The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

LUST by Elfriede Jelinek

Translated by Michael Hulse

IN ALL SERIOUSNESS I call upon you: air and lust for one and all!

The woman will be with you in a moment, can you hold? First she has to collect herself: for a kiss it’d be best to be collected, all five senses, collect the set. The student is well developed, a perfect picture of a man, no need for touching up, so she lets him touch her up. He places his arm between her thighs. With his eye on the way ahead and the main chance, he rummages under her clothes, which consist chiefly of a plain dressing-gown, which won’t be in the way for long. Many have to take terrible buses and regret it terribly when they remain on the wrong genitals for too long. The owner, or rather the passenger of his three-in-one wishes, grows too used to us and won’t let us out of his ground-level hospitable apartment. Let me explain that three-in-one: woman is a trinity of pleasures, to be grabbed up top, down below, or in the middle! Till at length they can move on to various amiable kinds of sport, possessing each other without understanding. Bawling and bawling. The woman is eager for the driver to drive her around a little, step on it.

It can’t simply be because the toilet’s in the corridor that we feel impelled to go out at night and, in front of the door, look slyly around to see if anyone’s watching as we stand there with our hands on our sex, as if we might be due to lose it before we can place it in its hand-painted chipboard box.

Of the many kinds of accommodation he might choose, the young man opts for this one alone. But the closet won’t keep still, no, it’s even hurrying off ahead in the dark and the cold! This Gerti beats him to the enclosure. Many a one has talked of kissing here. Spread their torchlight wide. And cast great shadows on the walls, so that for one other person they will be greater than just anyone, just anyone on a ski lift. As if sheer carnal desire could make them greater, bigger! As if they could draw themselves up so erect that they’d slam the ball straight in the basket! Players can be mighty fine specimens, tall and erect, and there they stand before their partners, fully equipped, with all the necessary tackle. So many requirements, all of them pressing, pressed into the service of hygiene and filth alike, simply to possess each other. As the phrase inaptly goes. This dusty junk shop’s where we end up. Two household objects. Of simple geometrical design. Wanting to fit together and be good as new again! Now! Suddenly there’s a woman in combinations in the corridor, a jug of water in her hand; has she been casting spells, calling forth a storm, or is she only going to make some tea? In no time at all a woman can make a home of the plainest, barest, most spartan of places. That is to say, even the plainest of women can make a man feel at home by baring all, in no time he places his spar. This young man who has entered her life might be the great intellectual? Now everything will be different from how it was planned. We’ll make a new plan on the spot. Our heads will swell good and proper. Oh, your boy plays the violin as well? But not at this very moment, surely, since no one’s punching his start button.

Come on, she yells to Michael. As if she were demanding money of a shopkeeper who hates us customers. And yet he can’t get by without us. He has to tempt us into his store or go penniless. Now the woman wants a pleasure that lasts at last. First of all, one! two! (you can do it too, sitting in your car, your speed as limited as your mental horizons) we lunge at each other’s mouths, then we plunge into all the other orifices; in thy orifices may I be remembered. And all of a sudden our partner means everything to us. Presently, in a minute or two, Michael will penetrate Gerti, whom he hardly knows and has barely taken a look at. Just as a sleeping car attendant always knocks first with a hard object. He lifts the woman’s dressing-gown over her head and with his mouth, in an excitement of his own creation, prompts her who was without form and void to make a frightful commotion in the queue. The queue at the cash desk where we’re all waiting, money clenched and balled behind our flies. We are our own worst enemies in matters of taste. People all like different things, isn’t that so? But what if we want to be liked? What will we do, in our infinite indolence: call upon sex to do the work for us?

