Delta of Venus

Marcel

Marcel came to the houseboat, his blue eyes full of surprise and wonder, full of reflections like the river. Hungry eyes, avid, naked. Over the innocent, absorbing glance fell savage eyebrows, wild like a bushman’s. The wildness was attenuated by the luminous brow and the silkiness of the hair. The skin was fragile too, the nose and mouth vulnerable, transparent, but again the peasant hands, like the eyebrows, asserted his strength.

In his talk it was the madness that predominated, his compulsion to analyze. Everything which befell him, everything which came into his hands, every hour of the day, was constantly commented upon, ripped apart. He could not kiss, desire, possess, enjoy, without immediate examination. He planned his moves before-hand with the help of astrology; he often met with the marvelous; he had a gift for evoking it. But no sooner had the marvelous befallen him than he grasped it with the violence of a man who was not sure of having seen it, lived it; and who longed to make it real.

I liked his pregnable self, sensitive and porous, just before he talked, when he seemed a very soft animal, or a very sensual one, when his malady was not perceptible. He seemed then without wounds, walking about with a heavy bag full of discoveries, notes, programs, new books, new talismans, new perfumes, photographs. He seemed then to be floating like the houseboat without moorings. He wandered, tramped, explored, visited the insane, cast horoscopes, gathered esoteric knowledge, collected plants, stones.

‘There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned,’ he said. ‘I see it in fragments of cut marble, I see it in worn pieces of wood. There is a perfection in a woman’s body that can never be possessed, known completely, even in intercourse.’

He wore the flowing tie of the Bohemians of a hundred years ago, the cap of an apache, the striped trousers of the French bourgeois. Or he wore a black coat like a monk’s, the bow tie of the cheap actor of the provinces, or the scarf of the pimp, wrapped around the throat, a scarf of yellow or bull’s-blood red. Or he wore a suit given to him by a businessman, with the tie flaunted by the Parisian gangster or the hat worn on Sunday by the father of eleven children. He appeared in the black shirt of a conspirator, in the checkered shirt of a peasant from Bourgogne, in a workman’s suit of blue corduroy with wide baggy trousers. At times he let his beard grow and looked like Christ. At other times he shaved himself and looked like a Hungarian violinist from a traveling fair.

I never knew in what disguise he was coming to see me. If he had an identity, it was the identity of changing, of being anything; it was the identity of the actor for whom there is a continual drama.

He had said to me, ‘I will come some day.’

Now he lay on the bed looking at the painted ceiling of the houseboat. He felt the cover of the bed with his hands. He looked out the window at the river.

‘I like to come here, to the barge,’ he said. ‘It lulls me. The river is like a drug. What I suffer from seems unreal when I come here.’

It was raining on the roof of the houseboat. At five o’clock Paris always has a current of eroticism in the air. Is it because it is the hour when lovers meet, the five to seven of all French novels? Never at night, it would seem, for all the women are married and free only at ‘tea time’, the great alibi. At five I always felt shivers of sensuality, shared with the sensual Paris. As soon as the light faded, it seemed to me that every woman I saw was running to meet her lover, that every man was running to meet his mistress.

When he leaves me, Marcel kisses me on the cheek. His beard touches me like a caress. This kiss on the cheek which is meant to ′ be a brother’s is charged with intensity.

We had dinner together. I suggested we go dancing. We went to the Bal Nègre. Immediately Marcel was paralyzed. He was afraid of dancing. He was afraid to touch me. I tried to lure him into the dance, but he would not dance. He was awkward. He was afraid. When he finally held me in his arms he was trembling, and I was enjoying the havoc I caused. I felt a joy at being near to him. I felt a joy in the tall slenderness of his body.

I said, ‘Are you sad? Do you want to leave?’

‘I’m not sad, but I’m blocked. My whole past seems to stop me. I can’t let go. This music is so savage. I feel as if I can inhale but not exhale. I’m just constrained, unnatural.’

I did not ask him to dance any more. I danced with a Negro.

When we left then in the cool night, Marcel was talking about the knots, the fears, the paralysis in him. I felt, the miracle has not happened. I will free him by a miracle, not by words, not directly, not with the words I used for the sick ones. What he suffers I know. I suffered it once. But I know the free Marcel. I want Marcel free.

