The Libertine's Parish
I acquired *Libertine* before I understood that it had a past.
It arrived on my arm in the manner of many youthful convictions: partly as an act of allegiance—to the ragged British guitars, the beautiful disrepair, the aristocratic ruin of a rock-and-roll age I had observed from afar—and partly as an ornament, a small black flag planted on the flesh of a young man who wished, desperately and not altogether unsuccessfully, to look as though he had already survived interesting disasters.
At the time, I knew the name through the band. The Libertines: their songs, their jackets, their cultivated collapse, their mythology of camaraderie and catastrophe. I wanted the guitar, the cigarette-scorched glamour, the passport into a world in which one could be poor in spirit yet rich in poses. I did not initially reckon with the older word beneath the proper noun: the libertine as creature of appetite; a man accused, sometimes enviously, sometimes piously, of declining to submit the body to the household law of shame.
Later, as tattoos often do, it began to explain me after the fact.
I grew into the word, or permitted the word to grow around me. A libertine is rarely a monster in his own mirror. He is merely a citizen of a more generous republic: one in which desire is not automatically a confession, pleasure not automatically a crime, and variety not automatically evidence of spiritual bankruptcy. Yet every republic has its border guards. Mine wore, in memory at least, the faces of schoolmasters, parish notices, aunties, earnest fathers, and the invisible committee of the respectable.
I was baptized into a Catholic atmosphere in India—one of those small but intense enclaves where a church is not merely a building but a climate. In Bandra and Santa Cruz, the Catholic world had its own weather: Mass, uniforms, saints in glazed color, parental anxiety, the mild grandeur of English names, the insistence that one acquire a job, preferably a stable one, preferably one that could be mentioned without embarrassment at a family gathering. Airlines, offices, respectable firms: these were the sanctioned vessels of adulthood. “Do you have a job?” was not a question so much as a moral catechism.
The body, meanwhile, was permitted to exist only under discreet supervision.
Condoms carried the faint odor of moral defeat. Sex was discussed in the grammar of danger, impropriety, sin, scandal, consequence. The young were expected to enter adulthood through a narrow corridor: study, work, marriage, respectability; preferably in that order, and preferably without leaving fingerprints on the wallpaper. The parents’ generation, or at least the loudest custodians of it, had inherited a theology in which desire was always one bad decision away from becoming a spectacle.
Yet this was never the whole of India, nor the whole of Catholic India, nor even the whole of Bandra and Santa Cruz. No culture is as unified as its moralists advertise. Behind every clean front door there were romances, indiscretions, family secrets, private bargains, unblessed loves, and longings that did not consult the parish calendar. Public restraint and private improvisation have always shared a house.
The remarkable thing about Christian memory is that its central figure has so often been recruited as a superintendent of exclusion, although the Gospel Jesus repeatedly moved toward those whom polite society arranged at a distance. Tax collectors, the ill, the compromised, the disreputable, the socially tainted: he did not dissolve moral questions into sentimentality, but neither did he make contempt into a sacrament. He understood, perhaps better than his later bureaucrats, that a human being is more than the accusation attached to his name.
This is why the old association of Jesus with prostitutes has such force, even when casually phrased. The point is not that he sponsored debauchery or maintained a bohemian salon of sinners. The point is sharper: he would not allow a person’s social stigma to become the final word on that person’s worth. In a world of strict ranks, he committed the nearly revolutionary act of attention.
Prostitution itself, that old and complicated traffic between hunger, power, money, loneliness, coercion, performance, and desire, has always made easy material for moral certainty. People call it the oldest profession because the phrase is elegant, not because history can certify it. Long before professions were professions, there were surely hands that hunted, planted, healed, built, carried, nursed, guarded, cooked, and buried the dead. But commercial sex is undeniably ancient because the conditions that surround it are ancient: inequality, migration, male demand, economic desperation, the cruelty of ownership, the loneliness of cities, and the genius of human beings for turning even intimacy into an exchange.
To call it merely a “human need” is too neat. Desire is human; so are tenderness, fantasy, boredom, vanity, curiosity, and appetite. But a market is never morally neutral simply because it responds to desire. The history of sex work contains voluntary choices, yes, but also coercion, trafficking, poverty, and bodies made available because other doors had been locked. A mature view has room for pleasure without becoming blind to power.
That, perhaps, is the distinction my tattoo taught me in its slow black way. Libertinism is not simply having many lovers; it is the theatrical decision to make one’s freedom visible. It announces itself. It is a costume, a rumor, a self-authored legend. And legends are dangerous in provincial places—not because provincial people lack sophistication, but because they possess the particular sophistication of surveillance. Everybody knows something. Everybody has heard something. Everybody is sufficiently modern to tolerate a scandal, so long as it belongs to somebody else.
In one social circle, I became the internationalized man: artsy, entrepreneurial, mobile, perhaps indulgent, perhaps fortunate, perhaps suspiciously unconcerned with the ordinary milestones that turned other men into acceptable adults. I had more latitude, perhaps more money, perhaps more audacity; and all three can look like vice to those who have had to build their lives around a timetable. A man with an office job may envy the musician, while judging him. The musician may envy the office worker’s settled legitimacy, while pretending not to. Each sees in the other a freedom he has either surrendered or feared.
And so the tattoo remained: *Libertine*, first a borrowed badge from English rock, then an accidental prophecy, then a question written on the skin.
The world has opened since the India of the 1990s and early 2000s. Or perhaps the doors were always there, and the internet, cheap flights, migration, language, and commerce merely taught us where the hinges had been hidden. A man can be born in one moral neighborhood and become, by travel and temperament, a citizen of several worlds. He can carry the scent of incense from childhood into bars, hotel rooms, studios, airports, border crossings, and late-night conversations with strangers who know none of the rules that once made him feel watched.
Still, no one entirely escapes the first parish.
Even the cosmopolitan carries a little province inside him: its streets, its gossip, its expectations, its invisible fathers asking whether he has found a proper job. We become men of the world only after first being accused of leaving home. And perhaps that is the secret comedy of the libertine: he believes he has escaped judgment, while the old tribunal continues to convene in the architecture of his memory.
The tattoo does not settle the case. It only records that the case was brought.