If there is an erotic game, it is pool.
The best definition of eroticism that I found was written by Barthes in
The Pleasure of the Text
, where he asked: “Isn't the most erotic place on a body where the clothing opens?”
The erotic is the intermittency, he wrote, "the skin that sparkles between two pieces (the pants and the sweater), between two edges (the half-open shirt, the glove and the sleeve), it is that sparkle that seduces."
Twinkling, what a beautiful word, more precise and at the same time - just like its meaning - fleeting;
one does not find it in the supermarket or at any dinner.
The sparkle cries out for the impossible: to be caught
;
and yet, with each flash we wish it would last a little longer.
Isn't that what keeps us alive?
So, I insist, the pool has that, that I don't know what.
A climate of slow competition, a kind of dance of approximation and distance around the cloth, of at least two players with a cue that could well be a sword, an elegance, a calculated movement made of ambition, challenge
and exchanges of glances, a universe
.
The rules of the game and skill with the cue also force you to show off your body, to run the risk of flashing, the fleeting appearance of skin or a
furtive glance at your opponent just before hitting the ball
, to smile afterwards. just by strutting around the cloth, possessed by the desire to win and the gentle threat of defeat.
It can also be accompanied with a drink and raised the glass near and far from the other.
Or let yourself be possessed even more and reach Tom Cruise's dances in
The Color of Money.
Pool bars were once all the rage in Buenos Aires.
I am not referring to the still lifes of nostalgic boys,
but to the nocturnal splendor of the cool bars of the late nineties
, Tazz, Jobs or Deep Blue, full of young people in their twenties in times when the closest thing to Tinder had been a very fun bar. in Recoleta which was called
El Correo
and whose motto was to send letters between the tables, written in obituaries that the bar itself provided.
If I could go back to my adolescence for one night, I would return, without a doubt, to a time when
the conquest was so successful that the table was covered with a mountain of letters
that my friend and I couldn't cope with answering.
Then, with the vanity typical of those times, we made the obituaries fly through the air to walk away triumphant and unattainable, enjoying ourselves.
With that friend we also played pool in the bars in the nineties.
It wasn't difficult to meet new people, talk, play, sparkle.
I wonder then and I accept my anachronism, if we really believe that everything that could happen around a pool table fits into an application like Tinder.
I'm not against technology, that would be stupid, I simply wonder if everyone from before fits in my pocket.