Give Me Fever

Just as I re-surfaced from a wicked heat wave (nine days of 97°F/36°C plus or minus 1°C) in Madrid, after three days of practically arctic temperatures (no higher than 90°/32°), I was hit with another birthday and rising temperatures yet again, up to 35° yesterday. Slogging my way through the birthday aftermath, I'm contemplating the feverish dreams my brain has seen fit to devise for me over the last couple of weeks. Now I'm no Jungian, and it's undoubtedly for the best that I hardly ever remember my dreams. But this fitful sleeping in hot and stuffy little rooms is a perfect dream factory, and it's very difficult to avoid the conclusion that my subconscious, at least, is simply not signed onto the fact that I live in Madrid now.

All three dreams have centered around Berlin, and two of the three, unsurprisingly, involved lusciously cold weather. In one, I seemed to have misplaced a lover somewhere in another country, and turned up another, ill from alcoholism; all the while the Lidl/Kaiser's/Robben und Wientjes area north of the Prenzlauerberg S-Bahn had turned into an ice-skating pond (doesn't that sound great?)! In the second, that previously misplaced lover inexplicably turned up with another woman on a bus in the German countryside, while I had apparently become invisible to him and his friends. Before I had time to become too distressed about this, the bus stopped and dumped us all out somewhere well outside of Berlin, with lots of snow and no clear way to get back to town. To put the icing on the cake, I was completely on my own while everyone else, somehow, miraculously had cars. OK, so, angst and displacement, perfectly explainable, particularly as I'd seen the very very eccentric Anti-Christ (Lars von Trier's latest) the night before the second dream.

But it's the one from last night that has me freaked out, as Mr. Not-a-Gentleman, about whom I hadn't thought for months, somehow replaced Sergi López (picture me wailing in distress) in a faintly-related and definitely sexual reprise of Isabel Coixet's movie, Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, that I just saw last night. López, one of my favorite actors since the oh-so-sexy Une Liaison Pornographique, was also fabulous in Dirty Pretty Things and Harry, Un Ami qui Vous Veut du Bien. In Tokyo, he meets a Japanese lover weekly at a "love hotel" with thematic rooms, Sergi Lopez's character's choice being one done up as a train car (I do admit to that being one of my own particular, ahem, preferences, as well). I can't recommend the movie (for me the plot's too weak), but there is one particular scene where López comes up for air, after pleasuring his co-star's character, and, with the coyest look possible, acts out removing a pubic hair from his tongue. Fascinating concept, that: a French woman directing a Spanish star in a scene that pointedly features (gasp) oral sex au naturel. I do believe it should be required viewing for all Spanish adult males in 2009. Oh my poor, poor brain, please try again tonight, to get it right.