A broad abroad. Or the manhood of Europe

“The Manhood of Europe”

from ¡Existe el amor solamente para matarme! or Love and Me Have No Business Doing Business

By Stuart González

Sarah got her man. She got him in every country. In Albania and Poland. In Italy and Germany. In France and Spain. In Denmark. She had them all. Men typical of their nations. Stereotypical. Some were greasy. Some pale. Some dirty. Too dirty. Some clean. Too clean. Some hirsute. Some androgynous. She hated that the most. It wasn’t that she was old-fashioned, she just liked her men to-- look like men. She didn’t want to wonder or be made to play a guessing game. The only points she wanted to stack up were penis points. And she was never behind.

Sarah Leigh and her not esteemed friends, like many young Americans with loaded parents, traveled Europe after high school. Despite hating each other, they called themselves a “band of sisters” and decided-- fuck men-- they were going to fuck men. The plan was to backpack from country to country, notching bedposts, and hopefully, maybe, gaining some culture along the way.

The journey began in England, where she met guys with great teeth and poor fashion sense. Seriously. There, she bedded young men who called themselves things like, Wilbur and Philip. In the seemingly ubiquitous pub environs of London, they wore argyle sweaters and sipped on pints while watching football on the telly. They weren’t sporty guys, but they feigned well enough their European machismo. Their sex was quick and eventless. Slow to start, fast to finish. Oh, how her sexual appetite had not been sated in the slightest!

In Germany, one of the girls let a guy named Friedrich shit on her. Sarah was appalled when the girl giggled and said that she enjoyed it. How could someone get off on being so debased? She herself met a guy in Bavaria who liked to have his nipples bitten to the point of bloodshed, but other than that, it was all quite normal, and he wasn’t nearly as quick as the English men.

By the time they reached France, Sarah found out that she was in the lead. Of course, she lied a little. At least ten of the guys she counted were just random oral partners. No penetration. But the truth was, outside of collecting condoms filled with seminal fluids or taking photographs, there could be no certitude. No real way to substantiate quantities.

It wasn’t too much later that her epiphany came while she ground her hips into a Scottish guy's crotch in Glasgow. In a room solely consisting of shadows and blue light. It was simple. She felt no joy. It was too easy. She could conquer, oh yes, and easily at that, but one cannot rape the willing. She wasn't doing anything new, even for a woman. None of them were. And despite the much touted and spoken of romanticism that supposedly gripped Europe, she felt she must be in the wrong place.

Because romance for the European male was merely a clever, serpentine artifice to the fruition of raw, unadulterated sex, by the time she met the beguiling Oliver from Italy, she’d become jaded to the whole contest. The “band of sisters” had traded pleasure for competition and what was the fun in that? A guy could thrust once, come, and that would be it. It’s just another number without the sensation to copy to memory. So with Oliver, Sarah began to count her orgasms. Maybe she wouldn’t break any records (she didn’t), but she’d feel damn good, and the process; focusing on her own pleasure, would lend more to hedonism than whoredom. Because that was what she needed. In the midst of all the boring, monotonous, occasionally wild copulation, she needed to regard herself as the user and not the usee.

Nearing the end of the trip, she’d become emboldened by her experiences. Now she could gather all her notes. She’d fucked men in two different continents. White men. Black men. Mixed men. Men who barely spoke the same language as she.

Her confidence solidified itself on a bus in London. She sat next to an older man. They were traveling from Greenwich to Westminster and she was reading "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." When she took her eyes from the pages to look out the window, she noticed the man shifting his eyes from her face to the book in her hand.

"Raymond Carver is no Hemingway," said he, chuckling.
"And Italians don't fuck nearly as good as Chicanos," she responded.
"Yes... yes. Very well," he said, and eased himself out of the seat with the aid of a cane. He tipped his hat to her as he stepped off into the wet street.

(2010)