The padlock bridge

Many years ago, in 1984, Barclays, just turned nineteen, a reporter for the conservative newspaper “La Prensa”, traveled to Frankfurt, Bonn and Berlin, officially invited by the German government, chosen as a young talent or young promise, an optimistic projection that the time would deny it. On the Lufthansa flight that took off from Lima, made a stopover in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and landed in Frankfurt, Barclays, sitting in business class thanks to the fine courtesy of the German ambassador, seduced a young German woman sitting next to him, who More out of boredom than out of lust or heat, she condescended to kiss and caress him under the blankets and down comforters as the aircraft crossed the ocean. Arriving at the Frankfurt airport, the German told Barclays that there were some great, private showers, at low rental cost for half an hour or an hour. They ended up showering together. Arguably it was his first acquaintance with German geography. The Barclays guide and translator was a young Argentine. Clever, clever, endowed with the proverbial Argentine mischievousness, he was insolently handsome, as Argentines tend to be handsome. Barclays still did not know that he could fall in love with a man: he had had two girlfriends, he had conquered the German woman on the plane, he believed himself to be a true Casanova from the Andes. However, it did not take him long to discover, touring West Germany with the helpful guide, that he was misinformed. Indeed, it did not take him long to fall in love with the guide, although, of course, he did not have the courage to tell him or insinuate it. The official agenda was intense and exhausting. They mainly visited museums and public buildings. They interviewed political leaders from the government and the opposition. Germany was still divided. In Berlin, they passed through the grim border checkpoint, Checkpoint Charlie, which bisected the city with an ominous bloodstained wall, and walked, dismayed, through the oppressed part, frozen in time, crushed under the communist boot. The contrast was terrible: capitalist Berlin was abuzz with lights and flourishing businesses, tourists and pedestrians, shops open all night, while communist Berlin was a gray, sad, ghostly city, inhabited by zombies, ruled by spies and thugs, vassals of Moscow. As soon as he finished his daily agenda, Barclays went out for a walk, already at night, through the streets of Frankfurt, or Bonn, or capitalist Berlin. It was then that he discovered that those cities were full of porn shops that stayed open all night. Dazzled, he spent hours in those sinful, concupiscent places, paradises of impudence and desire that he could not have imagined even in his wildest dreams. There were hermetic booths to see women undressing and touching each other, while the voyeur burned with erotic heat; there were live shows of couples copulating on the heights of giant hammocks, which seemed like an act of exhibitionism and, at the same time, of acrobatics or tightrope walking, since the male and his penis in spring could fall on the peepers below him ; there were all kinds of dildos, vibrators, inflatable sex dolls and battery-powered gadgets to multiply the pleasure; there were booths in which, after inserting some coins or bills (the currency was still the German mark), the overheated subject could choose between heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual pornography, and even with animals, such as dogs, horses, chickens and even donkeys ; but there was not, among the varied menu of options, the possibility of touching a flesh and blood woman, she could only be contemplated behind the glass so often stained by the lukewarm effusions of the pornographers. Barclays was no stranger to pornography: as a reporter for that conservative newspaper that had established him as a young promise or young talent, he had seen, in decadent and flea-ridden theaters in the center of the city, dozens of triple X films for adults, coming out at midnight of the newspaper, and that is why his colleagues in the newsroom called him «the vampire of the stalls»; but those German stores, through which well-dressed, elegant men strolled, as well as haughty and proud ladies, showing their faces, without hiding, left him in a state of shock: the earthly paradise existed and they were those German stores where no one repressed their erotic zone, their transparent desires, their majority, minority, marginal or even depraved, perverted sexual identity. Of course, Barclays used the fees given to it by the German government not to buy clothes, but to buy unspeakable things in those porn shops. He also had a surprise, or several, in the stately hotels where he was lodged by his Argentine guide and translator, the first Argentine he secretly fell in love with: the mini-bars were full of tiny bottles of the best liquors and both the Steam chambers like the hotel sauna admitted men and women at the same time, so that when Barclays entered those small, scorching rooms, impregnated with human sweat, it found naked women, completely naked, who naturally showed their bodies , as well as with naked men who refrained from looking in an inappropriate or crafty way at the ladies or young ladies sitting or lying down, showing everything or almost everything. Naturally, Barclays spent hours in the wooden sauna and steam room. He made no friends or lovers, but he nearly died of dehydration and lost weight. He then went out for a walk and went into erotic