THIS IS HOW the Basque found Bijou.
One day when he arrived at the house he was met by a melted Maman who told him that Viviane was busy. Then she offered to console him, almost as if he were a deceived husband. The Basque said that he would wait. Maman continued her teasing and caresses. Then the Basque said: “May I look in?”
Every room was arranged so that amateurs could watch through a secret aperture. Now and then the Basque liked to see how Viviane behaved with her visitors. So Maman took him to the partition, where she hid him behind a curtain and let him look.
There were four people in the room: a foreign man and woman, dressed with discreet elegance, watching two women on the large bed. Viviane, the heavy, dark skinned one, lay sprawled on the bed. On her hands and knees over her was a magnificent woman with ivory-colored skin, green eyes and long, thick, curly hair. Her breasts pointed high, her waist tapered to extreme slenderness and spread again for a rich display of hips. She was shaped as if she had been molded in a corset. Her body had a firm, marble smoothness. There was nothing flabby or loose in her, but a hidden strength, like the strength of a puma, an extravagance and vehemence in her gestures as in those of Spanish women. This was Bijou.
The two women were beautifully matched, without amorousness or sentimentality. Women of action, who both carried an ironic smile and a corrupt expression.
The Basque could not tell whether they were pretending or actually enjoying themselves, so perfect were their gestures. The foreigners must have asked to see a man and woman together, and this was Maman’s compromise. Bijou had tied on a rubber penis, which possessed the advantage of never wilting. So no matter what she did, this penis protruded from her female bush of hair as if nailed there by a perpetual erection.
Crouching, Bijou was sliding this fake virility not inside but between Viviane’s legs, as if she were churning milk, and Viviane was contracting her legs as if she were being tantalized by a real man. But Bijou had only begun to tease her. She seemed intent on making Viviane feel the penis only from the outside. She handled it like a door knocker, knocking gently against Viviane’s belly and loins, then gently teasing the hair, then the tip of the clitoris. At the last, Viviane jumped a little, and so Bijou repeated it, and Viviane jumped again. The foreign woman then leaned over as if she were nearsighted, to catch the secret of this sensitivity. Viviane rolled with impatience and offered Bijou her sex.
Behind the curtain, the Basque was smiling at Viviane’s excellent performance. The man and woman were fascinated. They stood right next to the bed, with dilated eyes. Bijou said to them: “Do you want to see how we make love when we feel lazy?”
“Turn over,” she commanded Viviane. Viviane turned on her right side. Bijou laid herself against her, entangling their feet. Viviane closed her eyes. Then, with her two hands Bijou made room for her entrance, spreading the dark-brown flesh of Viviane’s buttocks so she could slip the penis in, and she began to push. Viviane did not move. She let her push, thump. Then unexpectedly she gave a jerk like that of a horse kicking. Bijou, as if to punish her, withdrew. But the Basque saw the rubber penis glistening now, almost like a real one, still triumphantly erect.
Bijou began teasing again. She touched Viviane’s mouth with the tip of the penis, her ears, her neck, she rested it between her breasts. Viviane pressed her breasts together to hold it. She moved to join Bijou’s body, to rub herself against her, but Bijou was evasive now that Viviane was becoming a little wild. The man, bending over them, began to grow restless. He wanted to fall on the women. His companion would not let him, though her face was flushed.
The Basque suddenly opened the door. He bowed and said, “You wanted a man and here I am.” He threw off his clothes. Viviane looked at him gratefully. The Basque realized she was in heat. Two virilities would satisfy her more than that teasing, elusive one. He threw himself between the women. Everywhere the man and woman looked something was happening that enthralled them. A hand was opening someone’s buttocks and slipping in an inquisitive finger. A mouth was closing upon a leaping, charging penis. Another mouth was enclosing a nipple. Faces were covered by breasts or buried in pubic hair. Legs were closing over a burrowing hand. A glistening wet penis would appear and plunge again into flesh. The ivory skin and the gypsy skin were tangled with the man’s muscular body.
