I recall the very first stories we heard about it, of once rampant homosexuals reverting to masturbation, even celibacy, of former bons viveurs turning into what you might call bons voyeurs. I read one frightening account in France-Soir (but could I believe it?) of a young gay New Yorker who had returned home from hospital, terminally ill, only to find that in his absence his landlord had changed the locks on his West Village apartment and slung his belongings – clothes, books, LPs, the lot – on to the sidewalk in a heap, a heap that children were forbidden by their parents to touch and garbage collectors refused to remove. Mick told us of a rumoured-to-be-homosexual Hollywood actor who’d been turned down for a role in a TV soap because his leading lady positively refused to let herself be kissed by him. And Ferey, on his return from a short trip back to the States for the funeral of his hundred-and-two-year-old Iranian great-aunt, related how, at the reception, when he offered to share his Pepsi with one of his own nieces, her mother, his sister-in-law, had jerked the paper cup out of the little girl’s hand so violently she spilled its carbonated contents on to her black stiletto shoes.
I have to say, though, that the threat still felt airy, insubstantial and, above all, very, very far away, not just because we considered it to be solely an American problem – even if a couple of obscure African countries had latterly been mixed into the blender – but also because, as another Trib piece informed us, to be at risk you had to belong to one of an alliterative quartet of categories: homosexuals, haemophiliacs, heroin addicts and, of all unlikely targets to be singled out, Haitians. How, we said to ourselves, could we take seriously a disease so lunatically fixated on the letter H? Paris, at any rate, couldn’t and didn’t. If what was happening in the States was dutifully covered by the porn monthlies I bought for their pinups, they would also scoff at what everybody who was anybody on the local scene dismissed as just the latest, bogusly biological manifestation of Yankee homophobia.
Even so, it was an eerie time in which to be alive and horny. On the one hand, we were bombarded by sensational headlines in the national press: ‘New York Fights Back While Paris Dances’ (in Le Matin de Paris), ‘Panic Grips Gays’ (Le Nouvel Observateur), ‘The Pink Plague’ (Le Parisien libéré). On the other, in an article which caught my eye in one of my pinup mags, I read: ‘Not a week passes without some titillating exposure of a disease that is said to be more virulent than gangrene and bubonic plague combined, a disease destined, or so they insist, to decimate us poor poofters. Let’s just wait and see, shall we? And, while we wait, let’s go on living. Fucking is dangerous? Well, what about crossing the street?’ Another, lampooning a widely publicised report that the Swedes had already implemented a long-range plan to deal with the ‘epidemic’, proposed that so melodramatic an overreaction could be attributed to ‘the Scandinavian fascination with death perceptible in the work of Strindberg and Bergman’. And a third cheerfully counselled its readers to ignore the ‘imported illness’ along with the Big Macs to which its author compared it. That one had a particularly arresting title: ‘Sida, mon amour.’ Or ‘Aids, my love.’
For at last the cancer had been given its proper name. Or acronym. Aids. Or AIDS. Whichever – it stood for ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’.
If I may digress for a minute, let me say that I personally have always preferred to write ‘Aids’ rather than ‘AIDS’. The implication of the upper-case ‘AIDS’, after all, screeching at us as it does like a banner headline, is that this is definitely not a disease as others are. Once a week, for example, Mick, who continued to foster hopes of making it – but as what? – in the world of rock music, would turn up in the common room with the latest issue of Variety, a pretentious affectation given his chronic shiftlessness and, I was certain, lack of any talent for anything. After scanning the music section which was supposedly the main reason for his buying it, he would show us, on the obituary page, the list of mostly minor show-business personalities – orchestrators, assistant set designers, chorus boys and the like – who had all died at anxiety-inducing ages: thirty-two, twenty-four, even nineteen (a wunderkind of a Puerto Rican playwright who had only ever seen one of his plays staged). They were said to have passed on ‘following a lengthy illness’ – unspecified, natch – and also to have been ‘survived by’ parents, sisters, brothers, but never, never wives. Except that, almost every week too, it would be bluntly announced of at least one or two of them, either because they themselves had seen no shame in it or else because none of their ‘survivors’ had thought fit to insist on the canonic euphemism, that they had ‘died of AIDS’. Well, it always seemed to me that, the moment you turned to that obituary page, the first thing to leap out at you were those four capital letters. It was almost as though the typeface itself were raising both its voice and its eyebrows in horror at the cause of death and the life-style which had been the cause of that cause – as though, whatever else the departed might have achieved in his life, he was doomed to be remembered ever after for what he had died of.
