The Sacred Beasts (31 page)

WHEN ALEX AND Sylvie returned to the house, the regular group
meetings had ended, and a number of women stayed behind, as usual, to talk
uninhibitedly together and enjoy the last of the evening. Since their
conversation had been very intense, Alex and Sylvie didn’t feel like continuing
their work, and they sat with the group to hear the discussion, which seemed to
be on the subject of the Spanish media and who it was reaching and influencing.

“Do Spaniards actually buy and read newspapers?” asked a factory
worker. “Everyone is pinching pennies.”

“Yes, they read the free ones,” answered a media professional.
“With paid news, one person buys a copy and maybe half a dozen others read it.
You have office newspapers, even park bench newspapers.”

“But so many people watch TV instead,” said a senior. “
La caja
tonta
, the idiot box, is the ultimate voice in the dark of night.”

“But they don’t actually watch it,” said a student. “It’s only
background sound, white noise.”

“They watch when there’s sex,” said a journalist. “Remember the
last episode of
A Day is a Day
on TV-3 in Barcelona? The host asked the
whole cast and audience to take their clothes off in front of the camera. I
heard they did it.”

“I heard they didn’t,” said a professor.

“There, you’ve proven my point!” said the student. “Nobody
watches—that’s why you’ve heard two different versions.”

“My TV favorites were those early sex shows in the 1990s,” said a
lawyer. “There was a quiz show with strip teasers on one channel and then a
talk show with strippers on another channel. I used to watch it with my little
brother, and we’d shift between the channels and laugh all night about them.”

“For a while, I got caught up in the Latin American soap operas,”
said a writer. “There was one about a chemist and another about a family
doctor. I loved them.”

“I know plenty of women who became doctors and chemists after
watching those shows,” said a doctor.

“That makes me wonder how many became strippers on talk shows and
quiz shows,” said the writer.

Everyone laughed. Protests of “aaugh” and “no one!” were uttered.

“My favorites were the early celebrity scandal shows,” said a
senior. “They were raw enough for Pilar, weren’t they, dear? If they didn’t
have any scandals to report on, they created their own. I loved that night when
an interviewer ran down an alley to catch up with a bullfighter’s mistress so
he could find out if his penis was bigger than the bullfighter’s. ” Everyone
laughed, then there was the sound of many women talking at once.

“Then the government hired a couple of women to clean up all those
shows,” said a journalist.

“Why must women always be the ones to clean everything up?” asked
a senior.

“Men are congenitally irresponsible or dirty—unless they’re both,
of course,” said a writer.

“Spaniards listen more to radio than anything else, I think,” said
a professor. “The older generation only listens to radio and reads free
newspapers.”

“Radio moves information faster than any other medium except the
Internet,” said a journalist. “It really came through for us after the
terrorist bombings, when Aznar was defeated.”

“I love the pirated radio stations,” said a writer. “Late at
night, I never know what I’m going to hear. Lately, there’s some guy on at
around three am with the softest voice who talks really dirty. My mother can’t
go to sleep without him.”

“I like the obscene woman on at four am,” said a senior. “She
wakes everybody back up again.”

“I’ve heard crazy people on those pirate stations,” said a
student. “A guy once said he was broadcasting aboard a UFO with a bunch of
aliens.”

“I’ve even heard a little old lady who goes on and on about what
great paella she makes,” said an artist. “She’s non-stop!”

“That’s my mother-in-law!” said a factory worker. “We always tell
her to shut up about her damned paella! Is she on radio now?”

“Listen up, friends,” said a journalist. “It’s starting to sound
as though you’re really fast asleep in those wee hours of the night and
dreaming all this stuff! Are you sure all these radio pirates really exist?”

“I got up to take a leak around four and heard the little old lady
with her paella,” said a writer. “Also, you have no sense of humor!” Everyone
laughed, and several women began to speak in smaller groups.