Then a strange thing happened. Bijou lay full length under the Basque. Viviane was abandoned for a moment. The Basque was crouching over this woman who bloomed under him like some hothouse flower, odorous, moist, with erotic eyes and wet lips, a full-blown woman, ripe and voluptuous; yet her rubber penis stood erect between them, and the Basque was overtaken with an odd feeling. The penis touched his own and defended the opening of the woman like a lance. He commanded almost angrily: “Take it off.” She slid her hands under her back, unfastened the belt and pulled the rubber penis off. Then he threw himself on her, and she, still holding the penis, held it over the buttocks of the man who was now buried inside of her. When he raised himself to thump into her again, she pushed the rubber penis inside of his buttocks. He leaped like a wild animal and attacked her only more furiously. Each time he raised himself, he found himself attacked from behind. He felt the breasts of the woman crushed beneath him, rolling under his chest, her ivory-skinned belly heaving under his, her hips against his, her moist vagina engulfing him; and each time she plunged the penis into him, he felt not only his turmoil but hers as well. He thought the doubled sensation would drive him mad. Viviane lay there watching them, panting. The foreign man and woman, still clothed, had fallen over her and were rubbing against her frantically, too confused in wild sensations to seek an opening.
The Basque was sliding back and forth. The bed rocked as they rolled, clutching and folding, all curves filled, the machine of Bijou’s voluptuous body yielding honey. Ripples extended from the roots of their hair to the tips of their toes. Their toes sought each other and intertwined. Their tongues projected like pistils. Bijou’s cries now mounted in endless spirals, ah, ah, ah, ah, widening, expanding, becoming more savage. The Basque answered every cry with only a deeper plunge. They were oblivious to the twisted bodies near them; he must now possess her to annihilation—Bijou, this whore, with a thousand tentacles on his body, lying first under him and then over him, and seeming to be everywhere inside of him, her fingers everywhere, her breasts in his mouth.
She cried as if he had murdered her. She lay back. The Basque stood up, drunk, burning. His lance still erect, red, inflamed. The disordered clothes of the foreign woman lured him. He could not see her face, which was hidden under her raised skirts. The man was lying over Viviane, belaboring her. The woman was lying over both of them, her legs kicking in the air. The Basque pulled her down by the legs to take her. But she screamed and stood up. She said, “I only wanted to look.” She arranged her clothes. The man abandoned Viviane. Disheveled as they were, they bowed ceremoniously and hurriedly left.
Bijou was sitting up, laughing, her tilted eyes long and narrow. The Basque said: “We gave them a good spectacle. Now you get dressed and follow me. I’m going to take you home. I’m going to paint you. I’ll pay Maman whatever she wants.”
And he took her home to live with him.
IF BIJOU thought that the Basque had taken her home to have her all to himself, she was soon to be disillusioned. The Basque used her as a model almost continuously, but in the evenings he always had his artist friends for dinner, and Bijou was then the cook. After dinner he would make her lie on the bed in the studio while he talked with his friends. He merely kept her at his side and fondled her. His friends could not help watching them. His hand would mechanically circle over her ripe breasts. Bijou would not move. She would fall into a languid pose. The Basque would touch the material of her dress as if it were her skin. Her dresses always molded her body tightly. His hand would appraise and pat and caress, then circle over the belly, then suddenly tickle her to make her squirm. He would open her dress, take out one breast and say to his friends, “Did you ever see such a breast? Look!” They looked. One was smoking, one was sketching Bijou, the other was talking, but they looked. Against the black dress the breast, so perfect in its contours, had the color of old ivory marble. The Basque pinched the nipples, which reddened.
Then he would close the dress again. He would feel along the legs until he touched the prominence of the garters. “Isn’t it too tight for you? Let’s see. Has it left a mark?” He would lift the skirt and carefully remove the garter. As Bijou lifted her leg to him the men could see the smooth gleaming lines of her thighs above the stocking. Then she covered herself again and the Basque would continue to fondle her. Bijou’s eyes would blur as if she were drunk. But because she was now like the Basque’s wife and in the company of the Basque’s friends, each time he exposed her she fought to cover herself again, hiding away each new secret in the black folds of her dress.
She stretched her legs. She kicked off her shoes. The erotic light that shone from her eyes, a light that her heavy eyelashes could not shade sufficiently, traversed the bodies of the men like fire.
On nights like this she knew the Basque was not intent on giving her pleasure but on torturing her. He would not be satisfied until the faces of his friends were altered, decomposed. He would pull the zipper on the side of her dress and slip in his hand. “You are not wearing panties today, Bijou.” They could see his hand under the dress, caressing the belly and descending towards the legs. Then he would stop and withdraw his hand. They watched his hand coming out of the black dress and closing the zipper again.
