Sergio del Molino - Skin

This, which will be so evident to so many swimmers accustomed to letting themselves be cradled by the motion of the waves, was only revealed to me that morning in Alhama de Aragón as I tried to flee the nibbling fish, though at intervals I let them have their way, partly out of tiredness and partly because I believed they were actually going to eat my psoriasis off me, and that I would emerge from the water in perfect health.

I wasn’t as wrong as that might make it sound. The minerals in that water, allied with the summer sun filtering through the high branches of the trees planted a century and a half before, put the illness on the back foot after just a single day. I made such a miraculous improvement that I was surprised not to see a convoy of disabled people at the gate buying little bottles of medicinal water, as though it were another Lourdes. There were neither saints nor apparitions of the Virgin Mary, neither basilicas nor pilgrims, but there were nineteenth-century buildings just as ingenuous as any cathedral – built by someone who believed they were living in a civilised world – and as for the sacred, historical part, that was covered by Roman historians talking about going there to cure aching bones in the times of Christ. The town is also much prettier than Lourdes, and the food is better. I don’t know the reason for the Catholic disdain for Alhama’s miraculous powers, but nothing good has ever happened to me in Lourdes, whereas I climb out of the water in Alhama feeling strong and smooth-skinned, and with a great urge to have sex: a pretty jarring thing in a place so strongly associated with Thanatos and not Eros.

How about a shower before lunch, get the smell of the lake off us, I said to Cris, who noticed my erection though I tried to conceal it under my towel.

We crossed the park in our dressing gowns, pretending we couldn’t see the moribund people filing out of the lower-class hotel after applying poultices and leeches, and almost as soon as we closed our bedroom door – in the middle-class hotel, populated, instead of by zombies, by couples from Majadahonda and Torrelodones with no erotic appetite – we surrendered to a rough and noisy session of lovemaking, the way we don’t do it at home. Her skin, always smooth, takes on an almost supernatural lustre at the spa, and I feel myself possessed by a vigour that frightens me and that is down to having left the psoriasis behind in the lake, as though along with it I’ve forgotten all the courtesies of the nicely brought-up boy who paid exemplary attention during sex ed in school. Missing Cro-Magnon man, I could spend the whole afternoon and evening playing the porno superhero. My bones don’t even ache.

How great the sex is in Alhama, how blessed the sleep that overcomes me while Cris takes a pre-lunch shower and I ask for a few minutes’ grace, just to stay dirty, smelling her juices and my own, and the mud of the lake on our bodies, hair plastered against the pillow, and I stare out of the window at the loose bits of slate scattered across the mountainside, the valley’s secret hidden beneath them, the power of the water, which, for a number of hours, gives me back my humanity. For a few days, at most. I feel drowsy, and resist getting in the shower, not wanting the effect to fade, knowing it to be as ephemeral as cologne. If only I could live in Alhama, like a Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain , and die quietly one winter’s night! But the fantasy of the cure only functions, like all good spells, within the bounds of the sacred precinct. As soon as we’re back in the car, it starts to dwindle. Before we hit the motorway, I can already feel the itching start up again, and by the time we get to Calatayud I can’t stop myself from scratching. Before we’ve covered fifty kilometres, my monstrousness will have emerged once more and the days at Alhama will be nothing but a parenthesis that, like all good memories, I will mistake for a dream.

This only happens when the two of us go alone. Other years our son comes too, and Alhama unfolds like an event horizon engulfing any possible erotic interpretation. Then we get to revel in that other sensuality, far removed from sex, and far more perverse and complex; the one that exists between parents and children. Sex, however much we dress it up as a mystery, never ceases to be a simple, predictable and mechanical mise-en-scène . This is the reason behind couples’ divorcing: they think they’re tired of having sex with the same person, when actually they’re just tired of having sex. Or, what’s worse, they’re tired of needing to have sex, the greatest nuisance of all, far harder to endure than hunger or thirst, the pleasure of sating which is varied and rich and something that also evolves over the years.

A music lover can refine their tastes to an extent that, if not infinite, may certainly be cosmic. And the same can happen to a gastronome, who can challenge their tastebuds with novel combinations and textures. Most of the sense pleasures are apt to undergo a very wide-ranging development, which makes them, in practice, inexhaustible. To exhaust the possibilities of sex, on the other hand, is within anyone’s reach. Not even the most bestial person, like the Marquis de Sade, can handle more than 100 pages without becoming repetitive and, as any fan knows, there’s nothing more monotonous than pornography. Within a matter of weeks, if going hell for leather, an adult in good health can experience all – absolutely all – of the sexual pleasures out there. You only have to witness the evolution of a rutting teenager, who in under a year goes from the immaculate awkwardness of the first-timer to the virtuosity of the professional juggler. It’s possible to reach lovemaking perfection before one hits twenty, and to spend the rest of one’s life emulating and evoking those feats without adding anything substantial to them, and without the variety and quantity of partners contributing any significant innovation (rather, the opposite is true). On the other hand, a music lover can spend ninety years exploring music with maniacal dedication and still have many surprises left in store. The same goes for someone with a refined palate. Between a Big Mac and the daily offerings at a top oyster restaurant there is a far greater conceptual, aesthetic, and anthropological distance than there is between a quick shag in the kitchen and an orgy of Versailles-esque proportions involving androgynes, clusters of Nubian slaves, and Tantric masseurs. Every culture and region expresses its history in its cuisine, making every village an archive of surprises but, as far as I know, sex is more or less the same across cultures and geography. Moral attitudes vary, with some societies being more open and others more repressed, but sex itself, mechanically speaking, is no different. And as for sexual tourism, this, unlike foody tourism, is more about flouting the laws and customs of the country the tourist hails from than sampling exotic flavours. If there are far fewer music lovers and gourmets in the world than sex-maniacs, this is a simple question of hormones, which, like everything bad in life, self-correct with age. If sex were an intellectual pleasure, we’d give it up at eighteen out of utter weariness.

The closeness between parents and children, when the children are small, is far more complex and poetic than any mythological account of rape and celestial coitus between Greek gods; the reticence that means a lot of parents fail to revel in it, in all its surging excess, is a mystery to me. Plus, it’s so short-lived that it melts away as quickly as childhood itself.

The child is slightly afraid of water. It doesn’t know how to swim, the world it inhabits is far from swimming pools and oceans. To go under water is a thrilling, terrifying prospect, one it will only go along with from the safety of its parents’ arms. The Alhama lake is deep for him, and I only dip my feet at the water’s edge, so we get a flotation noodle for him to use. To begin with he doesn’t trust the noodle as much as he trusts being held by us, but little by little he does relax. The water’s lovely, there aren’t any waves and the fish – in his case, yes – tickle. Once the preliminary minutes are over, the swim begins to take shape, rhythm and pitch, like it was a Mahler symphony building from a quiet, almost non-existent opening, and that bar by bar gradually awakens the orchestra. All that is hard, gloomy, and brown on the earth becomes harmonious and clear in the water. We parents and children understand one another better in the water than anywhere else.