Pretty to Think So: Eros and Prostrate Cancer

Copyright © 2018 Enrique Fernández

Published by Book & Book Press, an imprint of Mango Publishing, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover Design & Layout: Roberto Nuñez & Elina Diaz

Cover photo: shutterstock - Bikeworldtravel

Mango is an active supporter of authors’ rights to free speech and artistic expression in their books. The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to produce exceptional works that enrich our culture and our open society.

Uploading or distributing photos, scans or any content from this book without prior permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. Please honor the author’s work as you would your own. Thank you in advance for respecting our author’s rights.

For permission requests, please contact the publisher at:

Books & Books Press

Mango Publishing Group

2850 Douglas Road, 2nd Floor

Coral Gables, FL 33134 USA

info@mango.bz

For special orders, quantity sales, course adoptions and corporate sales, please email the publisher at sales@mango.bz. For trade and wholesale sales, please contact Ingram Publisher Services at customer.service@ingramcontent.com or +1.800.509.4887.

Pretty to Think So: Eros and Prostate Cancer

Library of Congress Cataloging

ISBN: (print) 978-1-63353-946-4, (ebook) 978-1-63353-947-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958258

BISAC category code: BIO017000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical

Printed in the United States of America

Égloga

No me podrán quitar el dolorido

sentir, si ya del todo

primero no me quitan el sentido.

—Garcilaso de la Vega

One of my graduate school professors, a Spaniard, was fond of quoting this verse of Garcilaso. A scholar of Spain’s generation of ’98, he was attracted to the existentialist thrust of the verse, which opposed the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum with I feel; therefore, I am. El dolorido sentir. The pained feeling. Except that in Spanish, feeling is expressed as sentimiento—sentiment. And Garcilaso chose the infinitive sentir—to feel—which indicates a more powerful, muscular essence of the verb. And then he opposes it to sentido, which means sense as well as consciousness. They can’t take away my pained feeling, my ability to feel pain, unless they first take away my sense, my consciousness, my life. I suffer; therefore, I am. Nothing could be more Spanish.

A similar sentiment or feeling or existential thought is expressed in a South American mestizo song:

I would like to cross the river

Without feeling the sand.

I’m free. I’m a master.

I can want.

And that concrete expression of an idea morphs into the singer’s erotic desire, for he has seen a pair of woman’s eyes and he is dying for them.

They tell me they have an owner

But even if owned I want them.

I’m free. I’m a master.

I can want.

No matter that the woman he wants is already taken. He is free to want her. No one can take that away from him. No one can take from him el dolorido sentir. In this case, el dolorido querer. The pained desire, the pained love.

Yes, they can.

Two days ago, the effects of the androgen-deprivation shot a doctor’s assistant had injected under my skin a month earlier kicked in. And now I don’t want. I don’t desire. I’m apathetic, without pathos, without feeling. Ay, Garcilaso. If you were to return, as Rafael Alberti wrote in his beautiful poem, I would be your squire just to hear you utter your sweet Italianate Spanish verse as we rode. But I would have to tell you, mi señor, that your enamored shepherd was wrong. They can take away your dolorido sentir. Just ask Abelard. Did you know about Abelard, mi señor? You must have, you who were so erudite. They castrated him and, zap, no more desire. He was no longer free. No longer a master. He could not want (Eloise). And I, your humble squire, have been humbled thusly. Cut down without a blade but with the point of a needle.

I so desired, mi señor. I was so free, so full of want, so full of pain. But now, freedom, want, pain, they’re all gone. Perhaps I should be thankful. Desire breeds frustration. Frustration breeds neurosis, psychosis—but these will come later, mi señor, many centuries later. Enjoy your freedom from psychology. Your freedom to love and write verse. Soon you will die in battle. No matter. You will be read, quoted, forever. By a Spanish professor at an American Midwestern university, in a graduate seminar on the generation of ’98. The year 1898, mi señor; can you think that far ahead of your own sixteenth century? He will quote your lovesick shepherd and his boast that no one can take away his pain, his love, his sentir. And a young student will remember your words—will always remember them when fortune fails to smile on his love life. Until that day, a larger-than-love-life reversal of fortune gave the shepherd’s words, your words, mi señor, the lie. That day they took away his dolorido sentir.

●

A Dying

The heated state of consciousness that is Eros feels as distant as breathing the atmosphere of another planet. At the beach I see young women in skimpy bathing suits and their curves, their exposed soft skin, the hair falling on bare shoulders, the breasts barely covered by cloth, the loins exposed enough to remind a man of where everything converges. These are all pleasant. Esthetic. Near-nudes in an art exhibit. Delighting my eyes, but no further.