Once he asked one of the painters for his warm pipe. The man handed it to him. He slipped the pipe up Bijou’s skirt and laid it against her sex. “It’s warm,” he said. “Warm and smooth.” Bijou moved away from the pipe because she did not want them to know that all the Basque’s fondlings had wetted her. But the pipe came out revealing this, as if it had been dipped in peach juice. The Basque handed it back to its owner, who was thus given a little of Bijou’s sexual odor. Bijou was afraid of what the Basque would invent next. She tightened her legs. The Basque was smoking. The three friends sat around the bed, talking disconnectedly as if the gestures which were taking place had nothing to do with their conversation.
One of them was talking about the woman painter who was filling the galleries with giant flowers in rainbow colors. “They’re not flowers,” said the pipe smoker, “they’re vulvas. Anyone can see that. It is an obsession with her. She paints a vulva the size of a full-grown woman. At first it looks like petals, the heart of a flower, then one sees the two uneven lips, the fine center line, the wavelike edge of the lips, when they are spread open. What kind of a woman can she be, always exhibiting this giant vulva, suggestively vanishing into a tunnel-like repetition, growing from a large one to a smaller, the shadow of it, as if one were actually entering into it. It makes you feel as though you were standing before those sea plants which open only to suck in whatever food they can catch, open with the same wavering edges.”
At this moment the Basque had an idea. He asked Bijou to bring the shaving brush and razor. Bijou obeyed. She was glad for a chance to move about and shake off the erotic lethargy his hands had woven around her. His mind was on something else now. He took the brush and soap from her and began to mix a lather. He placed a new blade in the razor. Then he said to her, “Lie on the bed.”
“What are you going to do?” she said. “I have no hairs on my legs.”
“I know you haven’t. Show them.” She extended them. They were indeed so smooth that they looked as if they had been polished. They shone like some pale precious wood, highly burnished, not a hair showing, no veins, no roughness, no scars, no defects. The three men bent over her legs. As she shook them, the Basque caught them against his trousers. Then he raised her skirt while she fought to bring it down.
“What are you going to do?” she asked again.
He raised her skirt and exposed such a luxuriant tuft of curled hair that the three men whistled. She kept her legs tightly closed, her feet against the Basque’s trousers, where he suddenly felt a swarming sensation, like a hundred ants traveling over his sex.
He asked the three men to hold her. Bijou squirmed at first and then realized it was less dangerous to lie still, for he was carefully shaving her pubic hair, beginning at the edges, where it lay sparse and shining on her velvety belly. The belly came down in a soft curve there. The Basque lathered, then shaved gently, wiping off the hair and soap with a towel. With her legs tightly closed the men could not see anything but the hair, but as the Basque shaved on and reached the center of the triangle, he exposed a mount, a smooth promontory. The feeling of the cold blade there agitated Bijou. She was half-angry, half-stirred, intent on not showing her sex, but the shaving revealed where the smoothness descended into a fine incurving line. It revealed the bud of the opening, the soft folded flesh that enclosed the clitoris, the tip of the more intensely colored lips. She wanted now to move away but she was afraid of being hurt by the blade. The three men held her and bent down over her to watch. They thought the Basque would stop there. But he ordered her to part her legs. She shook her feet against him, which only excited him more. He said again: “Part your legs. There are some more hairs down there.” She was forced to open them, and he gently began to shave off the hairs, sparse again, delicately curled, on each side of the vulva.
And now everything was exposed—the long vertically placed mouth, a second mouth, which opened not like the mouth of the face, but which opened only if she chose to push out a little. But Bijou would not push, and they could see just the two lips, closed, barring the way.
The Basque said, “Now she looks like the paintings by that woman, doesn’t she?”
But in the paintings, the vulva was open, the lips parted, showing the paler inner layer like the inside of the lips of the mouth. This, Bijou would not show. Once shaved, she had closed her legs again.
The Basque said: “I will make you open there.”
He had rinsed the soap off the brush. Now he brushed the vulva lips, up and down, gently. At first, Bijou contracted herself even more. The men’s heads leaned closer. The Basque, holding her legs against his erection, meticulously brushed the vulva and the tip of the clitoris. Then the men saw that Bijou could no longer contract her buttocks and sex, that as the brush moved, her buttocks rolled a little forwards, the lips of the vulva parted, at first imperceptibly. The nakedness exposed every nuance of her motion. Now the lips parted and exposed a second aura, of a paler shade, then a third, and now Bijou was pushing, pushing as if she would open. Her belly moved in accord, swelling and falling. The Basque leaned more firmly against her writhing legs.
“Stop,” begged Bijou, “stop.” The men could see the moisture oozing from her. Then the Basque stopped, not wanting to give her pleasure, reserving that for himself later.