But when he came to the houseboat and saw Hans there, when he saw Gustavo arriving at midnight and staying on after he left, Marcel got jealous. I saw his blue eyes grow dark. When he kissed me goodnight, he stared at Gustavo with anger.

He said to me, ‘Come out with me for a moment.’

I left the houseboat and walked with him along the dark quays. Once we were alone, he leaned over and kissed me passionately, furiously, his full, big mouth drinking mine. I offered my mouth again.

‘When will you come to see me?’ he asked.

‘Tomorrow, Marcel, tomorrow I will come to see you.’

When I arrived at his place he had dressed himself in his Lapland costume to surprise me. It was like a Russian dress, and he wore a fur hat and high black felt boots, which reached almost to his hips.

His room was like a traveler’s den, full of objects from all over the world. The walls were covered with red rugs, the bed was covered with animal furs. The place was close, intimate, voluptuous like the rooms of an opium dream. The furs, the deep-red walls, the objects, like the fetishes of an African priest – everything was violently erotic. I wanted to lie naked on the furs, to be taken there lying on this animal smell, caressed by the fur.

I stood there in the red room, and Marcel undressed me. He held my naked waist in his hands. He eagerly explored my body with his hands. He felt the strong fullness of my hips.

‘For the first time, a real woman,’ he said. ‘So many have come here, but for the first time here is a real woman, someone I can worship.’

As I lay on the bed it seemed to me that the smell and feel of the fur and the bestiality of Marcel were combined. Jealousy had broken his timidity. He was like an animal, hungry for every sensation, for every way of knowing me. He kissed me eagerly, he bit my lips. He lay in the animal furs, kissing my breasts, feeling my legs, my sex, my buttocks. Then in the half-light he moved up over me, shoving his penis in my mouth. I felt my teeth catching on it as he pushed it in and out, but he liked it. He was watching and caressing me, his hands all over my body, his fingers everywhere seeking to know me completely, to hold me.

I threw my legs up over his shoulder, high, so that he could plunge into me and see it at the same time. He wanted to see everything. He wanted to see how the penis went in and came out glistening and firm, big. I held myself up on my two fists so as to offer my sex more and more to his thrusts. Then he turned me over and lay over me like a dog, pushing his penis in from behind, with his hands cupping my breasts, caressing me and pushing me at the same time. He was untiring. He would not come. I was waiting to have the orgasm with him, but he postponed and postponed it. He wanted to linger, to feel my body forever, to be endlessly excited. I was growing tired and I cried out, ‘Come now, Marcel, come now.’ He began then to push violently, moving with me into the wild rising peak of the orgasm, and then I cried out, and he came almost at the same time. We fell back among the furs, released.

We lay in half-darkness, surrounded by strange forms – sleighs, boots, spoons from Russia, crystals, sea shells. There were erotic Chinese pictures on the walls. But everything, even a piece of lava from Krakatoa, even the bottle of sand from the Dead Sea, had a quality of erotic suggestion.

‘You have the right rhythm for me,’ Marcel said. ‘Women are usually too quick for me. I get into a panic about it. They take their pleasure and then I am afraid to go in. They do not give me time to feel them, to know them, to reach them, and I go crazy after they leave thinking about their nakedness and how I have not had my pleasure. But you are slow. You are like me.’

As I dressed we stood by the fireplace, talking. Marcel slipped his hand under my skirt and began caressing me again. We were suddenly blind again with desire. I stood there with my eyes closed, feeling his hand, moving upon it. He gripped my ass with his hard, peasant grip, and I thought we were going to roll down on the bed again, but instead he said, ‘Lift up your dress.’

I leaned against the wall, moving my body up against his. He put his head between my legs, seizing my buttocks in his hands, tonguing my sex, sucking and licking until I was wet again. Then he took his penis out and took me there against the wall. His penis hard and erect like a drill, pushing, pushing, thrusting up into me while I was all wet and dissolved in his passion.

