If the husband had lovers—in France, maîtresses—and many had a string of illegitimate children, it was only fair that the wife could seek love in other arms.

  Today any woman capable of paying for this type of service can hire an expert lover for a few hours who will guarantee pleasure, hygiene, and absolute confidentiality. These young men, usually bisexual, are trained in erotic practices that most husbands cannot even imagine. Their lives turn about the instrument of their art: the body, which they must keep healthy and attractive. Free from the cares of work, of money patiently earned and therefore in short supply, as well as from the vanity of power or the torment of a guilty conscience, they devote their energy and their time to the sacred occupation of providing sensual pleasures. And I say sacred because sensuality can be traced back to the Taoist philosophy in which the coupling of male and female symbolizes the union between the gods in the very act of creating the universe, although I doubt that the gigolos who wander around Japan or any other spot in the world tantalizing ladies have heard of the Tao or anything resembling it.

  My good friend Miki Shima, the illustrious Japanese doctor to whom I turn when I have need to cure aches and pains or inquire about the exotic, sustains that these modern male prostitutes of his country usually memorize a major portion of the shungas, the ancient erotic manuals called “pillow books” because they were kept in the lacquered wooden boxes that elegant ladies used to support their necks at night without disturbing their hairdos. The illustrations of the shungas seem brutish to anyone not familiar with them: couples immobilized by clothing, wearing laboriously contrived hairdos and an expression of Buddhist placidity and equipped with enormous, threatening genitals, copulating in the most fascinating postures. Once the eye becomes accustomed, the shungas are very didactic. Although most women are content with two or three classic variations, deluxe Asian gigolos are capable of offering the complete repertoire for an adequate sum: galloping horse, jade flute, mandarin ducks, coupled doves, and other acrobatic postures with names too long to jot down during our conversation. Dr. Shima reminded me of the importance of diet for keeping in shape, imperative in that profession, and told me about a master of acupuncture from whom he himself had learned the most delicate techniques. The man had lived for more than a hundred years, with all his teeth and his hair still black, not neglecting a single day to pleasure himself with some ripe young girl, all of which he credited to ginseng, taken by the handful, and to a fabulous soup for which I was lucky enough to get the recipe, herewith included:

  Aphrodisiac Soup of Acupuncture Master

  For two, you place in a beautiful clay flameproof casserole, with due ceremony, 4 pieces of red Korean ginseng, 1/4 of a chicken, in pieces, 2 chives, minced, 4 slices fresh ginger, 2 tablespoons red or white miso. (These ingredients can been obtained in the Asian market of any more or less cosmopolitan city.) Cook over a slow fire until the chicken is tender, meanwhile reading an erotic text, and at the end add 1/2 cup sake and 6 raw prawns, shelled and deveined, which, in order to preserve their potency, should not be allowed to boil any longer than 5 minutes.

  Not only in Japan may ladies offer themselves the luxury of a professional lover by the hour. Women executives on business trips in Europe and the United States can also turn to them, but no one talks about this openly. The information is passed in whispers.

  I met one of these gigolos in the airport hotel in Frankfurt where I was waiting for a plane connection to India that left in the furtive hours of the night. I suppose that the story would be juicier had it been a young Chinese man with a lustrous black ponytail and obliquely set eyes, someone expert in the erotic practices of the Tao, but I had no such luck. In my case it was a typical good-looking guy, blond, of indeterminate age, wearing jeans and backpack and carrying a tennis racket. His light-colored eyes and somewhat shy air instantly gained my trust; he looked like a young university student. He asked me in English where I had come from, and when he heard the word California, he smiled, enchanted. He immediately informed me that he had been born in Los Angeles and was working as a model to pay for his studies. We looked for a table and sat down to share some coffee and pass the time chatting. In less than ten minutes he had suggested that we might take a room where we could rest, since it would still be several hours before the plane left, and he offered to give me a massage with aromatherapy and “something more.” I must have looked at him with the bland expression of an innocent granny, because he blinded me with another of his smiles, this time without a trace of shyness, and assured me that his fee of three hundred dollars was standard for these services. He showed me, without any fuss, a piece of paper I couldn’t read because I didn’t have my glasses at hand, but that I think was the results of a blood test.

