Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He carried it to work with him for several days before and after Valentine’s Day. He decided dozens of times to give it to her, and changed his mind every time. He examined it daily, wondering if it was good enough. When he decided it was perfect, he thought perhaps it would be better to keep it in his drawer, where he alone knew it existed for her. Finally, he said, “I have a valentine for you.” She pattered around his desk, smiling greedily. “Where is it?” “In my drawer. I don’t want to give it to you yet.” “Why not? Valentine’s Day was a week ago. Can’t I have it now?” She put her fingers on his shoulders like soft claws. “Give it to me now.” When he handed it to her, she hugged him and pressed against him. He giggled and put his arm around her. He sadly let go of his shadow captive. — That night he couldn’t eat his spinach salad. The radish, gaily flowering red and white, was futile enticement. Diane sat across from him, stonily working her jaws. She sat rigidly straight-backed, her throat drawn so taut it looked as if it would be hard for her to swallow. He picked at the salad, turning the clean leaves this way and that. He stared past her, sighing, his dry eyes hot in their sockets. “You look like an idiot,” she said. “I am.” The next day he took Daisy out to lunch, although he couldn’t eat. He ordered a salad, which appeared in a beige plastic bowl. It was littered with pale carrot curls and flats of radish that accused him. He ignored it. He watched her eat from her dish of green and white cold noodles. They were curly and glistened with oil, and were garnished with bright pieces of slippery meat and vegetables. Daisy speared them serenely, three curls at a time. “You can’t imagine how wonderful this is for me,” he said. “I’ve watched you for so long.” She smiled, he thought, uncertainly. “You’re so soft and gentle. You’re like a delicate white flower.” “No, I’m not.” “I know you’re probably not. But you seem like it, and that’s good enough for me.” “What about Diane?” “I’ll leave Diane.” She put down her fork and stared at him. The chewing movement of her jaws was earnest and sweet. He smiled at her. She swallowed, a neat, thorough swallow. “Don’t leave Diane,” she said. “Why not? I love you.” “Oh, dear,” she said. “This is getting out of hand. Why don’t you eat your salad?” “I can’t. I’m medicated.” “You’re what?” He forced himself to eat the pale leaves and shreds of carrot.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Suddenly I got a sound box on the ears, and then another and then she took me by the ear and leading me to a corner of the room she turned my face to the wall and said, “Now button up your fly, you silly boy!” We went back to the piano in a few moments—back to Czerny and the velocity exercises. I couldn’t see a sharp from a flat any more, but I continued to play because I was afraid she might tell my mother of the incident. Fortunately it was not an easy thing to tell one’s mother. The incident, embarrassing as it was, marked a decided change in our relations. I thought that the next time she came she would be severe with me, but on the contrary, she seemed to have dolled herself up, to have sprinkled more perfume over herself, and she was even a bit gay, which was unusual for Lola because she was a morose, withdrawn type. I didn’t dare to open my fly again, but I would get an erection and hold it throughout the lesson, which she must have enjoyed because she was always stealing sidelong glances in that direction. I was only fifteen at the time, and she was easily twenty-five or twenty-eight. It was difficult for me to know what to do, unless it was to deliberately knock her down one day while my mother was out. For a time I actually shadowed her at night, when she went out alone. She had a habit of going out for long walks alone in the evening. I used to dog her steps; hoping she would get to some deserted spot near the cemetery where I might try some rough tactics. I had a feeling sometimes that she knew I was following her and that she enjoyed it. I think she was waiting for me to waylay her—I think that was what she wanted. Anyway, one night I was lying in the grass near the railroad tracks; it was a sweltering summer’s night and people were lying about anywhere and everywhere, like panting dogs. I wasn’t thinking of Lola at all—I was just mooning there, too hot to think about anything. Suddenly I see a woman coming along the narrow cinder-path. I’m lying sprawled out on the embankment and nobody around that I can notice. The woman is coming along slowly, head down, as though she were dreaming. As she gets close I recognize her. “Lola!” I call. “Lola!” She seems to be really astonished to see me there. “Why, what are you doing here?” she says, and with that she sits down beside me on the embankment. I didn’t bother to answer her, I didn’t say a word—I just crawled over her and flattened her. “Not here, please,” she begged, but I paid no attention. I got my hand between her legs, all tangled up in that thick sporran of hers, and she was sopping wet, like a horse slavering.