The Wedding Officer

19

LIVIA WOKE up as they reached the harbor. “You can drop me here,” she said, tapping him on the back. He pulled up, and watched as she untied her bag from the pannier.

“Perhaps I’ll see you again,” he said tentatively.

“Perhaps,” she said, in a voice that suggested she rather hoped not. She reached up into her hair and with her fingers combed out some tangles from the journey. “Thank you for the lift.” She picked up her bag and walked away without another word.

“Will you be all right?” he called after her. She didn’t reply. He supposed she was still upset about having the tank confiscated. But really, she could hardly have expected him to let her keep it. In fact, when he looked back at the afternoon’s events it seemed to him he had gone out of his way to be reasonable. So why was she persisting in being so very ungrateful? And why was he so exasperated that she was?

For a moment he almost went after her. Then, with a sigh, he turned the bike in the direction of the Palazzo Satriano.

Livia had intended to walk the rest of the way. She had not realized, though, how much of a battering Naples had taken since she was last here. Picking her way through the dark streets was a precarious business. Worse, when she got to the street in which Enzo’s family lived, she saw that there was only a huge gap where their house had once stood.

“Excuse me,” she said, stopping a woman who was entering a nearby doorway. “Can you tell me where the Telli family are now?”

The woman crossed herself. “In heaven, God willing. They were all killed in an air raid.”

Livia stared at the mass of rubble, shocked. Of course, people were dying in the raids all the time, but this was different. It occurred to her that if she hadn’t gone back to Fiscino, she would almost certainly have been with the rest of the Telli family when they were killed.

“It was after little Enzo died in Russia,” the woman added. “His family got the letter, and that’s when they stopped going to the shelters. His mother said that if God took her to join him, she wouldn’t complain.”

Poor Quartilla, Livia thought. She had been a tough mother-in-law, but she had adored her son.

“You look upset,” the woman commented. “Did you know the family well?”

“I was married to Enzo,” Livia managed to say.

“Ahi, ahi. Everyone knows someone who’s lost a family,” the woman said. “Me, I lost all my brothers. I thank God I don’t have any sons, or they would have gone too.” She looked at Livia sympathetically. “You’ve had a bad shock. I’d give you some food, but I don’t have any.” She threw up her hands. “This war. When will it ever end?”

With the last of her money she rented a room in a shabby boardinghouse near the port, and the next morning she went to the munitions factory to see if they had any work. But the munitions factory was gone too. An old man who was picking through the rubble for scrap told her that it had been destroyed by the Germans before they left. He thought the hospital was taking on cleaners, so she walked two miles across Naples to the Ospedale dei Pellegrini, only to discover that the jobs had been filled days ago. “You could try the big hotels on Via Partenope,” the hospital administrator suggested. “They’ve reopened now for Allied officers, and one supposes they must have chambermaids.” Livia knew it was a long shot, but she walked all the way back to Via Partenope anyway.

The concierge at the first hotel where she asked for work was brutally dismissive. “As a chambermaid, or a whore?” he asked. “Not that it matters. I’ve got no vacancies for either.” It was the same everywhere she went. After a while she tried going directly to the hotel kitchens, reasoning that her skills as a cook must surely be in demand somewhere, but here, too, the message was identical: We have all the cooks we need, and more.

On the Corso Garibaldi she saw a girl gratefully accepting a tin of rations from two Canadian soldiers, before slipping off with them into a stairwell. However bad things had become in Fiscino, she realized, here they were much worse, worse than she’d ever imagined.

She returned to her room that evening exhausted. She hadn’t eaten all day, but she was so tired that even her hunger couldn’t prevent her from sleeping.

The next day there was more of the same. She was told there was definitely a job unloading pallets in the harbor, but when she got there, the line of applicants stretched for three hundred yards and fights had already broken out over places in the queue. She went back to trudging around kitchens. In many places her knock was not even answered: The restaurants were boarded up and silent, closed by the crackdown on black marketeering.