I enjoy making love with Gustavo more than with Marcel, because he has no timidities, no fears, no nervousness. He falls into a dream, we hypnotize each other with caresses. I touch his neck and pass my fingers through his black hair. I caress his belly, his legs, his hips. When I touch his back from neck to buttocks his body begins to shiver with pleasure. Like a woman, he likes caresses. His sex stirs. I don’t touch it until it begins to leap. Then he gasps with pleasure. I take it all in my hand, hold it firmly, and press it up and down. Or else I touch the tip of it with my tongue, and then he moves it in and out of my mouth. Sometimes he comes in my mouth and I swallow the sperm. Other times it is he who begins the caresses. My moisture comes easily, his fingers are so warm and knowing. Sometimes I am so excited that I feel the orgasm at the mere touch of his finger. When he feels me throbbing and palpitating, it excites him. He does not wait for the orgasm to finish, he pushes his penis in as if to feel the last contractions of it. His penis fills me completely, it is just made for me, so that he can slide easily. I close my inner lips around his penis and suck him inwardly. Sometimes the penis is larger than at other times and seems charged with electricity, and then the pleasure is immense, protracted. The orgasm never ends.

Women very often pursue him, but he is like a woman and needs to believe himself in love. Although a beautiful woman can excite him, if he does not feel some kind of love, he is impotent.

It is strange how the character of a person is reflected in the sexual act. If one is nervous, timid, uneasy, fearful, the sexual act is the same. If one is relaxed, the sexual act is enjoyable. Hans’s penis never softens, so he takes his time, with a sureness about it. He installs himself inside of his pleasure as he installs himself inside of the present moment, to enjoy calmly, completely, to the last drop. Marcel is more uneasy, restless. I feel even when his penis is hard that he is anxious to show his power and that he is hurrying, driven by fear that his strength will not last.

Last night after reading some of Hans’s writing, his sensual scenes, I raised my arms over my head. I felt my satin pants slipping a little at the waist. I felt my belly and sex so alive. In the dark Hans and I threw ourselves into a prolonged orgy. I felt that I was taking all the women he had taken, everything that his fingers had touched, all the tongues, all the sexes he had smelled, every word he had uttered about sex, all this I took inside of me, like an orgy of remembered scenes, a whole world of orgasms and fevers.

Marcel and I were lying together on his couch. In the semidarkness of the room he was talking about erotic fantasies he had and how difficult it was to satisfy them. He had always wanted a woman to wear a lot of petticoats and he would lie underneath and look. He remembered that is what he did with his first nurse and, pretending to play, had looked up her skirts. This first stirring of the erotic feeling had remained with him.

So I said, ‘But I’ll do it. Let’s do all the things we ever wanted to do or have done to us. We have the whole night. There are so many objects here that we can use. You have costumes too. I’ll dress up for you.’

‘Oh, will you?’ said Marcel. ‘I’ll do anything you want, anything you ask me to do.’

‘First get me the costumes. You have peasant skirts there that I can wear. We will begin with your fantasies. We won’t stop until we have realized them all. Now, let me dress.’

I went to the other room, put on various skirts he had brought from Greece and Spain, one on top of another. Marcel was lying on the floor. I came into his room. He was flushed with pleasure when he saw me. I sat on the edge of his bed.

‘Now stand up,’ said Marcel.

I stood up. He lay on the floor and he looked up between my legs, under the skirts. He spread them a little with his hands. I stood still with my legs apart. Marcel’s looking up at me excited me, so that very slowly I began to dance as I had seen the Arab women do, right over Marcel’s face, slowly shaking my hips, so that he could see my sex moving between the skirts. I danced and moved and turned, and he kept looking and panting with pleasure. Then he could not contain himself, pulled me down right over his face, and began biting and kissing me. I stopped him after a while: ‘Don’t make me come, keep it.’

I left him and for his next fantasy I returned naked wearing his black felt boots. Then Marcel wanted me to be cruel. ‘Please be cruel,’ he begged.

All naked, in the high black boots, I began to order him to do humiliating things. I said, ‘Go out and bring me a handsome man. I want him to take me in front of you.’

‘That I won’t do,’ said Marcel.

‘I order you to. You said you would do anything I asked you.’

Marcel got up and went downstairs. He came back about half an hour later with a neighbor of his, a very handsome Russian. Marcel was pale; he could see that I liked the Russian. He had told him what we were doing. The Russian looked at me and smiled. 1 did not need to arouse him. When he walked toward me, he was already roused by the black boots and the nakedness. I not only gave myself to the Russian but I whispered to him, ‘Make it last, please make it last.’

