Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  He was a shy but determined young man. He knew how to get a grip on an idea and hold on to it, with the tenacity of a reptile clamping its jaws down on something. He blushed constantly. He had a hard time looking anyone in the eye. He was athletic, he trained regularly with a Graeco-Roman wrestling team, and out there on the mat he unleashed an unexpected, almost desperate grit. Bruce first ran into him one night in an alley, in the middle of a brawl, one against two, fighting a pair of men who, as Bruce later learned, had called him a faggot. Bruce put the two attackers to flight. Then he’d turned to leave, without a word, ready to move on to other tasks. The young man had asked him to wait. He’d walked over to him, blood streaming from his nose, with his shy, burning gaze. “So you do exist after all,” he’d said. “I’ve always thought so, always hoped you did.” Bruce had looked into those green eyes for just a moment too long, and that moment had changed both their lives.

  Back then, as far as the world was concerned, Batman’s very existence was still an open question. The only ones willing to swear that Batman was real were the criminals who had faced him in combat, a number of eyewitnesses, and a handful of journalists who did investigative work on the mysterious hero. Although most people were convinced of Batman’s existence, no one could be fully certain. It was this haze of doubt that made him such an alluring personality. Batman was sort of an ambiguous legend. Until that night, he’d been a legend for Robin, too, he’d been an idea in the boy’s mind, a clue, a body made up of dreams for the most part. Until that night, this was all he had been, but in the course of just a few days he’d become real, so real that he was now his lover.

  Robin came into Bruce’s life with the attitude of someone who meant to stay, and at first Bruce had been impressed, almost amused at the young man’s determination, and at the idea that he was being courted by someone twenty years his junior. Robin would show up with presents he’d bought for a few dollars. He’d make awkward declarations. He recited short, clumsy poems into his answering machine. That boy was pathetic, yet somehow exciting. Bruce found it enjoyable to have him around. Enjoyable to be able to rely on his instant loyalty, on his feelings of adoration. Enjoyable to take him out to dinner, enjoyable to take him home afterwards, to fall asleep cuddling him. To wake up and find him there. Enjoyable to think that he was protecting someone, to take him under his wing and start to shape him, forge him; Robin wanted nothing more than to be forged.

  The young man had moved into the mansion with him. He’d learned all Batman’s secrets. He was strong, he was brave, and before long he’d become Batman’s assistant. In fact, he was soon at Bruce’s side every minute of the day and night: in the nights they spent patrolling the city, in the nights they spent in the bedroom. He was his assistant in his mission as a superhero, his assistant in the discovery of new sexual impulses. Robin satisfied every request. Robin complied with a smile whenever he was asked, giving in to Bruce’s desires, silently offering his white and hairless body, like a sacrifice, like a soft laboratory animal.

  With Robin, Bruce had discovered everything. He had discovered the physical type he liked. He had discovered the extremities of another body. Discovered the sensual moistness of toes, the overwhelming attractiveness of a pair of hands. Snow-white, promising hands. He had discovered the secrets of Robin’s hands. He’d discovered their power, their flexible softness, discovered the pleasure of giving himself up to the well-trained hands of the other. Feeling Robin’s heartbeat, in each of his hands, two small heartbeats in perfect unison. Two hands. Two systems of muscles, flesh, and nerves, two energy terminals, sensitive extremities, two perfect organs, two tiny miracles of evolution. The touch of those hands could fill him up. For years, Robin had filled his life, satisfied his body and his narcissism, his desire to have a disciple, an efficient partner, a pupil ready to believe whatever he said, a lover willing to lend his hands, his hand, from one night to the next with imperishable love.

  *

  He led the way to a small bathroom. He turned on the vanity lights over the mirror. A spotless granite sink awaited her. “Here’s what I want you to do,” he told the girl. “Something very simple. Just wash your hands,” he explained, satisfied with the sound of his persuasive voice, and with the way in which his words seemed in part to penetrate into the girl, causing her to quiver slightly, and in part to bounce off her, like solar radiation bouncing off a planet’s atmosphere. Bruce liked to dominate the person, but not entirely. Bruce liked it when the game had a shade of ambiguity to it. The slippery boundary between domination and being dominated. “Wash your hands,” he ordered, in a velvety voice.

