Delta of Venus

Elena

While waiting for the train to Montreux, Elena looked at the people around her on the quays. Every trip aroused in her the same curiosity and hope one feels before the curtain is raised at the theater, the same stirring anxiety and expectation.

She singled out various men she might have liked to talk with, wondering if they were leaving on her train or merely saying good-bye to other passengers. Her cravings were vague, poetic. If she had been brutally asked what she was expecting she might have answered, ‘Le merveilleux’. It was hunger that did not come from any precise region of her body. It was true, what someone had said about her after she had criticized a writer she had met: ‘You cannot see him as he really is, you cannot see anyone as he really is. He will always be disappointing because you are expecting someone.’

She was expecting someone – every time a door opened, every time she went to a party, to any gathering of people, every time she entered a café, a theater.

None of the men she had singled out as desirable companions for the trip boarded the train. So she opened the book she was carrying. It was Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Afterwards Elena remembered nothing of this trip except a sensation of tremendous bodily warmth, as if she had drunk a whole bottle of the very choicest Burgundy, and a feeling of great anger at the discovery of a secret which it seemed to her was criminally withheld from all people. She discovered first of all that she had never known the sensations described by Lawrence, and second, that this was the nature of her hunger. But there was another truth she was now fully aware of. Something had created in her a state of perpetual defense against the very possibilities of experience, an urge for flight which took her away from the scenes of pleasure and expansion. She had stood many times on the very edge, and then had run away. She herself was to blame for what she had lost, ignored.

It was the submerged woman of Lawrence’s book that lay coiled within her, at last exposed, sensitized, prepared as if by a multitude of caresses for the arrival of someone.

A new woman emerged from the train at Caux. This was not the place she would have liked to begin her journey. Caux was a mountain top, isolated, looking down upon Lake Geneva. It was spring, the snow was melting, and as the little train panted up the mountain, Elena felt irritation about its slowness, the slow gestures of the Swiss, the slow movement of the animals, the static, heavy landscape, while her moods and her feelings were rushing like newborn torrents. She did not plan to stay very long. She would rest until her new book was ready to be published.

From the station she walked to a chalet that looked like a fairytale house, and the woman who opened the door looked like a witch. She stared with coal-black eyes at Elena, and then asked her to come in. It seemed to Elena that the whole house was built for her, with doors and furniture smaller than usual. It was no illusion, for the woman turned to her and said, ‘I cut down the legs of my table and chairs. Do you like my house? I call it Casutza – “little house,” in Roumanian.’

Elena stumbled on a mass of snow shoes, jackets, fur hats, capes and sticks near the entrance. These things had overflowed from the closet and were left there on the floor. The dishes from breakfast were still on the table.

The witch’s shoes sounded like wooden shoes as she walked up the stairs. She had the voice of a man, and a small black rim of hair around her lips, like an adolescent’s mustache. Her voice was intense, heavy.

She showed Elena to her room. It opened on a terrace, divided by bamboo partitions, which extended the length of the sunny side of the house, facing the lake. Elena was soon lying exposed to the sun, although she dreaded sun baths. They made her passionate and burningly aware of her whole body. She sometimes caressed herself. Now she closed her eyes and recalled scenes from Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

During the following days she took long walks. She would always be late for lunch. Then Madame Kazimir would stare at her angrily and not talk as she served her. People came every day to see Madame Kazimir about mortgage payments on the house. They threatened to sell it. It was clear that if she were deprived of her house, her protective shell, her turtle back, she would die. At the same time, she turned out guests she did not like and refused to take in men.

Finally she surrendered at the sight of a family – husband, wife, and a little girl – who arrived one morning straight from the train, captivated by the fantastic appearance of Casutza. Before long they were sitting on the porch next to Elena’s and eating their breakfast in the sun.

One day Elena met the man, walking alone up toward the peak of the mountain behind the chalet. He walked fast, smiled at her as he passed, and continued as though pursued by enemies. He had taken his shirt off to receive the rays of the sun fully. She saw a magnificent athlete’s torso already golden. His head was youthful, alert, but covered with graying hair. The eyes were not quite human. They had the fixed, hypnotic gaze of an animal tamer, something authoritative, violent. Elena had seen such an expression in the pimps who stood at the corners of the Mont-martre district, with their caps and scarves of bright colors.

Apart from his eyes, this man was aristocratic. His movements were youthful and innocent. He swayed as he walked, as though he were a little drunk. All his strength centered in the glance he gave Elena, and then he smiled innocently, easily, and walked on. Elena was stopped by the glance and almost angered by the boldness of it. But his youthful smile dissolved the mordant effect of the eyes and left her with feelings she could not clarify. She turned back.

When she reached Casutza, she was uneasy. She wanted to leave. The desire for flight was already asserting itself. By this she recognized that she was facing a danger. She thought of returning to Paris. In the end, she stayed.

One day the piano, which had been growing rusty downstairs, began to pour out music. The slightly false notes sounded like the pianos of dingy little bars. Elena smiled. The stranger was amusing himself. He was, in fact, playing up to the nature of the piano, and giving it a sound quite alien to its bourgeois staleness, nothing like what had been played on it before by little Swiss girls with long braids.

The house was suddenly gay, and Elena wanted to dance. The piano stopped, but not before winding her up like some mechanical puppet. Alone on the porch, she turned on her feet like a top. Quite unexpectedly a man’s voice very near her said, ‘There are live people in this house after all!’ and laughed.

He was calmly looking through the bamboo slits, and she could see his figure clinging there like that of an imprisoned animal.

‘Won’t you come for a walk?’ he asked her. ‘I think this place is a tomb. It is the House of the Dead. Madame Kazimir is the Great Petrifier. She will make stalactites out of us. We shall be allowed one tear an hour, hanging from some cave ceiling, stalactite tears.’

So Elena and the neighbor started out. The first thing he said was, ‘You have a habit of turning back, starting a walk and turning back. That is very bad. It is the very first of crimes against life. I believe in audacity.’

‘People express audacity in various ways,’ said Elena. ‘I usually turn back, as you say, and then I go home and write a book which becomes an obsession of the censors.’

‘That’s a misuse of natural forces,’ said the man.

‘But then,’ said Elena, ‘I use my book like dynamite, I place it where I want the explosion to take place, and then I blast my way through with it!’

As she said these words an explosion took place somewhere in the mountain where a road was being made, and they laughed at the coincidence.

‘So you are a writer,’ he said. ‘I am a man of all trades, a painter, a writer, a musician, a vagabond. The wife and child were temporarily rented – for the sake of appearance. I was forced to use the passport of a friend. This friend was forced to lend me the wife and child. Without them I would not be here. I have a gift for irritating the French police. I have not murdered my concierge, though I should have. She has provoked me often enough. I have merely, like some other verbal revolutionaries, exalted the revolution too loudly on too many evenings at the same café, and a plainclothes man was one of my most fervent followers – follower, indeed! My best speeches are always made when I am drunk.

‘You were never there,’ continued the man, ‘you never go to cafés. The most haunting woman is the one we cannot find in the crowded café when we are looking for her, the one that we must hunt for, and seek out through the disguises of her stories.’

His eyes, smiling, remained on her all the time that he talked. They were fixed on her with the exact knowledge of her evasions and elusiveness, and acted like a catalyst on her, rooting her to the spot where she stood, with the wind lifting her skirt like a ballerina’s, inflating her hair as if she would blow away in full sail. He was aware of her capacities for becoming invisible. But his strength was greater, and he could keep her rooted there as long as he wanted. Only when he turned his head away was she free again. But she was not free to escape him.

After three hours of walking, they fell on a bed of pine needles within sight of a chalet. A pianola was playing.

He smiled at her and said, ‘It would be a wonderful place to spend the day and night. Would you like it?’

He let her smoke quietly, lying back on the pine needles. She did not answer. She smiled.

Then they walked to the chalet and he asked for a meal and a room. The meal was to be brought up to the room. He gave his orders smoothly, leaving no doubt about his wishes. His decisiveness in small acts gave her the feeling that he would equally wave aside all obstacles to his greatest desires.

She was not tempted to retrace her steps, to elude him. A feeling of exaltation was rising in her, of reaching that pinnacle of emotion which would fling her out of herself for good, which would abandon her to a stranger. She did not even know his name, nor he hers. The nakedness of his eyes on her was like a penetration. On the way upstairs, she was trembling.

When they found themselves alone in the room with its immense, heavily carved bed, she first moved toward the balcony, and he followed her. She felt that the gesture he would make would be a possessive one, one that could not be eluded. She waited. What happened, she had not expected.

It was not she who hesitated, but this man whose authority had brought her here. He stood before her suddenly slack, awkward, his eyes uneasy. He said with a disarming smile, ‘You must know, of course, that you are the first real woman I have ever known – a woman I could love, I have forced you here. I want to be sure that you want to be here. I …’

At this acknowledgment of his timidity she was immensely moved by tenderness, a tenderness she had never experienced before. His strength was bowing to her, was hesitating before the fulfillment of the dream that had grown between them. The tenderness engulfed her. It was she who moved toward him and offered her mouth.

Then he kissed her, his hands on her breasts. She felt his teeth. He kissed her neck where the veins were palpitating, and her throat, his hands around her neck as if he would separate her head from the rest of her body. She swayed with desire to be taken wholly. As he kissed her he undressed her. The clothes fell around her and they were still standing together kissing. Then without looking at her he carried her to the bed, with his mouth still on her face and throat and hair.

His caresses had a strange quality, at times soft and melting, at other times fierce, like the caresses she had expected when his eyes fixed on her, the caresses of a wild animal. There was something animal-like about his hands, which he kept spread over each part of her body, and which took her sex and hair together as if he would tear them away from the body, as if he grasped earth and grass together.

When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body. He whispered now and then, telling her to raise her legs, as she had never done, until the knees touched her chin; he whispered to her to turn, and he spread her backside with his two hands. He rested inside of her, lay back and waited.

Then she withdrew, half sat up, her hair wild and her eyes drugged, and through a half-mist saw him lying on his back. She slipped down in the bed until her mouth reached his penis. She began kissing all around it. He sighed. The penis shook slightly at each kiss. He was looking at her. His hand was on her head and he pressed it downward so her mouth would fall over the penis. His hand remained on her as she moved up and down and then fell, fell with a sigh of unbearable pleasure, fell on his belly and lay there, with eyes closed, tasting her joy.

She could not look at him as he looked at her. Her eyes were blurred by the violence of her feelings. When she looked at him she was magnetically drawn again to touch his flesh, with her mouth or hands, or with her whole body. She rubbed her whole body against his, with animal luxuriance, enjoying the friction. Then she fell on her side and lay there, touching his mouth as if she were molding it over and over again, like a blind person who wants to discover the shape of the mouth, of the eyes, of the nose, to ascertain his form, the feel of his skin, the length and texture of his hair, the shape of the hair behind his ears. Her fingers were light as she did this, then suddenly they would become frenzied, press deep into the flesh and hurt him, as if violently to assure her of his reality.

These were the external feelings of the bodies discovering each other. From so much touching they grew drugged. Their gestures were slow and dreamlike. Their hands were heavy. His mouth never closed.

How the honey flowed from her. He dipped his fingers in it lingeringly, then his sex, then he moved her so that she lay on him, her legs thrown over his legs, and as he took her, he could see himself entering into her, and she could see him too. They saw their bodies undulate together, seeking their climax. He was waiting for her, watching her movements.

Because she did not quicken her movements, he changed her position, making her lie back. He crouched over so that he could take her with more force, touching the very bottom of her womb, touching the very flesh walls again and again, and then she experienced the sensation that within her womb some new cells awakened, new fingers, new mouths, that they responded to his entrance and joined in the rhythmic motion, that this suction was becoming gradually more and more pleasurable, as if the friction had aroused new layers of enjoyment. She moved quicker to bring the climax, and when he saw this, he hastened his motions inside of her and incited her to come with him, with words, with his hands caressing her, and finally with his mouth soldered to hers, so that the tongues moved in the same rhythm as the womb and penis, and the climax was spreading between her mouth and her sex, in cross-currents of increasing pleasure, until she cried out, half sob and half laughter, from the overflow of joy through her body.

When Elena returned to Casutza, Madame Kazimir refused to speak to her. She carried her stormy condemnation about silently but so intensely that it could be felt all through the house.

Elena postponed her return to Paris. Pierre could not return. They met every day, sometimes staying the whole night away from Casutza. The dream continued unbroken for ten days, until a woman came to call. It was an evening when Elena and Pierre were away. His wife received her. They locked themselves up together. Madame Kazimir tried to listen to what they said but they caught sight of her head at one of the little windows.

The woman was Russian. She was unusually beautiful, with violet eyes and dark hair, an Egyptian cast of features. She did not talk very much. She appeared greatly disturbed. When Pierre arrived in the morning he found her there. He was quite evidently surprised. Elena received a shock of inexplicable anxiety. She feared the woman immediately. She sensed danger for her love. Yet when Pierre met her hours later, he explained it all on the basis of his work. The woman had been sent with orders. He was to move on. He was given work to do in Geneva. He had been rescued from the complications in Paris with the understanding that he was to obey orders from then on. He did not say to Elena, ‘Come with me to Geneva.’ She waited for his words.

‘How long will you be away?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you going with … ?’ She could not even repeat her name.

‘Yes, she is in charge.’

‘If I am not to see you any more, Pierre, tell me at least, the truth.’

