A Long Life

Nowadays our life has become longer, sometimes even beyond the capacity of our bones to sustain it, but Methuselahs existed and still do.
Beings capable of challenging the centuries, of remembering the two great Wars, one fought with cold weapons and the other with the Atomic bomb. The 20th Century gave us an awful temporal acceleration, launching us into this phenomenon.

Lately I’m hanging out with an octogenarian, still in quite good shape and an exceptional mental dexterity. Like all of these particular scientific cases he boasts of his mischief, flaunts an almost pathetic virility and the heterosexuality expected of his generation. But I adore him, he seems such a modern fossil! Together we make fun of the new fads and lifestyles, from vegans to the most fierce of teetotallers. It’s him, already past it, that comments “what point in life have these 80 or 90 year olds got!?”. He smokes Toscani cigars, drinks Italian wines, and rum with pestiferous toasted cocoa beans, I like to flatter him, listening to him a bit, pitying him and humouring him a bit.

But you should listen to how he talks about women! It seems as if he really knew his stuff, like Magellano would have told of Oceans. When I tell him this, he turns round and answers back insolently “my women, I had to undress them myself”.
He says it as if he really had relished in that discovery, reliving it on each different occasion. Maybe woman had loved him…

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