The Divine Comedy of Don Juan

The lecture was successful. He had been brilliant and confident. The questions were handled deftly. The erudite audience had seemed very welcoming of his theories. A solid reputation grounded in a number of innovative articles in scholarly journals had certainly done his cause no harm. And she had boldly walked up at the end and requested a private interview.

She brushed the snow flakes off her coat, beamed a broad smile, and very assuredly invited herself to a couch, when he responded to her crisp knocks on the door of his suite the next morning. She was petite, brunette, had curly Semitic hair and her brown and intelligent eyes seemed very alive behind her fashionable black-framed glasses - they seemed to size up every detail in the room - and him.

"Consider me a great admirer of your works, particularly the treatise on semiotics, and your comparative analysis of the cult of ancestor worship" - she said with a careless toss of her head, still smiling.

"Yes. They have attracted attention in some circles."  He was not very well-known for his modesty.

"And I found yesterday's talk particularly stimulating.  The kind of grand synthesis you're aiming at is very inspiring."

" It might take several lifetimes to put it all together though. Well I certainly do hope to motivate lively youngsters such as yourself to take up the project of course. What would you like to drink?" He was at his charming best. He had read somewhere that womanization became a reflex in those who indulged in it too much - well, he could feel the reflex  kicking in. Here was a girl he would have chased in his younger days without much hope.  She looked intellectual and enterprising - she talked fast, like one of those class valedictorian types - or the type that edited the college magazine, organized political meets and dreamed of grand projects, part of which of course consisted in hobnobbing with famous men. And he considered himself successful now. His hair had just been touched by a streak of gray which some (including he himself) thought enhanced his boyish good looks.

"Just tea, please. I try to avoid alcohol before evening. Actually I have my own idea for a project - one involving some field work - and I wanted to bounce it off you before I wrote my application for a scholarship to finance it."

"Well let's hear it then" - he put his fingers together as he was wont to do in most academic discussions - part curious and part amused with the very assured airs of this university girl.

It took her twenty minutes to state her case. He often interrupted, asked questions, sometimes out of genuine curiosity and sometimes to test her, and sometimes he couldn't resist flirty wisecracks to which she responded measure for measure - while always being increasingly conscious of her being a very attractive woman, and being pleasantly excited by the scent in her hair. Her idea to live and work among the Tzotzil Maya, and record their ancestral worship rituals, that had been integrated into their form of Christianity, could certainly supply a vital missing link in his research.  He expressed interest - somewhat more than was his wont in usual academic exchanges - and told her they should certainly meet once more to talk over some more details. They stood up. She reached out for his hand and gave it a firm squeeze to express her gratitude. He patted her shoulder, and smiled indulgently : "You are a smart woman...and you may have heard this line before....very attractive too".  She didn't blush but looked him in the eye and returned the compliment with an element of playful abandon : "You are not so bad yourself, and your accent is quite charming,", and reached out to kiss him briefly,and mechanically, on the cheek. He wouldn't let go. He held her by the waist and tried to kiss her back. She did not move away but intervened, "Oh no, you got the wrong idea here." 

 "I don't think so. I am usually always right"...he was still smiling and almost indulgent, and not to be put off so easily, he kissed her all the same. She seemed to be returning his ardor for a moment, and his fingers had hastily set to work, when she suddenly wrestled free from his grip and pushed him away.

"Look don't get me wrong. You are an attractive man, but I am not looking for this sort of thing."  She was breathing heavily, trying to win back some measure of control.

"Ok, I understand. Well, sorry for being so presumptuous. I guess I'm just a lonely old man in a foreign country." It was his turn to struggle to choose his words.

"You are not so old. See you another day about the project then."

She smiled, picked up her coat and left, leaving him more vexed than she was - her stride was equally self-assured.

That night he lunged at the waitress in a bar in a bout of drunken stupor.

He was firmly told off, and sent home. He fell asleep on the steps of his lodge under a brilliant starlit sky.  

He dreamt of all the women he had had, and all the ones he hadn't.  Some of their faces were blurry, some were faceless, some just drowned him in their liquid laughter.  There was a spell in his youth when he chased women because he wanted to fit in. He was an awkward young man, always tongue-tied and shy with women : he found it hard to disguise his habitual arrogance with the easy charm his more successful counterparts seemed to possess. Once the "successes" started coming in, it became a habit. It now fed his arrogance. He could not rest easy in any single relationship and felt compelled to move on to other women. He worked hard on his academic career, trying to drown one obsession with another, and for a while this worked. But the more his career seemed on an upswing, the more women he seemed to attract, without even having to try.  Success in a man, was like, they said, aphrodisiac for a  woman. This bored him, and made him restless - but it was now a reflex like it said in the book (was it about Goethe?), and failures caused him more pain and emptiness than even the loneliness of his early youth.

