A man called Gianluca and I mounted the steps to the Friedrichsbad in pensive silence. We hadn’t made eye contact since we’d met in reception at our hotel, the divine Brenners, for this rendezvous with destiny. At the front desk, we were sternly reminded again of the dress code. We nodded. For the next three hours we were going to be stark naked in a 19th-century, Renaissance-themed, domed and frescoed temple to the God of Thermal Springs, adorned with hand-painted majolica tiles, statuary and a sequence of pools and chambers. ‘Kein Textil,’ the woman repeated.
After removing every stitch, we processed to the shower room – me checking that the area, which was equipped with vast ceiling-mounted bronze fittings, had several exits. I was wearing only blue plastic slippers. We weren’t given towels, just strips of white sheet like tiny togas.
Gianluca had left his spectacles behind. ‘Probably a good thing,’ I said, as I wrenched a lever for my regulation three-minute drenching. My ‘towel’ was already soaked so I abandoned it in a hammam where men lounged on stone benches, legs apart. Gianluca and I sat in silence on a raised dais, snuffing the sulphurous airs and glancing at our fellow bathers as if this was the most natural thing in the world.
In my head, I had entered a rhapsodic state already. ‘This is marvellous,’ I was thinking. ‘When in Baden-Baden, you should definitely go to the authentic Bad, not that modern one next door, the Caracalla, where you’re allowed swimwear, but here, this is the echt Bad,’ I was telling myself, pitying the others, who’d chosen to go to the super-deluxe spa and pool at the Brenners, and how they’d all wish they’d been to this proper old one by the ruins of the Roman baths after I had told them all about it.
For the next hour we moved silently between numbered pools and chambers, none very hot nor very cold, designed to warm and cool the body with air and water and purify the mind. I had entered a fugue state. It was clear to me now. The reason you or I can be as naked as a Lucian Freud for a few hours is that this is the one place where you would never say: ‘But don’t you know who I am?’
We are all equal, and equally human! This realisation is helped by nobody talking. Being fleshly as a Freud while simmering in waters spouted into the earth’s surface by artesian pressure from 12 individual springs containing sodium chloride, from a depth of 2,000 metres, cannot be improved by small talk of any kind.
This is the one place where you would never say: ‘But don’t you know who I am?’
Gianluca and I lolled in a pool beneath a cinnamon-coloured dome. This is one of the only times, I was thinking, where we can bask in an amniotic bubble as if we are babies, yes, babies who have returned in advanced middle-age to the blissful ataraxy of our mother’s wombs, all our needs and wants provided for by this warm immersion, cares washed away…
Without his spectacles, Gianluca couldn’t see where we should go next – and there were so many options. He turned to a man he assumed was a regular, a German regular, standing at one end of the pool we were in. He was wearing glasses. He looked at home.
Unfortunately, he turned out to be Scottish. ‘I’ll show ye,’ he said eagerly, hauling himself out. We had no choice but to follow his buttocks into a room where you bobbed in shallow water on slabs, like beached whales, and that was that.
Look, I didn’t mind showing my front bottom to any number of naked Germans. Given a choice, they’d be naked all the time. But I found I minded someone from Auld Reekie asking out loud in front of half of the Black Forest: ‘Are you Rachel Johnson?’ Of course I should have denied it but I didn’t think of that. ‘It’s your hair,’ he confided, breaking the fourth wall and whipping away my invisibility cloak at the same time.
As we lay with our herbal teas on daybeds afterwards, Gianluca apologised, but I was over it already and asking him how it was for him. Was there a vibe? I mean, were men checking each other out? I couldn’t tell, as I am not a gay male, you see.
‘Within seconds,’ he said, and then explained about the various men, ‘the skinny one in the corner’ and ‘that fat blond one with the button mushroom’, and the looks exchanged. Only gay men sit like that, legs akimbo, apparently.
As we left, pink and clean, and moisturised with special mineral lotions, we discovered that the fat blond one with the button mushroom was from Newcastle. I know this because he followed us out of the changing room, and suggested we went to this great little place he knew up the road ‘for a few beers’. Reader, we made our excuses and left the Geordie with the chode on the steps of the Friedrichsbad.
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