“My belt is wearing out,” Pierre said, “and it makes me sad because I have had it ten years.” He studied it contemplatively.

As she looked at him sitting there, with his belt not yet fastened, she was sharply reminded of the moment before he unfastened his belt to let his pants down. He never unfastened it until a caress, a tight embrace of their bodies against one another, had aroused his desire so that the confined penis hurt him.

There was always that second of suspense before he loosened his pants and took out his penis for her to touch. Sometimes he let her take it out. If she could not unbutton his underwear quickly enough, then he did it himself. The little snapping sound of the buckle affected her. It was an erotic moment for her, as was, for Pierre, the moment before she took down her panties or loosened her garters.

Though she had been fully satisfied a moment before, she was aroused again. She would have liked to unfasten the belt, let his pants slip down and touch his penis once more. When it first came out of the pants, how alertly it straightened itself to point to her, as if in recognition.

Then suddenly the realization that the belt was so old, that Pierre had always worn it, struck her with a strange, sharp pain. She saw him unfastening it in other places, other rooms, at other hours, for other women.

She was jealous, acutely jealous, with this image repeating itself. She wanted to say, “Throw the belt away. At least do not carry the same one that you wore for them. I will give you another.”

It was as if his feeling of affection for the belt were a feeling of affection for the past that he could not rid himself of entirely. For her, the belt represented the gestures made in the past. She asked herself if all the caresses had been the same.

For a week or so Elena responded completely to his embraces, almost lost consciousness in his arms, sobbed once with the acuteness of her joys. Then she noticed a change in his mood. He was preoccupied. She did not question him. She interpreted his preoccupation in her own way. He was thinking of his political activity, which he had surrendered for her. Perhaps he was suffering from his inaction. No man could live completely for love as a woman could, could make this the purpose of his life and fill his days with it.

She could have lived for nothing else. In fact, she lived for nothing else. The rest of the time—when she was not with him—she felt and heard nothing clearly. She was absent. She only came to life fully in his room. All day, as she did other things, her thoughts circled around him. Alone in bed, she remembered his expressions, the laughter at the corner of his eyes, the willfulness of his chin, the glittering of his teeth, the shape of his lips as he uttered words of desire.

That afternoon she lay in his arms, noticed the clouds on his face, the clouded eyes, and could not respond to him. Usually they were in rhythm. He felt when her pleasure was mounting, and she, his. In some mysterious way they could hold back the orgasm until the moment when each was ready for it. Usually they were slow in their rhythmic motions, then quicker, then still quicker, in time with the rising temperature of the blood and the mounting waves of pleasure, and they reached the orgasm together, his penis quivering as it spurted semen, and her womb quivering from the darts, which were like flickering tongues of fire inside of her.

Today he waited for her. She moved to meet his thrusts, arching her back, but she did not come. He begged her, “Come, my darling. Come, my darling. I can’t wait any longer. Come, my darling.”

He emptied himself in her and fell on her breast without a sound. He lay there as if she had struck him. Nothing wounded him more than her unresponsiveness.

“You’re cruel,” he said. “Why are you holding back from me now?”

She was silent. She herself was sad that anxiety and doubt could so easily close her being to a possession she wanted. Even if it were to be the last, she wanted it. But because she feared it might be the last, her being closed, and she was deprived of real union with him. And without the orgasm experienced together, there was no union, no absolute communion between the two bodies. Afterwards, she knew, she would be tortured as she had been other times. She would be left unsatisfied, with the imprint of his body on hers.

She would re-enact the scene in her mind, see him bending over her, see how their legs appeared when they were tangled together, see how over and over again his penis penetrated her, how he fell away when it was over, and she would experience the stirring hunger again, and be tormented with desire to feel him deep inside of her body. She knew the tension of unsatisfied desire, the nerves unbearably awake, keen, naked, the blood in turmoil, everything set for a climax that did not take place. Afterwards she could not sleep. She felt cramps along her legs, making her shake like a restless racehorse. Obsessional erotic images pursued her all through the night.

“What are you thinking of?” said Pierre, watching her face.

“Of how sad I will be when I leave you, after not being really yours.”

“There is something else on your mind, Elena, something that was there when you came, something I want to know.”

“I’m concerned about your depression and have asked myself if you missed your activity and were wishing to return to it.”