She stopped for a rest on a doorstep, and a pretty girl her own age waved to her from across the street. Grateful for some human contact, Livia waved back, only to realize from the other girl’s scowl that she wasn’t actually waving, but gesticulating for Livia to get out of the doorway. “Vìa vìa!” the girl screeched. “Scram! That’s where I work, you little thief. Find your own place, or my brother will knife you.”

Despite his inexperience, James was not completely ignorant of sexual matters. At school there had been a dissection of the reproductive organs of a frog, which left him with the impression that sex was probably not for the squeamish, and a veiled talk from his housemaster in which the words “spiritual hygiene,” “self-control” and “bodily purity” had featured heavily, which left him with the impression that a tendency to self-abuse would ruin him for marriage. Eventually one of the other boys had got hold of a copy of Richard Burton’s notorious translation of the Kama Sutra, but despite the eagerness with which they devoured its pages, that too tended to mystify rather than elucidate. “Man is divided into three classes,” Burton explained breezily, “the hare man, the bull man, and the horse man, according to the size of his lingam. Woman also, according to the depth of her yoni, is either a female deer, a mare, or a female elephant. There are thus three equal unions between persons of corresponding dimensions, and there are six unequal unions, when the dimensions do not correspond, or nine in all, as the following table shows:

“Amongst all these, equal unions are the best; those of a superlative degree, i.e., the highest and the lowest, are the worst; and the rest are middling, and with them the high are better than the low.”

This seemed to James even more worrying than the talk from his housemaster had been. How was one meant to know if one was a bull or a horse? More to the point, how was one to know whether one’s intended wife was a deer or a mare? Even supposing she knew herself, which seemed unlikely, you could hardly come right out and ask her. And what happened if, through simple ignorance, a horse married a mare (a natural enough occurrence, one would think, but a union which Burton specifically advised against) and the two parties thus found themselves inadvertently mismatched for an entire lifetime? On a statistical basis, in fact, since there were more unequal combinations than equal ones, it seemed you were more likely to have a disaster on your hands than not.

Nor, despite an impressive list of sexual positions and embellishments, did one learn very much from the Kama Sutra about the act itself, owing to the difficulty of visualizing Burton’s rather vague descriptions. “When she raises her thighs and keeps them wide apart and engages in congress, it is called the ‘Yawning Position,’” Burton wrote. “When she places her thighs with her legs doubled on them upon her sides, and thus engages in congress, it is called the ‘Position of Indrani’ and this is learnt only by practice.” James could just about picture what she was doing with her legs, but where was the man while all this was going on—on top? Underneath? Watching? And what exactly were the dangers of attempting the “Position of Indrani” without practice?

“Auparishtaka, or mouth congress,” Burton warned, “should never be done by a learned Brahman, by a minister that carries on the business of a state, or by a man of good reputation, because though the practice is allowed by the Shastras, there is no reason why it should be carried on, and need only be practiced in particular cases.” These “particular cases” might include “unchaste and wanton women, female attendants and serving maids,” who were apparently expert in a technique called “Sucking the mango stone.” As James had never come across a mango, let alone a wanton woman, this information was not much use either.

One thing he remained particularly unclear about was just what a woman got out of sex. Even Burton, usually so dogmatic in his obscurity, seemed unsure on this subject. “Females do not emit as males do,” he wrote. “The males simply remove their desire, while the females, from their consciousness of desire, feel a certain kind of pleasure, which gives them satisfaction, but it is impossible for them to tell you what kind of pleasure they feel.” Amongst the few friends James was able to discuss the matter with, opinion was divided. Was sex for a woman simply a duty, or was there actual pleasure involved? A boy who had been carrying on an affair with a serving maid—one of Burton’s “wanton women”—claimed that they did, but it was generally held that he was being spun a line, and that whilst men desired women for their bodies as well as their minds, a woman’s desire was principally for the admiration of a man.