Michael yanks the woman’s legs about him like the legs of hightension masts. In his exploratory zeal he gives intermittent attention to her undouched cleft, a gnarled version of what every other woman has on her person in a discreet shade of lavender or lilac. He pulls back and takes a good look at the place where he is repeatedly disappearing, only to reappear, a huge great thing, fun for one and all. A funster, this fellow. But flawed. Sport being one of his flaws, and hardly the least. The woman is calling him. What’s got into him? Why hasn’t it got into her? Since Gerti didn’t have an opportunity to wash, her hole looks murky, as if it were plastic-coated. Who can resist jamming a finger in (you can use peas, lentils, safety pins or marbles if you like), try it and see what an enthusiastic response you’ll get from your lesser half. Woman’s unyielding sex looks as if it were unplanned. And what is it used for? So that Man can tussle with Nature, and the children and grandchildren have somewhere to come trailing their clouds of glory from. Michael scrutinizes Gerti’s complicated architecture and yells like a stuck pig. As if he were dissecting a corpse, he seizes her hairy cunt, stinking of secret dissatisfaction and dissatisfied secretions, and buries his face in it. You tell a horse’s age by the teeth. This woman isn’t so young any more either, but nonetheless this wrathful bird of prey is flapping at her door.

Michael laughs: he’s terrific. Will we ever learn from these transactions? Will the one ever be able to cross the gap to the other, to talk and be understood and understand? Women’s genitals, so outrageously located in a hillside, tend to be quite distinct, claims the expert. Just as no two people are entirely alike. They can wear quite different headgear, for instance. And the ladies are particularly prone to difference. No two of them are entirely alike. Not that a lover cares, when they lie prone: what he sees is what he’s used to seeing on other women. In the mirror he sees himself reflected, his own deity. In the waters’ depths. Fishing, plenty of fish in the sea, just hang out your dripping rod and wait for a catch, another woman to toss off your godhead in and then toss back. Ah, the privy parts and privy arts of mankind! All that’s required of womankind is that she reck his rod (not wreck his rod), rock his godhead, toss his rocks off.

Let observation with extended view survey mankind… and what you’ll see is the gaping gawp of somebody’s integrated, semi-conducted craving for ecstasy. Go ahead. Try for something of real value! Feeling, perhaps, that guide who takes the tour party into terrain he’s unfamiliar with, burgeoning through your skull? We don’t have to watch him grow. We can choose another pupil to waken and give us pleasure. Yet the ingredients are stirred as we are. Our dough rises, puffed up with the sheer force of air, the atomic cloud mushrooming over the mountaintop. A door slams shut. And we’re on our own again. Gerti’s jolly husband, who is forever dangling his hose with a nonchalant air, as if his waters sprang from some precious source, isn’t here right now to reach out his hand to his wife or torment his offspring on the rack of music. The woman laughs out loud at the thought. The young man is ramming his piston forcefully home, every stroke an attempt to get a little locomotion going, stoke her engine, can’t you hear that whistle blow? He is taking a lively interest at present. Well aware of the changes even the least likely of women can undergo at the hands of a red-hot fresh and scented wad of male sex. Sex is the downtown of our lives, shopping precinct and leisure centre and red light district all in one, but it isn’t where we live. We prefer a little elbow room, a bigger living room, with appliances we can turn on and off. Within her, this woman has already done an about-turn and is heading straight back for her own familiar allotment where she can pick the fruits of sensuality from her private plot herself and do the job with her own hands. Even alcohol becomes volatile at a certain point. But still, almost blubbing with joy at the changes he has wished upon himself, the young man is rummaging about the cosy taxi. He even looks under the seat. He opens Gerti, and then snaps her shut again. Nothing there!

Of course we can don hygienic caps if we like, to avoid the risk of disease. Otherwise, we have everything we need. And though the lordsandmasters cock their legs and slash their waters into their women, they can’t remain but must hurry on, restless, to the next tree, where they waggle their genital worms till someone takes an interest. Pain flashes like lightning into women, but it does no permanent damage, no need to cry over charred furniture or molten appliances. And out it dribbles once again. Your partner will be willing to forgo anything but your feelings. After all, she likes to cook up feelings too. Poor people’s food. I’d even say she’s specialized in economy cooking, she’s out to have men’s hearts in a preserve jar at last. The poor prefer to turn away without being shoo’d about by tour guides. Their pricks even lay them down to rest before they do. And the source from which their waters spring is the heart. They leave the sheet unstained, and off we go.