  The girl obeyed. She betrayed no sign of amazement. She had certainly been instructed in what Bruce preferred. She soaped her hands and scrubbed them, calmly, under the stream of lukewarm water.

  “That’s right,” Bruce panted. He watched her hands, those two white fragments, as they glowed in the silvery rush of water. The foam slid around her wrists like a bracelet, like the slobber of a mysterious animal. In those hands, too, just as in her face, there seemed to be something timeless and impersonal, the incarnation of a perfect principle. Bruce experienced some sort of painful dizziness. He wanted to grab those hands and press them to his face; he wanted to kiss them and gulp them down.

  He enjoyed the show for a few minutes. He watched the two hands scrubbing, polished and smooth, one against the other. He watched the slender fingers. He could have gone on admiring them for hours. At last he decided it was enough, at least for the moment, and gave her a towel. “You did a good job,” he said.

  She dried her hands without haste, lazily. “I thought you’d want to watch me longer than that,” was all she said. Her face was the picture of absolute calm.

  Bruce decided that this girl would never be amazed at anything, any demand, any surprise, and that she would always preserve that same unruffled demeanour. That’s what she was. Innocent and impassive. The girl looked up at him, without warning, a green-grey bolt that left him breathless. The friend who had sent her had guessed right. This girl definitely was his type.

  They went back into the living room. The music welled up around them, welcoming them back, and the light from the lamps had the warmth of a sunset. The girl got comfortable on the sofa. “Oh,” she said, as if relaxing after a strenuous effort.

  Bruce filled two more glasses. He dropped a couple of ice cubes into each glass and stirred them with his finger. “Now, then,” he said, as he handed the girl her drink. “What do you feel like talking about?”

  The girl gave him one of her vague looks. “Talking about?” She seemed to think that over. “I couldn’t say.”

  Bruce drew closer, touched her glass with the rim of his own. The two glass edges produced an almost imperceptible sound. “Tell me,” he said, sitting down beside her. “Tell me what you did today.”

  “What I did today?” The girl dipped a finger into her own glass, to stir it the way Bruce had just done, then ran her wet finger over her lips. “Is that important?”

  “No,” Bruce admitted, staring at her finger, her inviting lips. “But still. Just for something to talk about, just to get to know you a little better.” With a well-rehearsed smile, he prompted her: “I imagine you already know all about me.”

  “Of course,” she said, breaking eye contact. “You’re Batman. Batman,” she said, uttering the name in an even voice, almost like a kind of watchword. “Can I call you that? That is, can I call you Batman?”

  “Sure. Call me whatever you want,” he replied, sipping from his glass. He imagined someone watching them right now, the two of them, the man with the well-cared-for physique, bronzed, relaxed, sitting next to the sexy girl. They must make quite a pretty picture. He felt pleasantly confident. He reached out a hand and brushed the girl’s lips, finding a fresh, damp trace.

  She didn’t seem to register his touch. She seemed capable of letting herself be touched a thousand times, by a thousand hands, with the indifference of a cat. “I’d say that today
I got ready. I got ready for tonight.”

  Bruce laughed briefly. Not that there was anything funny, it just seemed like the right moment for him to laugh. He let his hand slide towards the nape of her smooth neck. “You got ready all day long?”

  She seemed to stop and think it over again. “No, I went… Central Park. I went to Central Park.”