But neither his expression nor his words seemed to come from the man she knew intimately. He seemed to be saying what he had been made to say, nothing more. He had lost all his personal authority. He was talking as if someone else were listening to him. Elena was silent. Then Pierre approached her and whispered, ‘I am not in love with any woman. I never have been. I am in love with my work. With you I was in great danger. Because we could talk together, because we were so near each other in so many ways, I stayed with you too long. I forgot my work.’

Elena was to repeat these words to herself over and over again. She remembered his face as he talked, his eyes no longer fixed on her with obsessional concentration, but like those of a man obeying orders, not the laws of desire and love.

Pierre, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.

She never questioned Pierre’s words or considered pursuing him. She left Casutza before he did. On the train she recalled his face as it had been, so open, commanding, yet somewhere, vulnerable and yielding too.

The most terrifying aspect of her feelings was that she was unable to shrink back as before, to shut out the world, to become deaf, colorblind, and to throw herself into some long-drawn-out fantasy, which she had done as a girl to replace reality. She was obsessed with concern for his safety, with anxiety over the dangerous life he led; she realized that he had not only penetrated her body but also her very being. Whenever she thought of his skin, his hair where the sun had bleached it a fine gold, his steady green eyes, flickering only at the moment when he bent over her to take her mouth between his strong lips, then her flesh vibrated, still responded to the image, and she was tortured.

After hours of a pain so vivid and strong that she thought it would shatter her completely, she fell into a strange state of lethargy, a half-sleep. It was as if something had broken inside of her. She ceased to feel pain or pleasure. She was numb. The entire trip became unreal. Her body was dead again.

After eight years of separation, Miguel had come to Paris. Miguel had come but was not bringing Elena any joy or relief, for he himself was the very symbol of her first defeat. Miguel was her first love.

When she first met him they were mere children, two cousins lost at a huge family dinner of many cousins and aunts and uncles. Miguel had been drawn to Elena magnetically, following her like a shadow, listening to her every word, words no one could hear, her voice was so small and transparent.

He wrote her letters from that day on, came to see her now and then during school holidays – a romantic attachment, in which each one used the other as the embodiment of the legend or story or novel they had read. Elena was every heroine; Miguel was every hero.

When they met, they were enveloped in so much unreality that they could not touch each other. They did not even hold hands. They were exalted in each other’s presence, they soared together, they were moved by the same sensations. She was the first to experience a deeper emotion.

They went to a dance together, unaware of their beauty. Other people were. Elena saw all the other young girls stare at Miguel and try to attract his attention.

Then she saw him objectively, outside of this warm devotion in which she had enveloped him. He stood a few yards away, a very tall and lithe young man, his movements easy, graceful and strong, his muscles and nerves like those of a leopard, with a gliding walk but in readiness to spring. His eyes were leaf-green, fluid. His skin was luminous, a mysterious sun glow shining through it, like that of some phosphorescent undersea animal. His mouth was full, with a look of sensual hunger in it, with the perfect teeth of a predatory animal.

And for the first time he saw her outside of the legend in which he had enveloped her, saw her pursued by every man, her body never static, always poised in movement, light on its feet, supple, almost evanescent, tantalizing. The quality which set everyone to hunt her down was something in her that was violently sensual, alive, earthy; her full mouth was all the more vivid because of the delicate body that moved with the fragility of tulle.

This mouth, embedded in a face from another world, out of which came a voice which touched the soul directly, so lured Miguel that he would not let other boys dance with her. At the same time no part of his body touched her except when they danced. Her eyes drew him into her, and into worlds where he was numb, like a drugged person.

But she, as she danced with him, had become aware of her body, as if it had suddenly turned to flesh – ignited flesh, into which each motion of the dance threw a flame. She wanted to fall forward into the flesh of his mouth, abandon herself to a mysterious drunkenness.

Miguel’s drunkenness was of another kind. He behaved as if seduced by an unreal creature, a fantasy. His body was dead to hers. The nearer he moved to her, the stronger he felt this taboo surrounding her, and he stood as if he were before a sacred image. As soon as he entered her presence, what he succumbed to was a kind of castration.

As her body warmed to his nearness, he found nothing to say but her name: ‘Elena!’ At this, his arms and legs and sex were so paralyzed that he stopped dancing. What he was aware of as he uttered her name was his mother, his mother as he had seen her when he was small; that is, a woman larger than other women, immense, abundant, with the curves of her maternity overflowing from her loose white clothes, the breasts from which he had nourished himself and which he had clung to past the age of necessity, until the time when he was becoming conscious of the full dark mystery of flesh.

So each time he saw the breasts of big, full women who resembled his mother, he experienced the desire to suckle, to chew, to bite and even hurt them, to press them against his face, to suffocate under their bursting fullness, to fill his mouth with the nipples, but he felt no desire to possess with sexual penetration.

Now Elena, when he first met her, had the tiny breasts of a girl of fifteen, which aroused in Miguel a certain contempt. She had none of the erotic attributes of his mother. He was never tempted to undress her. He never pictured her as a woman. She was an image, like the images of saints on little cards, the images of heroic women in books, the paintings of women.

Only whores possessed sexual organs. Miguel had seen such women very early when his older brothers had dragged him to the whorehouses. While his brothers took the women, he caressed their breasts. He filled his mouth with them, hungrily. But he was frightened by what he saw between their legs. To him it looked like a huge, wet, hungry mouth. He felt that he could never satisfy it. He was frightened by the luring crevice, the lips rigid under the stroking finger, the liquid that came like the saliva of a hungry person. He imagined this hunger of women as tremendous, ravenous, insatiable. It seemed to him that his penis would be swallowed forever. The whores he happened to see had big sexes, big, leathery sex lips, big buttocks.

What was there left for Miguel to turn to with his desires? Boys, boys without the gluttonous openings, boys with sexes like his, that did not frighten him, whose desires he could satisfy.

So on the very evening that Elena experienced this dart of desire and warmth in her body, Miguel had discovered the intermediate solution, a boy who aroused him without taboos, fears and doubts.

Elena, completely innocent of the love between boys, went home and sobbed all night because of Miguel’s remoteness. She had never been more beautiful; she felt his love, his worship. Then why did he not touch her? The dance had brought them together, but he was not inflamed. What did this mean? What mystery was this? Why was he jealous when others approached her? Why had he watched the other boys who were so eager to dance with her? Why did he not touch even her hand?

Yet he haunted her, and was haunted by her. Her image predominated over all women. His poetry was for her, his creations, his inventions, his soul. The sexual act alone took place away from her. How much suffering would have been spared her had she known, understood. She was too delicate to overtly question him, and he too ashamed to reveal himself.

And now Miguel was here, with his past life known to all, a long train of love affairs with boys, never lasting. He was always in quest, always unsatisfied – Miguel, with the same charm, only enhanced, stronger.

Again she sensed his remoteness, the distance between them. He would not even take her arm, shining brown in the Parisian summer sun. He admired all she wore, her rings, her tinkling bracelets, her dress, her sandals, but without touching her.

Miguel was being analyzed by a famous French doctor. Every time he moved, loved, took someone, it seemed the knots of his life drew closer around his throat. He wanted liberation, liberation to live out his abnormality. This he did not have. Each time he loved a boy, he did so with a sense of crime. The aftermath was guilt. And then he sought to atone with suffering.

Now he could talk about it, and he opened his whole life before Elena, without shame. It caused her no pain. It relieved her doubts about herself. Because he did not understand his nature, he had at first blamed her, put on her the burden of his frigidity toward woman. He said it was because she was intelligent, and intelligent women mixed literature and poetry with love, which paralyzed him; and that she was positive, masculine, in some of her ways, and this intimidated him. She was so young at the time, she had readily accepted this and come to believe that slender, intellectual, positive women could not be desired.

He would say: ‘If only you were very passive, very obedient, very very inert, I might desire you. But I always feel in you a volcano about to explode, a volcano of passion, and that frightens me.’ Or: ‘If you were just a whore, and I could feel that you would not be too exacting, too critical, I might desire you. But I would feel your clever head watching me and looking down on me if I failed, if, for instance, I were suddenly impotent.’

Poor Elena, for years she completely overlooked the men who desired her. Because Miguel was the one she had wanted to seduce, it seemed to her that only Miguel could have proved her power.

Miguel, in his need of someone other than his analyst to confide in, introduced Elena to his lover, Donald. As soon as Elena saw Donald she loved him too, as she would a child, an enfant terrible, perverse and knowing.

He was beautiful. He had a slender Egyptian body, wild hair like that of a child who had been running. At times the softness of his gestures made him seem small, but when he stood up, stylized, pure in line, stretched, then he seemed tall. His eyes were in a trance, and he talked flowingly, like a medium.

Elena was so enchanted with him that she began to enjoy subtly and mysteriously Miguel’s making love to him – for her. Donald as a woman, being made love to by Miguel, courting his youthful charm, his sweeping eyelashes, his small, straight nose, his faun ears, his strong, boyish hands.

She recognized in Donald a twin brother who used her words, her coquetries, her artifices. He was obsessed with the same words and feelings that obsessed her. He talked continually about his desire to be consumed in love, about his desire for renunciation and for protection of others. She could hear her own voice. Was Miguel aware that he was making love to a twin brother of Elena, to Elena in a boy’s body?

When Miguel left them at the café table for a moment, they looked at each other with a stare of recognition. Without Miguel, Donald was no longer a woman. He straightened his body, looked at her unflinchingly, and talked about how he was seeking intensity and tension saying that Miguel was not the father he needed -Miguel was too young, Miguel was just another child. Miguel wanted to offer him a paradise somewhere, a beach where they could make love freely, embrace day and night, a paradise of caresses and lovemaking; but he, Donald, sought something else. He liked the infernos of love, love mixed with great sufferings and great obstacles. He wanted to kill monsters and overcome enemies and struggle like some Don Quixote.

As he talked about Miguel, there came to his face the same expression women have when they have seduced a man, an expression of vain satisfaction. A triumphant, uncontrollable inner celebration of one’s power.

Each time Miguel left them for a moment Donald and Elena were acutely aware of the bond of sameness between them, and of a malicious feminine conspiracy to enchant and seduce and victimize Miguel.

With a mischievous glance, Donald said to Elena, ‘Talking together is a form of intercourse. You and I exist together in all the delirious countries of the sexual world. You draw me into the marvelous. Your smile keeps a mesmeric flow.’

Miguel returned to them. Why was he so restless? He went for cigarettes. He went for something else. He left them. Each time he returned she saw Donald change, become woman again, tantalizing. She saw them caressing each other with their eyes, and pressing their knees together under the table. There was such a current of love between them that she was taken into it. She saw Donald’s feminine body dilating, she saw his face open like a flower, his eyes thirsty, and his lips wet. It was like being admitted into the secret chambers of another’s sensual love, and seeing in both Donald and Miguel what would otherwise be concealed. from her. It was a strange transgression.

Miguel said, ‘You two are exactly alike.’

‘But Donald is more truthful,’ said Elena, thinking how easily he betrayed the fact that he did not love Miguel wholly, whereas she would have concealed this, out of the fear of hurting the other.

‘Because he loves less,’ said Miguel. ‘He is a narcissist.’

A warmth broke through the taboo between Donald and Elena, and Miguel and Elena. Love now flowed among the three of them, shared, transmitted, contagious, the threads binding them.

She could look with Miguel’s eyes at Donald’s finely designed body, the narrow waist, the square shoulders of an Egyptian relief figure, the stylized gestures. His face expressed a dissolution so open that it seemed like an act of exhibitionism. Everything was revealed, naked to the eye.

Miguel and Donald spent afternoons together, and then Donald would seek out Elena. With her he asserted his masculinity and felt that she transmitted to him the masculine in her, the strength. She felt this and said, ‘Donald, I give you the masculine in my own soul.’ In her presence he became erect, firm, pure, serious. A coalescence took place. Then he was the perfect hermaphrodite.

But Miguel could not see this. He continued to treat him as a woman. True, when Miguel was present, Donald’s body softened, his hips began to sway, his face became that of the cheap actress, the vamp receiving flowers with a batting of the eyelashes. He was as fluttery as a bird, with a petulant mouth pursed for small kisses, all adornment and change, a burlesque of the little gestures of alarm and promise made by women. Why did men love this travesty of women and yet elude women?

And in contradiction, there was Donald’s male fury against being taken like a woman: ‘He overlooks the masculine in me completely,’ he complained. ‘He takes from behind, he insists on giving it to me through the ass, and treating me like a woman. And I hate him for this. He will make a real fairy out of me. I want something else. I want to be saved from becoming a woman. And Miguel is brutal and masculine with me. I seem to tantalize him. He turns me over by force and takes me as if I were a whore.’

‘Is this the first time you have been treated like a woman?’

‘Yes, before this I have done nothing but sucking, never this – mouth and penis, that was all – kneeling before the man you love and taking it into your mouth.’

She looked at Donald’s small, childish mouth and wondered how he could get it inside. She remembered a night when she had been so frenzied with Pierre’s caresses that she had enveloped his penis and balls and hair in her two hands with a kind of gluttony. She had wanted to take it into her mouth, something she had never wanted to do to anyone before, and he had not let her because he liked it so much inside of her womb, and wanted it there for good.

And now she could see so vividly a huge penis – Miguel’s blond penis, perhaps, entering Donald’s small child’s mouth. Her nipples hardened at the image and she turned her eyes away.

‘He takes me all day, in front of mirrors, on the floor of the bathroom, while he holds the door with his foot, on the rug. He is insatiable, and he disregards the male in me. If he sees my penis, which is really larger than his, and more beautiful – really, it is – he does not notice it. He takes me from behind, mauls me like a woman, and leaves my penis dangling. He disregards my masculinity. There is no fulfillment between us.’