After he met Jane, and marriage seemed a real possibility, James had taken the bull by the horns and visited a small bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, where he purchased a slim volume entitled Married Love. The man who sold it to him had, it seemed to James, given him a faint smirk as he wrapped it up in brown paper, and it was not until he was completely alone and sure of being undisturbed that he had dared to open it.

It has become a tradition of our social life that the ignorance of woman about her own body and that of her future husband is a flower-like innocence…

the author wrote,

and to such an extreme is this sometimes pushed, that not seldom is a girl married unaware that married life will bring her into physical relations with her husband fundamentally different from those with her brother. When she discovers the true nature of his body, and learns the part she has to play as a wife, she may refuse utterly to agree to her husband’s wishes. I know one pair of which the husband, chivalrous and loving, had to wait years before his bride recovered from the shock of the discovery of the meaning of marriage and was able to allow him a natural relation. There have been not a few brides whom the horror of the first night of marriage with a man less considerate has driven to suicide or insanity.

James had read on with his heart in his mouth. This was exactly the sort of thing he was afraid of.

Those who are shocked at the publication of such a book as this on the ground that it gives material for impure minds to sport with, need only reflect that such material is already amply provided in certain comic papers, in hosts of inferior novels, too often on the stage and film, and presented thus in coarse and demoralizing guise. It can do nothing but good to such minds to meet the facts they are already so familiar with in a totally new light.

And shed new light it did. True, the author, a woman scientist named Dr. Stopes, had much to say about her own discovery of certain fundamental principles governing female responses (“We have studied the wave-lengths of water, of sound, of light; but when will the sons and daughters of men study the sex-tide in woman and learn the Laws of her Periodicity of Recurrence of Desire?”). But on one subject she was quite clear, and that was that women were capable of enjoying married relations:

By the majority of “nice” people a woman is supposed to have no spontaneous sex-impulses. By this I do not mean a sentimental “falling in love,” but a physical, physiological state of stimulation which arises spontaneously and quite apart from any particular man. So widespread in our country is the view that it is only depraved women who have such feelings (especially before marriage) that most women would rather die than own that they do at times feel a physical yearning indescribable, but as profound as hunger for food.

It is true that in our northern climate women are on the whole naturally less persistently stirred than southerners; and it is further true that with the delaying of maturity, due to our ever-lengthening youth, it often happens that a woman is approaching or even past thirty years before she is awake to the existence of the profoundest calls of her nature.

Nor did Dr. Stopes shirk from explaining how this stirring could come about:

Woman has at the surface a small vestigial organ called the clitoris, which corresponds morphologically to the man’s penis, and which, like it, is extremely sensitive to touch-sensations. This little crest, which lies anteriorly between the inner lips round the vagina, enlarges when the woman is really tumescent, and by the stimulation of movement it is intensely roused and transmits this stimulus to every nerve in her body. But even after a woman’s dormant sex-feeling is aroused and all the complex reactions of her being have been set in motion, it may even take as much as from ten to twenty minutes of actual physical union to consummate her feeling, while two or three minutes often completes the union for a man who is ignorant of the need to control his reactions so that both may experience the added benefit of a mutual crisis to love….

This mutual orgasm is extremely important, but in many cases the man’s climax comes so swiftly that the woman’s reactions are not nearly ready, and she is left without it.

A woman’s orgasm, Dr. Stopes explained briskly, particularly “a really complete and muscularly energetic orgasm,” was necessary to her health, her nerves, her sleep, and even her ability to conceive. A dutiful husband would, through self-control, ensure his wife’s pleasure even before his own, although many, even most, neglected to do so.

But as things are to-day it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the majority of wives are left wakeful and nerve-racked to watch with tender motherly brooding, or with bitter and jealous envy, the slumbers of the men who, through ignorance and carelessness, have neglected to see that they too had the necessary resolution of nervous tension.

James had immediately resolved never to leave Jane either wakeful or nerve-racked. But on one subject Dr. Stopes was just as firm as his housemaster: The exercise of these duties was a matter to be left until after marriage:

However much he may conceal it under assumed cynicism, worldliness, or self-seeking, the heart of every young man yearns with a great longing for the fulfillment of the beautiful dream of a life-long union with a mate. Each heart knows instinctively that it is only a mate who can give full comprehension of all the potential greatness in the soul.

