The lady in black pantyhose

When Barclays, who has been married to a woman for ten years, who has been faithful to her all that time, beating his fidelity records, who proclaims himself bisexual, who has had A boyfriend before falling in love with his wife and has not been intimately with a man for twelve years, wonders if he still wants to sleep with a man, as in his days of intoxicated and unbridled youth, he ends up always, always, thinking of three men of his past, three men whom he has not seen for many years.

The first man who comes like a lightning bolt or an unexpected rainbow to his memory is a talented actor, very successful, that he was his lover when they were both young and had girlfriends, his lover consequently in the closet, and that, like Barclays, he married a woman, had several daughters and suspended his furtive passion for men or confined her to the territory of unspeakable secrets. That man, the actor, was the first man Barclays slept with, the first man with whom he fell in love, and therefore occupies a privileged place in the writer’s memory, a house inhabited by many people, people whom memory of Barclays, arbitrarily, make up and beautify, or people like his father and his other enemies, whom the memory, that machine of mutilating, debasing and ugly.

Barclays knew seeing the actor in plays in which he stood out for his chameleonic talent to be many different people and for an expressive, persuasive force that resembled that of a hurricane. Then he interviewed him on television. That night it was Barclays who, as a boyfriend with a girl who was studying in Geneva, fell in love with the actor to the bone, although he did not tell him and tried to hide it during the interview, in which the actor spoke freely about himself, as actors tend to do, so happy to be in their skins, to hear the echo of their own voices, while Barclays looked at him rapt, amazed, as if he had discovered a small treasure, a precious jewel, some gold coins at the same time. bottom of the turbulent sea of ​​religion, a sea in which Barclays, as a young man, sunk by his parents, weighed down by priests, had almost drowned.

Not so much because of the actor’s wishes, but because Barclays surrendered to him, confessed that he had fallen in love and begged him to educate him in the arduous love between men (risks or pleasures that the actor already knew with other men), they ended up sleeping in an apartment that Barclays had bought with the smelly monies from e on television. That night, not knowing that it would be a meeting that he would vividly remember until the end of time, Barclays confused his secret desires with those of the actor and inaugurated himself in certain forms of love that until then had only been malicious in his imagination, but had not been daring to live. They loved each other with all the skill of the actor and the inexperience of Barclays, they loved each other with the haste of those who shared an ineffable secret, they loved each other with the certainty that that passion would always unite them, they loved each other with the suspicion that the love they felt for his girlfriends he was vague, pale, warm, compared to the one who, mixing pain with pleasure, had just founded between them.

But they could not be a couple , or they did not dare to be, they did not find the courage to break up with their girlfriends and, being already famous in that city, famous for being on television, for doing theater and movies, the actor, for conducting talk shows, the writer, telling his families and their friends, and finally to the press of the heart, who were in love. They continued to see each other secretly, in a clandestine way, pretending they were friends, hiding the truth that united them from their girlfriends. Barclays felt that he could never fall in love with a woman or another man as he had fallen in love with the actor. He felt that the actor was the man of his life. He felt powerfully that he couldn’t lose it, that he didn’t want to lose it. But he lost it. Now, so many years later, when he remembers certain sleepless nights, he continues to miss the actor, a formidable, tireless lover, a funny, witty, singing companion: how the actor liked to sing when they were on the beach, in the sea!

Then Barclays would tell him:

– We will make a movie. You will be my flags, my fetish actor. I will be your Almodóvar, your gay director.

But they did not make a film or a short or a documentary. They did not come out of the closet. They got married, had daughters. The actor made a huge effort to love his wife and apparently failed, as they divorced, albeit in a friendly way. Barclays interviewed him again, but things had already changed and they did not love each other with the fury and candor of the first fights, of the most memorable erotic flings, some scuffles that survive in Barclays’ memory and, on certain sleepless nights, make him to think that one day she will sleep with the actor again. It does not seem so probable, however: since Barclays published his first novel, pierced with gay anguish, almost thirty years ago, the actor came to the conclusion that the writer was a perfidious lover, felon, who told literary all his secrets and whom it was better not to see at all. Since then they have not seen each other. But Barclays, stubborn as a mule, dreams of seducing him again.

