The initial contact, by letter, and my follow-up email communication with my father's enduring partner, suggested a curious combination of the old-fashioned and the contemporary.
"I believe that the Bovary character is your dad's age, Billy," Uncle Bob had forewarned me. I knew, from the 1940 Owl, that William Francis Dean had been born in 1924, which meant that my father and Senor Bovary were eighty-six. (I also knew from the same '40 Owl that Franny Dean had wanted to be a "performer," but performing what?) From the emails of "the Bovary character," as the Racquet Man had called my dad's lover, I understood that my father had not been informed of my coming to Madrid; this was entirely Senor Bovary's idea, and I was following his instructions. "Have a walk around Chueca on the day you arrive. Go to bed early that first night. I'll meet you for dinner on your second night. We'll take a stroll; we'll end up in Chueca, and I'll bring you to the club. If your father knew you were coming, it would just make him self-conscious," Senor Bovary's email said.
What club? I wondered.
"Franny wasn't a bad guy, Billy," Uncle Bob had told me, when I was still a student at Favorite River. "He was just a little light in his loafers, if you know what I mean." Probably the place Bovary was taking me in Chueca was that sort of club. But what kind of gay club was it? (Even an old bi guy in Vermont knows there's more than one kind of gay club.) In the late afternoon in Chueca, most of the shops were still closed for siesta in the ninety-degree heat; it was a dry
heat, however--very agreeable to a visitor coming to Madrid from the blackfly season in Vermont. I had the feeling that the Calle de Hortaleza was a busy street of commercialized gay sex; it had a sex-tourism atmosphere, even at the siesta time of day. There were some lone older men around, and only occasional groups of young gay guys; there would have been more of both types on a weekend, but this was a workday afternoon. There was not much of a lesbian presence--not that I could see, but this was my first look at Chueca.
There was a nightclub called A Noite on Hortaleza, near the corner of the Calle de Augusto Figueroa, but you don't notice nightclubs during the day. It was the out-of-place Portuguese name of the club that caught my eye--a noite means "the night" in Portuguese--and those tattered billboards advertising shows, including one with drag queens.
The streets between the Gran Via and the metro station in the Plaza de Chueca were crowded with bars and sex shops and gay clothing stores. Taglia, the wig shop on the Calle de Hortaleza, was opposite a bodybuilders' gym. I saw that Tintin T-shirts were popular, and--on the corner of the Calle de Hernan Cortes--there were male mannequins in thongs in the storefront window. (There's one thing I'm glad to be too old for: thongs.) Fighting jet lag, I was just trying to get through the day and to stay up late enough to have an early dinner at my hotel before I went to bed. I was too tired to appreciate the muscle-bound waiters in T-shirts at the Mama Ines Cafe on Hortaleza; there were mostly men in couples, and a woman who was alone. She was wearing flip-flops and a halter top; she had an angular face and looked very sad, resting her mouth on one hand. I almost tried to pick her up. I remember wondering if, in Spain, the women were very thin until they suddenly became fat. I was noticing a certain type of man--skinny in a tank top, but with a small and helpless-looking potbelly.
I had a cafe con leche as late as 5 P.M.--very unlike me, too late in the day for me to drink coffee, but I was trying to stay awake. I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina--Libros, I believe it was called. (I'm not kidding, a bookstore called "Books.") The English novel, in English, was well represented there, but there was nothing contemporary--not even from the twentieth century. I browsed the fiction section for a while. Diagonally across the street, on the corner of San Gregorio, was what looked like a popular bar--the Angel Sierra. The siesta must have been over by the time I left the bookstore, because that bar was beginning to get crowded.
I passed a coffeehouse, also on the Calle de Gravino, with some older, stylishly dressed lesbians sitting at a window table--to my limited knowledge, the only lesbians I spotted in Chueca, and almost the only women I saw anywhere in that district. But it was still early in the evening, and I knew that everything in Spain happens late. (I'd been in Barcelona before, on translation trips. My Spanish-language publisher is based there.) As I was leaving Chueca--for that long walk back to the Santo Mauro--I stopped in at a bear bar on the Calle de las Infantas. The bar called Hot was packed with men standing chest to chest and back to back. They were older men, and you know what bears are like--ordinary-looking men, chubby guys with beards, many beer drinkers among them. It was Spain, so of course there was a lot of smoking; I didn't stay long, but Hot had a friendly atmosphere. The shirtless bartenders were the youngest guys in the place--they were hot, all right.
