the best brothel was Barcelona,” said a journalist. “The red
light district was the biggest in Spain up to the 1980s. Today, look at it!
It’s a bunch of boutiques, art galleries, universities, and bookstores. Kill
’em with culture.”

“I loved that old red light district,” said a senior who was a
writer. “The streets were maze-like; even we Catalans got lost in them. They
were very dangerous, too. I used to walk around there with a bunch of women who
carried knives. Jean Genet wrote
The Thief’s Journal
while he was living
there.”

“But aren’t we progressive in some ways, too?” asked a student.
“We’re ahead of the whole world on gay marriage, or at least since 2003 when
Zapatero legalized it.”

“But Madrid’s ahead of Barcelona. They have those ‘kiss-ins’ on
Gay Pride Day in the Puerta del Sol,” said another student.

“I do that every year in Barcelona,” said another student.

“Every year! You should be doing that several times a day,” said
another student.

“Hell, I do! Just not in public places,” said a student. It was
rapidly turning into a dispute between students.

“Anyway, Barcelona started lesbian rights in the 1970s. My mother
told me about it,” said a student.

“But my sister was a
member!
” said a student proudly.

“Enough!” said a journalist, who wanted to stop a trivial argument
among students. “Shut up unless you were actually
born
during a lesbian
political rally.”

“I was, I was!” said the most persistent student, a writer. “They
had to carry my mother through the streets.” Everyone laughed; no one believed
it.

“This argument is over,” said the journalist. “Goodnight,
students.”

No one left.

“Zapatero had that fifty-fifty cabinet of men and women. Didn’t
that really blow your mind?” asked a media professional.

“But that’s just because no one expected him to win,” said a
journalist.

“And half the men were Opus Dei, so there was really another
gender and maybe even another species in the cabinet all along,” said a writer.
Everyone laughed; the discussion was back in full swing.

“That cabinet is why they call us ‘the Sweden of the
Mediterranean.’ There is no other conceivable reason,” said a professor.

“Unless they’re still thinking about all those Swedish women on
the beach in their bikinis, the ones all the men can’t forget about,” said a
journalist.

“Who could
not
be thinking about them? I think about them
plenty,” said a gay rights lawyer to applause and laughter.

“Before this degenerates into anything let us kindly say
‘whimsical,’ let’s get back to the subject we were discussing before, men and
women and whether we have made any progress toward equality,” said a senior who
was also a professor.

“Since when were we talking about that? I thought the topic was
sex,” said a student.

“That’s because your generation talks about nothing but sex. My
generation was talking about equal rights,” answered the professor. The student
looked miffed.

“The real crux of it is the speed of change,” said a journalist.
“Before the death of Franco, women had no rights outside the home if they
married. In the six years after Franco, all of that was undone. By the 1990s,
women had entered the professions in great numbers and there are now more women
in the university than men.”

“And what about bullfighters?” asked one of the writers, who
half-wanted to bait the journalist. “Women couldn’t fight bulls for a century,
and then there was that hair-dresser, Cristina Sanchez, who entered the
bullring and killed all six bulls in the corrida.”

“I’d rather we didn’t talk about fighting bulls,” said one of the
seniors. “I’ve always found them terribly sweet. I love to pet them—they are
very sensitive around their noses and lips—and besides, our web site argues for
the end of bullfighting.”

“But we’re not
advocating
it!” said a student. “We’re just
talking about whether women have been involved in Spain’s most macho
profession. I didn’t know about Cristina.”

“Before Cristina Sanchez, there was that amazing old woman in the
nineteenth century,” said a professor. “She fought her last bull at the age of
seventy-six. What was her name?”

“Who would ever remember that?” asked a student.

“Martina Garcia,” said a senior firmly, “and don’t forget it.”

“I always root for the bulls at a bull-fight, and I really don’t
care if the matador gets it,” said a writer. “Of course, I would never feel
that way toward a woman in her seventies in the bullring. This is an involved
way of asking: can we stop this conversation?”

“No, let’s just stop talking about women bull-fighters,” said a
professor. “By the way, Cristina retired early because, as she said, Spain
still discriminates against women. She couldn’t get into as many corridas as a
man.”

“No wonder!” said a media professional. “What man would pay money
to see a woman who killed all the bulls and was the best matador in the
corrida?” Everyone laughed.

“Since Franco,” said a journalist, “women have entered the
military en masse, even the fighting units. They’re pilots now, too. Women are
in the Guardia Civil.”

“Then Spain has caught up to the U.S. in less than a decade,” Alex
said in excitement.

“We should have no comparisons to a country that has gone berserk!
Spain is no right-wing pig of a country where people love their guns more than
their genitals,” said a journalist.

Alex looked crestfallen, again. “They’ll elect another government
in 2008, and it will be very different then,” she said in a small voice. Sylvie
smiled and kissed her; then Alex felt a wild elation.

“Does all of this make a real difference?” asked a professor. “The
laws in Spain have changed, true, but like many other European countries, women
didn’t really unite and fight for it. So, discrimination has a way of coming
and going. If there’s an economic crunch, women are the first to be fired.
Right now, they have double the unemployment rate of men. That’s appalling.”