  “You went to the park. And in fact, it was a beautiful day,” Bruce conceded, feeling a sudden, indistinct pang of jealousy at the idea that she had moved around the city that day without him. That happened to him sometimes. The thought left him aghast. The thought that out there in the world were girls and boys who were his type, girls and boys with that gaze, that light in their eyes, those freckles on their noses. The thought that they were out there, and he hadn’t had them yet. It was stupid, he knew that, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He went on caressing the nape of her neck. He waited for the thought to go away. The nape of the girl’s neck was smooth and slender, and Bruce clutched it with a powerful, almost violent grip.

  She remained unfazed. “A beautiful day. Yes, it was. I lay on the grass and read a book.”

  “That’s nice,” he said, taking his hand off her neck and letting it slide down her back, exploring as it went. “All those trees, all those lovely squirrels.” Her back, too, was slender, and at the same time fairly powerful. He wondered what sports this girl played. He let his hand slide further down, discovering the knobs of her spinal column, counting them one by one, like the grains of a precious rosary. “Are you nervous?” he smiled, sensing tension at the base of her spine.

  She ignored the question. “To tell the truth, the squirrels are the thing I like least. They make me think of rats.” She took a sip from her glass, then asked with sudden emphasis: “Don’t you think there’s a relationship? I mean, a link between the squirrels in Central Park and the rats on the subway tracks.”

  Bruce smiled again, amused at her reasoning. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I never take the subway.” He leaned in towards her, closer, until he could smell the scent of the wine on her breath. He could sense the moisture of her respiration. He could observe her heartbeat pulsating in her temple, and could feel the echo of that heartbeat down there, under his hand, where it lay confidently at the base of her back.

  “You know what?” she went on. “I read that none of us are ever more than five metres away from the nearest rodent,” she said, in the tone of someone revealing an important piece of information.

  “You read a lot,” he said, taking her hand.

  The girl must have sensed a hint of irony in Bruce’s voice, because she abruptly changed the subject: “And you?” she asked. “How did you spend your day?”

  Bruce looked at her in surprise. People her age, and with her looks, rarely reciprocated a question with another. They usually just answered. They usually seemed incurious. “I bought some clothes. I worked out. I waited for you to arrive,” he whispered, lifting her hand. He brushed the tips of her fingers with his lips. Then he extended his tongue and, with a shiver, sampled the flavour of her fingernails.

  “I was convinced…” the girl stopped, trying to find the words to express her thought. “I was convinced you went to some exclusive health club to work out. I was convinced there was a gym where superheroes go. Where do you meet each other, you superheroes?”

  “We don’t,” Bruce answered. He explored another one of her fingernails with his tongue. It tasted of iron, of seashell, of salt. He took the fingertip into his mouth and remained, for a few seconds, in complete peace.

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought superheroes saw each other socially.”

  Bruce could have explained it to her. He could have said that, in effect, the superheroes used to get together every now and then: they did the same work, they shared the same mission. Once most of them retired, though, they’d stopped seeing each other as often. Bruce remembered seeing Reed Richards, that old piece of gum, at the George Hotel’s health club a couple of times. He remembered noticing that Reed was still in decent physical shape, though nowhere near his level. What had they talked about on those occasions? They must have chatted about the old days. They must have sat together in the panoramic sauna and watched the sunset. Later, Bruce had a home gym installed. He’d stopped going to the George Hotel, stopped meeting Reed or anyone else from the old scene. There was just no occasion. There was no reason. There really was nothing left for them to say to each other.

  Bruce didn’t explain all that to the girl. It wasn’t a very sexy topic for discussion. It wasn’t a topic suitable to the moment.

  He let go of the delicious finger, having sucked it from top to bottom, realising that both their glasses were empty. He got to his feet but then changed his mind. He’d better not overdo it with the wine. Instead, he realised that the girl hadn’t paid enough attention to the posters from the various movies inspired by his life, nor to the magazines with articles about him, nor to a certain object that was on the table. The precious object. The famous object. “Come here,” he said. “Let’s see if this time I can amaze you.”

  *

  A few years had passed. Bruce and Robin still lived together. Their relationship was still intact, to all appearances anyway, even though many things had changed. Their life together would have seemed unchanged to outside eyes, like the shell of a shiny insect whose body was being devoured, in actuality, by a ravenous larva.