“Oh, that was it. That was it. You were preparing for my leaving again. But that was not in my mind. On the contrary. I have seen friends who will help me prove that I was not active, that I was only a café revolutionist. Do you remember the character in Gogol? The man who talked day and night but never moved, acted? That is me. That is all I have done—talk. If this can be proved, then I can stay and be free. That is what I am struggling for.”

What an effect these words had on Elena!—as great as her fears had had on her sensual being, arresting her impulses, dominating them. It frightened her. She now wanted to lie on Pierre and have him take her. She knew that his words were sufficient to release her. He may have divined this, for he continued his caresses for a long time, waiting for the touch of his fingers on her moist skin to arouse his desire again. And much later, as they lay in the dark, he took her again, and then she had to hold back the intensity and quickness of her orgasm so as to have it with him, and they both cried out, and she wept with joy.

From then on the struggle of their love was to defeat this coldness which lay dormant in her and which a word, a small wound, a doubt, could bring out to destroy their possession of each other. Pierre became obsessed with it. He was more intent on watching her moods and predispositions than his own. Even as he enjoyed her, his eyes searched her for a sign of that future clouding, always hanging over them. He exhausted himself waiting for her pleasure. He withheld his. He stormed against this unconquerable core of her being, which could close at will against him. He began to understand some of men’s perverse devotions to frigid women.

The citadel—the impregnable virgin woman: The conqueror in Pierre, who had never burst forth to carry out a real revolution, gave itself to this conquest, to once and forever break down this barrier that she could erect against him. Their lovers’ meetings became a secret battle between two wills, a series of ruses.

If they had a quarrel (and he quarreled over her intimate association with Miguel and Donald, because he said they were making love to her through the bodies of each other) then he knew she would withhold her orgasm from him. He stormed and sought to conquer her with the wildest caresses. He treated her brutally at times, as if she were a whore and he could pay for her submission. At other times he tried to melt her with tenderness. He made himself small, almost a child in her arms.

He surrounded her with erotic atmosphere. He made of their room a den, covered with rugs and tapestries, perfumed. He sought to reach her through her response to beauty, luxury, odors. He bought her erotic books, which they read together. This was his latest form of conquest—to arouse a sexual fever in her so potent that she could never resist his touch. As they lay on the couch together and read, their hands wandered over each other’s body, to the places described in the book. They exhausted themselves in excesses of all kinds, seeking every pleasure known to lovers, fired by images and words and descriptions of new positions. Pierre believed he had awakened in her such a sexual obsession that she could never control herself again. And Elena did seem corrupted. Her eyes began to shine in an extraordinary way, not with the effulgence of day, but with a disquieting light like that of a tubercular patient, with a fever so intense that it burned rings around them.

Now he ceased to leave the room in darkness. He liked to see her arrive with this fever in her eyes. Her body seemed to have become heavier. Her nipples were always hard, as if she were constantly in a state of erotic excitement. Her skin had become so hypersensitive that as soon as he touched her it rippled under his fingers. A shiver passed through her back, touching every nerve.

They would lie on their stomachs, still dressed, open a new book and read together, with their hands caressing each other. They kissed over erotic pictures. Their mouths, glued together, fell over enormous protruding women’s asses, legs open like a compass, men squatting like dogs, with huge members almost dragging the floor.

There was a picture of a tortured woman, impaled on a thick stick which ran into her sex and out of her mouth. It had the appearance of ultimate sexual possession and aroused in Elena a feeling of pleasure. When Pierre took her, it seemed to her that the joy she felt at his penis belaboring her was communicated to her mouth. She opened it, and her tongue protruded, as in the picture, as if she wanted his penis in her mouth at the same time.

For days Elena would respond madly, almost like a woman who was about to lose her reason. But Pierre discovered that a quarrel or a cruel word from him could still arrest her orgasm and kill the erotic flame in her eyes.

When they had exhausted the novelty of erotica, they found a new realm—the realm of jealousy, terror, doubt, anger, hatred, antagonism, of the struggle human beings undergo at times against the bond to one another.

