ELENA NOW understood why some Spanish husbands refused to initiate their wives to all the possibilities of lovemaking—to avoid the risk awakening in them an insatiable passion. Instead of being contented, calmed by Pierre’s love, she had become more vulnerable. The more she desired Pierre, the greater her hunger for other loves. It seemed to her that she had little interest in the rooting of love, in its fixity. She wanted only the moment of passion from everyone.
She did not even want to see Leila again. She wanted to see the sculptor Jean because he was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt. She thought to herself, I talk almost like a saint, to burn for love—for no mystic love, but for a ravaging sensual meeting. Pierre has awakened in me a woman I did not know, an insatiable woman.
Almost as if she had willed her desire to accomplish itself, she found Jean waiting at the door. He was, as usual, carrying some little offering in a package, which he held awkwardly. The way his body moved, the way his eyes trembled when she approached him, betrayed the strength of his desire. She was already possessed by his body, and he moved as if he were installed within her.
“You have never come to see me,” he said humbly. “You have never seen my work.”
“Let’s go now,” she answered, and with a light, dancing step, she walked at his side. They reached a curious, barren part of Paris, near one of the gates, a city of sheds turned into studios, side by side with workmen’s homes. And there Jean lived with statues in place of furniture, massive statues. He himself was fluid, changeable, hypersensitive, and he had created a solidity and power with his trembling hands.
The sculptures were like monuments, five times life size, the women pregnant, the men indolent and sensual, with hands and feet like tree roots. One man and woman were so kneaded together that one could not detect the differences between their bodies. The contours were completely welded together. Bound by their genitals, they towered over Elena and Jean.
In the shadow of this statue, they moved towards each other, without a word, without a smile. Even their hands did not move. As they met, Jean pressed Elena against the statue. They did not kiss or touch each other with their hands. Only their torsos met, repeating in warm human flesh the welding of the bodies of the statue above them. He pressed his genitals against hers, with a low, entranced rhythm, as if he would thus enter her body.
He slid down, as if he were going to kneel at her feet, only to rise again, this time carrying her dress upwards under his pressure, so that it ended in a swollen heap of material under her arms. And again he pressed against her, sometimes moving from left to right or right to left, sometimes in circles, sometimes pushing into her with compressed violence. She felt the bulk of his desire rubbing as if he were lighting a fire with two stones, drawing sparks each time he moved, and finally she slid downwards as if in a light-bodied dream. She fell in a heap, caught between his legs, and now he wanted to fix this position, to eternalize it, to nail down her body with the powerful thrust of his swollen virility. They moved again, she to offer the deepest recesses of her femininity, and he to bind them together. She contracted to feel his presence more, moving with a gasp of unbearable joy, as if she had touched the most vulnerable point of his being.
He closed his eyes to feel this elongation of his being into which all his blood had concentrated and which lay in the voluptuous darkness of her. He could no longer hold back and pushed out to invade her, to fill her womb to the brim with his blood, and as she received this, the little passageway where he moved closed tighter around him, swallowing the essences of his being within her.
The statue cast its shadow over their embrace, which did not dissolve. They lay as if turned to stone, feeling the very last drop of pleasure ebbing away. She was already thinking of Pierre. She knew she would not return to Jean. She thought, Tomorrow it would be less beautiful. She thought with an almost superstitious fear that if she stayed with Jean, then Pierre would sense the betrayal and punish her.
She expected to be punished. As she stood before Pierre’s door she expected to find Bijou there on his bed, her legs wide apart. Why Bijou? Because Elena expected revenge for the betrayal of her love.
Her heart beat wildly as he opened the door. Pierre smiled innocently. But then, was not her smile innocent? To ascertain this, she looked at herself in the mirror. Had she expected the demon driving her to appear in her green eyes?
She observed the creases in her skirt, the specks of dust on her sandals. She felt that Pierre would know, if he made love to her, that it was Jean’s essence which flowed together with her own moisture. She eluded his caresses and suggested they visit Balzac’s house in Passy.