Surprisingly, this condition is not frustrating. Though why should I be surprised? There can only be frustration when there’s desire, and I experience none of the latter. I want not. I am a serene, smiling Buddha with neutered testicles. ¡Cojones! Am I a man? I am alive, I reply to myself.

The big C, I remember John Wayne calling cancer when he had licked it temporarily. But not even the Duke could blast his way out, like he did in The Shootist, a film biography not of the actor but of the role he was identified with, the one that had filled the screen since that tracking shot in Stagecoach closed in on Ringo—the lens going out of focus for a second, a mistake John Ford never fixed with a second take, and I always thought that blur was Death already claiming its territory, blurring the man if not the myth.

The last time I saw Wayne was on TV, at the Academy Awards. Cancer had eaten away half his weight. I wished I’d never seen him like that.

Would I end up like him? The older I got the more I learned of people who had succumbed to cancer. It seemed like everyone eventually did. It seemed that since everyone must die, this was the death that was coming for us all. I felt cancer closing in, like Poe’s Red Death mingling with the guests at the masque.

●

Vivo Sin Vivir En Mi

Three nights ago I dreamed I was making love to St. Theresa of Avila. The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, despite her divine raptures, was no cloistered nun: She was a church reformer who traveled widely throughout Spain and pleaded her cases before the Crown. Her poetry is deeply religious, addressing her soul’s need to rise to the divine, yet a strong sensuality courses through it. She speaks of her urge to enjoy her Lord as if she were a love-hungry bride. Still, in my dream St. Theresa was no sex kitten.

On the contrary, she was, though not ugly, plain. We were in a swimming pool with another woman, a lover in real life whose precise identity faded from my memory as soon as I woke. All three of us had gone for a nude swim. At first, my attention was on the other woman, whose charms I knew. But eventually, I turned toward the saint. Her flesh was pallid, her long hair black; she seemed shy and embarrassed about the situation she found herself in. But there was something attractive about her very plainness and inexperience. And she was not totally reluctant. I touched her. She responded. Somehow we started to make love, or were about to, when I woke up.

What the…! Of all the women I knew or knew about, St. Theresa of Avila? But the dream excited me. I felt sensations I had not experienced for a while. Still, what in the world was I doing with this saint? I didn’t even like her poetry.

●

Buzzkill

I had reached sixty, and yearly physicals gave me passing grades. Only low-level miseries like high cholesterol. Good heart, good lungs. Could be leaner, but I did exercise regularly. And my diet was healthy, nothing processed, plenty of fresh—organic, even—produce.

The exam included blood work for prostate specific antigen—PSA—a protein produced by the prostate. A high number could be a sign of prostate cancer; mine were in the safe zone. The only troubling condition was blood traces in my urine. At first, the doctor thought it was a bladder infection, and twice he prescribed antibiotics. But the condition persisted, so he sent me to a urologist.

The exam had included a digital prostate exam, an indignity I always dreaded but which, like all the previous ones, revealed no problems. It was a different matter with the urologist, not exactly a lover with an easy touch. He dug in. It hurt like hell. He found a tumor. He set me up for a biopsy. (The blood traces proved to be a common and harmless seepage into the urinary tract.)

"Sorry to tell you this, buddy, but you have cancer,’’ he told me on the phone a few days later. The uninvited guest had removed his mask.

●

Handle with Care

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death for American men (the first is lung cancer). In 2008, the year I began writing this, 186,320 American men were diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 28,660 died of it. (The estimated toll for 2016, according to the American Cancer Society, is 180,890 new cases and 26,120 deaths.) One of seven American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime. And many more will have it and never know because they will die of something else.

There is still no clearly defined cause of prostate cancer—or of many other cancers—but environmental factors are suspected. Diet perhaps. The American diet, which has made us big and strong, has also made us fat and susceptible to illness. Genetic risk factors are being investigated with the hope of identifying high-risk individuals who can be monitored more closely.

Despite its scythe’s wide swing, prostate cancer death is not inevitable. A diagnosis, particularly in the early stages, does not ring a death knell. Standards of treatment can work extremely well, while research into new treatments is moving rapidly. Organizations devoted to raising consciousness among men have the goal of no prostate cancer deaths, and this is no mere chimera. The list of high-profile Alpha males who have survived prostate cancer and continue to thrive includes Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, John Kerry and Robert De Niro.

Or so I thought until I walked into the urologist’s office in Miami, where I live. Sad little old men accompanied by their sad little old wives. Hey, where are the studs? At Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, where I had gone for a second opinion on treatment, it was a slightly different story. Indeed, a lot of the men were older, but at least some were better dressed. One of them was definitely an Alpha. And that was his problem. He wore a tight black leather jacket and tight blue jeans, both clean and crisp. Not much older than fifty, he was in terrific shape. He paced impatiently, talking into his cellphone.