At any rate, there are glasses that contain nothing of any greater sense than the wine. The Direktor likes looking into the glass: when it’s raised to his lips he can see the bottom, and similarly he wants to drain his own immense tank, right into Gerti. The moment he sees her he exposes himself. His rain comes pouring from the cloudburst before she has a chance to run for shelter. His member is big and heavy and would fill the pan if you added his eggs. In the old days he used to invite many a woman to breakfast, they gobbled him up, slipped down a treat, but now he no longer calls in the hungry folk to eat at his table. Deformed by the opulence of leisure, humanity reclines in its deckchairs, resting its sex, or else strolls the gravel paths, sex in its pockets, hands in its pockets. Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state. Thanks to one of Nature’s whims, men’s members are usually too small by the time they’ve got the knack of handling them. And there they go, leafing through the catalogues of exotic women, high-performance models that are more economical to run and need less fuel. The dipsticks plunge their dipsticks in the sump they know best, which happens to be their wives. Whom they wouldn’t trust as far as they could throw them. So they stay home to keep a watch on them. Then their gaze pans across to the factory in the mist. Though, if they applied themselves a little more patiently, they could take a holiday as far afield as the Adriatic. Where they could dip their sticks in other waters. Their gangling danglers, carefully packed in their elasticated bathing trunks. Their wives wear sawn-off swimsuits. Their breasts are close friends, but they also like making new acquaintances, how do you do, a firm grip, perhaps too firm, uncouthly dragging them from the recliners where they were lounging, lazy and tender, tearing them out, crumpling them in careless fingers and tossing them into the nearest wastepaper basket.

There are signposts along the roads, pointing the way to the towns. Only this woman has to go messing about where children are trying to get their first bearings in life. Calm down and carry on! Hereabouts it is distinctly frosty and foresty. There’s a smell of hay. Of straw. Strewn for us, for the animal within. The dog in the manger. How often we’ve taken the mangy creature walkies! How many before us – who would gladly have buried their wives if they could harvest a goodly crop of women from the place – have splashed and sprayed here! Like winning a motor race! Or like giving it all away: someone, for instance, has thrown a condom away before turning homeward once again. Most men have no idea what you can perform on that keyboard, the clitoris. But they’ve all read the magazines that prove there’s more to women than anyone ever imagined. A millimetre or so more, to be exact.

The student crushes the woman to him. The hissing that escapes from his pent valve can be stopped by the merest touch, he can do it himself. He doesn’t want to squirt off yet, nor does he want the wait to have been in vain. As she reclines there in his upholstered crate, he clumsily paws and pinches the most unseemly parts of the woman’s anatomy, so that she has to spread her legs further apart. He rummages in her slumbering sex, squeezes it into a pout and smacks it abruptly apart again. Oughtn’t he to excuse himself, given that he’s treating her worse than the furniture? He slaps her derriere and heaves her onto her back once more. He’ll sleep well tonight, that’s for sure, like anyone who’s done an honest day’s work and then taken his innocent rest and recreation.

His hands clawed tight in her hair, the student quickly fucks the woman shitless, it messes the car seats but what the fuck. As he services her, he does not look out at the world, where only the beautiful come in for care and maintenance, a major service every few thousand miles. He looks at her, trying to read something in that face which has been rendered indecipherable by her husband. Men are capable of detaching themselves from the world for as long as they want. Only to take a tighter grip on their own tour group afterwards. They have the option. Everyone who has any idea about men knows who we mean: that male world, a couple of thousand people involved in sport, politics, the economy, the arts. Where the rest come a cropper. And who will love them all, that crop of puffed-up flatulent bigmouths? What does the student see, beyond his own body’s unctions and functions? The woman’s mouth, a source from which streams well up, and the floor, from where her image laughs at him. They don’t bother with any rubber protection. The man half turns away in order to watch his rigid member entering and exiting. The woman’s socket gapes wide. The piggy bank squeaks, it’s designed for paying in, only to pay everything promptly out again. Both transactions are of equal importance in this business, but you try telling that to any modern businessman, he’ll raise his eyebrows in alarm, he’ll raise the alarm, he’ll lift his kids up so high so that they don’t step in their inferiors’ anger.