It was a soft rainy afternoon, with that gray Parisian melancholy that drove people indoors, that created an erotic atmosphere because it fell like a ceiling over the city, enclosing them all in a nerveless air, as in an alcove; and everywhere, some reminder of the erotic life—a shop, half-hidden, showing underwear and black garters and black boots; the Parisian woman’s provocative walk; taxis carrying embracing lovers.
Balzac’s house stood at the top of a hilly street in Passy, overlooking the Seine. First they had to ring at the door of an apartment house, then descend a flight of stairs that seemed to lead to a cellar but opened instead on a garden. Then they had to traverse the garden and ring at another door. This was the door of his house, concealed in the garden of the apartment house, a secret and mysterious house, so hidden and isolated in the heart of Paris.
The woman who opened the door was like a ghost from the past—faded face, faded hair and clothes, bloodless. Living with Balzac’s manuscripts, pictures, engravings of the women he had loved, first editions, she was permeated with a vanished past, and all the blood had ebbed from her. Her very voice was distant, ghostly. She slept in this house filled with dead souvenirs. She had become equally dead to the present. It was as if each night she laid herself away in the tomb of Balzac, to sleep with him.
She guided them through the rooms, and then to the back of the house. She came to a trap door, slipped her long bony fingers through the ring and lifted it for Elena and Pierre to see. It opened on a little stairway.
This was the trap door Balzac had built so that the women who visited him could escape from the surveillance or suspicions of their husbands. He, too, used it to escape from his harassing creditors. The stairway led to a path and then to a gate that opened on an isolated street that in turn led to the Seine. One could escape before the person at the front door of the house had enough time to traverse the first room.
For Elena and Pierre, the effect of this trap door so evoked Balzac’s love of life that it affected them like an aphrodisiac. Pierre whispered to her, “I would like to take you on the floor, right here.”
The ghost woman did not hear these words, uttered with the directness of an apache, but she caught the glance which accompanied them. The mood of the visitors was not in harmony with the sacredness of the place, and she hurried them out.
The breath of death had whipped their senses. Pierre hailed a taxi. In the taxi he could not wait. He made Elena sit over him, with her back to him, the whole length of her body against his, concealing him completely. He raised her skirt.
Elena said, “Not here, Pierre. Wait until we get home. People will see us. Please wait. Oh, Pierre, you’re hurting me! Look, the policeman stared at us. And now we’re stopped here, and people can see us from the sidewalk. Pierre, Pierre, stop it.”
But all the time that she feebly defended herself, and tried to slip off, she was conquered by pleasure. Her efforts to sit still made her even more keenly aware of Pierre’s every movement. Now she feared that he might hurry his act, driven by the speed of the taxi and the fear that it would soon stop in front of the house and the taxi driver would turn his head towards them. And she wanted to enjoy Pierre, to reassert their bond, the harmony of their bodies. They were observed from the street. Yet she could not draw away, and he now had his arms around her. Then a violent jump of the taxi over a hole in the road threw them apart. It was too late to resume the embrace. The taxi had stopped. Pierre had just enough time to button himself. Elena felt they must look drunk, disheveled. The languor of her body made it difficult for her to move.
Pierre was filled with a perverse enjoyment of this interruption. He enjoyed feeling his bones half-melted in his body, the almost painful withdrawal of the blood. Elena shared his new whim, and later they lay on the bed caressing each other and talking. Then Elena told Pierre the story she had heard in the morning from a young French woman who sewed for her.
