Love and Love Affairs

"In the 1920s, while I was living at the Residencia, there was a strange suicide in Madrid that fascinated me for years. In the neighborhood of Amaniel, a student and his young fiancée killed themselves in a restaurant garden. They were know to be passionately in love; their families were on excellent terms with each other; and when an autopsy was performed on the girl, she was found to be a virgin.

On the surface, then, there seem to be no obstacles; in fact, the "Amaniel lovers" were making wedding plans at the time of their deaths. So why the double suicide? I still don't have the answer, except that perhaps a truly passionate love, a sublime love that's reached a certain peak of intensity, is simple incompatible with life itself. Perhaps it's too great, too powerful. Perhaps it can exist only in death.

As a child, I felt intense love, divorced from any sexual attraction, for both boys and girls. As Lorca used to say, "Mi alma niña e niño" - I have an androgynous soul. These were purely platonic feelings; I loved as a fervent monk would love the Virgin Mary. The mere idea of thouching a woman's sex or breasts, or that I might feel her tongue against mine, repelled me.

These platonic affairs lasted until my baptism in the tradicional Saragossa brothel, but these platonic feelings never gave way interely to sexual desire. I've fallen in love with women many times, but maintained perfectly chaste relationships with them. On the other hand, from the age of fourteen until the last few years, my sexual desire remained powerful, stronger than hunger, and usually far more difficult to satisfy. No sooner would I sit down in a railway carriage, for example, than erotic images filled my mind. All I could do was succumb, only to find them still there, and sometimes even stronger, afterwards."

             Buñuel, My Last Sigh, the Autobiography of Luis Buñuel, Vintage, 2013, pp.146-147.