I sat in the last hours of 2020 to write this column, my first to see the light in The New Barcelona Post in 2021, and I thought of dedicating it to a memorable New Year's Eve I spent in Barcelona, jumping from party to party like a bee from flower to flower. I was then very good friends, what do I say friends, best friends, with another lively reporter who on a certain December 31 received the following assignment from the newspaper she worked for: to "cover" up to twelve New Year's Eve celebrations, at half an hour each, arriving of course in time to submit the report for the next day's edition. A kind of speed dating marathon. Who knows.
My time at the Bagdad was brief but unforgettable. My friend was the one doing the report, not me. That is, while she was busy talking to the madam and to some and to others, I waited posted at the bar. All alone. In my hand a tall glass that, now I can say it, under a sophisticated appearance of a gin and tonic hid pure and simple mineral water with a lot of ice: because we still had a lot of party reporting ahead of us, and because, well, let's say it didn't seem like the ideal place to let my guard down.
I think I have never in my life been more aware of the overwhelming power of appearances. Every time I brought the glass of water to my lips, I seemed to hear the entire place hold its breath. I suppose you had to see it to believe it: a woman under 30 (then), apparently drinking alone as can be, on the night of December 31, at the bar of the Bagdad. That place where clientele used to go not as a couple or in a group of friends but directly in a pack, to see that: "real fucking."
Is there anything more false than "real fucking" for money and with a place full of people watching? Maybe I've never gotten the hang of porn; I've seen petanque tournaments more erotic than the Bagdad stage. It can't be the morbid curiosity that is sought there, it has to be something else. Something else. Something that escapes me and that I intuit that the day it stopped escaping me, I would find myself as in one of those nightmares where your feet are trapped in tar while a steamroller comes over you....
Well, I was going to write about all this when, searching for information online, I find out that Bagdad is "temporarily closed." It's one of the venues that have succumbed to the coronavirus. I investigate a bit more and discover that the lockdown has been poison for the box office of live "real fucking." Not so, or not as much, for more telematic or virtual porn. Although there are professionals who complain that clients lack "privacy" to consume the product ---it's not the same to kill time at the office as at home, with family…---, I assume there will always be someone who manages to lock themselves in the bathroom with their mobile or tablet, just like in the old days with a cigarette… Wasn't it Santiago Carrillo who complained about having to end his life as he started it, smoking secretly in the toilet?
Experts (in what?) say that in times of confinement, what we could call the middle class of sex disappears or greatly diminishes, the kind that, without being for love or habit, doesn't quite become a vice. The casual sex that arises from nothing, but also from improvisation and good faith. From an ephemeral magic, but magic nonetheless….
Hopefully 2021 will be generous and bring us something better than "real fucking."
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