Gradually the spasms the man has set going in the woman calm and subside. She’s had hers and perhaps she’ll even get a second helping. Quiet! Now only the senses are doing the talking. But we don’t understand what they’re saying, because under the seat they’ve changed into something incomprehensible.

The student spills his packetful into the animals’ cratch, fills his packet into the animal’s snatch. Now it is deepest night. Clad in deepest black. Elsewhere, people are turning over, thinking of other more finely built specimens they’ve seen in magazines before they dock their bodies alongside for love. When Michael unbuckled his skis, he didn’t pause to consider that sport, that eternal constant of our world, which hath its dwelling place in the TV set, doesn’t simply stop when you’ve shot down your slope. The whole of life is sport. Sports dress enlivens our existence. All our relatives under the age of eighty wear tracksuits and T-shirts. Tomorrow’s eggs are on sale today so you can count your chickens before they’re hatched. There are others who are better-looking or cleverer than we are, for it is written. But what will become of those of whom no mention at all is made? And their inactive unattractive penises: where shall they channel their little rivers? Where is the bed for them to flow and lay their heads to rest? On this earth they are forever worrying about their wretched little organs, but where oh where shall they spray the antifreeze to afford protection in the winter to come, so their engines don’t refuse to start? Will they negotiate union, or negotiate with a union? What ridges and ranges of perfumed flesh strew the path of dalliance, all the way till the stock feel the knife on the throat and the family feel the ramrod and lash? For those who are attractive, and who generally tend to be the most active too, are not mere decor in our lives. They want to plug their members into other people’s sockets, and will do. Always bear in mind that, in their attempt to get what they want, people will hide away far inside each other, inseparable. So the atom doesn’t split them.

Even before the minute hand of happiness can stroke the two of them, Michael has emitted a fluid, and that’s it. But, in the woman, nuclear energy is powering her higher. These are the headwaters of which she has secretly dreamt for decades. Ah, the faithful old work-horse, pulling the man’s body at the woman’s whiplash behest! These forces are felt in even the tiniest remotest ramifications of the female. They spread like wildfire. The woman hugs the man tight as if he had become a part of her. She cries out. Presently, her head turned by what she feels, she’ll be going on her way, dripping the seeds of discord in the petty principality of her household, and wherever the seed touches the earth mandrakes and other creatures will shoot up and grow, for her sake. This woman belongs to love. Now, for sure, she has to make certain she revisits this wonderful leisure centre. Again and again. Because this young man has hauled out his tool (now next to useless) and waved it about, see you again, Gerti suddenly sees his face with the pimple at the top right in a totally new and meaningful light. It is a face she’ll have to see again, of course. Her future will depend on this go-getter’s talent for gun-running, the secret arms trade hidden in his trousers. From now on, his one and only joy shall be to dwell inside Gerti. But here come the windy gusts. The breezy gusto. Bang on time. For holidays over the hills and far away are ruffling and dishevelling and tousling the desire of girls and women, so that they want a good hard regular brushing. In town, where you can go dancing in the cafés, the women on holiday congregate in deadened leaden droves. Ready to fall when night falls. Michael, who is interested in shooting off the lead in his pencil, will have to invest in rubber. And make his choice of the women dressed in their après ski best. All of them are natural beauties with natural tastes in natural sex, naturally, that’s what he likes best. Make-up painted over pimples would blow him clean away.

Long before opening time, poor Gerti is sure to be at the telephone tomorrow, pestering it. This Michael, if the signals he’s sending us and has himself received from various magazines can be relied on, is a blond creature off the cinema screen. Looking as if he’d been out in the sun for some time, with gel in his hair. Prompting us to finger our own sex, he’s giving us the finger, he won’t give us the finger for real. He is and always will be far away from us. Remote even when he’s close. He enjoys nightlife. Keeping the night alive, lively. Not a man who cares for restraint. It’s not easy to account for lightning, either: but in middle age we women are herded together in an enclosure of weekend assignations, and the bolt will strike one of us, that’s for sure, before we have to leave.