‘It is like the love between women, then,’ said Elena. ‘There is no fulfillment, no real possession.’

One afternoon Miguel asked Elena to come to his room. When she knocked at the door she heard scurrying. She was about to turn away when Miguel came to the door and said, ‘Come in, come in.’ But his face was congested, his eyes bloodshot, his hair wild, and his mouth marked by kisses.

Elena said, ‘I’ll come back later.’

Miguel answered, ‘No, come, you can sit in the bathroom for a little while. Donald will be leaving.’

He wanted her to be there! He could have sent her away. But he led her through the little hallways into the bathroom which adjoined the bedroom, and sat her there, laughing. The door remained open. She could hear the groans and the heavy panting. It was as if they were fighting there together in the dark room. The bed creaked rhythmically, and she heard Donald say, ‘You hurt me.’ But Miguel was panting and Donald had to repeat, ‘You hurt me.’

Then the groaning continued, the rhythmic creaking of the bedsprings accelerated, and despite all Donald had told her, she heard his groan of joy. Then he said, ‘You’re stifling me.’

The scene in the dark affected her strangely. She felt part of herself sharing in it, as a woman, she as a woman within Donald’s boy’s body, being made love to by Miguel.

She was so affected that, to distract herself, she opened her bag and took out a letter she had found in her letterbox before leaving but had not read yet.

When she opened it, it was like a thunderbolt: ‘My elusive and beautiful Elena, I am in Paris again, for you. I could not forget you. I tried. When you gave yourself entirely, you also took me wholly and entirely. Will you see me? You have not retreated and shrunk beyond me for good? I deserve this, but do not do it to me, you will be murdering a deep love, deeper for its struggle against you. I am in Paris …’

Elena got up and ran out of the apartment, slamming the door as she left. When she reached Pierre’s hotel he was waiting for her, eager. He had no light on in his room. It was as if he wanted to meet her in the darkness, to better feel her skin, her body, her sex.

The separation had made them feverish. In spite of their savage encounter Elena could not have an orgasm. Deep within her was a reserve of fear, and she could not abandon herself. Pierre’s pleasure came with such strength that he could not hold it back to wait for her. He knew her so well he sensed the reason for her secret withdrawal, the wound he had dealt her, the destruction of her faith in his love.

She lay back weary from desire and caresses, but without fulfillment. Pierre bent over her and said in a gentle voice, ‘I deserve this. You are hiding away, even though you want to meet me. I have lost you forever.’

‘No,’ said Elena, ‘wait. Give me time to believe in you again.’

Before she left Pierre, he tried again to possess her. He again met with that secret, ultimately closed being, she who had attained a wholeness in sexual pleasure the first time she had been caressed by him. Then Pierre bowed his head and sat at the edge of the bed, defeated, sad.

‘But you’ll come back tomorrow, you’ll come back? What can I do to make you trust me?’

He was in France without papers, risking arrest. For greater security Elena hid him at the apartment of a friend who was away. They met every day now. He liked to meet her in the darkness, so that before they could see each other’s face, their hands became aware of the other’s presence. Like blind people, they felt each other’s body, lingering in the warmest curves, making the same trajectory each time; knowing by touch the places where the skin was softest and tenderest and where it was stronger and exposed to daylight; where, on the neck, the heartbeat was echoed; where the nerves shivered as the hand came nearer to the center, between the legs.

His hands knew the fullness of her shoulders so unexpected in her slender body, the tautness of her breasts, the febrile hairs under her arm, which he had asked her not to shave. Her waist was very small, and his hands loved that curve opening wider and wider from the waist to the hips. He followed each curve lovingly, seeking to take possession of her body with his hands, imagining the color of it.

Only once had he looked at her body in full daylight, in Caux, in the morning, and then he had delighted in the color of it. It was pale ivory, and smooth, and only towards the sex this ivory became more golden, like old ermine. Her sex he called ‘the little fox’, whose hair bristled when his hand reached out for it.

His lips followed his hands; his nose, too, buried in the odors of her body, seeing oblivion, seeking the drug that emanated from her body.

Elena had a little mole hidden away in the folds of secret flesh between the legs. He would pretend to be seeking it when his fingers ran up between the legs and behind the fox’s bush, pretend to be wanting to touch the little mole and not the vulva; and as he caressed the mole, it was only accidentally that he touched the vulva, so lightly, just lightly enough to feel the quick plantlike contraction of pleasure which his fingers produced, the leaves of the sensitive plant closing, folding over the excitement, enclosing its secret pleasure, whose vibrato he felt.

Kissing the mole and not the vulva, while sensing how it responded to the kisses given a little space away, traveling under the skin, from the mole to the tip of the vulva, which opened and closed as his mouth came near. He buried his head there, drugged by the sandalwood smells, seashell smells; by the caress of her pubic hair, the fox’s bush, one strand losing itself inside of his mouth, another losing itself among the bedclothes, where he found it later, shining, electric. Often their pubic hairs mingled. Bathing afterwards, Elena would find strands of Pierre’s hair curled among hers, his hair longer, thicker and stronger.

Elena let his mouth and hands find all kinds of secret shelters and nooks, and rest there, falling into a dream of enveloping caresses, bowing her head over his when he placed his mouth on her throat, kissing the words she could not utter. He seemed to divine where she wanted a kiss to fall next, what part of her body demanded to be warmed. Her eyes fell on her own feet, and then his kisses went there, or below her arm, or in the hollow of her back, or where the belly ran into a valley, where the pubic hairs began, small and light and sparse.

Pierre stretched out his arm as a cat might, to be stroked. He threw his head back at times, closed his eyes, and let her cover him with moth kisses that were only a promise of more violent ones to come. When he could no longer bear the silky light touches, he opened his eyes and offered his mouth like a ripe fruit to bite, and she fell hungrily on it, as if to draw from it the very source of life.

When desire had permeated every little pore and hair of the body, then they abandoned themselves to violent caresses. At times she could hear her bones crack as he raised her legs above his shoulders, she could hear the suction of the kisses, the raindrop sound of the lips and tongues, the moisture spreading in the warmth of the mouth as if they were eating into a fruit which melted and dissolved. He could hear her strange muffled crooning sound, like that of some exotic bird in ecstasy; and she, his breath, which came more heavily as his blood grew denser, richer.

When his fever rose, his breath was like that of some legendary bull galloping furiously to a delirious goring, a goring without pain, a goring which lifted her almost bodily from the bed, raised her sex in the air as if he would thrust right through her body and tear it, leaving her only when the wound was made, a wound of ecstasy and pleasure which rent her body like lightning, and let her fall again, moaning, a victim of too great a joy, a joy that was like a little death, a dazzling little death that no drug or alcohol could give, that nothing else could give but two bodies in love with each other, in love deep within their beings, with every atom and cell and nerve, and thought.

Pierre was sitting at the edge of the bed and had slipped his pants on and was fastening the buckle of his belt. Elena had slipped on her dress but was still coiled around him as he sat. Then he showed her his belt. She sat up to look at it. It had been a heavy, strong leather belt with a silver buckle but was now so completely worn that it looked about to tear. The tip of it was frayed. The places where the buckle fastened were almost as thin as a piece of cloth.

‘My belt is wearing out,’ Pierre said, ‘and it makes me sad because I have had it ten years.’ He studied it contemplatively.

As she looked at him sitting there, with his belt not yet fastened, she was sharply reminded of the moment before he unfastened his belt to let his pants down. He never unfastened it until a caress, a tight embrace of their bodies against one another, had aroused his desire so that the confined penis hurt him.

There was always that second of suspense before he loosened his pants and took out his penis for her to touch. Sometimes he let her take it out. If she could not unbutton his underwear quickly enough, then he did it himself. The little snapping sound of the buckle affected her. It was an erotic moment for her, as was, for Pierre, the moment before she took down her panties or loosened her garters.

Though she had been fully satisfied a moment before, she was aroused again. She would have liked to unfasten the belt, let his pants slip down and touch his penis once more. When it first came out of the pants, how alertly it straightened itself to point to her, as if in recognition.

Then suddenly the realization that the belt was so old, that Pierre had always worn it, struck her with a strange, sharp pain. She saw him unfastening it in other places, other rooms, at other hours, for other women.

She was jealous, acutely jealous, with this image repeating itself. She wanted to say, ‘Throw the belt away. At least do not carry the same one that you wore for them. I will give you another.’

It was as if his feeling of affection for the belt were a feeling of affection for the past that he could not rid himself of entirely. For her, the belt represented the gestures made in the past. She asked herself if all the caresses had been the same.

For a week or so Elena responded completely to his embraces, almost lost consciousness in his arms, sobbed once with the acuteness of her joys. Then she noticed a change in his mood. He was preoccupied. She did not question him. She interpreted his preoccupation in her own way. He was thinking of his political activity, which he had surrendered for her. Perhaps he was suffering from his inaction. No man could live completely for love as a woman could, could make this the purpose of his life and fill his days with it.

She could have lived for nothing else. In fact, she lived for nothing else. The rest of the time – when she was not with him – she felt and heard nothing clearly. She was absent. She only came to life fully in his room. All day, as she did other things, her thoughts circled around him. Alone in bed, she remembered his expressions, the laughter at the corner of his eyes, the willfulness of his chin, the glittering of his teeth, the shape of his lips as he uttered words of desire.

That afternoon she lay in his arms, noticed the clouds on his face, the clouded eyes, and could not respond to him. Usually they were in rhythm. He felt when her pleasure was mounting, and she, his. In some mysterious way they could hold back the orgasm until the moment when each was ready for it. Usually they were slow in their rhythmic motions, then quicker, then still quicker, in time with the rising temperature of the blood and the mounting waves of pleasure, and they reached the orgasm together, his penis quivering as it spurted semen, and her womb quivering from the darts, which were like flickering tongues of fire inside of her.

Today he waited for her. She moved to meet his thrusts, arching her back, but she did not come. He begged her, ‘Come, my darling. Come, my darling. I can’t wait any longer. Come, my darling.’

He emptied himself in her and fell on her breast without a sound. He lay there as if she had struck him. Nothing wounded him more than her unresponsiveness.

‘You’re cruel,’ he said. ‘Why are you holding back from me now?’

She was silent. She herself was sad that anxiety and doubt could so easily close her being to a possession she wanted. Even if it were to be the last, she wanted it. But because she feared it might be the last, her being closed, and she was deprived of real union with him. And without the orgasm experienced together, there was no union, no absolute communion between the two bodies. Afterwards, she knew, she would be tortured as she had been other times. She would be left unsatisfied, with the imprint of his body on hers.

She would re-enact the scene in her mind, see him bending over her, see how their legs appeared when they were tangled together, see how over and over again his penis penetrated her, how he fell away when it was over, and she would experience the stirring hunger again, and be tormented with desire to feel him deep inside of her body. She knew the tension of unsatisfied desire, the nerves unbearably awake, keen, naked, the blood in turmoil, everything set for a climax that did not take place. Afterwards she could not sleep. She felt cramps along her legs, making her shake like a restless racehorse. Obsessional erotic images pursued her all through the night.

‘What are you thinking of?’ said Pierre, watching her face.

‘Of how sad I will be when I leave you, after not being really yours.’

‘There is something else on your mind, Elena, something that was there when you came, something I want to know.’

‘I’m concerned about your depression and have asked myself if you missed your activity and were wishing to return to it.’

‘Oh, that was it. That was it. You were preparing for my leaving again. But that was not in my mind. On the contrary. I have seen friends who will help me prove that I was not active, that I was only a café revolutionist. Do you remember the character in Gogol? The man who talked day and night but never moved, acted? That is me. That is all I have done – talk. If this can be proved, then I can stay and be free. That is what I am struggling for.’

What an effect these words had on Elena! – as great as her fears had had on her sensual being, arresting her impulses, dominating them. It frightened her. She now wanted to lie on Pierre and have him take her. She knew that his words were sufficient to release her. He may have divined this, for he continued his caresses for a long time, waiting for the touch of his fingers on her moist skin to arouse his desire again. And much later, as they lay in the dark, he took her again, and then she had to hold back the intensity and quickness of her orgasm so as to have it with him, and they both cried out, and she wept with joy.

From then on the struggle of their love was to defeat this coldness which lay dormant in her and which a word, a small wound, a doubt, could bring out to destroy their possession of each other. Pierre became obsessed with it. He was more intent on watching her moods and predispositions than his own. Even as he enjoyed her, his eyes searched her for a sign of that future clouding, always hanging over them. He exhausted himself waiting for her pleasure. He withheld his. He stormed against this unconquerable core of her being, which could close at will against him. He began to understand some of men’s perverse devotions to frigid women.

The citadel – the impregnable virgin woman: The conqueror in Pierre, who had never burst forth to carry out a real revolution, gave itself to this conquest, to once and forever break down this barrier that she could erect against him. Their lover’s meetings became a secret battle between two wills, a series of ruses.

If they had a quarrel (and he quarreled over her intimate association with Miguel and Donald, because he said they were making love to her through the bodies of each other) then he knew she would withhold her orgasm from him. He stormed and sought to conquer her with the wildest caresses. He treated her brutally at times, as if she were a whore and he could pay for her submission. At other times he tried to melt her with tenderness. He made himself small, almost a child in her arms.

