GOOD friend Zal, age 80, almost died of COVID-19 eight months ago and came out of the hospital almost a skeletal invalid - unable to walk.
I thought he was a goner. But with sheer willpower, he recovered and now stands erect and bulked up, with skin glowing.
Of late, I have called in old acquaintance poet and playwright Dong, 68, to join the “clarifying sessions” over Starbucks morning coffee with Zal.
Firstly, to divine what the elder friend has done right and tell the world about it.
We find ourselves foraying into various topics like fallacies of the pandemic, the power of karate, the marvel of pushing gravity, the tensegrity principle in humans, meditative walking, the electro-magnetic pulse of the earth, and so forth.
It is inevitable that the talks will soon pivot to the mundane, if truly it is mundane. And these are: women and relations.
Because we ask: what good is long life without sex?
And I recall what I wrote about here in Opinyon almost ten years ago.
Novelist F. Sionil Jose, 97, once said that American author Ernest Hemingway killed himself because he could no longer get an erection.
Apo Jose do, sometimes, issue funny conjectures.
But doctors, nowadays, are saying that we have for so long overlooked the incapacity of senior citizens to make love.
That we have wrongly dismissed this decline as normal like we have accepted dementia or even Alzheimer’s disease as natural and as inevitable concluding chapters in life.
Researcher Lee Smith said in a 2018 Time Magazine article: “Sexual activity does decline as we age, but older adults are not asexual. Having sex may be one way older adults can feel better and enjoy life more.”
But aging does make life fuzzier or makes one frantic for fulfillment while recalling the vigor and vitality.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Junichirō Tanizaki, and Hemingway, three of my favorite authors, have separately expressed through fiction that sexual desire does not and must not grow old with the body.
Canto One: In 2004, Gabriel Marquez, at the age 77, came out with a novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which tells of the autumn of a 90-year-old journalist and his awakened desire for a young virgin.
The old man finds immaculate love at the end of his life, while death wafts from the typewriter.
Gabriel or Gabo was a novelist, storyteller, writer and journalist from Colombia. In 1982 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his beguiling novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a superb icon of the magic realism genre.
Canto Two: In another part and generation of the world, Junichirō Tanizaki, one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, wrote Diary of a Mad Old Man, one of his last novels.
It is about a 77-year-old diarist who is struck down by a stroke due to excessive sexual excitement.
He discovers that while his body is breaking down, his libido rages on.
He remains incorrigible as he records both his past desires and his current efforts to bribe his daughter-in-law to provide sexual titillation in return for jewelries and baubles.
Tanizaki himself died of heart attack at age 79 in 1965.
Tanizaki’s body of works is replete with erotic obsessions. He first became widely known in 1910 with his short story The Tattooer that tells of a tattoo artist who inscribes a giant spider on the body of a beautiful young woman.
Canto Three: Hemingway struggled with The Garden of Eden for fifteen years and yet was not able to finish it, even after writing 200,000 words and 800 pages.
The novel, about the affair of a honeymooning couple with a woman, came out abridged in 1986, 25 years after he shot himself at a relatively young age of 62 in 1961.
That was light years away before Viagra freed drooping men from anxiety and ruined self-esteem.
In the Garden of Eden, Hemingway dealt head-on with male-female relationships, sexual attraction and their complications. It is a languid meandering narrative, truncated by sex bouts.
Now, the inability to have sex is probably frightening when the mind still imagines or remembers the joys of copulation.
It is like a silent scream.And authors like Gabo and Junichirō are fortunate to find solace and fortitude in writing.
But for Papa Hemingway, a true bon vivant, his failing health, the lose of potency and the verve for writing, was just too much. He took his life like his father did before him.
May I add to this three the erotic novel Eungyo by Korean author Park Bum-shi which tells of an esteemed 70-year-old poet who becomes obsessed with a 17-year-old student and apprentice whom he found sleeping outside of his home one day.
Eungyo or “Muse” was made into a full-length film and garnered dozens of industry awards and nominations. Still, it was controversial because it dared touch on a taboo topic. Kadiri!
Social conventions say that any old man who desires women or sex must be sick, a lecher, or a predator.
At the same time, the biological facts on evolution indicate that a woman’s interest in intercourse declines when her capacity to give birth stops, while the man continues to produce sperms.
Time Magazine hit it right on the gonads: “Everyone knows young men think constantly about sex, but many guys remain interested in sex until they are almost dead.” -30