my life. Could it be that my manhood does not reside in my genitals, but elsewhere? That I am libidinous beyond libido? I have not turned sweeter since my chemical castration (neither did Abelard, for that matter). I feel fatigued by the shots, but I don’t walk down the street any more or less badass than before—not that I often tried on that persona. And I feel as capable of harm as ever, perhaps even more so because the ordeals of the past six years have stripped me of layers of fear. I could join the army, go kill like any good old boy. And sometimes, when my condition sparks in me not the self-pity that leads to suicidal thought but the anger that leads to homicidal ones, I wish for war, for an automatic weapon in my hand and an enemy target I can annihilate. Fortunately, I don’t think this way for long.
Like Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City, I am a lover, not a killer. Where is Susan Sarandon and her heavenly breasts?
●
Screen Test
Angelic. In those movies where I desired her, installing myself in the position of the male protagonist—a confluence of what Roland Barthes called desire in the text and desire of the text—Dominique Sanda looked like an angel, even more because she had an edge of the perverse, which in The Conformist is more than an edge. And just like one can never possess an angel, this hapless spectator could never possess her angelic beauty. Or so I thought in the days when I toiled as an academic, far from cinema’s glamour, though admiring it as a lifelong viewer—addict may be a better word—and an occasional scholar and professor of film criticism. A professor of desire.
But then my career changed. I became a cultural journalist and began meeting those demiurgic creatures of the entertainment media, like musicians and actors. In most cases the meetings were professional: I was interviewing these people for newspaper or magazine articles. In a handful of cases, the meetings grew into warm acquaintances and even friendships. And always, at least while the interview lasted, I did my best to make a brief friendship of it. Some of these meetings were with attractive women, and I steered my libidinous impulses toward the work of connecting with my subject. It was a kind of flirtation, all the more exciting because there was no acknowledgment of anything but work. Still, I couldn’t help notice that Spanish actress Assumpta Serna, for example, was wearing no bra under her light and loose summer blouse when I interviewed her. When it came time to write, I harnessed my desire to my keyboard.
However, meeting an angel is something I never imagined. And meeting a post-angelic angel, well, that was, as Gabriel García Márquez said in another context, beyond imagination.
The very Assumpta Serna I had interviewed in 1986 apropos of her leading role in Pedro Almodóvar’s Matador, played the seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Maria Luisa Bemberg’s 1990 biopic Yo la peor de todas (I the Worst of All). That year, the film was shown at the Havana Film Festival, which I was covering for a magazine, but Serna was not in attendance.
Director Bemberg was there, as was the actress, older than Serna, who played her Mother Superior: Dominique Sanda. Frankly, I was not paying much attention to this film—I confess I have yet to see it—and was interested, instead, in Sidney Pollack, whose movie Havana was premiering in Havana. I got myself invited to a glamorous luncheon for some of the movie directors and stars attending the festival. And that’s how, at an outdoor table in the Marina Hemingway, an unabashedly sybaritic yachting playground in socialist Cuba, I found myself sitting close to Pollack, whom I would corner later for an interview, and across from his fellow director Paul Mazursky, a genial fellow who asked the woman seated next to me, “How is Bernardo?”
I forget how she answered the Bertolucci query because I was struck dumb by the fact that the woman next to me was the cinematic love of my life, Dominique Sanda. Years had passed since she had driven both Jean-Louis Trintignant and me mad with desire in The Conformist. She had aged, though not badly. Her body was still lean and taut, her face appealing. She was, I must say, a beautiful woman in early middle age.
But she was no longer an angel. Gone were the soft baby cheeks, that perfect face that only Raphael could have conjured. I could not see her eyes for she was wearing sunglasses, as was I under the tropical sun. I did my best to ignore her, to stop thinking, fuck, I’m sitting next to Dominique Sanda! So I paid attention to Mazursky’s chatter, a kind of hip Borscht Circuit wit, and I pursued Pollack, with whom I managed to spend the rest of the afternoon.
Still, I was haunted by the two Sandas. The perfect beauty on the screen, with her angelic face and nipples so enchanting they could turn a man to Fascism and murder. And the older yet still beautiful woman about my age sitting next to me. Despite my efforts to ignore her, I heard things she said that went straight into the file in my brain where details that have a bearing on sexuality are kept. She was, I realized, quite aware that she was no longer the world’s most beautiful woman. She commented—to Mazursky, not me—that this morning she had felt quite sure of herself, she felt strong and beautiful, and went out for a walk around the hotel—the Habana Libre, formerly the Havana Hilton, one of the grand hotels of the pre-Castro gambling era—full of confidence, even though, she admitted, no one recognized her. Thus, I concluded, her self-esteem had sagged now that she was no longer a puff-cheeked cherub. I took note. This is a woman who could be seduced by a man skilled at stroking the female ego. In other words, by me.
I also concluded, from her comments to the director, that she was rather lonely in this festival, in this city. A lonely, vulnerable woman I had desired for a good part of my life…alone!…in my hometown! Even as I tried to concentrate on my work as a reporter, a bird of prey inside my consciousness was sharpening his talons.
The luncheon passed, the afternoon passed, the full day and night passed. The following day I went about the business of reporting my story. I was returning to my hotel room at the Habana Libre after lunch when, in a crowded elevator, I found myself, once again, next to Dominique Sanda. I said hello and mentioned we were sitting next to each other the day before. She apologized for not recognizing me because I was wearing dark sunglasses. The elevator was rising to our separate destinations as she took a good look at me. The way a woman looks at a man.
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