It may be that after years of fighting with his hot young blood a man has given up and gone now and again for relief to prostitutes, and then later in life has met the woman who is his mate, and whom, after remorse for his soiled past, and after winning her forgiveness for it, he marries. Then, unwittingly, he may make the wife suffer either by interpreting her in the light of the other women or perhaps (though this happens less frequently) by setting her absolutely apart from them.

As for what his housemaster had referred to as “spiritual hygiene,” Dr. Stopes was also of the opinion that abstinence was the correct path, although her reasons were more scientific:

The analysis of the chemical nature of the ejaculated fluid reveals among other things a remarkably high percentage of calcium and phosphoric acid—both precious substances in our organization. It is therefore the greatest mistake to imagine that the semen is something to be got rid of frequently—all the vital energy and nerve-force involved in its ejaculation and the precious chemical substances which go to its composition can be better utilized by being transformed into other creative work.

James was utterly converted, and from then on he had resolved, firstly, to keep his baser lusts, along with all the potential greatness in his soul, to himself, at least until his wedding night; secondly, to keep away from prostitutes; and thirdly, to reserve his own stores of calcium and phosphoric acid for his work. Since Jane had broken off their engagement the first had been pretty much assured, and the second held little attraction in any case, but the third had not been easy, particularly now that he was subject to the stirring influence of a southern climate himself. He had tried to steer clear of seafood, as per Jackson’s instructions, but sunlight was harder to avoid, and there had been one or two occasions when his work at the FSS had been somewhat calcium-deficient. He had noticed, however, that Dr. Stopes and his old housemaster seemed to be wrong about one thing. Far from turning him into a raving sex-fiend, his occasional lapses actually seemed to have the opposite effect, making his baser thoughts temporarily less pressing, whilst it was when he was apparently being virtuous that he was more troubled by thoughts of women.

And at the moment he was extremely troubled by thoughts of women. Or, to be more precise, by thoughts of one woman in particular. When a naked arm reached into his mind and beckoned alluringly to him, or when a dress slipped off a shoulder, or a shadow brushed past him, the face it belonged to—the mischievous face, its eyes a bold mixture of challenge and haughtiness—was that of Livia Pertini.

She would steal up on him at the most inopportune moments. He could be conducting an interview or writing a report: One moment his mind would be on his work, the next, a sort of cold, melting feeling in the base of his spine would herald an almost physical shock as Livia pressed her lips against his. He could imagine the cool skin of her cheek, the warm softness of her ears, the tiny pulse at the base of her neck…. Most disturbingly of all, his body reacted quite physically to these visitations. More than once he had to quickly cover his lap with a file, before whoever he was interviewing thought that it was she who was causing him this discomfort.

His arm was giving him no trouble, but he thought it prudent to get it examined by a medic.

“It’s a good dressing,” the doctor commented as he unwound Marisa’s bandage. He peered at the wound. “And no sign of infection. What did you say this girl put on it?”

“Honey,” James confirmed. “And she got one of the bees to sting me. It couldn’t really have helped, could it?”

The doctor shrugged. “It’s an odd thing, but when I was in Nepal I heard of healers there using the same remedy. Perhaps there’s something in it after all.” He redressed the wound. “Either way, you’ve been lucky. I’ve only got a single crate of penicillin left, and my orders are to reserve it for combat casualties. If you’d got an infection, you’d probably have lost your arm. Is there anything else you wanted to ask me about?”

“Actually, there is.” James explained about his problem. “I wondered if I might have a touch of malaria or something,” he concluded.

“Hmm. Stick your tongue out?”

James complied. “Looks healthy enough to me,” the doctor said. “My advice is to drink plenty of tea. It won’t reduce your urges, but in my experience it’s hard to contemplate doing anything really beastly while drinking a nice cup of tea.”