When I first got to Argentina, I thought the little porcelain apparatus sitting beside almost every toilet in almost every bathroom (even some public ones) was a pissoir for men to use to not dribble up the toilet seat when peeing. My friend from Spain said she and her people used it mainly to wash their feet. And Fritz the Swiss assumed, naturally, that it was for women to wash their pussies before (and, if necessary, after) sex. (Yes, the same Fritz who forced me to break up with him in Thailand after repeatedly calling me a “hobby writer,” and who then showed up here three years later and pranced around my yard wearing nothing but his euro man-panties, like an exhibitionist Doctor Oetker, for eleven straight mornings.)
But this foreshortened co-toilet of which I speak is neither urinal nor foot bath nor pussy washer (though it can be easily used for all those things). It is a bidet! A bidet! A post-poop ass-washer! In South-East Asia, you use the little tube coming out of the wall to spray your crack clean. In India, beside the hole in the ground you do your business in, there’s usually a tap or a bucket of water to wash yourself with afterwards. Here, and in big parts of Europe, you see the more elaborate and decorative bidet. Most of the world, in fact, insists on washing their asses after shitting. So how do we North Americans get by with only a wipe or two? Why have none of us two-ply-paper-wadding Gringos ever once dreamed of installing a bidet (or a tube or a bucket of water) snug beside the toilet, and using it every day (or at least every day we take a shit) as part of our normal business. Do we really think that a few squares of flimsy Cottonelle can get us clean?
[This topic of “business”, I’m sure, makes many Gringuitos very uncomfortable. Farts and puke are generally okay topics for humour, but shit, sheizer, stools, and excrement, especially our own, is pretty much out-of-bounds for civilized discussion. But after so many years of living in the tropics with bacteria and amoebas and year-long bouts of diarrhea, for me, talking about my shit-life is completely natural. (Talking about my love-life would probably make me more uncomfortable.) When I was in Ethiopia with the Giullari, for example, we all knew the state of each others’ shits—the consistency, the frequency, the urgency with which we went. It was just a natural part of the trip. Living in Guatemala, one’s shit was usually a top-three topic for discussion on any given day, with any given person, even relative strangers, especially between May and October when the rains would wash the toiletless locals’ shit down the mountains and into the water sources, causing mass cases of regional runs.]
But back to the bidet. Once I discovered it—it took me a couple weeks to really get comfortable with it—this beautiful bathroom implement became an essential thing for me. The height of bathroom civilization. I mean, how did I think I could ever wipe off all the bad with just a couple swipes of paper? You don’t wipe dishes clean with a bit of Scott Towel, do you? No, you need water and soap to get your plates, and your ass, really clean. The bidet makes this easy (for the ass, though I suppose you could also wash the dishes in it) with its hot and cold taps and its little spray nozzle, allowing you to lather up then adjust the perfect stream of water to shoot up and wash your butthole to a squeakily spotless state. (I had a Welsh boyfriend once who said he always washed after shitting and he claimed, at fifty years old, to have an anus “as pink as a little baby’s.”)
The last house I lived in didn’t have a bidet, so for four months, I called a two-liter bottle of water a bidet. Make-shift and much more awkward, but it worked. Here in the new place, the bidet is right where it’s supposed to be, a foot away from the toilet, so that when my loaf is squeezed out (is that the expression? Or do I pinch out a puppy?) I just transfer my cheeks directly over, set the stream to high, and wash that dirty, dark part of me clean clean clean!
Yes, I believe clean cracks are a mark of true civilization.
You know what they say...Once bidet, never back.
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