He surrounded her with erotic atmosphere. He made of their room a den, covered with rugs and tapestries, perfumed. He sought to reach her through her response to beauty, luxury, odors. He bought her erotic books, which they read together. This was his latest form of conquest – to arouse a sexual fever in her so potent that she could never resist his touch. As they lay on the couch together and read, their hands wandered over each other’s body, to the places described in the book. They exhausted themselves in excesses of all kinds, seeking every pleasure known to lovers, fired by images and words and descriptions of new positions. Pierre believed he had awakened in her such a sexual obsession that she could never control herself again. And Elena did seem corrupted. Her eyes began to shine in an extraordinary way, not with the effulgence of day, but with a disquieting light like that of a tubercular patient, with a fever so intense that it burned rings around them.

Now he ceased to leave the room in darkness. He liked to see her arrive with this fever in her eyes. Her body seemed to have become heavier. Her nipples were always hard, as if she were constantly in a state of erotic excitement. Her skin had become so hypersensitive that as soon as he touched her it rippled under his fingers. A shiver passed through her back, touching every nerve.

They would lie on their stomachs, still dressed, open a new book and read together, with their hands caressing each other. They kissed over erotic pictures. Their mouths, glued together, fell over enormous protruding women’s asses, legs open like a compass, men squatting like dogs, with huge members almost dragging the floor.

There was a picture of a tortured woman, impaled on a thick stick which ran into her sex and out of her mouth. It had the appearance of ultimate sexual possession and aroused in Elena a feeling of pleasure. When Pierre took her, it seemed to her that the joy she felt at his penis belaboring her was communicated to her mouth. She opened it, and her tongue protruded, as in the picture, as if she wanted his penis in her mouth at the same time.

For days Elena would respond madly, almost like a woman who was about to lose her reason. But Pierre discovered that a quarrel or a cruel word from him could still arrest her orgasm and kill the erotic flame in her eyes.

When they had exhausted the novelty of erotica, they found a new realm – the realm of jealousy, terror, doubt, anger, hatred, antagonism, of the struggle human beings undergo at times against the bond to one another.

Pierre sought now to make love to the other selves of Elena, the most buried ones, the most delicate ones. He watched her sleep, he watched her dress, he watched her as she combed her hair before the mirror. He sought a spiritual clue to her being, one he could reach with a new form of lovemaking. He no longer spied on her to make certain she had enjoyed an orgasm, for the very simple reason that Elena had now decided to pretend enjoyment even when she did not feel it. She became a consummate actress. She showed all the symptoms of pleasure, the contraction of the vulva, the quickening of the breath, of the pulse, of the heartbeats, the sudden languor, the falling away, the half-fainting fog that followed. She could simulate everything – to her, loving and being loved were so irrevocably mixed with her pleasure that she could achieve a breathless emotional response even if she did not feel physical enjoyment – everything, that is, but the inner palpitation of the orgasm. But this, she knew, was difficult to detect with the penis. She had found Pierre’s struggle to always obtain an orgasm from her destructive, and foresaw that it might well end in taking away his confidence in her love and ultimately separate them. She chose the course of pretense.

So now Pierre turned his attention to another kind of courtship. As soon as she entered he noted how she moved, how she took her coat and hat off, how she shook her hair, what rings she wore. He thought that from all these signs he could detect her mood. Then this mood became his ground for conquest. Today she was childlike, pliant, with her hair loose, her head bowing easily with the weight of all her life. She had on less make-up, an innocent expression, she wore a light dress of bright colors. Today he would caress her gently, with tenderness, observing the perfection of her toes, for instance, as free as the fingers of a hand; observing her ankles, on which pale-blue veins showed through; observing the little ink spot forever tattooed below her knee, where, when she was fifteen – a girl in school and wearing black stockings – she had covered a little hole in the stockings with ink. The pen point had broken during the process, wounding her and marking her skin for good. He would look for a broken fingernail so that he might deplore its loss, its pathetic truncated look among her other long, pointed ones. He worried over all her little miseries. He held close to him the little girl in her, whom he would have liked to know. He asked questions: ‘So you wore black cotton stockings?’

‘We were very poor, and it was also part of the school uniform.’

‘What else did you wear?’

‘Middy blouses and dark blue skirts, which I hated. I loved finery so.’

‘And underneath?’ he asked, with such innocence that he might have been asking whether she wore a raincoat in the rain.

‘I’m not sure what my underclothes were like then – I liked petticoats with frills on them, I remember. I’m afraid I was made to wear woolen underwear. And in the summer, white slips and bloomers. I did not like the bloomers. They were too full. I dreamed of lace then, and gazed by the hour at the underwear in shop windows, entranced, imagining myself in satin and lace. You would have found nothing entrancing about a little girl’s underwear.’

But Pierre thought yes, that no matter if it were white and perhaps shapeless, he could imagine himself very much in love with Elena in her black stockings.

He wanted to know when she had experienced her first sensual tremor. It was while reading, said Elena, and then while coasting on a sled with a boy lying full length over her, and then when she fell in love with men she only knew at a distance, for as soon as they came near her, she discovered some defect that estranged her. She needed strangers, a man seen at a window, a man seen once a day in the street, a man she had seen once in a concert hall. After such encounters, Elena let her hair fall wild, was negligent in her dress, slightly wrinkled, and sat like some Chinese woman concerned with small events and delicate sadnesses.

Then, lying at her side, holding only her hand, Pierre talked about his life, offering her images of himself as a boy, to match those of the little girl she brought him. It was as if in each the older shells of their mature personalities had dissolved, like some added structure, a superimposition, revealing the cores.

As a child, Elena had been what she had suddenly become again for him – an actress, a simulator, someone who lived in her fantasies and roles and never knew what she truly felt.

Pierre had been a rebel. He had been raised among women, without his father, who had died at sea. The woman who mothered him was his nurse, and his mother lived only to find a replacement for the man she had lost. There was no motherhood in her. She was a born mistress. She treated her son like a young lover. She fondled him extravagantly, received him in the morning in her bed, in which he could still detect the recent presence of a man. He shared her lazy breakfast brought by the nurse, who was always incensed to find the boy lying in bed next to his mother, where a moment before her lover had been.

Pierre loved the voluptuousness of his mother, the flesh always appearing through lace, the outline of the body transparent between skirts of chiffon; he loved the sloping shoulders, the fragile ears, the long mocking eyes, the opalescent arms emerging from full-blown sleeves. Her preoccupation was how to make a feast of every day. She eliminated people who were not amusing, anyone who told stories of illness or misfortune. If she went shopping, it was done extravagantly, as if for Christmas, and included everyone in the family, surprises for all; and for herself – caprices and useless things, which accumulated around her until she gave them away.

At ten Pierre was already initiated into all the preparations which a life filled with lovers demanded. He assisted at his mother’s toilette, watched her powder herself under the arms and slip the powder puff into her dress, between her breasts. He saw her emerge from the bath half-covered by her kimono, her legs naked, and watched her pull on her very long stockings. She liked her garters to grip her very high, so that the stockings almost touched her hips. As she dressed she talked about the man she was going to meet, extolling to Pierre the aristocratic nature of this one, the charm of another, the naturalness of a third, the genius of a fourth – as if Pierre should some day become all of them for her.

When Pierre was twenty she discouraged all his friendships with women, even his visits to the whorehouse. The fact that he sought women who resembled her did not impress her. In the whorehouses he asked the women to dress up for him, deliberately and slowly, so that he could enjoy an obscure, undefinable joy – the same joy he had experienced in the presence of his mother. For this ceremony he demanded coquetry and particular clothes. The whores laughingly humored him. During these games his desires would suddenly run wild; he tore at the clothes, and his lovemaking resembled a rape.

Beyond this lay the mature regions of his experience which he did not confess to Elena that day. He gave her only the child, his own innocence, his own perversity.

There were days when certain fragments of his past, the most erotic, would rise to the surface, permeate his every movement, give to his eyes the disquieting stare Elena had first seen in him, to his mouth a laxness, an abandon, to his whole face an expression of one whom no experience had eluded. She could then see Pierre and one of his whores together, a willful seeker of poverty, dirt and decay as the only proper accompaniment to certain acts. The apache, the voyou appeared in him, the man of vice who could drink for three days and three nights, abandoning himself to every experience as if it were the ultimate one, spending all his desire on some monstrous woman, desiring her because she was unwashed, because so many men had taken her and because her language was charged with obscenities. It was a passion for self-destruction, for baseness, for the language of the street, women of the street, danger. He had been caught in opium raids and arrested for selling a woman.

It was his capacity for anarchy and corruption that gave him at times the expression of a man capable of anything, and that kept awake in Elena a mistrust of him. At the same time, he was fully aware of her own attraction to the demonic and the sordid, to the pleasure of falling, of desecrating and destroying the ideal self. But because of his love for her, he would not let her live out any of this with him. He was afraid to initiate her and lose her to one vice or another, to some sensation he could not give her. So this door upon the corrupt element of their natures was seldom opened. She did not want to know what his body had done, his mouth, his sex. He feared to uncover the possibilities in her.

‘I know,’ he said, that you are capable of many loves, that I will be the first one, that from now on nothing will stop you from expanding. You’re sensual, so sensual.’

‘You can’t love so many times,’ she answered. ‘I want my eroticism mixed with love. And deep love one does not often experience.’

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past. She became aware that she was twenty-five and he was forty, that he had experienced many things he was already tired of and she had not yet known.

When the silence grew long and Elena did not see on Pierre’s face an expression of innocence, but on the contrary, a hovering smile, a certain contempt in the outline of the lips, then she knew he was remembering the past. She lay at his side looking at his long eyelashes.

After a moment he said, ‘Until I knew you, I was a Don Juan, Elena. I never wanted to really know a woman. I never wanted to stay with one. My feeling was always that a woman used her charms not for the sake of a passionate relationship but to win from a man some durable relationship – marriage, for instance, or at least companionship – to win, finally, some kind of peace, possession. It was this that frightened me – the sense that behind the grande amoureuse lay concealed a little bourgeoise who wanted security in love. What attracts me to you is that you have remained the mistress. You maintain the fervor and the intensity. When you feel unequal to the great battle of love, you stay away. Another thing, it is not the pleasure I can give you which attaches you to me. You repudiate it when you are not emotionally satisfied. But you are capable of all things, of anything. I feel that. You are open to life. I opened you. For the first time I regret my power to open women to life, to love. How I love you when you refuse to communicate with the body, seeking other means to reach into the entire being. You did everything to break down my resistance to pleasure. Yes, at first, I could not bear this power you had to withdraw. It seemed to me that I was losing my power.’

This talk again inspired in Elena a sense of the unstable in Pierre. She never rang his bell without wondering if he might be gone. In an old closet he had discovered a pile of erotic books concealed under blankets by the former occupants of the place. Now he met her every day with a story to make her laugh. He saw that he had saddened her.

He did not know that when the erotic and the tender are mixed in a woman, they form a powerful bond, almost a fixation. She could think only of erotic images in connection with him, his body. If she saw a penny movie on the boulevards that stirred her, she brought her curiosity or a new experiment to their next meeting. She began to whisper certain wishes in his ear.

Pierre was always surprised when Elena was willing to give him pleasure without taking it herself. There were times after their excesses when he was tired, less potent, and yet wanted to repeat the sensation of annihilation. Then he would stir her with caresses, with an agility of the hands that approached masturbation. Meanwhile her own hands would circle around his penis like a delicate spider with knowing fingertips, which touched the most hidden nerves of response. Slowly, the fingers closed upon the penis, at first stroking its flesh shell; then feeling the inrush of dense blood stretching it; feeling the slight swell of the nerves, the sudden tautness of the muscles; feeling as if they were playing upon a stringed instrument. By the degree of tautness Elena knew when Pierre could not sustain sufficient hardness to penetrate her, she knew when he could only respond to her nervous fingers, when he wanted to be masturbated, and soon his own pleasure would slow down the activity of his hands on her. Then he would be drugged by her hands, close his eyes and abandon himself to her caresses. Once or twice he would try, as if in sleep, to continue the motion of his own hands, but then he lay passively, to feel better the knowing manipulations, the increasing tension. ‘Now, now,’ he would murmur. ‘Now.’ This meant that her hand must become swifter to keep pace with the fever pulsing within him. Her fingers ran in rhythm with the quickening blood beats, as his voice begged, ‘Now, now, now.’

Blind to all but his pleasure, she bent over him, her hair falling, her mouth near his penis, continuing the motion of her hands and at the same time licking the tip of the penis each time it passed within reach of her tongue – this, until his body began to tremble and raised itself to be consumed by her hands and mouth, to be annihilated, and the semen would come, like little waves breaking on the sand, one rolling upon another, little waves of salty foam unrolling on the beach of her hands. Then she enclosed the spent penis tenderly in her mouth, to cull the precious liquid of love.

His pleasure gave her such a joy that she was surprised when he began to kiss her with gratitude, as he said, ‘But you, you didn’t have any pleasure.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Elena, in a voice he could not doubt.

She marveled at the continuity of their exultation. She wondered when their love would enter a period of repose.

Pierre was gaining liberty. He was often out when she telephoned. Meanwhile she was advising an old friend, Kay, who was just back from Switzerland. On the train Kay had met a man who could be described as the younger brother of Pierre. Kay had always so identified with Elena, been so dominated by Elena’s personality, that the only thing which could satisfy her was an adventure which, at least in some superficial way, resembled Elena’s.