To return to those halcyon, ostensibly halcyon, days: considering the emergency it would one day become, it may be difficult to believe that during the next twelve months the gay community in Paris (in which I include our gay micro-community at the Berlitz) contrived to talk constantly and compulsively about Aids yet at the same time refused to let it inhibit its own, hard-won right to personal liberty and unaccountability. If even half their morning-after tales were to be credited, my colleagues, with a single exception, went on leading sexual lives as reckless as they always had, and I went on fibbing as recklessly about my own. Aids was a matter for concern, yes – but in Africa, where the origins of the virus had finally been traced, and in America, where the moral majority, homophobic to a man (and woman, let’s not forget), had been accorded a heaven-sent excuse to turn the clock back on everything militant homosexuality had achieved since the Stonewall riots. As Mick put it, ‘Straights can’t abide the thought of us having it off together without being slung into the jug. So what do they do? They invent a disease just for gays!’ French anti-Americanism, not all that latent at the best of times, was stoked up to foaming fever pitch by the advent of what Schuyler called ‘Aparthaids’ – doctors declining to attend patients, growing numbers of suicides, parents too afraid to comfort dying sons. Only in America, we gloated, with the immemorial condescension of the old world towards the new, and we truly did think (I speak of a time when next to no fatalities had been reported in France) that it was happening, if not only then primarily, in America.
Yet, even in Paris, the situation lent itself to all kinds of distortions and misinterpretations. I remember when, via one of his sugar-daddy connections, Ralph Macavoy secured for himself an invitation to the vernissage of a David Hockney retrospective at the Grand Palais. Next morning we asked him if he’d been presented to the great man and what his impression of him had been.
‘Oh,’ said Ralph, ‘he’s a real sweetie. I mean, he’s totally unspoilt.’ Then, after a moment of reflection, he added, ‘I guess that’s why I feel so sorry for him.’
Sorry for David Hockney?
‘Because he’s got Aids.’
‘Hockney has Aids?’
‘Yeah,’ Ralph answered, and I would swear to it he wasn’t joking. ‘Really big ones. One in each ear. They say in a couple of years he’ll be stone deaf.’
How we did laugh.
Except for the cranky night porter, whom I continued to shun, I was soon on first-name terms with the younger members of the Voltaire staff, who would permit me to take furtive baths without paying for them. Then there was the curmudgeonly Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault, who also lived in the hotel and who, when in one of his gregarious moods, would invite me into his room – a room filled, surreally, with dozens of empty English jam jars – to listen to his meandering and for me meaningless score-settling monologues. And the widowed Contessa – Contessa of what exactly? I never did learn – who occupied a suite on the floor beneath mine and who bankrolled her affluent,
useless way of life by twice a year auctioning off a couple of the rare first editions the collection of which had been her ex-hubby’s ex-hobby. Her grimy features were a waxy palimpsest of several face-lifts and, with her beringed fingers, kohl-rimmed eyes and weighty pearl or faux pearl choker, she resembled a raddled café-society harpy from a Brassai snapshot. She was a frightful snob, haughty, irascible, antisemitic and, to be honest, not somebody I was always proud to be seen with: complaining, as she regularly did, about the noise made by guests in the suite above hers, guests who, I suspect, were simply walking to and fro as they had every right to do, she remarked to me once with a sour cackle that the only upstairs neighbour she could ever have tolerated was Anne Frank. But whenever we met, in the Voltaire bar or in a nearby restaurant, La Frégate, where she would insist on picking up the bill for both of us, I thought her, though spooky, inexhaustibly interesting. I found out quite by chance, for example, that, a Hollywood hopeful in the thirties, she had been one of the chorus girls roped to the wings of a snow-white aquaplane in Flying Down to Rio, an Astaire-Rogers musical I’d happened to catch in a small revival cinema in the rue Champollion.