Marcel was suffering. I was enjoying the Russian, who was big and powerful and who could hold out for a long time. As Marcel watched us, he took his penis out of his pants, and it was erect. When I felt the orgasm coming in unison with the Russian’s, Marcel wanted to put his penis in my mouth but I would not let him. I said, ‘You must keep it for later. I have other things to ask you. I won’t let you come!’ The Russian was taking his pleasure. After the orgasm he stayed inside and wanted more, but I moved away. He said, ‘I wish you would let me watch.’

Marcel objected. We let him go. He thanked me, very ironically and feverishly. He would have liked to stay with us.

Marcel fell at my feet. ‘That was cruel. You know that I love you. That was very cruel.’

‘But it made you passionate, didn’t it, it made you passionate.’

‘Yes, but it hurt me too, I would not have done that to you.’

‘I did not ask you to be cruel to me, did I? When people are cruel to me it makes me cold, but you wanted it, it excited you.’

‘What do you want now?’

‘I like to be made love to while looking out of the window,’ I said, ‘while people are looking at me. I want you to take me from behind, and I want nobody to be able to see what we are doing. I like the secrecy of it.’

I stood by the window. People could look into the room from other houses, and Marcel took me as I stood there. I did not show one sign of excitement, but I was enjoying him. He was panting and could scarcely control himself, as I kept saying, ‘Quietly, Marcel, do it quietly so that nobody will know.’ People saw us, but they thought we were just standing there looking at the street. But we were enjoying an orgasm, as couples do in doorways and under bridges at night all over Paris.

We were tired. We closed the window. We rested for a little while. We began to talk in the dark, dreaming and remembering.

‘A few hours ago, Marcel, I entered the subway at the rush hour, which I rarely do. I was pushed by the waves of people, jammed, and stood there. Suddenly I remembered a subway adventure Alraune told me about, when she was convinced that Hans had taken advantage of the crowdedness to caress a woman. At the very same moment, I felt a hand very lightly touch my dress, as if by accident. My coat was open, my dress thin, and this hand was brushing lightly through my dress just at the tip of my sex. I did not move away. The man in front of me was so tall that I could not see his face. I did not want to look up. I was not sure it was he, I did not want to know who it was. The hand caressed the dress, then very lightly it increased its pressure, feeling for the sex. I made a very slight movement to raise the sex toward the fingers. The fingers became firmer, following the shape of the lips deftly, lightly. I felt a wave of pleasure. As a lurch of the subway pushed us together I pressed against the whole hand, and he made a bolder gesture, gripping the lips of the sex. Now I was frenzied with pleasure, I felt the orgasm approaching, I rubbed against the hand, imperceptibly. The hand seemed to feel what I felt and continued its caress until I came. The orgasm shook my body. The subway stopped and a river of people pushed out. The man disappeared.’

War is declared. Women are weeping in the streets. The very first night there was a black-out. We had seen rehearsals of this, but the real black-out was quite different. The rehearsals had been gay. Now Paris was serious. The streets were absolutely black. Here and there a tiny blue or green or red watch light, small and dim, like the little ikon lights in Russian churches. All the windows were covered with black cloth. The café windows were covered or painted in dark blue. It was a soft September night. Because of the darkness it seemed even softer. There was something very strange in the atmosphere – an expectancy, a suspense.

I walked carefully up the Boulevard Raspail feeling lonely and intending to go to the Dome and talk to someone. I finally reached it. It was overcrowded, half-full of soldiers, half-full of the usual whores and models, but many of the artists were gone. Most of them had been called home, each one to his own country. There were no Americans left, no more Spaniards, no more German refugees sitting about. It was a French atmosphere again. I sat down and was soon joined by Gisele, a young woman I had talked with a few times. She was glad to see me. She said she could not stay at home. Her brother had been called, and the house was sad. Then another friend, Roger, sat at our table. Soon we were five. All of us had come to the café to be with people. All of us felt lonely. The darkness isolated one, it made going out difficult. One was driven indoors – so as not to be alone. We all wanted this. We sat there enjoying the lights, the drinks. The soldiers were animated, everyone was friendly. All the barriers were down. People did not wait for introductions. Everyone was in equal danger and shared the same need of companionship and affection and warmth.

Later I said to Roger, ‘Let’s go out.’ I wanted to be in the dark streets again. We walked slowly, cautiously. We came to an Arabian restaurant that I liked and went in. People were sitting around the very low tables. A fleshy Arabian woman was dancing. Men would give her money and she would place it on her breasts and go on dancing. Tonight the place was full of soldiers, and they were drunk on the heavy Arabian wine. The dancer was drunk, too. She never wore very much, hazy, transparent skirts and a belt, but now the skirt had slit open and when she did her belly dance, it revealed the pubic hair dancing, the massive flesh around it trembling.

