Pretty to Think So
Also by Enrique Fernández
Cortadito
Pretty to
Think So
Eros and Prostate Cancer
Enrique Fernández
Copyright © 2018 Enrique Fernández
Published by Book & Book Press, an imprint of Mango Publishing, a division of Mango Media Inc.
Cover Design & Layout: Roberto Nuñez & Elina Diaz
Cover photo: shutterstock - Bikeworldtravel
Mango is an active supporter of authors’ rights to free speech and artistic expression in their books. The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to produce exceptional works that enrich our culture and our open society.
Uploading or distributing photos, scans or any content from this book without prior permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. Please honor the author’s work as you would your own. Thank you in advance for respecting our author’s rights.
For permission requests, please contact the publisher at:
Books & Books Press
Mango Publishing Group
2850 Douglas Road, 2nd Floor
Coral Gables, FL 33134 USA
For special orders, quantity sales, course adoptions and corporate sales, please email the publisher at [email protected]. For trade and wholesale sales, please contact Ingram Publisher Services at [email protected] or +1.800.509.4887.
Pretty to Think So: Eros and Prostate Cancer
Library of Congress Cataloging
ISBN: (print) 978-1-63353-946-4, (ebook) 978-1-63353-947-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958258
BISAC category code: BIO017000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical
Printed in the United States of America
Égloga
No me podrán quitar el dolorido
sentir, si ya del todo
primero no me quitan el sentido.
—Garcilaso de la Vega
One of my graduate school professors, a Spaniard, was fond of quoting this verse of Garcilaso. A scholar of Spain’s generation of ’98, he was attracted to the existentialist thrust of the verse, which opposed the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum with I feel; therefore, I am. El dolorido sentir. The pained feeling. Except that in Spanish, feeling is expressed as sentimiento—sentiment. And Garcilaso chose the infinitive sentir—to feel—which indicates a more powerful, muscular essence of the verb. And then he opposes it to sentido, which means sense as well as consciousness. They can’t take away my pained feeling, my ability to feel pain, unless they first take away my sense, my consciousness, my life. I suffer; therefore, I am. Nothing could be more Spanish.
A similar sentiment or feeling or existential thought is expressed in a South American mestizo song:
I would like to cross the river
Without feeling the sand.
I’m free. I’m a master.
I can want.
And that concrete expression of an idea morphs into the singer’s erotic desire, for he has seen a pair of woman’s eyes and he is dying for them.
They tell me they have an owner
But even if owned I want them.
I’m free. I’m a master.
I can want.
No matter that the woman he wants is already taken. He is free to want her. No one can take that away from him. No one can take from him el dolorido sentir. In this case, el dolorido querer. The pained desire, the pained love.
Yes, they can.
Two days ago, the effects of the androgen-deprivation shot a doctor’s assistant had injected under my skin a month earlier kicked in. And now I don’t want. I don’t desire. I’m apathetic, without pathos, without feeling. Ay, Garcilaso. If you were to return, as Rafael Alberti wrote in his beautiful poem, I would be your squire just to hear you utter your sweet Italianate Spanish verse as we rode. But I would have to tell you, mi señor, that your enamored shepherd was wrong. They can take away your dolorido sentir. Just ask Abelard. Did you know about Abelard, mi señor? You must have, you who were so erudite. They castrated him and, zap, no more desire. He was no longer free. No longer a master. He could not want (Eloise). And I, your humble squire, have been humbled thusly. Cut down without a blade but with the point of a needle.
I so desired, mi señor. I was so free, so full of want, so full of pain. But now, freedom, want, pain, they’re all gone. Perhaps I should be thankful. Desire breeds frustration. Frustration breeds neurosis, psychosis—but these will come later, mi señor, many centuries later. Enjoy your freedom from psychology. Your freedom to love and write verse. Soon you will die in battle. No matter. You will be read, quoted, forever. By a Spanish professor at an American Midwestern university, in a graduate seminar on the generation of ’98. The year 1898, mi señor; can you think that far ahead of your own sixteenth century? He will quote your lovesick shepherd and his boast that no one can take away his pain, his love, his sentir. And a young student will remember your words—will always remember them when fortune fails to smile on his love life. Until that day, a larger-than-love-life reversal of fortune gave the shepherd’s words, your words, mi señor, the lie. That day they took away his dolorido sentir.
●
A Dying
The heated state of consciousness that is Eros feels as distant as breathing the atmosphere of another planet. At the beach I see young women in skimpy bathing suits and their curves, their exposed soft skin, the hair falling on bare shoulders, the breasts barely covered by cloth, the loins exposed enough to remind a man of where everything converges. These are all pleasant. Esthetic. Near-nudes in an art exhibit. Delighting my eyes, but no further.
Surprisingly, this condition is not frustrating. Though why should I be surprised? There can only be frustration when there’s desire, and I experience none of the latter. I want not. I am a serene, smiling Buddha with neutered testicles. ¡Cojones! Am I a man? I am alive, I reply to myself.
The big C, I remember John Wayne calling cancer when he had licked it temporarily. But not even the Duke could blast his way out, like he did in The Shootist, a film biography not of the actor but of the role he was identified with, the one that had filled the screen since that tracking shot in Stagecoach closed in on Ringo—the lens going out of focus for a second, a mistake John Ford never fixed with a second take, and I always thought that blur was Death already claiming its territory, blurring the man if not the myth.
The last time I saw Wayne was on TV, at the Academy Awards. Cancer had eaten away half his weight. I wished I’d never seen him like that.
Would I end up like him? The older I got the more I learned of people who had succumbed to cancer. It seemed like everyone eventually did. It seemed that since everyone must die, this was the death that was coming for us all. I felt cancer closing in, like Poe’s Red Death mingling with the guests at the masque.
●
Vivo Sin Vivir En Mi
Three nights ago I dreamed I was making love to St. Theresa of Avila. The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, despite her divine raptures, was no cloistered nun: She