This man also had a mission. What the, he did not confess, but he used it as an excuse, perhaps an alibi, when he went away or when he had to spend a whole day without seeing Kay. Elena suspected that she gave Pierre’s double stronger colors than he actually possessed. To begin with, she endowed him with abnormal virility marred only by his habit of falling asleep before or immediately after the act, without waiting to thank her. He passed from the middle of a conversation to a sudden desire for rape. He hated underwear. He taught her not to wear anything under her dress. His desire was imperative – and unexpected. He could not wait. With him, she learned hasty departures from restaurants, wild drives in curtained taxi cabs, séances behind the trees in the Bois, masturbation in cinemas – never in a bourgeois bed, in the warmth and comfort of a bedroom. His desire was distinctly ambulant and bohemian. He liked carpeted floors, even the cold floors of bathrooms, super-heated Turkish baths, opium dens, where he did not smoke but where he liked to lie with her on a narrow mat, and their bones would ache afterwards from falling asleep. Kay’s job was to keep alert enough to follow his caprices, and to try to catch her own elusive pleasure, in this wild race, which might have come easier with a little leisure surrounding it.

But no, he enjoyed these sudden tropical outbursts. She followed him like a somnambulist, giving Elena the feeling that she knocked against him in a reverie, as against a piece of furniture. Sometimes, when the scene had happened too swiftly for her to bloom voluptuously and completely under his rape, she lay at his side while he slept and invented a more thorough lover. She closed her eyes and thought: Now his hand is lifting my dress slowly, very slowly. He is looking at me first. One hand lies over my buttocks, and the other begins exploring, sliding, circling. Now he dips his finger there, where it is moist. He touches it like a woman feeling a piece of silk, to see its quality. Very slowly.

Pierre’s double would turn over on his side, and Kay would hold her breath. If he awakened, he would find her with her hands in a strange position. Then suddenly, as if he had guessed her wishes, he would place his hand between her legs and leave it there, so that she could not move. The presence of his hand aroused her more than ever. Then she would close her eyes again and try to imagine that his hand was moving. To create a sufficiently vivid image for herself, she would begin to contract and open her vagina, rhythmically, until she felt the orgasm.

Pierre had nothing to fear from the Elena he knew and had so delicately circumnavigated. But there was an Elena he did not know, the virile Elena. Although she did not wear short hair or a man’s suit, ride a horse, smoke cigars or frequent the bars where such women congregate, there was a spiritually masculine Elena, dormant in her for the moment.

In all but matters of love, Pierre was helpless. He could not nail a nail to a wall, hang up a picture, repair a book, discuss technical matters of any kind. He lived in terror of servants, concierges, plumbers. He could not make a decision, sign a contract of any sort; he did not know what he wanted.

Elena’s energies rushed into these lacunas. Her mind became the more fecund. She bought the books and newspapers, incited activity, made decisions. Pierre permitted this. It suited his nonchalance. She gained in audacity.

She felt protective toward him. As soon as the sexual aggression was over, he reclined like a pasha and let her rule. He did not observe another Elena emerging, affirming new contours, habits, a new personality. Elena had discovered that women were drawn to her.

She was invited by Kay to meet Leila, a well-known nightclub singer, a woman of dubious sex. They went to Leila’s house. She was lying in bed. The room was heavily charged with the perfume of narcissus, and Leila rested against the headboard in a languid, intoxicated way. Elena thought she was recovering from a night of drinking, but this was Leila’s natural pose. And from this languid body came a man’s voice. Then the violet eyes fixed themselves on Elena, appraising her with masculine deliberateness.

Leila’s lover, Mary, entered the room then, with a rushing sound of wide silk skirts inflated by her quick steps. She threw herself at the foot of the bed and took Leila’s hand. They looked at each other with so much desire that Elena lowered her eyes. Leila’s face was sharp, Mary’s vague; Leila’s, drawn in heavy charcoal around the eyes as in the Egyptian frescos, Mary’s, in pastels – pale eyes, sea-green eyelids and coral nails and lips; Leila’s eyebrows natural, Mary’s, a pencil line only. When they looked at each other, Leila’s features seemed to dissolve, and Mary’s to acquire some of Leila’s definiteness. But her voice remained unreal, and her phrases unfinished, floating. Mary was uneasy in Elena’s presence. Instead of expressing hostility or fear, she took the feminine attitude, as toward a man, and sought to charm her. She did not like the way Leila looked at Elena. She sat near Elena, folding her legs under her like a little girl, and turned her mouth up toward her as she talked, invitingly. But these childish mannerisms were the very ones Elena disliked in women. She turned toward Leila whose gestures were mature and simple.

Leila said, ‘Let’s go together to the studio. I’ll get dressed.’ As she leaped out of her bed she abandoned her languor. She was tall. She used apache French, like a boy, but with a royal audacity. No one could use it on her. She did not entertain at the nightclub; she ruled. She was a magnetic center for the world of women who considered themselves condemned by their vice. She whipped them into being proud of their deviations, not succumbing to bourgeois morality. She severely condemned suicides and disintegration. She wanted women who were proud of being Lesbians. She set the example. She wore men’s clothes despite police regulations. She was never molested. She did it with grace and nonchalance. She rode horseback at the Bois in men’s clothes. She was so elegant, so suave, so aristocratic, that people who did not know her bowed to her, almost unconsciously. She made other women hold up their heads. She was the one masculine woman men treated as a comrade. Whatever tragic spirit lay behind this polished surface went into her singing, with which she tore people’s serenity to shreds, spreading anxiety and regrets and nostalgia everywhere.

In the taxi, sitting next to her, Elena felt not her strength but her secret wound. She ventured a gesture of tenderness. She took the royal hand and kept it. Leila did not let it lie there, but responded to the pressure with a nervous power. Already Elena knew what this power failed to obtain for her: fulfillment. Surely, the whimpering voice of Mary and her obvious little ruses could not satisfy Leila. Women were not as tolerant as men toward women who made themselves small and weak by calculation, thinking to inspire an active love. Leila must suffer more than a man, because of her lucidity about women, her incapacity to be deceived.

When they reached the studio, Elena smelled a curious odor of burnt cacao, of fresh truffle. They entered what seemed to be a smoke-filled Arabian mosque. It was a huge room surrounded by a gallery of alcoves furnished only with mats and little lamps. Everybody was wearing kimonos. Elena was handed one. And then she understood. This was an opium den: the lights veiled; people lying down, indifferent to newcomers; a great peace; no sustained conversations, but a sigh now and then. A few for whom opium awakened desire lay in the darkest corners, spoon-fashion, as if asleep. But in the silence, the voice of a woman began what seemed at first to be a song, and then turned out to be another sort of vocalizing, the vocalizing of the exotic bird finally caught in the mating season. Two young men held each other, whispering.

Elena heard at times the fall of pillows on the floor, the crushing of silks and cottons. The woman’s vocalizing became clearer, firmer, rising in harmony with her pleasure, so even in its rhythm Elena accompanied it with a movement of her head, until it reached its height. Elena saw that this cadenza irritated Leila. She did not want to hear it. It was so explicit, so female, betraying women’s soft cushion of love pierced by the male, uttering with each thrust a little cry of the ecstatic wound. No matter what women did to each other, they could never bring forth this rising cadenza, this vaginal song; only a sequence of stabbings, man’s repeated assault, could produce this.

The three women fell on little mattresses, side by side. Mary wanted to lie close to Leila. Leila would not let her. The host offered them opium pipes. Elena refused one. She was sufficiently drugged by the veiled lamps, the smoky atmosphere, the exotic hangings, the doors, the muffled sounds of caresses. Her face was so entranced that Leila herself believed Elena was under the influence of some other drug. She did not realize that the pressure of Leila’s hand in the taxi had plunged Elena into a state that was unlike anything Pierre had ever aroused in her.

Instead of reaching right to the center of her body, Leila’s voice and touch had enveloped her in a voluptuous mantle of new sensations, something in suspense that did not seek fulfillment but prolongation. It was like this room, affecting one by its mysterious lights, its rich odors, its shadowy niches, its half-seen forms, its mysterious enjoyments. A dream. Opium could not have enlarged or dilated her senses any more than they were, could not have given her a greater sense of joy.

Her hand reached out to Leila’s. Mary was smoking already with her eyes closed. Leila was lying back, with her eyes open, looking at Elena. She took Elena’s hand, held it for a while, and then she slipped it under her kimono. She placed it over her breasts. Elena began caressing her. Leila had opened her tailored suit. She wore no blouse. But the rest of her body was sheathed in a tight skirt. Then Elena felt Leila’s hand running delicately under her dress, seeking for an opening between the tops of her stockings and her underwear. Elena turned gently on her left side, so that she could place her head over Leila’s breast and kiss it.

She was afraid Mary might open her eyes and get angry. Now and then she looked at her. Leila smiled. Then she turned over to whisper to Elena: ‘We will meet sometime and be together. Do you want it? Will you come to my place tomorrow? Mary will not be there.’

Elena smiled, assented with a nod, stole one more kiss and lay back. But Leila did not withdraw her hand. She watched Mary and continued to caress Elena. Elena was dissolving under her fingers.

It seemed to Elena they had been lying there only a moment, but then she noticed the studio was growing colder and morning had come. She sprang up, surprised. The others seemed to be asleep. Even Leila had fallen back and slept now. Elena slipped on her coat and left. The early dawn revived her.

She wanted to talk to someone. She saw that she was quite near to Miguel’s studio. Miguel was asleep with Donald. She woke him and sat at the foot of the bed. She talked. Miguel could barely understand her. He thought she was drunk.

‘Why is my love for Pierre not strong enough to keep me from this?’ she kept repeating. ‘Why is it throwing me into other loves? And loves for a woman? Why?’

Miguel smiled. ‘Why are you so afraid of a little detour? It’s nothing. It will pass. Pierre’s love has awakened your real nature. You’re too full of love, you will love many people.’

‘I don’t want to, Miguel. I want to be whole.’

‘That’s not such a great infidelity, Elena. In another woman you’re only seeking yourself.’

From Miguel’s she went home, bathed and rested and went to Pierre. Pierre was in a tender mood. So tender he lulled her doubts and secret anguish, and she fell asleep in his arms.

Leila waited for her in vain. For two or three days Elena hid from thoughts of her, winning from Pierre greater proofs of love, seeking to be encircled, protected from wandering away from him.

He was quick to observe her distress. Almost by instinct, he held her back when she wanted to leave earlier, prevented her physically from going anywhere. Then with Kay, Elena met a sculptor, Jean. His face was soft, feminine, appealing. But he was a lover of women. Elena was on the defensive. He asked for her address. When he came to see her she talked volubly against intimacy.

He said, ‘I would like something lovelier and warmer.’

She was frightened. She became even more impersonal. They were both uneasy. She thought: Now it is spoiled. He will not return. And she regretted it. There was an obscure attraction. She could not define it.

He wrote her a letter: ‘When I left you, I felt newborn, cleansed of all falsities. How did you give birth to a new self without even wanting to? I will tell you what happened to me once. I stood on the corner of a street in London looking at the moon. I looked so persistently at it that it hypnotized me. I do not remember how I got home, hours and hours later. I always felt that during that time I had lost my soul to the moon. That is what you did to me, in that visit.’

As she read this she became vividly aware of his chanting voice, his charm. He sent other letters with pieces of rock crystal, with an Egyptian scarab. She left them unanswered.

She felt his attraction, but the night she spent with Leila had given her a strange fear. She had returned to Pierre that day feeling as if she were returning from a long trip and had been estranged from him. Each bond had to be renewed. It was this separateness she feared, the distance that it created between her deep love and herself.

Jean waited for her at the door of her house one day and caught her as she walked out, trembling, pale with excitement, unable to sleep. She was angry that he had the power to unnerve her.

By a coincidence, which he observed, they were both dressed in white. The summer enveloped them. His face was soft, and the emotional upheaval in his eyes enmeshed her. He had the laughter of a child, full of candor. She felt Pierre inside of her, clutching at her, holding her back. She closed her eyes so as not to see his. She thought she might be suffering merely from contagion, the contagion of his fervor.

They sat at a humble café table. The waitress spilled the vermouth. Annoyed, he demanded that the table be wiped, as if Elena were a princess.

Elena said, ‘I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.’

But she saw in his eyes that she had already hurt him. He walked stubbornly beside her, almost to the very door of Pierre’s apartment house.

She found him with a ravaged face. He had seen them in the street, had followed them from the little café. He had watched every gesture and expression that had passed between them. He said, ‘There were quite a few emotional gestures between you.’

He was like a wild animal, his hair falling over his forehead, his eyes haggard. For an hour he was dark, beside himself with anger and doubt. She pleaded, pleaded with love, took his head and laid it on her breast, lulling him. Out of sheer exhaustion he fell asleep. She then slid out of the bed and stood by his window. The charm of the sculptor had faded. Everything faded beside the depth of Pierre’s jealousy. She thought of Pierre’s flesh, his flavor, the love they had, and at the same time she heard Jean’s adolescent laughter, trusting, sensitive, and she saw the potent charm of Leila.

She was afraid. She was afraid because she was no longer securely tied to Pierre but to an unknown woman lying down, yielding, open, spreading.

Pierre awakened. He stretched out his arms and said, ‘It is over now.’

Then she wept. She wanted to beg him to keep her imprisoned, to let no one lure her away. They kissed passionately. He answered her desire by locking her in his arms with such a force that her bones cracked. She laughed and said, ‘You’re suffocating me.’ She lay dissolved, then, by a maternal feeling, a feeling that she wanted to protect him from pain; he, on the other hand, seemed. to feel he could possess her once and for all. His jealousy incited him to a kind of fury. The sap rose in him with such vigor that he did not wait for her pleasure. And she did not want this pleasure. She felt herself as a mother receiving a child into herself, drawing him in to lull him, to protect him. She felt no sexual urge but the urge to open, to receive, to enfold only.