One of the officers offered her a ten-franc piece and said, ‘Pick it up with your cunt.’ Fatima was not at all disturbed. She walked to his table, laid the ten-franc piece on the very edge of it, spread her legs a little and gave a twist like those she did in the dance, so that the lips of her vulva touched the money. At first she could not catch it. While she tried to do this, she made a sucking noise, and the soldiers were laughing and excited by the sight. Finally the lips of the vulva stiffened sufficiently around the piece of money and she picked it up.

The dancing continued. A young Arab boy who played the flute was watching me intently. Roger was sitting next to me dissolved by the dancer, gently smiling. The Arab boy’s eyes continued to burn through me. It was like a kiss, a burn on one’s flesh. Everybody was drunk and singing and laughing. When I got up, the Arab boy got up too. I was not quite sure of what I was doing. At the entrance there was a dark cubbyhole for coats and hats. The girl who took care of it was sitting with the soldiers. I went in there.

The Arab understood. I waited among the coats. The Arab spread one of them on the floor and pushed me down. In the dim light I could see him taking out a magnificent penis, smooth, beautiful. It was so beautiful that I wanted it in my mouth, but he would not let me have it. He immediately placed it inside my sex. It was so hard and hot. I was afraid we would be caught and I wanted him to hurry. I was so excited that I had come immediately and now he was going on, plunging, and churning. He was untiring.

A half-drunk soldier came out and wanted his coat. We did not move. He grabbed his coat without stepping into the cubbyhole where we lay. He went away. The Arab was slow in coming. He had such a strength in his penis and in his hands and in his tongue. Everything was firm about him. I felt his penis growing larger and hotter, until the edges rubbed so much against the womb that it felt rough, almost like a scraping. He moved in and out at the same even rhythm, never hurrying. I lay back and thought no more of where we were. I thought only of his hard penis moving evenly, moving obsessionally, in and out. Without any warning or change of rhythm, he came, like the spurt of a fountain. Then he did not take his penis out. It remained firm. He wanted me to come again. But people were leaving the restaurant. Fortunately the coats had fallen over us and concealed us. We were in a kind of tent. I did not want to move. The Arab said, ‘Will I see you again? You are so soft and beautiful. Will I ever see you again?’

Roger was looking for me. I sat up and arranged myself. The Arab disappeared. More people began to leave. There was an eleven o’clock curfew. People thought I was taking care of the coats. I was no longer drunk. Roger found me. He wanted to take me home. He said, ‘I saw the Arab boy staring at you. You must be careful.’

Marcel and I were walking through the darkness, in and out of cafés, pulling aside the heavy black curtains as we entered, which made us both feel as if we were going into some underworld, some city of the demons. Black, like the black underwear of the Parisian whore, the long black stockings of the cancan dancers, the wide black garters of the women especially created to satisfy men’s most perverse caprices, the tight little black corsets which set off the breasts and push them up toward men’s lips, the black boots of flagellation scenes in French novels. Marcel was shivering with the voluptuousness of it. I asked him, ‘Do you think there are places that make one feel like making love?’

‘I certainly do,’ said Marcel. ‘At least, I feel this. Just as you felt like making love on top of my fur bed, I always feel like making love where there are hangings and curtains and materials on the walls, where it is like a womb. I always feel like making love where there is a great deal of red. Also where there are mirrors. But the room which excited me most was one I saw one time near the Boulevard Clichy. As you know, at the corner of this boulevard there is a famous whore with a wooden leg who has many admirers. I was always fascinated with her because I felt that I could never bring myself to make love to her. I was sure that as soon as I saw the wooden leg I would be paralyzed with horror.