shops. As expected, when he returned to his bed in the hotel, the poor thing was a volcano about to erupt. He drank fine spirits, thought of the German woman on the plane who didn’t want to give him her telephone number, slept for a few hours, celebrated being in a country where no one, absolutely no one, recognized him from television (it had opened on television a year earlier, in 1983 , still eighteen years old). Because he was ignorant, because he was provincial, because it was his first trip to Europe, Barclays suffered several terrible embarrassments, of which the Argentine guide and translator was a witness. The most memorable of them happened when they were about to retire from the five-star hotel in Frankfurt, the famous hotel of writers, literary agents, editors and translators, the Steigenberger Frankfurter Hof, in the center of the city, near the river Meno: the Argentine asked, with perfect command of the German language, the bill for the Barclays room, examined it briefly, made a gesture of shock or astonishment and asked the visitor: -Did you drink all the drink in the mini- bar? Surprised, Barclays responded with third-world candor: -No, how can you think of it. I’ve had a few little bottles of whiskey, nothing more. The guide and translator insisted: -But here they are charging us for the entire mini-bar. Without malice, Barclays asked, like a perfect moron: -But aren’t the mini-bar bottles free? The Argentine smiled: -No, of course not. “I thought they were a tourist souvenir, a little gift from the hotel,” said Barclays. “No, what do you say?” laughed the guide and translator. We have to pay for each little bottle. “Oh no,” Barclays trembled. -And I can’t pay for your alcoholic consumption, do you understand? You have to pay for it, James. -Is it a lot of money? The guide told him the amount in German marks and Barclays jumped: “No way, it’s a fortune,” he said. I don’t have that much money. – Did you drink all the bottles? asked the guide. “No, what’s up,” said Barclays. I have them all stuffed here, in my suitcases. Barclays was traveling with not one, not two, but three heavy suitcases lent to him by his maternal grandfather. “If you don’t want them to charge you, you have to return them,” the guide told him, while the circumspect gentlemen at the reception looked at Barclays severely. ‘Oh no, what a shame,’ said Barclays. Then he got down on his knees, opened a suitcase, and took out ten or twelve small bottles of fine liquor. Then he opened a second suitcase: it was so full that the erotic magazines he had bought overflowed, with which Barclays was already a thief, a gangster, a drunkard and a pornographer in the eyes of the German receptionists, let alone in the eyes puzzled by her attentive chaperone. Finally, he opened the third suitcase, the bulkiest, and as he did so, a rubber erotic doll suddenly unfolded and inflated, making a sudden jump and flying, propelled by the perfidious current of the air conditioning: it flew through the reception, she approached the door and, before the impassive gaze of the hatted concierges of the Steigenberger Frankfurter Hof hotel, she flew through the streets of Frankfurt, Barclays chasing her, as a lover in heat would chase his elusive, elusive girlfriend. He was so traumatized in that hotel in Frankfurt, that in the hotels in Bonn and Berlin he did not even dare to open the mini-bar, nor to buy dolls, magazines or gadgets in the nearby erotic shops, that blessed prelude to hell. Luckily, his Argentine guide was not a Puritan, he had a sense of humor and celebrated with great laughter the memorable ridicule made by the young promise or the young talent at the reception of the hotel in Frankfurt. Many years later, lying on the grass in New York City’s Central Park, Barclays met a naughty and horny German woman, who was also lying on the grass in the park, one sunny summer afternoon, and they ended up making love in a hotel suite. Square. “Don’t move,” the German told her, and she straddled him. Then, with astonishing dexterity, he rode her passing lover, while he thought he saw Frankfurt’s erotic flying doll in her: he had caught her at last. Many years later, Barclays, on vacation on television, has arrived in Frankfurt with his wife and daughter (the Lufthansa flight, very comfortable, but the queues at Frankfurt airport, appalling) and has stayed in the same hotel which he visited almost forty years ago, the noble and stately Steigenberger Frankfurter Hof, a meeting point for writers and their agents and publishers during the city’s annual book fair, held in the fall. The hotel’s mini-bar is no longer a temptation: Barclays is a teetotaler, it doesn’t drink a drop of alcohol. Porn stores no longer exist, they have all gone bankrupt, now those vices are offered on the phone and the computer, you don’t have to leave the hotel to consume them, but Barclays hates pornography because it plunges it into deep sadness about the human condition. Touring the city, walking along the pedestrian bridge that crosses over the river Main (the Iron Bridge or Eiserner Steg, built a century and a half ago and renovated exactly one hundred years ago), observing the hundreds of padlocks that lovers have left hanging on said bridge, with their names inscribed on the locks as incorruptible promises of love, Barclays has seen a padlock with the initials “D and J” and, moved, devastated by a sadness that does not yield, a sorrow that will be infinite, has spilled a couple of furtive tears, without his wife or daughter noticing.