PAGAN FIRE (VINTAGE) - ABOUT KISSING

Originally published in El Imparcial, on August 19, 2004

There are cultural peculiarities that are very important but we use to forget about them, we do ignore them, while they could well be a good conversation topic at boring parties. Gaius Valerius Catulus, the best Roman poet (and one of the best poets of all times) ,before dying at the age of thirty years due to a venereal collapse, visited the environs of Rome and found the last survivors of the Etruscan civilization.

The poor dudes, as if they were dodo birds had been cornered to extinction by the Roman Machine, but the day in which Catulo found them they made their last and greater contribution to Western Civilization.

Not many years before the trips of Catulo, the lips of Judas Iscariot gently pressed against those of Jesus of Nazareth, and in that kiss —which set the basis of the cliche "kiss of death" for the gangsters yet to come— the most famous crucifixion began to take its form.

The kiss is as old as humankind. Freudians think that the kiss is a continuation of the pleasure which we felt from being breast-fed as babies, and that this is an inherent reflex to all human beings. But a theory exists that seems more interesting to me: the kiss was used by the primitive couples to silence the moaning noises, grunts and shouts of sexual activity , which could attract some predator; the kiss would initiate, then, as a silence technique, which reminds us of the modern “shut up and kiss me”.

Even with its incredible antiquity, for some reason, the erotic kiss was not well-known nor was used with regularity, with the exception of a few, isolated civilizations. Yes. The Etruscans were one of them.

So Catulo saw how the Etruscan kissed all the time. And Catulo saw that it was good and took the kissing craze to Rome, and we know this worked because afterwards Catulo kissed many men, women and little boys.

“Basciere” was the verb that the poet used for this new act of the kiss. The best thing would come later, when the French invented (some say they didn't) what is the best they have given the world after the poems of Baudelaire: the French kiss.

The Far East, nevertheless, was never subject of the Roman Empire and it did not know of kissing. In these lands the kiss has had a strange luck: even today we can't figure out why Jackie Chan and Jet Li never kiss the hot girls whom they rescue in their films, but is comprehensible if we remember that in the heat of the 20th century a Japanese cronist who visited the United States reviewed a kiss as a strange, repugnant event. And that one of the good points towards the movie The Last Samurai is that Tom Cruise did not kiss the Japanese woman during the torrid scenes.

Kissing, next to music, writing and electricity, must be on top of the human inventions, although perhaps Christ did not think the same about it at the garden of olives. If the kiss had become popular decades before Christ as it is today, an expression of desire and a preface to copulation, I'm sure that Christ and Judas would have exchanged a very manly and diplomatic handshake.

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