‘She was a very cheerful young woman, smiling, good-natured. She had dyed her hair blond. But her eyelashes were of deep black and bushy like a man’s. She had a soft little bit of hair in her upper lip. She must have been a dark, hairy southern girl before she dyed her hair. Her one good leg was sturdy, firm, her body quite beautiful. But I could not bring myself to ask her. As I looked at her I remembered a painting by Courbet I had seen. It was a painting commissioned by a rich man long ago, who had asked him to paint a woman in the act of sex. Courbet, who was a great realist, painted a woman’s sex and nothing else. He left out the head, the arms, the legs. He painted a torso, with a carefully designed sex, in contortions of pleasure, clutching at a penis that came out of a bush of very black hair. That was all. I felt that with this whore it would be the same, one would only think of the sex, try not to look down at her legs or anything else. And perhaps that would be exciting. As I stood in the corner deliberating with myself, another whore came up to me, a very young one. A young whore is rare in Paris. She spoke to the one with the wooden leg. It was beginning to rain. The young one was saying, “I’ve been walking in the rain for two hours now. My shoes are ruined. And not a single client.” I suddenly felt sorry for her. I said, “Will you have a coffee with me?” She accepted joyously. She said, “What are you, a painter?”

‘“I’m not a painter,” I said, “but I was thinking about a painting I saw.”

‘“There are wonderful paintings in the Café Wepler,” she said. “And look at this one.” She took out of her pocketbook what looked like a delicate handkerchief. She held it opened. There was painted on it a big woman’s ass, placed so as to reveal the sex fully, and an equally large penis. She tugged at the handkerchief, which was elastic, and it looked as if the ass were moving, the penis too. Then she turned it over, and now the penis was still heaving but it looked as if it had gone inside of the sex. She gave it a certain movement which made the whole picture active. I laughed, but the sight aroused me, so that we never got to the Café Wepler and the girl offered to let me go to her room. It was in a very shabby house of Montmartre, where all the circus and vaudeville people stayed. We had to climb five flights.

‘She said, “You’ll have to excuse the drabness. I’m just starting in Paris. I’ve only been here a month. Before that I was working in a house in a small town and it was so boring seeing the same men every week. It was almost like being married! I knew just when they would be coming to see me, the day and hour, regular as clocks. I knew all their habits. There were no more surprises. So I came to Paris.”

‘As she talked we entered her room. It was very small – just room enough for the big iron bed on which I pushed her and which creaked as if we were already making love like two monkeys. But what I couldn’t get used to was that there was no window – absolutely no window. It was like lying in a tomb, a prison, a cell. I can’t tell you exactly what it was like. But the feeling it gave me was of security. It was wonderful to be shut in so securely with a young woman. It was almost as wonderful as being already inside her cunt. It was the most marvelous room I ever made love in, so completely shut out of the world, so tight and cozy, and when I got inside of her I felt that the whole rest of the world could vanish for all I cared. There I was, in the best place of all in the world, a womb, warm and soft and shutting me in from everything else, protecting me, hiding me.

‘I would like to have lived there with this girl, never to go out again. And I did for two days. For two days and nights we just lay there in her bed and caressed and fell asleep and caressed again and fell asleep, until it was all like a dream. Every time I woke up I was with my penis inside of her, moist, dark, open, and then I would move and then lie quiet, until we got terribly hungry.

‘Then I went out, got wine and cold meat and back to bed again. No daylight. We did not know what time of day it was, or whether it was night. We just lay there, feeling with our bodies, one inside of the other almost continuously, talking into each other’s ears. Yvonne would say something to make me laugh. I would say, “Yvonne, don’t make me laugh so much or it will slip out.” My penis would slip out of her when I laughed and I would have to put it back again.

‘“Yvonne, are you tired of this?” I asked.

‘“Ah, no,” said Yvonne, “it is the only time I have ever enjoyed myself. When clients are always in a sort of hurry, you know, it sort of hurts my feelings, so I let them go at it, but I don’t take any interest in it. Besides, it’s bad for business. It makes you old and tired too quickly if you do. And I always have that feeling that they don’t pay enough attention to me, so it makes me draw in, away from them somewhere in myself. You understand that?”’

Then Marcel asked me if he had been a good lover that first time in his place.

‘You were a good lover, Marcel. I liked the way you gripped my ass with both hands. You gripped it firmly as if you were going to eat into it. I liked the way you took my sex between your two hands. It was the way you took it, so decisively, with so much maleness. It is a little touch of the caveman you have.’

‘Why do women never tell men this? Why do women make such a secret and mystery of it all? They think it destroys their mystery, but it is not true. And here you come out and say just what you felt. It is wonderful.’

‘I believe in saying it. There are enough mysteries, and these do not help our enjoyment of each other. Now the war is here and many people will die, knowing nothing because they are tongue-tied about sex. It’s ridiculous.’