He looked like a man used to owning the street, and, indeed, he was. He was a cop. I could tell his profession by the nature of the conversations I overheard. But, God, how hard it must have been for him to submit to the indignities of this disease! To have his virility threatened, vanished perhaps. That guy’s in a worse place than I am, I thought. I was never that high up the macho ladder, so my fall couldn’t be as terrifying.

The urologist at Sloan-Kettering was reassuring. His surgery would attempt to spare as much nerve as possible. Nerves could be rewired, like an electrician patching up damaged cable. There were procedures and pills to restore virility. All was not lost.

I was not depressed. And I didn’t hinge my manhood on my penis and mix up my power with potency, like the cop who walked up and down the crowded waiting room in the basement of the Sloan-Kettering building devoted to our sick prostates, our fragile manhood.

●

Pretty to Think So

There are worse things than celibacy, Mr. Shannon, Deborah Kerr tells Richard Burton in The Night of the Iguana. Yes, replies the drunken Episcopalian priest expatriated in Mexico, lunacy and death.

Burton’s character was being flip, as usual, and, also as usual, hyperbolic. Death is, in fact, less feared by many men than that unwilled formed of celibacy called impotence. As men age, we become more susceptible to bouts of impotence. It begins with drinking. In our first years of drinking and fucking, we can do both with abandon. But sooner or later, the moment of truth arrives. Trouble is we are used to alcohol putting us—and our partners—in the mood for love. But where, indeed, our partners may be very much in the mood, our penises won’t respond. That is when a man discovers his vulnerability.

I was an eager reader in my teens, and impotence was then just one more bookish concept. I read about it in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. (All the Hemingway I’ve read was in my teens, his novels being the ultimate boy stories.) Jake Barnes, the narrator, had suffered a war injury that rendered him impotent. At the end of the book, he and the alluring Brett are riding through Paris in a cab when a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic…raised his baton. The car slowed, pressing Brett against Jake, who can feel her lusciousness but can do nothing about it. She has just told him, Oh, Jake…we could have had such a damned good time together, and in the novel’s last words, Jake replies, Yes… Isn’t it pretty to think so? The heavy-handed irony of the raised baton and Jake’s bitter reply struck me as subtle and smart.

I was in my late twenties when it first happened in life, not in literature. After an evening of too much food and wine, I became sad and slack in the sack. At that age, however, recovery from excess comes quickly, and as soon as I could, I did. With the passing years, this happened more often and recovery came less quickly, so I was careful with drink, sexuality being a man’s natural guide to temperance.

I thought the day would come when sex would be over, but that seemed such a distant prospect that no crow’s nest I could climb would allow a sighting. I read that in some retirement communities, men were so outnumbered by women that they devoted themselves to the pleasures of their slacker years: getting laid and getting high. At sixty I had no thought of retirement, but when I did, the prospect of spliffs and eager ladies didn’t seem shabby at all.

But the body does say no eventually. In her late years, M.F.K. Fisher gave an interview to the New York Times in which she revealed that a few years before she had lost interest in sex and that recently she no longer cared for food. For the famously sensual gastronome to admit this only meant one thing, I concluded: The end was near. Sure enough, next time I read about her was in an obituary.

Passions for sex and food. Their passing from my life would be harbingers of death, but as Don Juan says in his first appearance on the stage in seventeenth-century Spain, ¡Cuán largo me lo fiais!—what a long time you give me to pay it (my sinning) back. Eat, drink and be merry for Death is far, far away.

Impotence? Yes, libido was declining, but that had its merits. Best of all, age could make a man a good lover. The embarrassment of premature ejaculation was a distant memory. On the contrary, as long as erections held, an older man could be a paragon of virility, allowing a woman multiple orgasms until she tired. Of course, once a man is done, the call of Again! cannot be answered right away. Time for pillow talk, dinner, sleep. We rest to engage another day.

But my idyll had ended.

●

Moment

The first time I touched a girl’s bare breast I came in my pants. My bathing suit, really—we were at the beach. I went in the surf and that washed the semen away. And I was not ashamed or even slightly troubled because, well, I was quite drunk. It was a beach party at the end of my first year in college. I was seventeen and still a virgin. But I had a girlfriend. We had passionate kissing sessions, but no touching of breasts or genitals. Not because she stopped me when I tried, but because I didn’t try. Self-consciousness of my inexperience trumped the horniness of a teenage boy. After that night our kissing sessions included baring our chests. I touched, fondled, kissed, suckled her small breasts. But that’s as far as we went. Or rather, as far as I went. She grew tired of me and, in the middle of that summer, she dumped me and took up with an older guy who, I’m sure, screwed her properly. My heart was broken and my desire pounded