What else? Like most of my colleagues I was constantly short of ready cash and would give private lessons on the sly, as our Berlitz contracts banned us from teaching anywhere but on the boulevard des Italiens. My kindliest, hardest-working pupils were a retired Hungarian couple who lived on the Champs de Mars (even after I’d been based for a couple of years in the city, the spectacle of the Eiffel Tower – my initial! – in the dead centre of their salon window always gave me a thrill: it was an edifice about which I was never to grow, as Mick affected to put it, ‘bladed and jasé’) and who, in the closing fifteen minutes of our twice-weekly classes, would serve me an ‘English’ high tea of cucumber sandwiches, scones and Dundee cake from a glamorous silver tea-service.
What else? I took myself off, by myself, to Tangiers for a week, in the forlorn hope of combining lust and wanderlust. It was raining when I arrived, raining when I departed, raining when I walked through the shabby souk, raining when I caught fleeting sight of a raincoated Paul Bowles in the town’s tumbledown central square, raining when I glumly followed a trio of male ‘escorts’ (not all together but in the course of three consecutive afternoons) into the Hôtel Marie-Antoinette in a stinking side-street that even Tangerines avoided as too louche for comfort. Let them eat cock! – so I Marie-Antoinettishly told myself. But when I recall the sex I had there, on all three occasions, it might as well have been raining inside the hotel room.
What else? I was paid a visit, one hot and humid week in July, by a cousin of mine, Dennis, a teacher in a small Buckinghamshire boarding school. Ah now, I’d given a lot of thought to Dennis. In his mid-thirties, unmarried and likely to remain so, the despair of his grandchildren-craving mother, he was the type of art master who wore dubiously dark navy-blue shirts and those hand-woven ties that, no matter how meticulously they’re knotted at the collar, inevitably end by dangling the wrong way round. A ‘confirmed’ bachelor, he took all his summer holidays, alone, in the Far East. My own suspicion – but I had no hard evidence to back it up since Dennis, for as long as I could remember, had been referred to by the rest of the family, with a comically awestruck respect for mild behavioural difference, as ‘a very private person’ – was that this Far East of his was confined pretty much to the likes of Manila and Bangkok. At home, where I’d only ever run into him at domestic dos, anniversaries, christenings and so forth, there was certainly no obligation on his part, a man fifteen years my senior, to open up to me, the nature of whose still raw and untested sexuality he mightn’t even have divined. Yet in Paris the moment was surely propitious for each of us to come out joyfully to the other. To be fair, I never prompted him, never dropped a pin, as gays say, never once gave him either a cue or a clue. Yet, as we lunched together at the Coupole or glided down the Seine one foggy night on a fairy-lit bateau-mouche or talked in his hotel room for hours on end, up to one or two o’clock in the morning, till I felt like opening a window to let the stale conversation drift away, the subject seemed to hover over us, crying out to be caught on the wing. It never was. A week later Dennis departed, leaving me, even if I hadn’t the slightest doubt he was homosexual, somehow none the wiser.
What else? I witnessed this scene at Chez Francis, the ultra-smart café in the sixteenth arrondissement once famously frequented by Giraudoux: at the terrace table next to mine a living, breathing gay centrefold in his early twenties – lush, layered blond hair, a rock-hard, hairless chest visible thanks to the fan-shaped aperture of his unbuttoned white shirt, and the kind of flawless facial features which always make me wonder what it must be like to be behind such a face rather than in front of it – was attempting to coax a tomboyish, indeed frankly boyish, pony-tailed girl in a red duffel coat to go to bed with him. She was at first coyly reticent, shaking her head a good deal; then she turned definitely chilly; and when at last they left, still in each other’s company but, as was all too evident to me, only as far as the nearest taxi rank, I was once more confounded by the abyss that divides the heterosexual and homosexual worlds. For, let’s face it, had I been in her position, the boy wouldn’t have had time to finish his question before I’d have cried out, ‘Oh oui! Oui! Oui! Oui! Oh oui!’ at the prospect of spending the night love-locked to that long, angular, aromatic body whose low-slung jeans already afforded me a half-real, half-imagined glimpse of its converging abdominal declivities. Just what are these cunts holding out for?
