Harold Pinter

Private screening of a Belle Époque erotic film?



Naughty Forefathers

It's not everyone who can claim to spend an evening on a place full of memories of a Nobel Prize Award for Literature in the very same day the Wise Men (?) from Stockholm have decided to confer upon Harold Pinter,CH the ultimate literary accolade. To what lengths is this blogger of yours prepared to go in order to satisfy the Honourable Reader, one might ask?

The near-theatrical set was a small dinner-party with that blend of formal informality and high-browed frivolity that characterizes, in a way, Society here. We were ten, like the little Negroes of Auntie Agatha's famous crime novel. There were enough characters and lack of information about respective backgrounds (to a new in town, like this blogger of yours) to try to do something "Pinteresque" out of it. Even UST could be perceived across the table (for those less familiar with Hollywood script-writing jargon, UST stands for Unresolved Sexual Tension, an essential ingredient of your average blockbuster, meaning the situation whereby the audience senses that the two main characters might end up at it).

What really enlivened the after-dinner coffee & Port wine was the mention of the existence of modern video copies of erotic/porn movies made in the golden times of His Majesty Alfonso XIII, belonging to a series entitled "Nuestros Picaros Abuelos" (loosely translatable as "our naughty grandfathers" ). We even had a glimpse at the videoboxes with the suggestive imagery which I have submitted above to the curious, hopefully delighted, attention of the Honourable Reader.

Some of us were skeptical as to the actual hardcore content of films made in the 20's and made our inquiries timidly. "But, how is it? What does it really show?" - asked my neighbour with candid curiosity ."Must be something more subtle than... You know..". The owner of the videos looked at us with the triumphal smile of a 14 years old boy revealing juicy truths to his younger brothers: "What do you think they're doing, for Goodness' sake?" She made a pause (Pinter again) and then let it out : "Follar, claro!". Now, the Honourable Reader might not have been expecting the use, in that particular social context, of the slang version of the verb "to fornicate" (on top of it, rather less used in Society than its English equivalent in Anglo-Saxon dinner-parties). We all understood that our naughty grand-daddies were not to be underestimated...

A guest, who happened to have a cinema as one of the businesses he keeps going, went then so far as suggesting we might organize a private after-hours screening of the picaresque films in a real nickelodeon. With drinks on the house but no viewers allowed to seat in couples on the back rows. Another guest, smiling and self-confident because of being clearly the better dressed of all the female dinner companions, got almost carried away, and declared that she might take care of the invitations herself. With a final flourish she added that she was thinking of hand-writing it with a permanent ink marker on the photographed breasts of detached pages of "Interviú" (the local soft-porn magazine).

That reminded me a poem I read recently which I have been attempting to translate for the benefit of the Honourable Reader:

“If my fingers were spray canisters of black ink /

Yours breasts would be full of graffitti/

Like a propitious wall in a sordid backstreet ”

Pinteresque enough?