‘I am remembering St Tropez,’ said Marcel. ‘The most wonderful summer we have ever had …’

As he said this, I saw the place vividly. An artists’ colony where society people and actors and actresses went, people with yachts anchored there. The little cafés on the waterfront, the gaiety, the exuberance, the laxity. Everybody in beach costumes. Everybody fraternizing – the yacht people with the artists, the artists with the young postman, the young policeman, the young fisherman, young and dark men of the south.

There was dancing on a patio under the sky. The jazz band came from Martinique and was hotter than the summer night. Marcel and I were sitting in a corner one evening when they announced that they would put all the lights out for five minutes, then for ten, then for fifteen in the middle of each dance.

A man called out, ‘Choose your partners carefully for the quart d’heure de passion. Choose your partners carefully.’

There was a great flurry and bustle for a moment. Then the dance began, and eventually the lights went out. A few women screamed hysterically. A man’s voice said, ‘That’s an outrage, I won’t stand for it.’ Someone else screamed, ‘Turn on the lights.’

The dance continued in the dark. One felt that bodies were in heat.

Marcel was in ecstasy, holding me as if he would break me, bending over me, his knees between mine, his penis erect. In five minutes people only had time to get a little friction. When the lights went on everybody looked disturbed. A few faces looked apoplectic, others pale. Marcel’s hair was tousled. One woman’s linen shorts were wrinkled. One man’s linen trousers were wrinkled. The atmosphere was sultry, animal, electric. At the same time there was a surface of refinement to be maintained, a form, an elegance. Some people, who were shocked, were leaving. Some waited as if for a storm. Others waited with a light in their eyes.

‘Do you think one of them will scream, turn into a beast, lose his control?’ I asked.

‘I may,’ said Marcel.

The second dance began. The lights went out. The voice of the band leader said, ‘This is the quart d’heure de passion. Messieurs, mesdames, you now have ten minutes of it, and then you will have fifteen.’

There were stifled little screams in the audience, women protesting. Marcel and I were clutched like two tango dancers, and at each moment of the dance I thought I would unleash the orgasm. Then the lights went on, and the disorder and feeling in the place was even greater.

‘This will turn into an orgy,’ said Marcel.

People sat down with eyes dazed, as if by the lights. Eyes dazed with the turmoil of the blood, the nerves.

One could no longer tell the difference between the whores, the society women, the Bohemians, the town girls. The town girls were beautiful, with the sultry beauty of the south. Every woman was sunburnt and Tahitian, covered with shells and flowers. In the pressure of the dance some of the shells had broken and lay on the dance floor.

Marcel said, ‘I don’t think I can go through the next dance. I will rape you.’ His hand was slipping into my shorts and feeling me. His eyes were burning.

Bodies. Legs, so many legs, all brown and glossy, some hairy as foxes’. One man had such a hairy chest that he wore a net shirt to show it off. He looked like an ape. His arms were long and encircled his dance partner as if he would devour her.

The last dance. The lights went out. One woman let out a little bird cry. Another began to defend herself.

Marcel’s head fell on my shoulder and he began to bite my shoulder, hard. We pressed against each other and moved against each other. I closed my eyes. I was reeling with pleasure. I was carried by a wave of desire, which came from all the other dancers, from the night, from the music. I thought I would have the orgasm then. Marcel continued to bite me, and I was afraid we would fall on the floor. But then drunkenness saved us, the drunkenness kept us suspended over the act, enjoying all that lay behind the act.

When the lights went on everybody was drunk, tottering with nervous excitement. Marcel said, ‘They like this better than the actual thing. Most of them like this better. It makes it last so long. But I can’t stand any more of it. Let them sit there and enjoy the way they feel, they like to be tickled, they like to sit there with their erections and the women all open and moist, but I want to finish it off, I can’t wait. Let’s go to the beach.’

At the beach the coolness quieted us. We lay on the sand, still hearing the rhythm of the jazz from afar, like a heart thumping, like a penis thumping inside of a woman, and while the waves rolled at our feet, the waves inside of us rolled us over and over each other until we came together, rolling in the sand, to the same thumping of the jazz beats.

Marcel was remembering this, too. He said, ‘What a marvelous summer. I think everybody knew it would be the last drop of pleasure.’