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She was ravishing to look at, and she was alert and intelligent. It was just the time when women were wearing short skirts and she wore them to advantage. I used to go to the restaurant night after night just to watch her moving around, watch her bending over to serve or stooping down to pick up a fork. And with the beautiful legs and the bewitching eyes a marvelous line about Homer, with the pork and sauerkraut a verse of Sappho’s, the Latin conjugations, the odes of Pindar, with the dessert perhaps The Rubaiyat or Cynara. But the greasy hands and the frowsy bed in the boarding house opposite the marketplace—Whew! I couldn’t stomach it. The more I shunned her the more clinging she became. Ten-page letters about love with footnotes on Thus Spake Zarathustra. And then suddenly silence and me congratulating myself heartily. No, I couldn’t bring myself to go to the Grand Central Station in the morning. I rolled over and I fell sound asleep. In the morning I would get the wife to telephone the office and say I was ill. I hadn’t been ill now for over a week—it was coming to me. At noon I find Kronski waiting for me outside the office. He wants me to have lunch with him . . . there’s an Egyptian girl he wants me to meet. The girl turns out to be a Jewess, but she came from Egypt and she looks like an Egyptian. She’s hot stuff and the two of us are working on her at once. As I was supposed to be ill I decided not to return to the office but to take a stroll through the East Side. Kronski was going back to cover me up. We shook hands with the girl and we each went our separate ways. I headed toward the river where it was cool, having forgotten about the girl almost immediately. I sat on the edge of the pier with my legs dangling over the string-piece. A scow passed with a load of red bricks. Suddenly Monica came to my mind. Monica arriving at the Grand Central Station with a corpse. A corpse f. o. b. New York! It seemed so incongruous and ridiculous that I burst out laughing. What had she done with it? Had she checked it or had she left it on a siding? No doubt she was cursing me out roundly. I wondered what she would really think if she could have imagined me sitting there at the dock with my legs dangling over the stringpiece. It was warm and sultry despite the breeze that was blowing off the river. I began to snooze. As I dozed off Pauline came to my mind. I imagined her walking along the highway with her hand up. She was a brave kid, no doubt about it. Funny that she didn’t seem to worry about getting knocked up. Maybe she was so desperate she didn’t care. And Balzac!

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Ovid, mutual satisfaction was a vital part of his sexual code. For the author of the Lucianic Amores, it is what recommends heterosexual love. But nothing can match Clitophon’s panegyric. For him, the climbing ecstasy of shared plea sure encapsulated the real meaning of eros. When the woman neared the “climax of Aphrodite,” she became frenzied with plea sure, and at the peak of orgasm the woman’s gasps even carried a little of her vital spirit into the mouth of her lover, where it mingled with his wandering kiss and returned to the heart. Th is description of the woman’s plea sure, the reader of the romance remembers, is delivered by a young man whose experiences, on his own admission, have been limited to professional women. Part of us may wonder if Clitophon has not himself been sold a convincing act, but that is to bring a modern cynicism into the picture. Achilles is a sly author, to be sure, but his rendering of female plea sure is integral to the whole conception of eros in the novel. Th e novels embrace the physical power of eros and celebrate its potential to be reconciled within the order of married life and the city- state. Th e Greeks and Romans recognized eros as a wild, destructive force. Th e novels present a cosmos where the feral power of eros is harnessed by marriage, not dampened by it. For Achilles, marriage itself exists as part of nature, or at least on an indistinct border between wild nature and human civilization. Th e novels are about the ending, about marriage, but they are not sermons or po liti cal pamphlets on behalf of marriage. In the world of the novel, civilization does not repress eros. For the novelist, the fi res of sexual love gave warmth and meaning to human life. Civilization is nourished by absorbing eros into its most vital institution. TH E G LO O M Y O N E S : TH E P H I LO S O P H E R S A N D S E X UA L IT Y In the very opening scene of Leucippe and Clitophon, the “author” sails to Sidon and meets Clitophon in a temple of the goddess Astarte. Th e topic of eros arises and the two descend to a nearby grove bordered by a clear cold stream; the rest of the novel is Clitophon’s fi rst- person account of his experiences. Th e story of Clitophon and Leucippe’s romance is an afternoon conte in the cool shade of the plane trees. Th e ancient reader would have known immediately that we have been placed in the surroundings of Plato’s Phaedrus, one of the Athenian’s most celebrated dialogues on eros, in which T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E 