“MADELEINE used to work for a big department store. She came from the poorest ragpicker’s family in all Paris. Both her father and mother lived by picking garbage cans and selling the bits of tin, leather and paper they found. Madeleine was placed in the sumptuous bedroom furniture department, under the supervision of a suave, waxed, starched floorwalker. She had never slept on a bed, only on a pile of rags and newspapers in a shack. When people were not looking she felt the satin bedspreads, the mattresses, the feather pillows, as if they were ermine or chinchilla. She had a natural Parisian gift for appearing charmingly dressed on the money other women spent on stockings alone. She was attractive, with humorous eyes, curly black hair and well-rounded curves. She developed two passions, one to steal a few drops of perfume or cologne from the perfume department, another to wait until the store was closing so she could lie down on one of the softest beds and pretend she was to sleep there. She preferred the canopied ones. She felt more secure lying under curtains. The floorwalker was usually in such a hurry to leave that she was left alone for a few minutes to indulge in this fantasy. She thought that while lying in such a bed her feminine charms were a million times enhanced, and she wished certain elegant men she had seen on the Champs Élysées could see her there and realize how well she would look in a beautiful bedroom.
“Her fantasy became more complex. She arranged to have a mirrored dressing table placed in front of the bed so she could admire herself lying down. Then one day when she had accomplished every step of the ceremony, she saw that the floorwalker had been watching her with amazement. As she was about to leap off the bed he stopped her.
“‘Madame,’ he said (she had always been called Mademoiselle), ‘I am delighted to make your acquaintance. I hope you are pleased with the bed I made for you, according to your orders. Do you find it soft enough? Do you think Monsieur le Comte will like it?’
“‘Monsieur le Comte is fortunately away for a week, and I will be able to enjoy my bed with someone else,’ she answered. Then she sat up and offered her hand to the man. ‘Now kiss it as you would kiss a lady’s hand in a salon.’ Smiling, he did this with suave elegance. Then they heard a sound and they both vanished in different directions.
“Every day they stole five or ten minutes from the closing-hour rush. Pretending to put things in order, to dust, to rectify errors on the price tags, they planned the little scene. He added the most effective touch of all—a screen. Then lace-edged sheets from another department. Then he made up the bed and turned down the coverlet. After kissing her hands, they conversed. He called her Nana. As she did not know the book, he gave it to her. What concerned him now was the incongruous effect of her tight little black dress on the pastel bedspread. He would borrow a filmy negligée worn by a mannequin during the day and cover Madeleine with it. Even if salesmen or saleswomen passed by, they did not see the scene behind the screen.
“When Madeleine had enjoyed the hand-kissing, he deposited a kiss further up along her arm, in the nook within the elbow. There the skin was sensitive, and when she folded her arm, it seemed as if the kiss were enclosed and nurtured. Madeleine let it lie there like a preserved flower and then later, when she was alone, she opened her arm and kissed the same place as if to devour it more intimately. This kiss, deposited with such delicacy, was more potent than all the gross pinchings she had received in the street as tributes to her charms or the whispered obscenities of the workmen: Viens que je te suce.
“At first he sat at the foot of the bed, then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer. Alarming footsteps on the other side of the screen gave to their meeting the secrecy and dangers of a lovers’ rendezvous. Then Madeleine would say, ‘I wish we could escape from the jealous surveillance of the Count. He is getting on my nerves.’ But her admirer was too wise to say, ‘Come with me to some humble little hotel’ He knew this could not take place in some dingy room, in a brass bed with torn blankets and gray sheets. He placed a kiss in the warmest nook of her neck, under the curling hair, then on the tip of her ear, where Madeleine could not taste it later, where she could merely touch it with her fingers. Her ear burned all day after this kiss because he had begun to bite it.
“As soon as Madeleine lay down she was taken with languor, which may have been due to her conception of aristocratic behavior, or to the kisses which now fell like necklaces around her throat and further down where the breasts began. She was no virgin, but the brutality of the attacks she had known, pushed against a wall in dark streets, thrown to the floor of a truck, or tumbled behind the ragpickers’ shacks where people coupled without even troubling to see each other’s faces, had never stirred her as much as this gradual and ceremonious courtship of her senses. He made love to her legs for three or four days. Made her wear furry bedroom slippers, slipped off her stockings and kissed her feet and held them as if he were possessing her whole body. By the time he was ready to lift her skirt he had inflamed the rest of her body so completely that she was ripe for the final possession.