Barclays memory also assails a man, university professor, literature professor, who lived in Kingston, Ontario, a remote Canadian town, who had read Barclays novels with devotion, who dreamed of meeting him and therefore invited him to give a talk at that university lost among mountains of snow. So many times he wrote to him, begging him to go to that Canadian town to give a lecture to his students at Queen’s University, that Barclays, being in Montreal, at a literary festival, and devoting himself mainly not to walking around the festival, but on the irresistible body of a Canadian, a reader of his books, whom he met at that event, a singular, memorable lover who was tattooed and used drugs, and who seemed impatient to corrupt and pervert Barclays and return him to the years in which he was addicted to certain drugs, he decided to take a break from that indefatigable woman for love, get on a train, travel hundreds of kilometers and arrive hours later to give a talk at the university of the Canadian professor, his devoted reader. The professor was young, handsome, flirtatious, desirable, and as soon as he saw him, Barclays realized that perhaps he would not return to Montreal on the train that night and, accepting the professor’s invitation, he would stay to sleep in a hotel in that little town at the same time. that only the brave or those who had lost their way came. The literary talk at the university had a humorous point because there were no more than ten or twelve students, listening in a stupid state to Barclays. It was clear that the Canadian professor had invented the talk to convince Barclays to take the train, when his purpose was to meet him, seduce him, sleep with him, an eagerness in which he met no resistance from the writer, who felt vigorously attracted by this boy with an intellectual air, who, against all odds, turned out to be a delicate, humble, helpful lover, a lover who would occupy a conspicuous place in the memory of Barclays. Of course, the writer returned to Montreal, not to the remote town of Kingston, and not to meet the tattooed nympho, but the Canadian professor who worshiped him as if he were a god from the Andes.

The third man, and the last of them, who still haunts or bristles the memory of desire at Barclays, was a famous model whom he met in New York. Tall, stocky, the son of Germans, astonishingly beautiful and immodest, intoxicated with being in his own body, this model, considerably smaller than Barclays, had walked for the best designers, posed for the most sought-after fashion photographers, earned considerable money and he had become famous for his wild beauty, his ease in stripping and his rare talent to love other bodies, without falling in love with any: that is why Barclays, without knowing it, was doomed to suffer love penalties, when he suddenly fell in love with that model selfish, hedonistic and somewhat vulgar. They met in a Japanese restaurant, Barclays approached him and spoke to him naturally, the model said he was a painter, which was true, because he had exhibited paintings in which he painted only men’s feet, and that night, at the suggestion of the model, they ended up smoking a very powerful marijuana and taking drinks in the clubs that the model entered as a celebrity. At the end of the night, Barclays wanted to sleep with the model, but he politely declined. Then Barclays offered him money and the model laughed. Then he said:

– I will only sleep with you if you put on some black tights and wait for me tomorrow at your hotel, at midnight.

As Barclays did not carry black pantyhose in his suitcase, nor had he ever worn black pantyhose, he had to buy them the next day at a women’s underwear store. When trying them on in the dressing room of the store, he bristled with desire, feverish with lust, plotted pleasures that, with luck, he would dare to experience that night with the model.

At midnight, Barclays, dressed only in black pantyhose, like a decaying hetaira or a combat prostitute, waited for the model. Never arrived. Humiliated, the writer called him and told him that he was looking forward to him, that he was burning to see him.

– I am not going – said the model, laughing with cruel cynicism -. I don’t sleep with fat men. Have you looked in the mirror? You are fat, very fat!

Although the model behaved like a jerk and left him sad and disheartened, Barclays, or his arbitrary and irrational memory, still comes back imaginatively to that young man in New York, and then the fevers and delusions of fiction, fables and daydreams of desire, make possible what miserable reality thwarted: that Barclays, in black pantyhose, receive the model and that Both, stripped of all modesty, of all sense of decency and honor, love each other like wild animals, without saying corny, without promising anything, as two men would love each other in a jail, one of them, undoubtedly Barclays, wishing feel like a woman, the lady in black pantyhose.