Free Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson Page A

Bethlehem. The bones would save me from pain of every kind and lead me piously to Heaven. He was wearing some himself.
    'And love?' I said. 'And love?'
    He shook his head and assured me that nothing was proof against love. Not even the slightest amourette could be forestalled by an amulet. Bringing it on, though, was another matter - did I want a bag of spices mixed by Don Juan himself?
    'But surely if it can be encouraged it can also be prevented?'
    'Not at all,' said the man, 'for everyone is inclined to love. It is easy to bring on, impossible to end until it ends itself.'
    'And yet some people never love. My mother is one such.'
    He said, 'They have a secret somewhere. Usually.'
    I thought of the great lovers, men and women who had made it their profession, who had tirelessly leapt from one passion to another, sometimes running two, three or four at once like a stunt charioteer. What were they looking for?
    My own passions had nothing to recommend them. Not only was I chasing a dancer who, on the evidence of her sisters, was too old to move, I had in the past entangled myself in numerous affairs with women who would not, could not or did not love me. And did I love them? I thought so at the time, though now I have come to doubt it, seeing only that I loved myself through them.
    On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of loveor is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not know it, habit being a great binder.
    I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing.
    When I have shaken off my passion, somewhat as a dog shakes off an unexpected plunge into the canal, I find myself without any understanding of what it was that ravaged me. The beloved is shallow, witless, heartless, mercenary, calculating, silly. Naturally these thoughts protect me, but they also render me entirely gullible or without discrimination.
    And so I will explain it as follows.
    A man or woman sunk in dreams that cannot be spoken, about a life they do not possess, comes suddenly to a door in the wall. They open it. Beyond the door is that life and a man or a woman to whom it is already natural. It may not be possessions they want, it may very well be the lack of them, but the secret life is suddenly revealed. This is their true home and this is their beloved.
    I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse maybe enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself.
    In one city I visited, the entire population had been wiped out by love three times in a row. After the third occasion the only two survivors, a monk and a whore, determined that love should be illegal in their new state and that anyone found indulging in it would be put to death. Cheered by their admirable plan the two of them made love as often as possible and, thanks to the sturdiness of the whore, were soon able to re-fill the city with inhabitants. From their earliest moment children were warned of the dire consequences, personal and social, of love. They were urged to put aside any romantic fancies, the sexes were carefully segregated and all marriages were arranged. Sex itself, tending as it does to fire the heart as well as the groin, was possible only for the purposes of