  I am not accustomed to the caresses of a mercenary, and besides, it seemed sinful to spend so much money for selfish purposes when there are so many people in the world who need charity, so I declined his offer as gently as I could and instead invited him to eat. I seized the moment to question him, at first circumspectly, out of fear of offending him, but later, when the pride he took in his office became evident, with more daring. While I was trying to make my soup last and he was devouring his lobster, he told me that his clients were not always women. “Gays let loose in airports because no one knows them. You can’t imagine how many directors of corporations and solid family fathers solicit my services,” he boasted. He preferred women, even though they demanded more dedication and time, he said, because they gave good tips. He confessed, laughing, that often they don’t understand the basic rules of this kind of transaction; they forget that they’re the ones who are paying and put themselves out trying to make a good impression. Some go so far as to feign pleasure, to avoid disappointing him, a deceit he must immediately unmask because his reputation is at stake and he cannot allow a client to wrap him in maternal tenderness and end up unsatisfied.

  Objets Familiers, painting by René Magritte, 1928, private collection, photograph: Paul Hester © 1997, C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  Soon my dinner companion began to grow bored with me and began gazing around the dining room, looking for someone with a stronger inclination, and readier cash, than I, so I subtly slipped a twenty-dollar bill onto the table. He took it with such elegance that I blushed at not having given him more. I wanted to know how he managed when he had to deal with someone disagreeable, the kind of woman who evokes regret, not temptation, and he told me that whenever he posed as a model before the photographer’s camera, he did his job without stopping to analyze his own emotions. This was no different, he clarified; he offered a service and the other person bought it: a simple, clean commercial transaction.

  And if one day he couldn’t perform . . . that is, couldn’t do it? I asked him, worried. He glanced over at me, clearly surprised. For him it was like dancing: a skill, not an impulse. Since I already had the idea for this book in mind, I wanted to know whether he used stimulants to keep himself in shape, and he said that as yet he didn’t but his older colleagues lived on pills, and he knew one who injected a medication directly into his penis, thanks to which he could perform the feats of a man in love, although sometimes his discomfort was so great that he forgot his own name. My companion explained that his method for keeping in shape was simple: he jogged and lifted weights because without flexibility and muscles he had no future in that profession. He smoked marijuana but not tobacco because many American clients were disturbed by the smell; he didn’t drink alcohol when he was working, he avoided tension and thought very little, to keep from wearing himself out. That is, he was the perfect companion for passing a few hours in an airport.

  And what about food? I asked. Did he, for example, know about the aphrodisiac power of birds’ nests? He hadn’t a clue to what I was talking about. I mentioned my infallible wild-mushroom soup, which when administered with proper frequency is a heavenly aphrodisiac, but that young man had no vocation for the kitchen and I could see that he was beginning to find our conversation tedious. Before he got up, I asked him about the tennis racket. “It inspires confidence,” he told me, “and if business is slow, I carry my golf clubs—they’re irresistible.” I paid the bill, but between the lobster and tips, I would have been better off paying his fee. At least I would have had something salacious to tell.

  Bread, God’s Grace

  I don’t recommend baking bread; it can become a dangerous passion. Some years ago I bought an amazing machine into which, employing the appropriate opening, I introduced flour, yeast, and water, and adjusted a clock; the next morning, at the exact hour, we were awakened by the fragrance of freshly baked bread. How that transmutation occurred is something that will live on in the realms of mystery. Soon, however, the consequences became obvious on the waistlines of the adult members of the family and in the implacable refusal of the children to draw their nourishment from proteins or vegetables—all they wanted were rings, rolls, braids, and other breads. In view of which we decided to retire the machine from circulation. It sat abandoned in the garage for several months until my stepson Harleigh, he of the funereal tattoos, had the idea of changing a few pieces, adjusting a couple of screws, and using it to convert marijuana into chocolate cookies, which he sold at school at great profit. That was my one attempt at making bread.