He dreamt he was at the gates of a grand castle which was guarded by two female sentry - who seemed to be out of some graphic novel of his teens. They were broad of bust and hip, and wore severe expressions to match their leather skirts.  "Your papers please!" barked the taller of the two in his direction.

She had a rasping Scandinavian accent : quite the Valkyrie, he thought with grim satisfaction.  The shorter, broader woman, who looked Asian, checked his records, and remarked in a mechanical voice : "You do not have a good history with women. You are not a violent man, but have caused great misery to some women with your selfishness. And you have used prostitutes in your youth - and pretended to yourself that it was the right and reasonable thing to do for an unattached and workaholic man like  you. What do you have to say for yourself?"  

"I do not see how this is relevant. I have always done my job well and have pleased the women I have been with."

"We have no means to verify that. But we will let you pass and you can rest your case with some higher authority. Welcome to the Tor" - Valkyrie permitted herself a luscious smile even as her bright blue eyes glared at him with a cold fire, even as the Mongoloid cast of her companion betrayed no feeling.

He was greeted at the gate by the university girl from the morning. She wanted to show him around the place.

She walked and talked fast, and beads of sweat appeared on his forehead and he began to breathe heavily, as he tried to keep pace with her.  They walked into a hospital. He felt tempted by the nurses in their short dresses but was too ashamed to betray any sign of it in front of his pretty young companion. She led him straight into the maternity ward, and brought him face to face with the first love of his life - and also his first failure. The woman who had rejected him then after a brief courtship, was now delivering another man's baby.  The sight of the barely human neonate as it thrust its head out of the birth canal, disgusted him.  He had no wish to speak to the mother, but congratulated her all the same so as not to appear unfriendly to his companion.  She did not recognize him - she was recovering from labor. Had he made no impression on her life at all, then...and was it this bundle of flesh all that mattered at the end of the day?

The girl led him on. She was flirty and firmly in control.  He held her hand, and she did not object. 

"Look, you fire my imagination like no one has done in a while. We are interested in the same subjects, too! Couldn't we be together?" "You old flirt. Let me go. I need to use the ladies' room first. Can't you wait till then for the answer?" She disentangled her hand, giggled and skipped away. He sat down on a plush bench. He felt quite tired. All the women who interested him also wore him out.

One of the nurses came up to him and whispered in his ear, "you lookin' for some fun?"

He looked up and recognized the first prostitute he had visited in his youth. The night when he decided he could take neglect from women no more, and decided to visit a brothel.  She was much younger then, and looked a little lost and delicate in the hubbub of the brothel. He felt like a patient visiting a doctor, a sufferer visiting his therapist.  And then in the act of losing his virginity, he felt like he could even pretend to be in love with this fragile girl. Her porcelain white fingers betrayed her nervousness - and she smoked constantly to dull the revulsion and nervousness that most beginners in the flesh-trade feel. He wanted to be gentle and kind to her. He now laughed at his younger self. She was now grown and all matronly - her eyes wore a sly look, her lips were garishly dabbed over with pink lipstick, and she quickly unbuttoned her nurse's apron even as she rested on his lap and nuzzled his head on her ample bosom. He found her repulsive but had no choice but to respond to her caresses, and was soon on top of her - mechanically reliving those pleasurable moments of first lovemaking.

The university girl came out and shrieked in horror. He did not stop to look. She went running up the aisle and made a quick telephone call. Two Valkyries came marching up, and accosted him even as he was in the act. "You are under arrest for public indecency" - shrill warning voice and cold blue stare met him, even as he struggled to get dressed. Why had this dream degraded into pornography?

The trial was quick. The university girl doubled  as the prosecutor. All his pleas, his brilliant academic record, and his deep theories on the nature of man, were ignored. He was accused of possessing a weapon of war between his legs and sentenced to perpetual misfortune when it came to women. He was also to spend a year in the Tor doing community work at the hospital, deprived of all opportunity to do field-work, even as the university girl worked to check some of his theories. How much more harm could she do him? With women he never knew, despite having chased them all his life.