On days when she found Pierre weak, passive, uncertain, his body lax, eluding even the effort of dressing, of walking out into the street, then she felt herself incisive, active. She had strange feelings when they fell asleep together. In sleep he seemed vulnerable. She felt her strength aroused. She wanted then to enter him, like a man, take possession of him. She wanted to penetrate him with knifelike thrusts. She lay between sleep and wakefulness, identified with his virility, imagined herself becoming him and taking him as he took her.

And then, at other times, she fell back, became herself – sea and sand and moisture, and no embrace then seemed violent enough, brutal enough, bestial enough.

But if after Pierre’s jealousy their lovemaking was more violent, at the same time the air was dense; their feelings were in tumult; there was hostility, confusion, pain. Elena did not know whether their love had grown a root or absorbed a poison that would hasten its decay.

Was there an obscure joy in this that she missed, as she missed so many morbid, masochistic tastes other people had for defeat, misery, poverty, humiliation, entanglements, failures? Pierre had said once, ‘What I remember most are the great pains of my life. The pleasant moments I have forgotten.’

Then Kay came to see Elena, a newborn Kay, glittering. Her air of living among many lovers was finally a reality. She had come to tell Elena how she had balanced her life between her hasty lover and a woman. They sat on Elena’s bed, smoking, talking.

Kay said, ‘You know the woman. It’s Leila.’

Elena could not help thinking: So Leila loves a little woman again. Will she never love an equal? Someone as strong as she? She was wounded with jealousy. She wanted to be in Kay’s place being loved by Leila.

She asked, ‘What is it like to be loved by Leila?’

‘It’s incredibly marvelous, Elena. Something incredible. In the first place, she always knows what one wants, what mood I’m in, what I desire. She is always accurate. She looks at me when we meet and she knows. To make love she takes so much time. She locks one up in some marvelous place – it must be a marvelous place first of all, she says. Once we were driven to use a hotel room, because Mary was staying in her apartment. The lamp was too strong. She covered it with her underwear. She makes love to the breasts first. We stay for hours merely kissing. She waits until we are drunk with kissing. She wants all our clothes removed, and then we lie glued together, rolling over each other, still kissing. She sits over me as if she were on horseback and then moves against me, rubbing. She does not let me come for a long time. Until it becomes excruciating. Such long, drawn-out lovemaking, Elena. It leaves you tingling, it leaves you wanting more.’

After a while she added, ‘We talked about you. She wanted to know about your love life. I told her you were obsessed with Pierre.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said she had never known Pierre to be anything but the lover of women like the prostitute Bijou.’

‘Pierre loved Bijou?’

‘Oh, for a few days.’

The image of Pierre making love to the celebrated Bijou effaced the image of Leila making love to Kay. It was a day of jealousies. Was love to become one long train of jealousies?

Every day Kay brought new details. Elena could not refuse to hear them. All through them, she hated Kay’s femininity and she loved Leila’s masculinity. She divined Leila’s struggle to be fulfilled and her defeat. She saw Leila donning her man’s silk shirt and silver cuff links. She wanted to ask Kay what her underwear was like. She wanted to see Leila dressing.

It seemed to Elena that, just as the passive homosexual male became a caricature of a woman for the active male homosexual, women who submitted to dominant Lesbian love became a caricature of women’s pettiest qualities. Kay was showing this, exaggerating her whims – loving herself through Leila, really. Tormenting Leila, too, as she would not have dared torment a man. Feeling that the woman in Leila would be indulgent.

Elena was sure that Leila was suffering from the mediocrity of the women she could make love to. The relationship could never be magnificent enough, with its taint of infantilism. Kay would arrive, eating candy out of her pocket like a schoolgirl. She pouted. She hesitated at a restaurant before ordering, and then changed her order, to play the cabotine, the woman with irresistible caprices. Soon Elena began to elude her. She began to understand the tragedy behind all Leila’s affairs. Leila had acquired a new sex by growing beyond man and woman. She thought of Leila as a mythic figure, enlarged, magnified. Leila haunted her.

Led by an obscure intuition, she decided to go to an English tearoom above a book shop on the Rue de Rivoli, where homosexuals and Lesbians liked to congregate. They sat in separate groups. Solitary middle-aged men looked for young boys; mature Lesbians were seeking young women. The light was dim, the tea fragrant, the cake properly decadent.

As Elena entered she saw Miguel and Donald sitting together and joined them. Donald was intent upon his whore role. He liked to show Miguel how he could attract men, how he could easily be paid for his favors. He was excited because a gray-haired Englishman of great distinction, a man who was known to pay sumptuously for his pleasures, stared at him. Donald spread his charms before him, giving oblique glances like the glances of a woman behind a veil. Miguel was half-angry. He said, ‘If you only knew what this man requires of his boys, you would stop flirting with him.’

‘What?’ asked Donald, with a morbid curiosity.

‘Do you really want me to tell you?’

‘Yes. I want to know.’

‘He only wants boys to lie under him while he crouches over their faces, and covers their face with – you can guess what.’

Donald made a grimace and looked at the gray-haired man.

He could hardly believe this, seeing the man’s aristocratic bearing, the fineness of his features. Seeing how delicately he held his cigarette holder, the dreamy and romantic expression of his eyes. How could this man actually perform such an act? This ended Donald’s provoking coquetries.

Then Leila came in, saw Elena and came to their table. She knew Miguel and Donald. She loved Donald’s peacock travesties – the spreading of imaginary colors, plumes one did not possess; without the colored hair, colored eyelashes, colored nails, that women had. She laughed with Donald, admired Miguel’s grace, then turned to Elena and plunged her dark eyes into Elena’s very green ones.

‘How is Pierre? Why don’t you bring him to the studio some time? I go there every evening before I sing. You never have come to hear me sing. I am at the nightclub every night about eleven.’

Later she offered: ‘Will you let me drive you where you are going?’

They left together and got into the back seat of Leila’s black limousine. Leila leaned over Elena and covered her mouth with her own full lips in one interminable kiss in which Elena nearly lost consciousness. Their hats fell off as they threw their heads back against the seats. Leila engulfed her. Elena’s mouth fell on Leila’s throat, in the slit of her black dress, which was open between the breasts. She only had to push the silk away with her mouth to feel the beginning of the breasts.

‘Are you going to elude me again?’ asked Leila.

Elena pressed her fingers against the silk-covered hips, feeling the richness of the hips, the fullness of the thighs, caressing her. The tantalizing smoothness of the skin and the silk of the dress melted into one another. She felt the little prominence of the garter. She wanted to push open Leila’s knees, right there. Leila gave an order to the chauffeur Elena did not hear. The car changed direction. ‘This is an abduction,’ said Leila, laughing deeply.

Hatless, hair flying, they entered her darkened apartment, where the blinds were drawn against the summer heat. Leila led Elena by the hand to her bedroom and they fell on the luxuriant bed together. Silk again, silk under the fingers, silk between the legs, silky shoulders, neck, hair. Lips of silk trembling under the fingers. It was like the night at the opium den; the caresses lengthened, the suspense was preciously sustained. Each time they approached the orgasm, either Leila or Elena, observing the quickening of the motion, took up the kissing again – a bath of lovemaking, such as one might have in an endless dream, the moisture creating little sounds of rain between the kisses. Leila’s finger was firm, commanding, like a penis; her tongue, far-reaching, knowing so many nooks where it stirred the nerves.

Instead of having one sexual core, Elena’s body seemed to have a million sexual openings, equally sensitized, every cell of the skin magnified with the sensibility of a mouth. The very flesh of her arm suddenly opened and contracted with the passage of Leila’s tongue or fingers. She moaned, and Leila bit into the flesh, as if to arouse a greater moan. Her tongue between Elena’s legs was like a stabbing, agile and sharp. When the orgasm came, it was so vibrant that it shook their bodies from head to foot.

Elena dreamed of Pierre and Bijou. The full-fleshed Bijou, the whore, the animal, the lioness; a luxuriant goddess of abundance, her flesh a bed of sensuality – every pore and curve of her. In the dream her hands were grasping, her flesh throbbed in a mountainous, heaving way, fermenting, saturated with moisture, folded into many voluptuous layers. Bijou was always prone, inert, awakening only for the moment of love. All the fluids of desire seeping along the silver shadows of her legs, around the violin-shaped hips, descending and ascending with a sound of wet silk around the hollows of her breasts.

Elena imagined her everywhere, in the tight skirt of the streetwalker, always preying and waiting. Pierre had loved her obscene walk, her naïve glance, her drunken sullenness, her virginal voice. For a few nights he had loved that walking sex, that ambulant womb, open to all.

And now perhaps he loved her again.

Pierre showed Elena a photograph of his mother, the luxuriant mother. The resemblance to Bijou was startling in all but the eyes. Bijou’s were circled with mauve. Pierre’s mother had a healthier air. But the body –

Then Elena thought, I am lost. She did not believe Pierre’s story that Bijou repulsed him now. She began to frequent the café where Bijou and Pierre had met, hoping for a discovery that would end her doubts. She discovered nothing, except that Bijou liked very young men, fresh-faced, fresh-lipped, fresh-blooded. That calmed her a little.

While Elena sought to meet Bijou and unmask the enemy, Leila was seeking to meet Elena, with ruses.

And the three women met, driven inside of the same café on a day of heavy rain: Leila, perfumed and dashing, carrying her head high, a silver fox stole undulating around her shoulders over her trim black suit; Elena, in a wine-colored velvet; and Bijou, in her streetwalker’s costume, which she could never abandon, the tight-fitting black dress and high-heeled shoes. Leila smiled at Bijou, then recognized Elena. Shivering, the three sat down before aperitifs. What Elena had not expected was to be completely intoxicated with Bijou’s voluptuous charm. On her right sat Leila, incisive, brilliant, and on her left, Bijou, like a bed of sensuality Elena wanted to fall into.

Leila observed her and suffered. Then she set about courting Bijou, which she could do so much better than Elena. Bijou had never known women like Leila, only the women who worked with her, who, when the men were not there, indulged with Bijou in orgies of kisses, to compensate for the brutality of the men -sitting and kissing themselves into a hypnotic state, that was all.

She was susceptible to Leila’s subtle flattery, but at the same time she was spellbound with Elena. Elena was a complete novelty for her. Elena represented to men a type of woman who was the opposite of the whore, a woman who poetized and dramatized love, mixed it with emotion, a woman who seemed made of another substance, a woman one imagined created by a legend. Yes, Bijou knew men well enough to know this was also a woman they were incited to initiate to sensuality, whom they enjoyed seeing become enslaved by sensuality. The more legendary the woman, the greater the pleasure in desecrating, eroticizing her. Deep down, she was, under all the dreaminess, another courtesan, living also for the pleasure of man.

Bijou, who was the whore of whores, would have liked to exchange places with Elena. Whores always envy women who have the faculty of arousing desire and illusion as well as hunger. Bijou, the sex organ walking undisguised, would have liked to have the appearance of Elena. And Elena was thinking how she would have liked to change places with Bijou, for the many times when men grew tired of courting and wanted sex without it, bestial and direct. Elena pined to be raped anew each day, without regard for her feelings; Bijou pined to be idealized. Leila alone was satisfied to be born free of man’s tyranny, to be free of man. But she did not realize that imitating man was not being free of him.

She paid her court suavely, flatteringly, to the whore of whores. As none of the three women abdicated, they finally walked out together. Leila invited Elena and Bijou to her apartment.

When they arrived, it was scented with burning incense. The only light came from illuminated glass globes filled with water and iridescent fish, corals and glass sea horses. This gave the room an undersea aspect, the appearance of a dream, a place where three diversely beautiful women exhaled such sensual auras that a man would have been overcome.

Bijou was afraid to move. Everything looked so fragile to her. She sat cross-legged like an Arab woman, smoking. Elena seemed to radiate light like the glass globes. Her eyes shone brilliant and feverish in the semidarkness. Leila emitted a mysterious charm for both women, an atmosphere of the unknown.

The three of them sat on the very low couch, on a heaving sea of pillows. The first one to move was Leila, who slid her jeweled hand under Bijou’s skirts and gasped slightly with surprise at the unexpected touch of flesh where she had expected to find silky underwear. Bijou lay back and turned her mouth toward Elena, her strength tempted by the fragility of Elena, knowing for the first time what it was to feel like a man and to feel a woman’s slightness bending under the weight of a mouth, the small head bent back by her heavy hands, the light hair flying about. Bijou’s strong hands encircled the dainty neck with delight. She held the head like a cup between her hands to drink from the mouth long draughts of nectar breath, her tongue undulating.

Leila had a moment of jealousy. Each caress she gave to Bijou, Bijou transmitted to Elena – the very same caress. After Leila kissed Bijou’s luxuriant mouth, Bijou took Elena’s lips between hers. When Leila’s hand slipped further under Bijou’s dress, Bijou slid her hand under Elena’s. Elena did not move, filling herself with languor. Then Leila slid to her knees and used both hands to stroke Bijou. When she pushed up Bijou’s dress, Bijou threw her body back and closed her eyes to better feel the movements of the warm, incisive hands. Elena, seeing Bijou offered, dared to touch her voluptuous body and follow every contour of the rich curves – a bed of down, soft, firm flesh without bones, smelling of sandal-wood and musk. Her own nipples hardened as she touched Bijou’s breasts. When her hand passed around Bijou’s buttocks, it met Leila’s hand.