  Like poetry, baking is a rather melancholy vocation, whose primary requirement is free time for the soul. The poet and the baker are brothers in the essential task of nourishing the world.

  If you insist on writing verses and making your own bread, skip this chapter, it’s not for you. People who need to experience everything, even if only once, sooner or later fall into the temptation of bread making. In such cases, I suggest compensating for the skill naturally absent in a beginner by giving the shape of the bread an amusing twist. In that vein, I gave my mother a pan in the shape of Il Santo Membro, as they sometimes call the male organ in Italy, whether out of arrogance or irony, I don’t know. After baking, however, the loaf was embarrassingly voluminous, and my mother hasn’t dared serve it for fear of humiliating the octogenarian gentlemen who come to her home for five o’clock tea. In the erotic kitchen, bread is an indispensable accompaniment—wheat is considered aphrodisiac and is a symbol of fertility—but preparing it consumes hours that could better be employed in bed. My advice is to buy bread from a good bakery without any guilt whatsoever and forcefully renounce the patient art of working dough, because one can do only so much in this life.

  In a story by Guy de Maupassant, the young servant of a bourgeois household goes every morning with her basket over her arm to buy bread. Through a window she sees a young baker kneading dough and carries with her the image of his broad shoulders, his powerful arms, the gleam of sweat on his skin, and those sensual hands, kneading and kneading the dough with a lover’s patient determination, just as she would like hands to fondle her. And since this is a love story, her fantasy is fulfilled, with interest. The sight of one of those large country loaves inevitably brings back to me the memory of Maupassant’s baker and his hands in the dough and on the firm flesh of the girl. There are hands and hands, some thick and clumsy, others small and strong, there are light and timid hands, large and gentle hands, but for making bread and making love, what matters is the intent that guides the hands.

  En la Cocina, painting by Antonio López-Garcia © 1997 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

  In Chile the most popular bread is called marraqueta and is shaped like vulvae. In France it is the baguette; though phallic in appearance, it is not phallic in temperament, since it is modest, trustworthy, and never failing. It can be bought in any civilized city, but nowhere is a baguette as crunchy outside and spongy inside as in Paris. If your menu calls for a different variety, pay no attention; your reputation can always be saved with a baguette, unless you need some pliable bread for an exotic dish, the kind you eat with your hands. The only drawback of the baguette is that since it contains no shortening, it grows stale within a matter of hours, which is why in France any respectable housewife buys bread twice a day. That kind of dedication, however, should not be demanded of anyone; you can resuscitate your baguette by sprinkling it with water and heating it in a conventional oven for a few minutes. If it is fossilized, soak it in milk and give it to the dog. But don’t even think of putting it in the microwave; that will shatter its soul, and its violated essence will turn to rubber.

  Tonight,

  like many without a lover,

  I’m going to bake bread

  push my knuckles

  into soft dough.

  —Haiku, Patricia Donegan

  I remember the kitchen of a convent in Brussels, where I witnessed, with reverence, the mysterious comingling of yeast, flour, and water. A nun, not wearing her habit, with the shoulders of a stevedore and delicate hands of a ballerina, arranged the dough in round and rectangular loaf pans, covered them with white cloths washed a thousand times and then washed again, and left them to rise beside a window, on a large medieval wood table. As she worked, at the far end of the kitchen the simple, daily miracle of flour and poetry ensued, the content of the pans took on life, and a slow and sensual process evolved beneath those white napkins that were discreet sheets covering the nakedness of the unbaked bread. The raw dough swelled with secret sighs, moved softly, pulsed like a woman’s body in the surrender of love. The acid odor of the fermenting dough blended with the intense and vigorous breath of newly baked loaves. And I, sitting on a penitent’s bench in a dark corner of that vast stone room, immersed in the warmth and fragrance of that mysterious process, wept, without knowing why.

  Creatures of the Sea

  In his De Poenitentia Decretorum, Bishop Burchard of Worms speaks of a curious erotic practice that sent sinners—it goes without saying—straight to the cauldrons of hell: the woman introduced a live fish (small, I suppose) into her private parts and, after it died, cooked it and fed it to the man of her desire.

