Ars amandi revisited

(Gee, I hope mine hosts' in-built profanities preventor has some inkling of Latin! Last time I used an expression similar to, but shorter than, 'my estimate!' to complete my headline 'Non olet?', the colloquial cussword was excised by the powers that be in the malignantly moralistic motherland of de-mock-racy... well, I suppose it beats a $US5 million fine, courtesy of the
hardcore Christian lobby!)

Talking about curses, and religion, in a round-about way: I can't fail to notice that my previously mentioned religious affairs reporter has been ignominiously ignored after his short stint in our national broadcaster's morning show slot. An article in Monday's The Guide insert in the Sydney Morning Herald fulsomely welcomes former London correspondent Fran Kelly to RN Breakfast, blandly stating that she takes over from Peter Thompson (now he was a hard act to follow!). Not a mention of the interregnum of one supremely cocky Stephen Crittenden. Well, I'll be knocked down with a feather...

But let's get back to our sheep...

When I was a youngster I often waxed lyrical.
Sleeping rough within the protective circular walls of the Castelo Sao Jorge in Lisbon towards the end of the 'Fifties, I still used a more familiar tongue to exclaim

Pfau'n verschenken
trunken ihr Gefieder
an den hellen Morgen...

in homage to the peacocks strutting about in the early morning light.

Worshipping the leggy blonde beauty Beatrix Svensson in my friend Thomas Bausch's home in Berlin-Dahlem somewhat later, I imagined

holding (her) in an embrace
rapidly disintegrating
into cool and clear oblivion...

This was in my 'English' period. Somewhat later, having traipsed to Sweden with a amourously disillusioned former school friend (my eldest sister had inexplicably failed to continue her flying visits to Hamburg, where we were then both indentured apprentices - me journalism, he books), my mouth runneth over with French

Blond

Blond tendre
cadeau de Suede,
louange d'anges magnanimes,
qu'entre nuances tiedes
garde des mythes intimes...

The French came naturally, as Martin Schmorl (who returned to his father's bookselling business in Hanover later) and I had made a bicycle tour of Britanny during holidays from our boarding school before I left that finishing school for unwanted rich kids, diplomats' brats, emigrants' offspring from Latin America and assorted upper-crust misfits.

Why Sweden? C'est toute une histoire! In those days a young socialist firebrand called Fidel Castro was leading a bunch of desperados toward Havanna from the Sierra Madre (I believe) to topple the dictatorship of a certain Battista, and naturally we wanted to rush to his aid. Impecunious would-be freedom fighters, we had heard of banana boats leaving Sweden for central America. We figured they might come close to Cuba...

Stuck in Stockholm

Instead, we got stuck in Stockholm. This wasn't too unpleasant: the Swedish capital sits nicely integrated with the waters of the Baltic, we could sip Tetley tea endlessly for the price of one cup in the Kungstraedsgardens park when we weren't on duty as diskplokkare in the Baecka Haesten restaurant in the picturesque Gamla Stan (the old part of town, with its hidden gardens and passages), and we had the run with other young foreign males up and down Kungsgatan to chase our share of the very multi-culturally aware and linguistically talented Swedish flickorna. I even learned to love, and speak, their harshly gentle language - but never enough to pen a single line in the lingo...


I wrote more 'poems' in Munich, strangely many in Portuguese, sitting outside the Nest cafe making a cup of coffee last forever:

Cafezinho

Horas a fio,
dias a toa,
cafezinhos na rua...
[missing line]
[missing line]
preguica da louca...
oras a fio,
dias a toa -
pacienca de quem nao espera.

(My memory isn't what it used to be - early-onset Alzheimer's, perhaps?)

And others again in English, drunk in a Schwabing bar, lamenting the 'loss' of Therese Cunningham, the Jamaican teacher from New York I had callously seen off after hitchhiking with her from Biarritz to Lisbon and back to Munich. The 'black olive-eyed' tan beauty, who had sat through a trip from Madrid to Segovia and back to Puerta de Hierro in my father's Mercedes without being once acknowledged by this haughty diplomat; who had suffered eviction with me from our Munich flat by a landlord who threatened to break down the door one morning shouting "dafuer sind wir nicht in Stalingrad gestorben", and who had wanted to come to Sweden with me, and to have my baby...

I believe I even wrote 'poems' for Bianca la bella, during our brief February courtship in 1964.

Which makes it all the more incomprehensible to me that I was able to hurl the words "silly cow" at her last week in front of my middle daughter and her hen-pecked (or so it seemed to me, which is why I thought to succour him) husband Isaac...

I suffered great remorse that night, and thought that, as a failed Catholic, my only salvation lay in a public 'confession'.

Don't worry, I'm a non-violent neocon, and it was a once-only lapse...

Ate a proxima!