And what else? After a series of formulaic letters in the early months, I ceased to receive any mail from home. I did, however, get an occasional telephone call from my mother, enquiring how I was, how things were, if I was enjoying my job and whether I wasn’t ready to move out of the Voltaire into a flat of my own. (For her, the notion of putting up longer than two weeks in a hotel, no matter how modest its mod cons might be, and I don’t think she understood how ascetic my room was, constituted an unheard-of luxury.) I never let on to her about my trip to London with Ferey and, even when I had free time, I tended to stay put in Paris, partly because I couldn’t afford to give up my private lessons and partly because, though I yearned to travel, to laze under skies swept clean and cloudless by feather-duster palms, waited on hand and foot (and, with any luck, in between) by a race of accommodating ‘natives’, I had no one to travel with and not for a moment, after Tangiers, did I contemplate again setting off alone. In one of the last letters she sent before our correspondence, such as it had ever been, fizzled out altogether, she asked if I wouldn’t like to spend a week en famille in Oxford – I could see the three of us in the back garden, father, mother and me, lolling sedately on striped deckchairs, a slew of Sunday supplements strewn at our feet. I wrote back by return of post to make the point that the trip from France to England was a once-in-a-lifetime undertaking and that it would be foolish of us not to wait till we had really, really started to miss each other. I could hardly believe that even she, who had only ever been out of the country twice, once to Majorca and once to visit in-laws in Oklahoma City, would swallow so preposterous an excuse. Yet she never protested and, as I said, corresponded with me less and less until, eventually, no longer at all.
But I wrote above that there had been one exception to the shoulder-shrugging absence of concern, save as a topic of conversation, with which the common room brushed off the no longer all that new menace. This was Fereydoun. From the start, he had been visibly affected by the macabre second-hand stories we all took guilty enjoyment in telling one another (the anecdote as antidote, if you will), and would go perceptibly pale on hearing the most horrific of them, those involving symptoms, bloated fungi, tumours like bowling balls, Arcimboldesque genitalia the size, shape and even the colour of cauliflowers and artichokes, that only farm animals had ever been known to exhibit. We all mercilessly ribbed him, but it was clear he was spooked. Just how spooked, though, I realised only when one evening he confidentially invited me, my
last class finishing a quarter-of-an-hour before his, not to go home at once but to wait for him in the café downstairs.
Since it was drizzling when I got outside, I didn’t take my regular seat on the terrace, the one which strategically faced the Berlitz exit; instead, I chose a quiet window table inside the café. But though it enabled me to spot Ferey the instant he emerged, it didn’t seem to work both ways. For when at last he did make an appearance, striking me as suddenly very skinny and frail underneath his black bourgeois brolly, I noticed that he stood for a few seconds, nonplussed, before the empty terrace, as though he suspected that for some reason of my own I’d changed my mind about waiting for him. I was surprised – but I was also pleased – at how upset he appeared to be that I wasn’t there and I let a few more moments go by before tapping loudly on the pane to let him know that I was.
He sat opposite me and ordered an Orangina. He didn’t tremble or burst into tears or splash any of his Orangina when pouring it into a glass. (The one external sign of his jitteriness was his right hand’s white-knuckled grip on the polo-neck top of his soda-pop bottle.) Yet there was something about him that made me wonder whether, if not at the end then clearly at the beginning of his tether, he might yet do any one of these things.
He gulped down half the Orangina. Then came the confession.
I didn’t know what to make of it. He had been with a boy the night before – the ‘boy’, when I vulgarly enquired, turned out to have been an engineer in his late thirties, married and father-of-three, but gays, whatever their predilections, have a tendency to refer to any object of their lust short of a septuagenarian as a ‘boy’ – and he was in the process of being violently fucked in the ass when one of his teeth fell out.
Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires Page 8