  Nearly all creatures that live in water, except whales, seals, and dolphins, splendid oceanic mammals that do not deserve to end up in a skillet, are aphrodisiac: eel, tuna, sea bass, turbot, salmon, sardine, herring, trout . . . and the list goes on. These treasures of the sea are rich in vitamins, minerals, and protein and low in fat; they have a delicious flavor and an aroma that evokes the most intimate regions of the human body.

  Fugu is perhaps the most controversial fish. Panchita and I had serious doubts about whether or not to mention it in these pages, for this is not a delicacy easily prepared at home. What’s more, you can’t buy it anywhere except in Japan. It contains a powerful poison for which there is no antidote; even in minute quantities it immediately paralyzes the bravest heart and sucks the breath from the lungs, resulting in death. Cooks who specialize in this fish know how to clean it, leaving barely enough poison to induce only minimal symptoms and thereby produce erotic excitation without causing death. Be that as it may, in Japan some five hundred people die annually from eating fugu. I have never wanted to try it; I’ve had enough anguish in my life, I don’t need more.

  Another aphrodisiac from Japan is sashimi, which I shall describe with scientific rigor despite the nightmares that assault me when I think of this dish. (If you are a fanatic animal lover, don’t read any farther in this paragraph). A waiter brings to the table a healthy, silvery exemplar just removed from the tank, still living and innocent of its karma, of the imminent agony of its damnation. Then the chef, who usually wears a white cloth tied around his forehead—along with a sinister expression—greets the diners with a brief bow, extracts several razor-sharp knives from his belt, makes them dance as he performs four passes from the martial arts, blades cutting the air with a viper’s hiss, and then proceeds to slice the fish in fine layers, without killing it. Each piece is skillfully impaled upon a toothpick and savored with a dash of soy sauce. With each slice the unfortunate fish writhes as if it had received an electric charge.

  To this cruelty we can contrast the beautiful story “The Cold Fish,” by Lady Onogoro, which was written in Japan at the beginning of the eleventh century. Hanako, a beautiful if somewhat befuddled young girl, had a lover so scrupulous about cleanliness that he liked to make love wearing gloves. Before he touched her, the man personally oversaw her bath and demanded that she scrub herself with pumice stone from head to foot, shave off every last hair, and soap every fold and orifice of her slim body: all of this without a single word of affection or appreciation for her charms.

  Well, then, in Hanako’s garden there was a pond in which an enormous carp made its home. Despite its forty years of living, the venerable fish had none of the peculiarities of Hanako’s meticulous lover; to the contrary, it was strong as an athlete and considered to be an expert lover. It is scarcely strange, therefore, that she preferred the company of the fish. The girl liked to sit on the bank of the pond and call the carp by name; it would swim to the surface to play with her.

  One night, after receiving the hygienic caresses of the gloved man, Hanako went out into the garden and threw herself down beside the pond to cry. Attracted by her sobs, the giant carp rose from the depths and, swimming up to the languid hand barely breaking the water, sucked each of her fingers, one after the other, with its strong lips. Hanako felt her skin prickling as an unknown sensuality raced through her entire body, shaking her to the pit of her being. She let one foot fall into the water, and the fish kissed each toe with the same dedication—and then the other hand and the other foot, and following them, she thrust her legs into the pond and the carp brushed the silvery scales of its belly against her skin. Hanako understood the invitation and sank into the mud at the bottom of the shallow pond, open and white as a lotus flower, while the bold fish circled around her, stroking her and kissing her and nudging her to spread her legs and surrender to its caresses. The fish bubbled streams of water across her most sensitive parts and thus, little by little, making ever deeper incursions, led Hanako along the most sublime paths of pleasure, a pleasure she had never known in the arms of any man, certainly not her begloved lover. Later, both girl and fish rested, floating happily in the ooze of the pond beneath the scrutiny of the stars. (Only a woman could imagine a story like this.)