Then Leila began to undress, exposing a soft little black satin corselet, which held her stockings with tiny black garters. Her thighs, slender and white, gleamed, her sex lay in shadow. Elena loosened the garters to watch the polished legs emerging. Bijou threw her dress over her head and then leaned forward to finish pulling it off, exposing as she did so the fullness of her buttocks, the dimples at the bottom of the spine, the incurving back. Then Elena slid out of her dress. She was wearing black lace underwear that was slit open back and front, showing only the shadowy folds of her sexual secrets.

Under their feet was a big white fur. They fell on this, the three bodies in accord, moving against each other to feel breast against breast and belly against belly. They ceased to be three bodies. They became all mouths and fingers and tongues and senses. Their mouths sought another mouth, a nipple, a clitoris. They lay entangled, moving very slowly. They kissed until the kissing became a torture and the body grew restless. Their hands always found yielding flesh, an opening. The fur they lay on gave off an animal odor, which mingled with the odors of sex.

Elena sought the fuller body of Bijou. Leila was more aggressive. She had Bijou lying on her side, with one leg thrown over Leila’s shoulder, and she was kissing Bijou between the legs. Now and then Bijou jerked backward, away from the stinging kisses and bites, the tongue that was as hard as a man’s sex.

When she moved thus, her buttocks were thrown fully against Elena’s face. With her hands Elena had been enjoying the shape of them, and now she inserted her finger into the tight little aperture. There she could feel every contraction caused by Leila’s kisses, as if she were touching the wall against which Leila moved her tongue. Bijou, withdrawing from the tongue that searched her, moved into a finger which gave her joy. Her pleasure was expressed in melodious ripples of her voice, and now and then, like a savage being taunted, she bared her teeth and tried to bite the one who was tantalizing her.

When she was about to come and could no longer defend herself against her pleasure, Leila stopped kissing her, leaving Bijou halfway on the peak of an excruciating sensation, half-crazed. Elena had stopped at the same moment.

Uncontrollable now, like some magnificent maniac, Bijou threw herself over Elena’s body, parted her legs, placed herself between them, glued her sex to Elena’s, and moved, moved with desperation. Like a man now, she thumped against Elena, to feel the two sexes meeting, soldering. Then as she felt her pleasure coming she stopped herself, to prolong it, fell backward and opened her mouth to Leila’s breast, to burning nipples that were seeking to be caressed.

Elena was now also in the frenzy before orgasm. She felt a hand under her, a hand she could rub against. She wanted to throw herself on this hand until it made her come, but she also wanted to prolong her pleasure. And she ceased moving. The hand pursued her. She stood up, and the hand again traveled toward her sex. Then she felt Bijou standing against her back, panting. She felt the pointed breasts, the brushing of Bijou’s sexual hair against her buttocks. Bijou rubbed against her, and then slid up and down, slowly, knowing the friction would force Elena to turn so as to feel this on her breasts, sex and belly. Hands, hands everywhere at once. Leila’s pointed nails buried in the softest part of Elena’s shoulder, between her breast and underarm, hurting, a delicious pain, the tigress taking hold of her, mangling her. Elena’s body so burning hot that she feared one more touch would set off the explosion. Leila sensed this, and they separated.

All three of them fell on the couch. They ceased touching and looked at each other, admiring their disorder, and seeing the moisture glistening along their beautiful legs.

But they could not keep their hands away from each other, and now Elena and Leila together attacked Bijou, intent on drawing from her the ultimate sensation. Bijou was surrounded, enveloped, covered, licked, kissed, bitten, rolled again on the fur rug, tormented with a million hands and tongues. She was begging now to be satisfied, spread her legs, sought to satisfy herself by friction against the others’ bodies. They would not let her. With tongues and fingers they pried into her, back and front, sometimes stopping to touch each other’s tongue – Elena and Leila, mouth to mouth, tongues curled together, over Bijou’s spread legs. Bijou raised herself to receive a kiss that would end her suspense. Elena and Leila, forgetting her, concentrated all their feelings in their tongues, flicking at each other. Bijou, impatient, madly aroused, began to stroke herself, then Leila and Elena pushed her hand away and fell upon her. Bijou’s orgasm came like an exquisite torment. At each spasm she moved as if she were being stabbed. She almost cried to have it end.

Over her prone body, Elena and Leila took up their tongue-kissing again, hands drunkenly searching each other, penetrating everywhere, until Elena cried out. Leila’s fingers had found her rhythm, and Elena clung to her, waiting for the pleasure to burst, while her own hands sought to give Leila the same pleasure. They tried to come in unison, but Elena came first, falling in a heap, detached from Leila’s hand, struck down by the violence of her orgasm. Leila fell beside her, offering her sex to Elena’s mouth. As Elena’s pleasure grew fainter, rolling away, dying off, she gave Leila her tongue, flicking in the sex’s mouth until Leila contracted and moaned. She bit into Leila’s tender flesh. In the paroxysm of her pleasure, Leila did not feel the teeth buried there.

Elena now understood why some Spanish husbands refused to initiate their wives to all the possibilities of lovemaking – to avoid the risk of awakening in them an insatiable passion. Instead of being contented, calmed by Pierre’s love, she had become more vulnerable. The more she desired Pierre, the greater her hunger for other loves. It seemed to her that she had little interest in the rooting of love, in its fixity. She wanted only the moment of passion from everyone.

She did not even want to see Leila again. She wanted to see the sculptor Jean because he was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt. She thought to herself: I talk almost like a saint, to burn for love – for no mystic love, but for a ravaging sensual meeting. Pierre has awakened in me a woman I did not know, an insatiable woman.

Almost as if she had willed her desire to accomplish itself, she found Jean waiting at the door. He was, as usual, carrying some little offering in a package, which he held awkwardly. The way his body moved, the way his eyes trembled when she approached him, betrayed the strength of his desire. She was already possessed by his body, and he moved as if he were installed within her.

‘You have never come to see me,’ he said humbly. ‘You have never seen my work.’

‘Let’s go now,’ she answered, and with a light, dancing step, she walked at his side. They reached a curious, barren part of Paris, near one of the gates, a city of sheds turned into studios, side by side with workmen’s homes. And there Jean lived with statues in place of furniture, massive statues. He himself was fluid, changeable, hypersensitive, and he had created a solidity and power with his trembling hands.

The sculptures were like monuments, five times life size, the women pregnant, the men indolent and sensual, with hands and feet like tree roots. One man and woman were so kneaded together that one could not detect the differences between their bodies. The contours were completely welded together. Bound by their genitals, they towered over Elena and Jean.

In the shadow of this statue, they moved toward each other, without a word, without a smile. Even their heads did not move. As they met, Jean pressed Elena against the statue. They did not kiss or touch each other with their hands. Only their torsos met, repeating in warm human flesh the welding of the bodies of the statue above them. He pressed his genitals against hers, with a low, entranced rhythm, as if he would thus enter her body.

He slid down, as if he were going to kneel at her feet, only to rise again, this time carrying her dress upward under his pressure, so that it ended in a swollen heap of material under her arms. And again he pressed against her, sometimes moving from left to right or right to left, sometimes in circles, sometimes pushing into her with compressed violence. She felt the bulk of his desire rubbing as if he were lighting a fire with two stones, drawing sparks each time he moved, and finally she slid downwards as if in a light-bodied dream. She fell in a heap, caught between his legs, and now he wanted to fix this position, to eternalize it, to nail down her body with the powerful thrust of his swollen virility. They moved again, she to offer the deepest recesses of her femininity, and he to bind them together. She contracted to feel his presence more, moving with a gasp of unbearable joy, as if she had touched the most vulnerable point of his being.

He closed his eyes to feel this elongation of his being into which all his blood had concentrated and which lay in the voluptuous darkness of her. He could no longer hold back and pushed out to invade her, to fill her womb to the brim with his blood, and as she received this, the little passageway where he moved closed tighter around him, swallowing the essences of his being within her.

The statue cast its shadow over their embrace, which did not dissolve. They lay as if turned to stone, feeling the very last drop of pleasure ebbing away. She was already thinking of Pierre. She knew she would not return to Jean. She thought: Tomorrow it would be less beautiful. She thought with an almost superstitious fear that if she stayed with Jean, then Pierre would sense the betrayal and punish her.

She expected to be punished. As she stood before Pierre’s door she expected to find Bijou there on his bed, her legs wide apart. Why Bijou? Because Elena expected revenge for the betrayal of her love.

Her heart beat wildly as he opened the door. Pierre smiled innocently. But then, was not her smile innocent? To ascertain this, she looked at herself in the mirror. Had she expected the demon driving her to appear in her green eyes?

She observed the creases in her skirt, the specks of dust on her sandals. She felt that Pierre would know, if he made love to her, that it was Jean’s essence which flowed together with her own moisture. She eluded his caresses and suggested they visit Balzac’s house in Passy.

It was a soft rainy afternoon, with that gray Parisian melancholy that drove people indoors, that created an erotic atmosphere because it fell like a ceiling over the city, enclosing them all in a nerveless air, as in an alcove; and everywhere, some reminder of the erotic life – a shop, half-hidden, showing underwear and black garters and black boots; the Parisian woman’s provocative walk; taxis carrying embracing lovers.

Balzac’s house stood at the top of a hilly street in Passy, overlooking the Seine. First they had to ring at the door of an apartment house, then descend a flight of stairs that seemed to lead to a cellar but opened instead on a garden. Then they had to traverse the garden and ring at another door. This was the door of his house, concealed in the garden of the apartment house, a secret and mysterious house, so hidden and isolated in the heart of Paris.

The woman who opened the door was like a ghost from the past – faded face, faded hair and clothes, bloodless. Living with Balzac’s manuscripts, pictures, engravings of the women he had loved, first editions, she was permeated with a vanished past, and all the blood had ebbed from her. Her very voice was distant, ghostly. She slept in this house filled with dead souvenirs. She had become equally dead to the present. It was as if each night she laid herself away in the tomb of Balzac, to sleep with him.

She guided them through the rooms, and then to the back of the house. She came to a trap door, slipped her long bony fingers through the ring and lifted it for Elena and Pierre to see. It opened on a little stairway.

This was the trap door Balzac had built so that the women who visited him could escape from the surveillance or suspicions of their husbands. He, too, used it to escape from his harassing creditors. The stairway led to a path and then to a gate that opened on an isolated street that in turn led to the Seine. One could escape before the person at the front door of the house had enough time to traverse the first room.

For Elena and Pierre, the effect of this trap door so evoked Balzac’s love of life that it affected them like an aphrodisiac. Pierre whispered to her, ‘I would like to take you on the floor, right here.’

The ghost woman did not hear these words, uttered with the directness of an apache, but she caught the glance which accompanied them. The mood of the visitors was not in harmony with the sacredness of the place, and she hurried them out.

The breath of death had whipped their senses. Pierre hailed a taxi. In the taxi he could not wait. He made Elena sit over him, with her back to him, the whole length of her body against his, concealing him completely. He raised her skirt.

Elena said, ‘Not here, Pierre. Wait until we get home. People will see us. Please wait. Oh, Pierre, you’re hurting me! Look, the policeman stared at us. And now we’re stopped here, and people can see us from the sidewalk. Pierre, Pierre, stop it.’

But all the time that she feebly defended herself, and tried to slip off, she was conquered by pleasure. Her efforts to sit still made her even more keenly aware of Pierre’s every movement. Now she feared that he might hurry his act, driven by the speed of the taxi and the fear that it would stop soon in front of the house and the taxi driver would turn his head toward them. And she wanted to enjoy Pierre, to reassert their bond, the harmony of their bodies. They were observed from the street. Yet she could not draw away, and he now had his arms around her. Then a violent jump of the taxi over a hole in the road threw them apart. It was too late to resume the embrace. The taxi had stopped. Pierre had just enough time to button himself. Elena felt they must look drunk, disheveled. The languor of her body made it difficult for her to move.

Pierre was filled with a perverse enjoyment of this interruption. He enjoyed feeling his bones half-melted in his body, the almost painful withdrawal of the blood. Elena shared his new whim, and later they lay on the bed caressing each other and talking. Then Elena told Pierre the story she had heard in the morning from a young French woman who sewed for her.

‘Madeleine used to work for a big department store. She came from the poorest ragpicker’s family in all Paris. Both her father and mother lived by picking garbage cans and selling the bits of tin, leather and paper they found. Madeleine was placed in the sumptuous bedroom furniture department, under the supervision of a suave, waxed, starched floorwalker. She had never slept on a bed, only on a pile of rags and newspapers in a shack. When people were not looking she felt the satin bedspreads, the mattresses, the feather pillows, as if they were ermine or chinchilla. She had a natural Parisian gift for appearing charmingly dressed on the money other women spent on stockings alone. She was attractive, with humorous eyes, curly black hair and well-rounded curves. She developed two passions, one to steal a few drops of perfume or cologne from the perfume department, another to wait until the store was closing so she could lie down on one of the softest beds and pretend she was to sleep there. She preferred the canopied ones. She felt more secure lying under the curtains. The floorwalker was usually in such a hurry to leave that she was left alone for a few minutes to indulge in this fantasy. She thought that while lying in such a bed her feminine charms were a million times enhanced, and she wished certain elegant men she had seen on the Champs Elysées could see her there and realize how well she would look in a beautiful bedroom.

‘Her fantasy became more complex. She arranged to have a mirrored dressing table placed in front of the bed so she could admire herself lying down. Then one day when she had accomplished every step of the ceremony, she saw that the floorwalker had been watching her with amazement. As she was about to leap off the bed he stopped her.

