Delta of Venus Read online

  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 iv
ory, 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.