Latin Lessons

So Katrien said on the phone last night that short horny Italians are 1) easy to train 2) eager to please and 3) not squeamish. I am not sure about the last one. It would never have occurred to me that it should go on the list of desirable qualities of a potential lover, mate or one-night stand. But as she said it I realised that ‘not squeamish’ should really be right on the top of The List. In my own experience the Italians, French and one Argentinean were mostly well taught and full of enthusiasm. The single exception simply was not that fond of sex, I think. ‘Squeamish’ was not a label that sprung to mind. ‘Lazy’ did. Funny how they were all quite short- another thing that I never noticed particularly. Patterns emerge when one starts to make gross generalisations, and what a lot of fun they are.

(But back to the topic.)

So. If one expects a… complete experience of the… business… of sex, squeamishness would be such a disappointment. There is a deeply disturbing scene in Dangerous Liaisons between Uma Thurman and John Malkovich, where he seduces her and says, ‘let’s start with a few… Latin terms… shall we?’ I wonder now, in the light of these musings, if it is perhaps the supposed enthusiasm of Latin men in this area that may have caused these terms to retain their Latin roots, and as such their common use.

The whole discussion was initiated by the fact that I have lightly pencilled a date in my diary with a short Italian man whom I have never met. I wrote to him… exactly which side of ‘172cm to 178cm’ are you on? And he said, 5ft 8 u? (Note economical use of word & letters). So I said, 5ft 11 and ½, but shorter men than me have often called themselves 6ft. And then I wrote… so now what? And he said that he will still ‘love’ to meet me, and am I ‘game’. I think he certainly rose to the challenge, and therefore I may well have a glass of wine with him.

There is not much else to recommend him, unfortunately. He is 50, ‘divorced 6 year’, and has a 26-year-old daughter who lives in London. His English appears to be a second language, the little of it he used for correspondence. One hopes that he would do better with spoken language and perhaps other, non-verbal forms of communication. Normally, when choosing which character to pursue and which to ignore, I give many marks for wit and a good sentence. But in this guy’s case…

I am, I admit freely, a sucker for Italians. This is mysterious, as I was an exchange student over there for a year and I found them deeply eccentric, if not downright unfriendly. I detected a profound confusion in the average Latin male brain between virgins and whores. The best example of this is actually found in the film Analyse This, when Robert De Niro says to Billy Crystal, are you crazy? That’s the mouth she kisses my children with! The mother of his children is neither virgin nor whore, but his girlfriend (and ALL of them have girlfriends) is both. But the food is spectacular, and I think any nation which eats that well but stays generally in such good shape has a thing or two to teach the rest of us about the sensual pleasures.

Besides, shortly after Katrien said goodbye and we stopped lauging, Mal and I agreed that there is space in life at the moment for a short horny Latino. A girl only lives once.