“Ladies,
very
raw ladies, just as I love you!” Pilar said
in a loud voice, and the group was quiet again. “I have an idea for you to
consider. Libre and I recently learned how to pirate a radio station. Our
friend, Alex, knows a lot about technology—she does the web site and Facebook
page for the house—and she showed us how to pirate a station. So, we had two
ideas for a radio series, to be broadcast as far as we can go. Libre lived in
American—San Francisco—for several years, and she said Americans love movies
and TV shows about people who can see and talk to dead people, ghosts. They say
they ‘whisper’ to them, apparently, and ‘whisperer’ often gets into the title.
Well, we wanted to apply this idea to the Spanish gay community with a show
called ‘The Dyke Whisperer.’ All these gay people will die, as everyone does,
without resolving their issues with lovers, friends, and family and need
desperately to speak to them. So, a dyke medium will be able to communicate
with the dead and be asked by all the poor neurotic ghosts of gays to talk to
their lovers, families, their cats and dogs, their goldfish, everyone. It
would, of course, be a farce, though Libre says the Americans actually believe
this kind of thing and even make serious films about it.

“So, that’s one idea. The other is an idea I heard here—a woman
wakes up one day covered with orifices; and, the world being what it is, she
will instantly attract many fools, mainly men but some women, too. As they all
try to use her for all the foolish and obvious purposes we can so easily
imagine, you will hear a parade of all the obsessions, obscenities and general fatuity
that flesh is heir to, etc. So, what do you think of these two ideas for a
pirate radio series?”

The group was silent, appalled, then burst out laughing. “It’s
certainly no worse than late-night sex talk and paella,” said a senior.

“The ideas are ingenious,” Alex said, “and, like many ingenious
ideas, they are probably better in concept than in execution.”

“Meaning what?” growled Libre, her mohawk hair a vivid blue.

“Meaning that it will be funny for an episode or two and then fall
flat,” said Alex. “A series requires a substantial idea, and this may only be a
clever one. But then, I could be wrong. Maybe you will be able to make all
kinds of witty, hilarious permutations and combinations out of it.”

The group was silent.

“Perhaps we should be discussing not the media but whether the
arts in Spain are some of the most bizarre in the world,” said a professor.

Everyone laughed and a few cheered. A new irreverent discussion
was born.

“There’s that Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao built to look like a
fish,” said a factory worker. “Bilbao is so rainy and dull that a fish might
want to vacation there, but I can’t imagine anyone else taking a trip to see
the thing.”

“Well, there’s the matter that Spain is the only European country
to have a
real
phantom of the opera,” said a musician, “and, like
Spain’s most bizarre architecture, it’s here in Barcelona. The Teatro Real may
look stable now, but my aunt, who sings opera, told me that it was destroyed by
fire several times and once blown up. Then, when they tried to rebuild it, the
architect died from heart failure as he was giving his plans to the media.
After that, the centerpiece, a chandelier weighing more than two tons, fell to
the floor and the builders went bankrupt.”

“But now, it’s a great opera house,” said a doctor. “I’ve seen
many wonderful productions there.”

“I have never set foot in it and never will,” said the musician.

“What are you, superstitious?” asked a lawyer. “Galician?”

“No,” said the musician, “a student of Spanish history forced to
believe that our phantoms are unusually nasty ones.”

“But the phantom has left,” said a student.

“Even a phantom can become embarrassed. It may have left for
America, a perfect home,” said the musician.

“There is also the matter of how Spain got the art on display at
the Villahermosa Palace,” said an artist. “I read that there was an open
worldwide competition for it since it was considered to be the most important
private art collection in Europe, the Thyssen collection, owned by a Dutch
steel tycoon. All the VIPs from different countries went to him to plea for
their country as a setting for it. Prince Charles was sent by Britain to get it
for the Tate. It was Spain that won it, and you know how? Our art ambassador
was a former Miss Spain. The steel tycoon was overwhelmed by lust and gave it
to her. So, there it is, Spain’s property, on view in the Villahermosa Palace.”

“I don’t find anything particularly bizarre about that, just
realistic,” said a lawyer. “Since when has Spain not been a great place to
fuck?”

