The sapiens — like all other species — responds naturally to basic stimuli. Food, prurience, the misfortune of others, and above all, sex. The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector observes that only one is more definitive and more pressing: the instinct to kill cockroaches. That, “if these had managed to escape human ferocity, it was because they had taken refuge in the dark, where they became invulnerable thanks to man’s congenital fear of the night”.

That is an instantaneous, tremendous impulse, undeliberate, almost pre-rational. Which is why it gets placed alongside the reproductive instinct. Both rise from the body before they reach the mind. If Clarice rates it as more urgent than the erotic, it is because the latter admits a degree of postponement, sublimation, and premeditated choice of setting. The urge to crush a cockroach is irrepressible — pisótiala, pisótiala, sings Pedro Luis Ferrer in “Pisotia la Cucaracha” (album Pedro Luis Ferrer, track 3, Caliente Records, 1999) — and brooks no negotiation. It forces you to detach from the desired body and go hunt down a chancleta with an almost neonatal desperation. And it is one of those rare moments in which a civilized, decent person recognizes herself capable of killing without guilt, almost with a dark satisfaction.

Back to sex: it can also be classified by its degrees of urgency. Setting aside the adolescent stage — crossed by an exhausting, umbral, dense obnubilation — for those who have logged over a thousand rounds, sex earns its stripes when it is risky or forbidden. Few moderns can claim never to have violated one of its commandments.

One of the first pieces I posted to this blog told the story of two heated Florida residents who were caught by a night watchman while making love atop an elephant woven from lantana camara. At the time I also worried about the structural integrity of the poor pachyderm. But it survived, and the Miami Beach lovers vanished into the night with or without remorse.

A couple of days ago I read a similar piece of news. Turbid and outright manipulative. It told, in the register of neighborhood gossip, that another lustful pair had been caught fucking inside a stuffed whale at a Swedish museum.

Something weighs on me about having taken it as fact right away. Which it is, let’s see. But the story is nearly a hundred years old and amounts to a much-repeated anecdote about the Malmska valen, the taxidermied blue whale of the Göteborgs Naturhistoriska Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The institution itself recounts that the whale beached on October 29th, 1865 in Askimsviken, south of Gothenburg; it measured over 16 meters and weighed some 25 tons. It was preserved over a wooden frame with the skin mounted onto it, and inside, a kind of parlor was fitted with benches and tapestries. The upper jaw could be hinged open so visitors could enter.

The scandalous part appears on the museum’s official website, vaguely worded. It says that, in the early twentieth century, a pair of lovers were caught inside the whale, and that from then on the institution decided to be more careful about keeping it open. Today it opens only on special occasions, such as election days or specific events. Atlas Obscura — a website (and book imprint) devoted to cataloguing unusual, curious, hidden, or little-known places of the world — places the episode in the 1930s.

The mania for fornicating in churches, museums, libraries, or cemeteries answers, generally speaking, to the intimate suspicion that sex, in itself, does not seem to be enough. That without a certain stage set, it is barely a biological errand whose choral background has been cancelled by a collective laryngitis. Meaning: that risk might be as necessary as lubrication. That outside the mattress consecrated by human or divine law, or by the most basic contemporaneity, it would amount to no more than a routine akin to brushing one’s teeth after a binge of stringy meat. If we need it as anecdote, to insist on how little attention we pay to whatever we consider an “institution,” fine. So be it.

Few are spared from having practiced it in the wildest locations. Stairwells, rooftops, inside fibrocement water tanks… enthusiasts may add their own. The ones remembered forever, though, oddly enough, are almost never recalled for the sexual episode itself, as does happen with the one performed in the venue intended for such activities and in a state of valid abandon.

I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is that it grows ever more difficult to take at face value what we see, hear, what we are told. In this first quarter of the century we dine far too often on the cat we’ve been sold as hare.

P.S.

The lovers’ anecdote is repeated across a great many sources (the GNM museum’s official website, the Swedish Wikipedia, Sveriges Radio, Atlas Obscura, Stockholmsmix, assorted blogs), but none cites a newspaper, a museum record, a name, an exact date, or a page number. The remark by the chairman of the Natural History Museum’s board — “Vi får vara nöjda över att denna förmån kommit ett par medborgare i vår egen stad till godo” / “We must content ourselves with the fact that this privilege fell to a couple of citizens of our own city” — has circulated everywhere ever since, without primary attribution.

Nor do the dates sit still. The official page says “början på 1900-talet” (early twentieth century), Sveriges Radio says “1920-talet,” Atlas Obscura says “sometime in the 1930’s,” and the Swedish Wikipedia leaves it suspended somewhere between 1918 and 1939. This carries some weight, because the folklore of Gothenburg around the whale has tended to invent episodes and to remember them as real. The amorous couple may well be one such case. To be fair, though, a story like that would never have made the official record. It is nearly impossible that an erotic scandal in the 1930s would have been amplified by the local press.

The journalist Kristian Wedel, of Göteborgs-Posten, has spent decades writing about the Malmska valen — over 43 articles, by his own count. He is the most obsessive journalistic expert that exists on the whale, and his story with the “café” supposedly installed inside it is highly illustrative. For years he devoted himself to debunking the myth that any such thing had ever existed inside the cetacean, demanding “photographs, receipts, menus, blueprints, permits, napkins” — and nothing ever surfaced. He received death threats for refusing to let it go.