Mind how you go. You may have something about your person that men like that would find a use for!

The animals are falling asleep, and desire has drawn Gerti out of herself, has struck a spark from her little pocket lighter, but Where’s this draught come from that’s made the flame burn higher? From this heart-shaped peep-hole? From some other loving heart? In winter they go skiing, in summer they are the children of light, playing tennis or swimming or finding other reasons to undress, other smouldering fires to stamp out. When once a woman’s senses are bespoke you can be sure she’ll make other slips of the tongue. This woman hates her sex. Which once she was the finest flower of.

The simpler folk hidden away behind their front gardens will soon be silent. But the woman is crying out loud for her idol Michael, long promised her in photographs that look like him. He’s just been for a fast drive in the Alps, now she roars and turns the vehicle of her body in every direction. It’s a steep downhill stretch. But even as she lies there whining and pining the clever housewife is planning the next rendezvous with her hero, who will provide shade on hot days and warm her on cold. When will they be able to meet without the lugubrious shadow of Gerti’s husband falling across them? You know how it is with the ladies: the immortal image of their pleasures means more to them than the mortal original, which sooner or later they will have to expose to life. To competition. When, fevering, chained to their bodies, they show up at a café in a new dress, to be seen in public with somebody new. They want to look at the picture of their loved one, that wonderful vision, in the peace and quiet of the marital bedroom, snuggled up side by side with the one who sometimes idly juggles his balls and pokes his poker in. Every one of these images is better accommodated in memory than life itself. On our own, we pick the memories from between our toes: how good it was to have properly unlocked oneself for once! Gerti can even bake herself anew and serve up her fresh rolls to the Man in the breadroom. And the children sing the praises of their Baker.

All of us earn the utmost we can carry.

The meadows are frozen entirely over. The senseless are beginning to think of going to bed, to lose themselves altogether. Gerti clings to Michael; let her climb every mountain, she still won’t find another like him. In the school of life, this young man has often been a beacon of light to his fellows, who are already taking their bearings from his appearance and his nose, which can always sniff out the genuine article from among the column inches of untruth. Most of the houses hereabouts hang aslant the slope, the sheds and byres clinging on to the walls with the last of their strength. They have heard of love, true. But they never got round to the purchasing of property that goes with it. So now they’re ashamed to be seen by their own TV screen. Where someone is just losing the memory game, the memory he wanted to leave with the viewers, the bill-and-cooers at home in their love-seats, hot-seats, forget-me-not-seats. Still, they have the power to preserve the image in their memories or reject it. Love it or shove it. Over the cliff. I can’t figure it out: is this the trigger on the eye’s rifle, this eyeful, is this the outrigger on the ship of courting senses, this sensitive courtship? Or am I completely wrong?

Michael and Gerti can’t get enough of touching. Necking. Checking to see if they’re still there. Clawing and pawing each other’s genitalia, done up in festive regalia as if for a premiere. Gerti speaks of her feelings and how far she’d like to follow them. Michael gapes as he realizes what he’s landed. Time to get out the rod and go fishing again. He hauls the woman round by the hair till she’s flapping above him like a great bird. The woman, awoken from the sedation of sex, is about to use her gob for uninhibited talking, but while it’s open Michael can think of better things to do with it and shoves his corncob in, amazing. The woman’s dragged by the hair against Michael’s firm belly, then skewered face-first on Michael’s shish-kebab. This continues for a while. Scarcely conceivable, that thousands of other insensate beings are wallowing in their misery at this very moment, forced by a terrible God to be parted from their loved ones all week long, in his illuminated factory. I hope your fate can be loosened a notch or two, so you can fit more in!