“Let’s remember that it was a distinguished and brilliant woman,
Pilar Miro, who single-handedly created the conditions for Spain’s current
renaissance in cinema,” said a professor. “When the Socialists came to power,
they made her the government controller of the film industry. She got rid of
censorship and initiated a system of government subsidies for art house films.
Spain made little but sex farces before her intervention; now our films have
international renown. The first director to benefit from her system was
Almoldóvar.”

“There are many important women in the arts,” said another
professor. “There are sculptors, Susana Galano in the 1980s and now, Cristina
Iglesias. In ballet, there’s Tamara Rojo. There are several internationally
famous opera singers—Monserrat Caballé, Teresa Berganza, Maria Bayo. Of course,
they primarily perform abroad, since Spain can’t finance many complex musical
productions.”

“I was moved that Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ returned to Spain from New
York after democracy was restored. That made great sense.”

“But now, we are coming to the conclusion that Spanish arts are
not bizarre, and I won’t concede that,” said a writer. “What about Spain’s
first national ballet? It completely disgraced itself when two dancers attended
the German reception in drag. So, that production was the beginning and end of
our national ballet.”

“That makes the Germans and the audience more bizarre than the
performers, in my opinion,” said a lawyer. “Let the queens have their night
out.”

“Someone said that we now have a great international cinema, but
how do we evaluate it if some of its most famous productions concern themselves
with physical paralysis, nervous breakdowns, transsexuality, dementia, murder
and ghosts?” asked a professor. “It is still bizarre.”

“No, it’s just an improvement for a country previously known
mainly for bullfights and drugged gypsies performing flamenco,” said a student.

Everyone laughed, gave up the quest for truth, and started talking
in smaller groups. It was the end of another evening at Monserrat’s, and they
were tired.

RUTH AND MONSERRAT woke up together in late morning light. They
had made love long into the night. Now, they were caressing one another,
wordless.

I never knew it could happen again, Monserrat thought, but here it
is. Here you are, intimate goddess of my life. Maybe you’ll make a pagan of me,
too. What an unvirginal vestal I’ll be.

How soft yet sure, bold yet beguiling, such ease in the erotic and
all the other wonderful contraries there are in you, Ruth thought. You are
limitless. You are my adventure. Sylvie was all the intensity of young love,
which has its own bright infinities. But, you are the depth and richness of
love.

How at ease we are, Monserrat thought, hardly needing to speak.
Without words we say, you are everything as long as my life lasts, my love, my
so husbandly woman.

There is a speech purely of the body, Ruth thought. When did I
stop talking? Last night, I thought I was swimming with you underwater. We had
to be in the sea, for the gravity of the earth was gone.

We have said everything, Monserrat thought. Now there is the
everything unsaid. You know what I feel like second sight. Is what I say, even
think, irrelevant entirely? Almost!

They rose and looked out at Monserrat’s panoramic view of their
city, the beautiful city on water with buildings that sprang up from the hand
of a wild fantasist. They could see the great bulbous hive of the Agbar Tower,
buzzing with kinetic red, blue and yellow tiles of color. Yes, Ruth thought,
buildings seem to be creatures, living things here. “Well, our city has a
multitude of words,” she said, “even if we don’t.”

“It does. It’s calling us and we must either invite or resist it.”

“Let’s resist, stay home and work today,” Ruth said.

“Yes, we need that now, and we have unfinished business with our
two young women.”

“Oh, yes! If we stay here, we’re bound to run into them. I want to
see your art very much, too. That’s equally important.”

“Most of it is in Cadaqués. Let’s go there! We can work very well
there, too.”

“But, let’s stay at least for today. There’s that unfinished
business,” Ruth said.

“They’re doing very well without us. Alex has been giving me
messages every day. They’re working all the time—when they’re not making love.”

“That sounds like Sylvie’s influence. Has she said anything . . .
violent?” They laughed.

“Alex would never tell me if she did. But, she is a woman who
lives with a certain violence.”

Ah, Ruth thought, those delicate words for something perhaps too
painful to describe: a woman of a certain age, a woman of a certain violence.
“That’s why we should meet with them, get it over with. And, we both want to
work.”

“Oh, yes. And we will!”