‘“Madame,” he said (she had always been called Mademoiselle), “I am delighted to make your acquaintance. I hope you are pleased with the bed I made for you, according to your orders. Do you find it soft enough? Do you think Monsieur le Comte will like it?”

‘“Monsieur le Comte is fortunately away for a week, and I will be able to enjoy my bed with someone else,” she answered. Then she sat up and offered her hand to the man. “Now kiss it as you would kiss a lady’s hand in a salon.” Smiling, he did this with suave elegance. Then they heard a sound and they both vanished in different directions.

‘Every day they stole five or ten minutes from the closing-hour rush. Pretending to put things in order, to dust, to rectify errors on the price tags, they planned the little scene. He added the most effective touch of all – a screen. Then lace-edged sheets from another department. Then he made up the bed and turned down the coverlet. After kissing her hands, they conversed. He called her Nana. As she did not know the book, he gave it to her. What concerned him now was the incongruous effect of her tight little black dress on the pastel bedspread. He would borrow a filmy negligée worn by a mannequin during the day and cover Madeleine with it. Even if salesmen or saleswomen passed by, they did not see the scene behind the screen.

‘When Madeleine had enjoyed the hand-kissing, he deposited a kiss further up along her arm, in the nook within the elbow. There the skin was sensitive, and when she folded her arm, it seemed as if the kiss were enclosed and nurtured. Madeleine let it lie there like a preserved flower and then later, when she was alone, she opened her arm and kissed the same place as if to devour it more intimately. This kiss, deposited with such delicacy, was more potent than all the gross pinchings she had received in the street as tributes to her charms or the whispered obscenities of the workmen: Viens que je te suce.

‘At first he sat at the foot of the bed, then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer. Alarming footsteps on the other side of the screen gave to their meeting the secrecy and dangers of a lovers’ rendezvous. Then Madeleine would say, “I wish we could escape from the jealous surveillance of the Count. He is getting on my nerves.” But her admirer was too wise to say, “Come with me to some humble little hotel.” He knew this could not take place in some dingy room, in a brass bed with torn blankets and gray sheets. He placed a kiss in the warmest nook of her neck, under the curling hair, then on the tip of her ear, where Madeleine could not taste it later, where she could merely touch it with her fingers. Her ear burned all day after this kiss because he had begun to bite it.

‘As soon as Madeleine lay down she was taken with languor, which may have been due to her conception of aristocratic behavior, or to the kisses which now fell like necklaces around her throat and further down where the breasts began. She was no virgin, but the brutality of the attacks she had known, pushed against a wall in dark streets, thrown to the floor of a truck, or tumbled behind the ragpicker’s shacks where people coupled without even troubling to see each other’s faces, had never stirred her as much as this gradual and ceremonious courtship of her senses. He made love to her legs for three or four days. Made her wear furry bedroom slippers, slipped off her stockings and kissed her feet and held them as if he were possessing her whole body. By the time he was ready to lift her skirt he had inflamed the rest of her body so completely that she was ripe for the final possession.

‘As the time was short and they were always expected to leave the shop with the others, he had to forgo the caresses when it came to taking her. And now she did not know which she liked best. If his caresses were too lingering he did not have time to take her. If he proceeded directly, she felt less enjoyment. Behind the screen now took place scenes enacted in the most lavish bedrooms, only more hurried, and each time the mannequin had to be dressed again, the bed straightened. Yet they never met outside of this moment. This was their dream for the day. He had contempt for the shabby adventures of his comrades in five-franc hotels. He acted as if he had visited the most courted prostitute in Paris, and was the amant de coeur of a woman kept by the richest men.’

‘Was the dream ever destroyed?’ Pierre asked.

‘Yes. Do you remember the sit-down strike of the big department stores? The employees stayed in them for two weeks. During that time other couples discovered the softness of the best-quality beds, of the divans and couches and chaises-longues, and they discovered the variations that can be added to love positions when the beds are wide and low and rich materials tickle the skin. Madeleine’s dream became public property and a vulgar caricature of the pleasures she had known. The uniqueness of her meeting with her lover came to an end. He called her Mademoiselle again, and she called him Monsieur. He even began to find fault with her salesmanship and she finally left the store.’

Elena took an old house in the country for the summer months, a house which needed painting. Miguel had promised to help her. They began in the attic, which was picturesque and complex, a series of small irregular rooms, rooms within rooms at times, added as afterthoughts.

Donald was there, too, but not interested in painting, he went off to explore the vast garden and the village and the forest surrounding the house. Elena and Miguel worked alone, covering themselves as well as the old walls with paint. Miguel held his brush as if he were painting a portrait, and stood off to survey his progress. Working together took them back into the moods of their youth.

To shock her, Miguel talked about his ‘collection of asses’, pretending that it was this particular aspect of beauty which held him enthralled, because Donald possessed it to the highest degree – the art of finding an ass that was not too globular, like most women’s, not too flat, like most men’s, but something between the two, something worth gripping.

Elena was laughing. She was thinking that when Pierre turned his back to her, he became like a woman for her, and she would have liked to rape him. She could well imagine Miguel’s feelings when he lay against Donald’s back.

‘If the ass is sufficiently rounded, firm, and if the boy has not got an erection,’ said Elena, ‘then there is not so much difference from a woman. Do you still feel around for the difference?’

‘Yes, of course. Think how distressing it would be to discover nothing there, and also to find too much of the mammary protrusions further up – breasts for milk, a thing to paralyze one’s sexual appetite.’

‘Some women have very small milk holders,’ said Elena.

It was her turn to stand on the ladder to reach a cornice and the slanting corner of the roof. Raising her arm she brought her skirts up with her. She wore no stockings. Her legs were smooth and slender, without ‘globular exaggerations’, as Miguel said, paying her compliments now that their relationship was secure from any sexual hopes on her side.

Elena’s desire to seduce a homosexual was a common error among women. Usually there was a point of female honor in this, a desire to test one’s power against heavy odds, a feeling, perhaps, that all men were escaping from their rule and that they must be seduced again. Miguel suffered from these attempts every day. He was not effeminate. He held himself well, his gestures were manly. As soon as a woman began to display coquetry toward him, he was in a panic. He immediately foresaw the entire drama: the aggression of the woman, her interpretation of his passivity as mere timidity, her advances, his hatred of the moment when he would have to reject her. He could never do this with calm indifference. He was too tender and compassionate. He suffered at times more than the woman, whose vanity was all that mattered. He had such a familial relationship with women that he always felt as if he were wounding a mother, a sister, or Elena again, in her new transformations.

By now he knew what harm he had done to Elena in being the first one to instill in her a doubt of her ability to love or to be loved. Each time he brushed off an advance from a woman, he thought he was committing a minor crime, murdering a faith and confidence for good.

How nice it was to be with Elena, enjoying her feminine endowments without danger. Pierre was taking care of the sensual Elena. At the same time, how jealous Miguel was of Pierre just as he had been of his father when he was a child. His mother always sent him out of the room as soon as his father entered. The father was impatient for him to leave. He hated the way they locked themselves together for hours. As soon as his father left, his mother’s love, embraces, kisses, returned to him.

When Elena said, ‘I am going to see Pierre,’ it was the same. Nothing could hold her back. No matter how much pleasure they had together, no matter how much tenderness she showered on Miguel, when it was time to be with Pierre, nothing could hold her back.

The mystery of Elena’s masculinity charmed him, too. Whenever he was with her, he felt this vital, active, positive action of her nature. In her presence, he was galvanized from his laziness, his vagueness, his procrastinations. She was the catalyst.

He looked at her legs. Diana’s legs, Diana the huntress, the boy-woman. Legs for running and leaping. He was taken with an overpowering curiosity to see the rest of her body. He moved nearer to the ladder. The stylized legs disappeared into the lace-edged panties. He wanted to see further.

She looked down at him and saw him standing and looking at her with dilated eyes.

‘Elena, I would just like to see how you are made.’

She smiled at him.

‘Will you let me look at you?’

‘You are looking at me.’

He lifted the edge of her skirt outward and it opened like a summer umbrella over him, concealing his head from her. She began to step down the ladder but his hands stopped her. His hands had gripped the elastic belt of the panties and stretched them to slip them down. She remained midway on the ladder, one leg higher than the other, which prevented him from slipping the panties all the way down. He pulled the leg down toward him, so that he could slip off the panties altogether. His hands cupped her ass lovingly. Like a sculptor, he ascertained the exact contours of what he held, feeling the firmness, the roundness, as if it were merely a fragment of a statue he had unearthed, from which the rest of the body was missing. He disregarded the surrounding flesh, and curves. He caressed only the ass, and gradually brought it down nearer to his face, keeping Elena from turning around as she descended the ladder.

She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of the eyes and hands only. When she reached the bottom rung, he had one hand on each round promontory and was kneading them as if they were breasts, bringing the caress back to where it had begun, hypnotically.

Now Elena faced him, leaning against the ladder. She sensed that he was trying to take her. At first he touched where the opening was too small for him and where it hurt her. She cried out. Then he moved forward and found the real female opening, found he could slip in this way, and she was amazed to find him so strong, remaining inside of her and moving about. But although he moved vigorously, he did not accelerate his movements to reach a climax. Was he becoming more and more aware that he was inside of a woman and not a boy? Slowly he withdrew, left her thus half-taken, hid his face away from her so that she would not see his disillusion.

She kissed him, to prove to him that this did not cloud their relationship, that she understood.

Sometimes in the street or in a café, Elena was hypnotized by the souteneur face of a man, by a big workman with knee-deep boots, by a brutal, criminal head. She felt a sensual tremor of fear, an obscure attraction. The female in her was fascinated. For a second she felt as if she were a whore who expected a stab in the back for some infidelity. She felt anxiety. She was trapped. She forgot that she was free. A dark fungus layer was awakened, a subterranean primitivism, a desire to feel the brutality of man, the force which could break her open and sack her. To be violated was a need of woman, a secret, erotic desire. She had to shake herself from the domination of these images.

She remembered that what she had first loved in Pierre was the dangerous light in his eyes, the eyes of a man who was without guilt and scruples, who took what he wanted, enjoyed, who was unconscious of risks and consequences.

What had become of this unruly, self-willed savage she had met on that mountain road one dazzling morning? He was now domesticated. He lived for lovemaking. Elena smiled at this. That was a quality one rarely found in a man. But he was still a man of nature. At times she said to him, ‘Where is your horse? You always look as if you had left your horse at the door and were soon to start on a gallop again.’

He slept naked. He hated pyjamas, kimonos, bedroom slippers. He threw his cigarettes on the floor. He washed in ice-cold water like a pioneer. He laughed at comfort. He chose the hardest chair. Once, his body was so hot and dusty and the water he used so ice-cold, that evaporation took place and smoke issued from his pores. He held his steaming hands toward her, and she said, ‘You are the god of fire.’

He could not submit to time. He did not know how much could or could not be done in an hour. Half of his being was forever asleep, coiled in the maternal love she gave him, coiled in reverie, in laziness, talking about the voyages he was going to make, the books he was going to write.

He was pure, too, at strange moments. He had the reserve of the cat. Although he slept naked, he would not walk about naked.

Pierre touched all the regions of understanding with intuition. But he did not live there, he did not sleep and eat in those superior regions as she did. Often he quarreled, warred, drank, with a company of ordinary friends, spent evenings with ignorant people. She could not do this. She liked the exceptional, the extraordinary. This separated them. She would have liked to be like him, near to everyone, anyone, but she could not. It saddened her. Often, when they went out together, she left him.

Their first serious quarrel was about time. Pierre would telephone and say, ‘Come to my apartment about eight.’ She had her own key. She would go in and pick up a book. He would arrive at nine. Or he would call her when she was already there waiting and say, ‘I will be right over,’ and come two hours later. One evening when she had waited too long a time (and the waiting was all the more painful because she imagined him making love to someone else), he arrived and found her gone. Then it was his turn to rage. But it did not change his habits. Another time she locked him out. She stood behind the door listening to him. She was already hoping he would not go away. She deeply regretted their night being spoiled. But she waited. He rang the bell again, so gently. If he had rung the bell angrily she might have remained unmoved, but he rang gently and guiltily, and she opened the door. She was still angry. He desired her. She resisted him. He was stirred by her resistance. And she was saddened by the spectacle of his desire.

She had a feeling that Pierre sought this scene. The more aroused he became, the greater her aloofness. She closed herself sexually. But honey seeped through the closed lips, and Pierre was in ecstacy. He became more passionate, forcing her knees open with his strong legs, pouring himself into her with impetus, coming with tremendous intensity.

Whereas at other times if she had not felt pleasure she would have feined it so as not to hurt him, this time she deliberately made no pretense. When Pierre’s passion was satisfied he asked her, ‘Did you come?’ ‘No,’ she said. And he was hurt. He felt the full cruelty of her holding back. He said, ‘I love you more than you love me.’ Yet he knew how much she loved him, and he was baffled.

Afterwards she lay with her eyes wide open, thinking that his lateness was innocent. He had already fallen asleep like a child, with his fists closed, his hair in her mouth. He was still asleep when she left. In the street, such a wave of tenderness washed over her that she had to return to the apartment. She threw herself over him, saying, ‘I had to come back, I had to come back.’

‘I wanted you to come back,’ he said. He touched her. She was so wet, so wet. Sliding in and out of her he said, ‘I like to see how I hurt you there, how I stab you there, in the little wound.’ Then he pounded into her, to draw from her the spasm she had withheld.

When she left him she was joyous. Could love become a fire that did not burn, like the fire of the Hindu religious men; was she learning to walk magically over hot coals?