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  “Francie, you bloody fucker,” I used to say, “you’ve got the morals of a clam.” “But you like me, don’t you?” she’d answer. “Men like to fuck, and so do women. It doesn’t harm anybody and it doesn’t mean you have to love everyone you fuck, does it? I wouldn’t want to be in love; it must be terrible to have to fuck the same man all the time, don’t you think? Listen, if you didn’t fuck anybody but me all the time you’d get tired of me quick, wouldn’t you? Sometimes it’s nice to be fucked by some one you don’t know at all. Yes, I think that’s the best of all,” she added—“there’s no complications, no telephone numbers, no love letters, no scraps, what? Listen, do you think this is very bad? Once I tried to get my brother to fuck me; you know what a sissy he is—he gives everybody a pain. I don’t remember exactly how it was any more, but anyway we were in the house alone and I was passionate that day. He came into my bedroom to ask me for something. I was lying there with my dress up, thinking about it and wanting it terribly, and when he came in I didn’t give a damn about his being my brother, I just thought of him as a man, and so I lay there with my skirt up and I told him I wasn’t feeling well, that I had a pain in my stomach. He wanted to run right out and get something for me but I told him no, just to rub my stomach a bit, that would do it good. I opened my waist and made him rub my bare skin. He was trying to keep his eyes on the wall, the big idiot, and rubbing me as though I were a piece of wood. ‘It’s not there, you chump,’ I said, ‘it’s lower down . . . what are you afraid of?’ And I pretended that I was in agony. Finally he touched me accidentally. ‘There! that’s it!’ I shouted. ‘Oh do rub it, it feels so good!’ Do you know, the big sap actually massaged me for five minutes without realizing that it was all a game? I was so exasperated that I told him to get the hell out and leave me alone. ‘You’re a eunuch,’ I said, but he was such a sap I don’t think he knew what the word meant.” She laughed, thinking what a ninny her brother was. She said he probably still had his maiden. What did I think about it—was it so terribly bad? Of course she knew I wouldn’t think anything of the kind. “Listen, Francie,” I said, “did you ever tell that story to the cop you’re going with?” She guessed she hadn’t. “I guess so too,” I said. “He’d beat the piss out of you if he ever heard that yarn.” “He’s socked me already,” she answered promptly.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I could have taken just the head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night, on a pillow, and made love to it. The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up, the whole being glowed from them. There was an illumination which came from some unknown source, from a center hidden deep in the earth. I could think of nothing but the face, the strange, womblike quality of the smile, the engulfing immediacy of it. The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife. This smile, this face, was borne aloft on a long white neck, the sturdy, swanlike neck of the medium—and of the lost and the damned. I stand on the corner under the red lights, waiting for her to come down. It is about two in the morning and she is signing off. I am standing on Broadway with a flower in my buttonhole, feeling absolutely clean and alone. Almost the whole evening we have been talking about Strindberg, about a character of his named Henriette. I listened with such tense alertness that I fell into a trance. It was as if, with the opening phrase, we had started on a race—in opposite directions. Henriette! Almost immediately the name was mentioned she began to talk about herself, without ever quite losing hold of Henriette. Henriette was attached to her by a long, invisible string which she manipulated imperceptibly with one finger, like the street hawker who stands a little removed from the black cloth on the sidewalk, apparently indifferent to the little mechanism which is jiggling on the cloth, but betraying himself by the spasmodic movement of the little finger to which the black thread is attached. Henriette is me, my real self, she seemed to be saying. She wanted me to believe that Henriette was really the incarnation of evil. She said it so naturally, so innocently, with an almost subhuman candor— how was I to believe that she meant it? I could only smile as though to show her I was convinced. Suddenly I feel her coming. I turn my head. Yes, there she is coming full on, the sails spread, the eyes glowing. For the first time I see now what a carriage she has. She comes forward like a bird, a human bird wrapped in a soft fur. The engine is going full steam: I want to shout, to give a blast that will make the whole world cock its ears. What a walk! It’s not a walk, it’s a glide. Tall, stately, full-bodied, self-possessed, she cuts the smoke and jazz and red-light glow like the queen mother of all the slippery Babylonian whores. On the corner of Broadway just opposite the comfort station, this is happening. Broadway—it’s her realm. This is Broadway, this is New York, this is America. She’s America on foot, winged and sexed.