These two want to wonder and wander and squander each other, they have plenty of themselves in store and all the latest catalogues of erotica at home. Just think of those who don’t need the expensive extras, who hold each other dear without the sundries! Their special offers are themselves. They flood their banks and dykes, they won’t be dammed or damned, they go with the flow of experience, the tide takes them where it will. Suddenly Gerti has an irresistible urge to piss, which she does, first hesitantly, then full force. The vapour fills the confined space. She wraps the dressing-gown about her thighs and it gets wet. Michael playfully cups his hands and catches some of the audible jet, laughing he washes his face and body, then thumps Gerti onto her back and chews at her dripping labia, sucking and wringing out the rags. Then he drags Gerti into her own puddle and splashes her in it. She rolls her eyes upward but there’s no lightbulb up there, just the darkness inside her grinning skull. This is a feast. We’re on our own, talking to our sex: our dearest of guests, though one who is forever wanting the choicest titbits. The dressing-gown, which the woman has pulled back on again, is torn off her once more, and she beds down deep in the hay. On the floorboards there’s a wet patch. As if some superior being no one saw coming had made it. The only light is moonlight. Illuminating the present. Expecting a present in return.

The pallid bags of her breasts sag on her ribcage. Only one man and one child have ever made use of them. The Man back home ever bakes his impetuous daily bread anew. If your breasts hang right down on the table at dinner you can get an operation. They were made for the child and for the Man and for the child in the Man. Their owner is still writhing in her excreted fluid. Her bones and hinges are rattling with cold. Michael, racing down the slope, chomps at her privates and clutches and tugs at her dugs. Any moment now his God-given sap will rise in his stem, his cup will overflow. Hurry up, stuff that prick in its designated slot, no loitering. You can hear her shrieks, you can see the whites of her eyes, what are you waiting for?

The young man is suddenly alarmed at the totality with which he can spend himself without being spent. Again and again he reappears from within the woman, only to bury his little bird in the box again. He’s now licked Gerti from top to toe. His tongue’s still tart with the taste of her piss. Next her face. The woman snaps at him and bites. It hurts, but it’s a language animals understand. He grabs her head, still by the hair, pulls it up off the floor and slams it back where he first found it. Gerti splays her mouth wide open and Michael’s penis gives it a thorough go. Her eyes are shut. He jabs his knees in, forcing the woman to spread her thighs again. The novelty of this has worn off, unfortunately, since he did it the same way last time. So there you are, all skin and flick, and your desire is always the same old film! An endless chain of repetitions, less appealing every time because the electronic media and melodies have accustomed us to having something new home-delivered every day. Michael spreads Gerti wide as if he wanted to nail her to a cross and were not presently going to hang her in the wardrobe with the other clothes he rarely wears, which is what he’d actually intended. He stares at her cleft. This is familiar territory now. When she looks away, because she cannot bear his scrutiny and the groping, pinching hands that examine her, he hits her. He wants to see and do everything. He has a right to. There are details you can’t see, and, in the event of there being a next time, a flashlight would come in handy. Before going in out of the night to the bodywork repairs shop. This woman had best learn to take the lordand-master’s examination of her sex. And not hang her feelings on his peg. For thereby hangs a tale.

Hay cascades over her, warming her slightly. The master is finished. The woman’s wound is throbbing and swollen. Retracting his instrument abruptly, Michael signals that he wants to retire to the tidy quarters of his own body. Already he has become a platform for this woman, from which she will speak on the subject of her longing and his long thing. Thus, without so much as being photographed in underwear and framed, one can become the centre-piece of a well-appointed room. This young man created the white and awe-inspiring mountains of flesh before him. Like the evening sun, he has touched that face with red. He has taken a lease on the woman, and as far as she’s concerned he can now grope under her dress whenever he likes.

Gerti covers Michael with soft and downy kisses. Soon she will return to her house and her lord and master, who has qualities of his own. For we always wish to return to the place of our old wounds and tear open the gift wrapping in which we have disguised the old as the new, to conceal it. And our declining star teaches us nothing at all.