Pierre sought now to make love to the other selves of Elena, the most buried ones, the most delicate ones. He watched her sleep, he watched her dress, he watched her as she combed her hair before the mirror. He sought a spiritual clue to her being, one he could reach with a new form of lovemaking. He no longer spied on her to make certain she had enjoyed an orgasm, for the very simple reason that Elena had now decided to pretend enjoyment even when she did not feel it. She became a consummate actress. She showed all the symptoms of pleasure: the contraction of the vulva, the quickening of the breath, of the pulse, of the heartbeats, the sudden languor, the falling away, the half-fainting fog that followed. She could simulate everything—to her, loving and being loved were so irrevocably mixed with her pleasure that she could achieve a breathless emotional response even if she did not feel physical enjoyment—everything, that is, but the inner palpitation of the orgasm. But this, she knew, was difficult to detect with the penis. She had found Pierre’s struggle to always obtain an orgasm from her destructive, and foresaw that it might well end in taking away his confidence in her love and ultimately separate them. She chose the course of pretense.

So now Pierre turned his attentions to another kind of courtship. As soon as she entered he noted how she moved, how she took her coat and hat off, how she shook her hair, what rings she wore. He thought that from all these signs he could detect her mood. Then this mood became his ground for conquest. Today she was childlike, pliant, with her hair loose, her head bowing easily with the weight of all her life. She had on less make-up, an innocent expression, she wore a light dress of bright colors. Today he would caress her gently, with tenderness, observing the perfection of her toes, for instance, as free as the fingers of a hand; observing her ankles, on which pale-blue veins showed through; observing the little ink spot forever tattooed below her knee, where, when she was fifteen—a girl in school and wearing black stockings—she had covered a little hole in the stocking with ink. The pen point had broken during the process, wounding her and marking her skin for good. He would look for a broken fingernail so that he might deplore its loss, its pathetic truncated look among her other long, pointed ones. He worried overall her little miseries. He held close to him the little girl in her, whom he would have liked to know. He asked questions: “So you wore black, cotton stockings?”

“We were very poor, and it was also part of the school uniform.”

“What else did you wear?”

“Middy blouses and dark blue skirts, which I hated. I loved finery so.”

“And underneath?” he asked, with such innocence that he might have been asking whether she wore a raincoat in the rain.

“I’m not sure what my underclothes were like then—I liked petticoats with frills on them, I remember. I’m afraid I was made to wear woolen underwear. And in the summer, white slips and bloomers. I did not like the bloomers. They were too full. I dreamed of lace then, and gazed by the hour at the underwear in shop windows, entranced, imagining myself in satin and lace. You would have found nothing entrancing about a little girl’s underwear.”

But Pierre thought yes, that no matter if it were white and perhaps shapeless, he could imagine himself very much in love with Elena in her black stockings.

He wanted to know when she had experienced her first sensual tremor. It was while reading, said Elena, and then while coasting on a sled with a boy lying full length over her, and then when she fell in love with men she only knew at a distance, for as soon as they came near her, she discovered some defect that estranged her. She needed strangers, a man seen at a window, a man seen once a day in the street, a man she had seen once in a concert hall. After such encounters, Elena let her hair fall wild, was negligent in her dress, slightly wrinkled, and sat like some Chinese woman concerned with small events and delicate sadnesses.

Then, lying at her side, holding only her hand, Pierre talked about his life, offering her images of himself as a boy, to match those of the little girl she brought him. It was as if in each the older shells of their mature personalities had dissolved, like some added structure, a superimposition, revealing the cores.

As a child, Elena had been what she had suddenly become again for him—an actress, a simulator, someone who lived in her fantasies and roles and never knew what she truly felt.

Pierre had been a rebel. He had been raised among women, without his father, who had died at sea. The woman who mothered him was his nurse, and his mother lived only to find a replacement for the man she had lost. There was no motherhood in her. She was a born mistress. She treated her son like a young lover. She fondled him extravagantly, received him in the morning in her bed, in which he could still detect the recent presence of a man. He shared her lazy breakfast brought by the nurse, who was always incensed to find the boy lying in bed next to his mother, where a moment before her lover had been.

Pierre loved the voluptuousness of his mother, the flesh always appearing through lace, the outline of the body transparent between skirts of chiffon; he loved the sloping shoulders, the fragile ears, the long mocking eyes, the opalescent arms emerging from full-blown sleeves. Her preoccupation was how to make a feast of every day. She eliminated people who were not amusing, anyone who told stories of illness or misfortune. If she went shopping, it was done extravagantly, as if for Christmas, and included everyone in the family, surprises for all; and for herself—caprices and useless things, which accumulated around her until she gave them away.

