apart like a piece of origami thousands of pages long and filled with whole paragraphs of subordinate clause after subordinate clause. I, taking the form of cake crumbs, transformed into my own personal temps perdu, but, before I could arrive at the epiphany, dozens of fish arrived and started nibbling at me. Just like a madeleine, my psoriasis came away in little pieces, which they then devoured, fighting over the little flakes, as is the way with fish.
To begin with it felt nice being tickled like this, but the fish were in predatory mode, they weren’t spa attractions, and their attacks grew more and more violent. The largest fish, who took a little while to arrive because they lived out in the middle of the lake, did actual damage. I soon got tired of letting them do as they pleased, and swam around a little to drive them away. They were pretty dauntless, however, and it took more than a couple of swipes to deter them: they’d spent their entire lives sharing their living space with decrepit, harmless human beings. They weren’t like fish in the rivers or sea who have seen their friends pierced by fishing hooks and getting grilled for somebody’s supper a couple of hours later. The fish in the Alhama lake knew they are invulnerable, and kept up their pursuit of me. The moment I stopped moving, they assaulted me once more. I had to move my arms and legs constantly to keep them at bay.
This battery made the epiphany harder to come by, but not impossible; a little laboured, without the psychedelic fluidity of the truly epiphanic, and yet it arrived with a certain rhythm and pulse. My conversion into a madeleine culminated in a brief illustration of my bathing history, which was projected on my mind like the film with which people are presented in the moments before they die. My childhood on the beach, before and after the red dot on the sole of my foot. The lover’s sea off Biarritz, a number of landlocked ones too, vague hints of the north, high tides, low tides, a couple of rivers whose location I can’t recall and two or three Mexican sinkholes that were dark and exotic and smelled of shrimp.
You always step in the same stream. Every time we go underwater, we pick up on the pleasure where we left off. The decades or kilometres between one diving-in and the next are immaterial. Heraclitus must have been a very dry sort not to understand this. How are man and river going to change the second time around? In fact, it’s the exact opposite: no more emphatic proof exists of immutability than a list of the times a person has bathed or swum. There’s a group of gentlemen in San Sebastián who go for a dip at the La Concha beach every morning, whatever the weather. They do it as a way of mocking the weather, mocking their own old age, even mocking death. Every time they get in the water, they return to the first immersion. Past, present and future? Nothing but inventions on the part of people with all their clothes on – and not a splash of water. The same holds true for distances. Going swimming in Patagonia and going swimming in Norway means the same swim in the very same water. This is why explorers used to go off in search of the fountain of youth: they went looking for it in the water, the only place it can be found.
This, which will be so evident to so many swimmers accustomed to letting themselves be cradled by the motion of the waves, was only revealed to me that morning in Alhama de Aragón as I tried to flee the nibbling fish, though at intervals I let them have their way, partly out of tiredness and partly because I believed they were actually going to eat my psoriasis off me, and that I would emerge from the water in perfect health.
I wasn’t as wrong as that might make it sound. The minerals in that water, allied with the summer sun filtering through the high branches of the trees planted a century and a half before, put the illness on the back foot after just a single day. I made such a miraculous improvement that I was surprised not to see a convoy of disabled people at the gate buying little bottles of medicinal water, as though it were another Lourdes. There were neither saints nor apparitions of the Virgin Mary, neither basilicas nor pilgrims, but there were nineteenth-century buildings just as ingenuous as any cathedral – built by someone who believed they were living in a civilised world – and as for the sacred, historical part, that was covered by Roman historians talking about going there to cure aching bones in the times of Christ. The town is also much prettier than Lourdes, and the food is better. I don’t know the reason for the Catholic disdain for Alhama’s miraculous powers, but nothing good has ever happened to me in Lourdes, whereas I climb out of the water in Alhama feeling strong and smooth-skinned, and with a great urge to have sex: a pretty jarring thing in a place so strongly associated with Thanatos and not Eros.
How about a shower before lunch, get the smell of the lake off us, I said to Cris, who noticed my erection though I tried to conceal it under my towel.
We crossed the park in our dressing gowns, pretending we couldn’t see the moribund people filing out of the lower-class hotel after applying poultices and leeches, and almost as soon as we closed our bedroom door – in the middle-class hotel, populated, instead of by zombies, by couples from Majadahonda and Torrelodones with no erotic appetite – we surrendered to a rough and noisy session of lovemaking, the way we don’t do it at home. Her skin, always smooth, takes on an almost supernatural lustre at the spa, and I feel myself possessed by a vigour that frightens me and that is down to having left the psoriasis behind in the lake, as though along with it I’ve forgotten all the courtesies of the nicely brought-up boy who paid exemplary attention during sex ed in school. Missing Cro-Magnon man, I could spend the whole afternoon and evening playing the porno superhero. My bones don’t even ache.
How great the sex is in Alhama, how blessed the sleep that overcomes me while Cris takes a pre-lunch shower and I ask for a few minutes’ grace, just to stay dirty, smelling her juices and my own, and the mud of the lake on our bodies, hair plastered against the pillow, and I stare out of the window at the loose bits of slate scattered across the mountainside, the valley’s secret hidden beneath them, the power of the water, which, for a number of hours, gives me back my humanity. For a few days, at most. I feel drowsy, and resist getting in the shower, not wanting the effect to fade, knowing it to be as ephemeral as cologne. If only I could live in Alhama, like a Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and die quietly one winter’s night! But the fantasy of the cure only functions, like all good spells, within the bounds of the sacred precinct. As soon as we’re back in the car, it starts to dwindle. Before we hit the motorway, I can already feel the itching start up again, and by the time we get to Calatayud I can’t stop myself from scratching. Before we’ve covered fifty kilometres, my monstrousness will have emerged once more and the days at Alhama will be nothing but a parenthesis that, like all good memories, I will mistake for a dream.
This only happens when the two of us go alone. Other years our son comes too, and Alhama unfolds like an event horizon engulfing any possible erotic interpretation. Then we get to revel in that other sensuality, far removed from sex, and far more perverse and complex; the one that exists between parents and children. Sex, however much we dress it up as a mystery, never ceases to be a simple, predictable and mechanical mise-en-scène. This is the reason behind couples’ divorcing: they think they’re tired of having sex with the same person, when actually they’re just tired of having sex. Or, what’s worse, they’re tired of needing to have sex, the greatest nuisance of all, far harder to endure than hunger or thirst, the pleasure of sating which is varied and rich and something that also evolves over the years.
A music lover can refine their tastes to an extent that, if not infinite, may certainly be cosmic. And the same can happen to a gastronome, who can challenge their tastebuds with novel combinations and textures. Most of the sense pleasures are apt to undergo a very wide-ranging development, which makes them, in practice, inexhaustible. To exhaust the possibilities of sex, on the other hand, is within anyone’s reach. Not even the most bestial person, like the Marquis de Sade, can handle more than 100 pages without becoming repetitive and, as any fan knows, there’s nothing more monotonous than pornography. Within a matter of weeks, if going hell for leather, an adult in good health can experience all – absolutely all – of the sexual pleasures out there. You only have to witness the evolution of a rutting teenager, who in under a year goes from the immaculate awkwardness of the first-timer to the virtuosity of the professional juggler. It’s possible to reach lovemaking perfection before one hits twenty, and to spend the rest of one’s life emulating and evoking those feats without adding anything