THE DAPPER LITTLE MAN who met me at a restaurant in the Plaza Mayor the following night did not immediately summon to mind a young soldier with his pants down at his ankles, reading Madame Bovary in a storm at sea, while--on his bare bum--he skipped over a row of toilet seats to meet my young father.
Senor Bovary's hair was neatly trimmed and all white, as were the short bristles of his no-nonsense mustache. He wore a pressed, short-sleeved white shirt with two breast pockets--one for his reading glasses, the other armed with pens. His khaki trousers were sharply creased; perhaps the only contemporary components of the fastidious man's old-fashioned image were his sandals. They were the kind of sandals that young outdoorsmen wear when they wade in raging rivers and run through fast-flowing streams--those sandals that have the built-up and serious-looking treads of running shoes.
"Bovary," he said; he extended his hand, palm down, so that I didn't know if he expected me to shake it or kiss it. (I shook it.) "I'm so glad you contacted me," I told him.
"I don't know what your father has been waiting for, now that your mother--una mujer dificil, 'a difficult woman'--has been dead for thirty-two years. It is thirty-two, isn't it?" the little man asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Let me know what your HIV status is; I'll tell your father," Bovary said. "He's dying to hear, but I know him--he'll never ask you himself. He'll just worry about it after you've gone back home. He's an impossible procrastinator!" Bovary exclaimed affectionately, giving me a small, twinkling smile.
I told him: I keep testing negative; I don't have HIV disease.
"No toxic cocktail for you--that's the ticket!" Senor Bovary exclaimed. "We don't have the virus, either--if you're interested. I admit to having had sex only with your father, and--save that truly disastrous dalliance with your mom--your dad has had sex only with me. How boring is that?" the little man asked me, smiling more. "I've read your writing--so, of course, has your father. On the evidence of what you've written about--well, one can't blame your dad for worrying about you! If half of what you write about has happened to you, you must have had sex with everyone!"
"With men and women, yes--with everyone, no," I said, smiling back at him.
"I'm only asking because he won't ask. Honestly, you'll meet your father, and you'll feel you've had interviews that are more in-depth than anything he'll ask you or even say to you," Senor Bovary warned me. "It isn't that he doesn't care--I'm not exaggerating when I say he's always worrying about you--but your father is a man who believes your privacy is not to be invaded. Your dad is a very private man. I've only ever seen him be public about one thing."
"And that is?" I asked.
"I'm not going to spoil the show. We should be going, anyway," Senor Bovary said, looking at his watch.
"What show?" I asked him.
"Look, I'm not the performer--I just manage the money," Bovary said. "You're the writer in the family, but your father does know how to tell a story--even if it's always the same story."
I followed him, at a fairly fast pace, from the Plaza Mayor to the Puerta del Sol. Bovary must have had those special sandals because he was a walker; I'll bet he walked everywhere in Madrid. He was a trim, fit man; he'd had very little to eat for dinner, and nothing to drink but mineral water.
It was probably nine or ten o'clock at night, but there were a lot of people in the streets. As we walked up Montero, we passed some prostitutes--"working girls," Bovary called them.
I heard one of them say the guapo word.
"She says you're handsome," Senor Bovary translated.
"Perhaps she means you," I told him; he was very handsome, I thought.
"She doesn't mean me--she knows me," was all Bovary said. He was all business--Mr. Money Manager, I was thinking.
Then we crossed the Gran Via into Chueca, by that towering building--the Telefonica. "We're still a little early," Senor Bovary was saying, as he looked again at his watch. He seemed to consider (then he reconsidered) taking a detour. "There's a bear bar on this street," he said, pausing at the intersection of Hortaleza and the Calle de las Infantas.