At ten Pierre was already initiated into all the preparations which a life filled with lovers demanded. He assisted at his mother’s toilette, watched her powder herself under the arms and slip the powder puff into her dress, between her breasts. He saw her emerge from the bath half-covered by her kimono, her legs naked, and watched her pull on her very long stockings. She liked her garters to grip her very high, so that the stockings almost touched her hips. As she dressed she talked about the man she was going to meet, extolling to Pierre the aristocratic nature of this one, the charm of another, the naturalness of a third, the genius of a fourth—as if Pierre should some day become all of them for her.

When Pierre was twenty she discouraged all his friendships with women, even his visits to the whorehouse. The fact that he sought women who resembled her did not impress her. In the whorehouses he asked the women to dress up for him, deliberately and slowly, so that he could enjoy an obscure, undefinable joy—the same joy he had experienced in the presence of his mother. For this ceremony he demanded coquetry and particular clothes. The whores laughingly humored him. During these games his desires would suddenly run wild; he tore at the clothes, and his lovemaking resembled a rape.

Beyond this lay the mature regions of his experience which he did not confess to Elena that day. He gave her only the child, his own innocence, his own perversity.

There were days when certain fragments of his past, the most erotic, would rise to the surface, permeate his every movement, give to his eyes the disquieting stare Elena had first seen in him, to his mouth a laxness, an abandon, to his whole face an expression of one whom no experience had eluded. She could then see Pierre and one of his whores together, a willful seeker of poverty, dirt and decay as the only proper accompaniment to certain acts. The apache, the voyou appeared in him, the man of vice who could drink for three days and three nights, abandoning himself to every experience as if it were the ultimate one, spending all his desire on some monstrous woman, desiring her because she was unwashed, because so many men had taken her and because her language was charged with obscenities. It was a passion for self-destruction, for baseness, for the language of the street, women of the street, danger. He had been caught in opium raids and arrested for selling a woman.

It was his capacity for anarchy and corruption that gave him at times the expression of a man capable of anything, and that kept awake in Elena a mistrust of him. At the same time, he was fully aware of her own attraction to the demonic and the sordid, to the pleasure of falling, of desecrating and destroying the ideal self. But because of his love for her, he would not let her live out any of this with him. He was afraid to initiate her and lose her to one vice or another, to some sensation he could not give her. So this door upon the corrupt element of their natures was seldom opened. She did not want to know what his body had done, his mouth, his sex. He feared to uncover the possibilities in her.

“I know,” he said, “that you are capable of many loves, that I will be the first one, that from now on nothing will stop you from expanding. You’re sensual, so sensual.”

“You can’t love so many times,” she answered. “I want my eroticism mixed with love. And deep love one does not often experience.”

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past. She became aware that she was twenty-five and he was forty, that he had experienced many things he was already tired of and she had not yet known.

When the silence grew long and Elena did not see on Pierre’s face an expression of innocence, but on the contrary, a hovering smile, a certain contempt in the outline of the lips, then she knew he was remembering the past. She lay at his side looking at his long eyelashes.

After a moment he said, “Until I knew you, I was a Don Juan, Elena. I never wanted to really know a woman. I never wanted to stay with one. My feeling was always that a woman used her charms not for the sake of a passionate relationship but to win from a man some durable relationship—marriage, for instance, or at least companionship—to win, finally, some kind of peace, possession. It was this that frightened me—the sense that behind the grande amoureuse lay concealed a little bourgeoise who wanted security in love. What attracts me to you is that you have remained the mistress. You maintain the fervor and the intensity. When you feel unequal to the great battle of love, you stay away. Another thing, it is not the pleasure I can give you which attaches you to me. You repudiate it when you are not emotionally satisfied. But you are capable of all things, of anything. I feel that. You are open to life. I opened you. For the first time I regret my power to open women to life, to love. How I love you when you refuse to communicate with the body, seeking other means to reach into the entire being. You did everything to break down my resistance to pleasure. Yes, at first, I could not bear this power you had to withdraw. It seemed to me that I was losing my power.”

This talk again inspired in Elena a sense of the unstable in Pierre. She never rang his bell without wondering if he might be gone. In an old closet he had discovered a pile of erotic books concealed under blankets by the former occupants of the place. Now he met her every day with a story to make her laugh. He saw that he had saddened her.

He did not know that when the erotic and the tender are mixed in a woman, they form a powerful bond, almost a fixation. She could think only of erotic images in connection with him, his body. If she saw a penny movie on the boulevards that stirred her, she brought her curiosity or a new experiment to their next meeting. She began to whisper certain wishes in his ear.