  Bruce had started seeing other boys. At first it wasn’t because he’d grown tired of Robin. It happened because those boys were young and available—each of them like the last one, and yet at the same time new—and he couldn’t seem to remember, quite simply, a single good reason why he should remain faithful to just one person. The mystery of their faces and their elusive gazes. When a young man of the right type crossed his path, Bruce couldn’t help but welcome him, with wonder, with gratitude, as if every young man were an emissary from the same distant land, the bearer of a secret that he was called upon to comprehend.

  As for Robin, he watched in silence. His jealousy consisted of dismayed glances, sudden blushes, profound sadness. As he grew older, he had preserved his clear boyish face, a face that appeared to be immune to the complications of the outside world and the increasingly perverse, ever more fragmented rules of human desire. “I love you, Bruce. Why can’t it be the way it used to be?”

  “I love you too,” Bruce tended to answer the first few times. “You’ll stay with me, you’ll go on living with me. But it can’t be the same as it was, we’re different people now. We’ve grown older.”

  Of the two of them, obviously, it was Robin who had committed the unforgivable sin of growing older. He was now a grown man. He had broad shoulders and a bit of a paunch, and two wreaths of golden hair that had sprouted around the buds of his light-coloured nipples. He was a man with a complete, virile body, a man who stood and watched, uncomprehending, as the person he loved got infatuated with boys who could claim only one merit: they were younger than him.

  Their relationship had begun to deteriorate. Bruce couldn’t have said when he started to find Robin, with his burdensome body, the wounded look on his face, irritating. More and more irritating. He wished Robin would look at the world with a more ironic gaze. Life was grim enough; what need was there for all this tragedy? He would have preferred for Robin to start sleeping around, would have preferred it if Robin had flown into a rage or wrecked the mansion. He would have preferred any reaction instead of that look, a look of love and absurd loyalty, clear as a dawning day, as impossible to look at as the glint of a knife.

  After a couple more years, they had left the old mansion and moved into the city. They’d moved into a brownstone in the West Village. It was the end of the Eighties, the superhero scene was changing, word had spread that Reed Richards’ old group had disbanded, and by now Bruce had unmasked himself to the public. For years, Batman’s actual existence had ceased to be a secret. All that Bruce had done now was to make the matter officia
l, becoming real to the eyes of the world, revealing his everyday identity. He’d started appearing on the occasional TV show and officiating at police ceremonies.

  Robin had opposed this change. He thought the world needed its heroes to be legendary, to remain shrouded in the mists of the impossible. “Becoming real,” he would say, in his awkward voice. “That’s the worst conceivable thing for a hero.”

  Bruce didn’t know what Robin was talking about. He’d lived in the shadows for so many years that he was happy to enjoy a little recognition for a change. In fact, he’d stopped patrolling the streets, but he continued to wear his costume for official occasions.

  Without meaning to, they soon became one of New York City’s most prominent couples. They were good-looking, famous, and miraculously healthy, a combination that wasn’t all that common among the male couples of that period. The gossip columns were full of them. Their mailbox overflowed with invitations to glamorous events. The cult of their relationship spread like wildfire, inflaming the public’s imagination. Apparently, people got excited about a love story only once it was on the way out.

  At first, Bruce just laughed it off. He asked his acquaintances to tell him about all the absurd, hilarious rumours in circulation. Batman and Robin were about to get married in Hawaii. Batman and Robin had each had the other’s name tattooed on his penis. Batman and Robin were about to adopt a Cambodian child, two female Siamese twins, an albino chimpanzee, or perhaps it was really an albino Cambodian child. It was so funny that you could just die laughing. Or else slap your head in amazement. As time passed, Bruce stopped laughing. He’d always liked the idea of people talking about him, but not in such ridiculous terms. Nor was he particularly happy about his name being so bound up with Robin’s.