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  The cute stories he could’ve told about all the kittens and puppies that came into his office, clinging to the shirts of their owners, the birds with broken wings in white-spattered boxes! — The fifth night he came to see her, she wasn’t sitting in the waiting room with the other girls. “Where’s Jane?” he asked the stretch-pants woman nervously. “Jane? You must mean Lisette. She’s busy right now,” she answered in her placid, salad-oily voice. “Would you like to see another lady?” A very young girl with burgundy hair smiled brightly at him. She was clutching a red patent-leather purse in purple-nailed hands. “I’ll wait for Lisette.” The stretch-pants woman widened her naked-lashed eyes in approval. “All right, Fred, just sit down and make yourself comfortable. Would you like something to drink?” She brought him a horribly flat, watered-down Scotch in a plastic cup. He held it, smiling and sweating. The burgundy-headed girl curled her legs up on the couch and turned back to her Monopoly game with the contemptuous black-haired girl, who lay across the couch like an eel on a market stand. The stretch-pants woman tried to talk to him. “Do you work around here, Fred?” “No.” “What kind of business are you in?” “Nothing. I mean, I’m retired.” The patches of shirt under his arms were glued with sweaty hair-lace. Jane was being mauled by a fat oaf who didn’t care that you could feel her innermost life on her skin. The stretch-pants woman asked him to step into the kitchen. This house advertised its discretion and made sure men did not meet each other. He saw only the man’s dismal black-suited shape through the slats of the swinging kitchen door as he stood there holding his drink, the ice cubes melting into a depressing fizz. He heard the black shape’s blurred rumble and Jane’s indifferent voice. She sounded much nicer when she said good-bye to him. The pale- eyed hostess opened the swinging door and gave him a flat smile. “Okay, sir, would you like to step out?” Jane stood smiling in her checked dress, her hands behind her back, one white-socked ankle crossing the other, her chin tilted up. He remembered how he had seen her first, how she could’ve been any girl, any bland, half-friendly face behind any counter. He felt a funny-bone twinge as he realized how her body, her voice, her every fussy gesture had become part of a Jane network, a world of smells, sounds and touches that found its most acute focus when she had her legs around his back. — The minute she came into the room, he went to her and put his arms around her hips. “Hello, Jane.” “Hi.” “It was strange not seeing you out there waiting for me.” She looked puzzled. “I guess I somehow got used to thinking of you as my own little girl.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  That was what she wanted all right. She was talking to me blubberingly about what a good Catholic she was and how she had tried not to sin, and maybe she was so wrapped up in what she was saying she didn’t know what I was doing, but just the same when I got my hand in her crotch and said all the beautiful things I could think of, about God, about love, about going to church and confessing and all that crap, she must have felt something because I had a good three fingers inside her and working them around like drunken bobbins. “Put your arms around me, Agnes,” I said softly, slipping my hand out and pulling her to me so that I could get my legs between hers. . . . “There, that’s a girl . . . take it easy now . . . it’ll stop soon.” And still talking about the church, the confessional, God, love, and the whole bloody mess I managed to get it inside of her. “You’re very good to me,” she said, just as though she didn’t know my prick was in her, “and I’m sorry I acted like a fool.” “I know, Agnes,” I said, “it’s all right . . . listen, grab me tighter . . . yeah, that’s it.” “I’m afraid the boat’s going to tip over,” she says, trying her best to keep her ass in position by paddling with her right hand. “Yes, let’s get back to the shore,” I said, and I start to pull away from her. “Oh don’t leave me,” she says, clutching me tighter. “Don’t leave me, I’ll drown.” Just then Francie comes running down to the water. “Hurry,” says Agnes, “hurry . . . I’ll drown.” Francie was a good sort, I must say. She certainly wasn’t a Catholic and if she had any morals they were of the reptilian order. She was one of those girls who are born to fuck. She had no aims, no great desires, showed no jealousy, held no grievances, was constantly cheerful and not at all unintelligent. At nights when we were sitting on the porch in the dark talking to the guests she would come over and sit on my lap with nothing on underneath her dress and I would slip it into her as she laughed and talked to the others. I think she would have brazened it out before the Pope if she had been given a chance. Back in the city, when I called on her at her home, she pulled the same stunt off in front of her mother whose sight, fortunately, was growing dim.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Nights, if I went out alone for a walk, I was sure to pick up someone—a nurse, a girl coming out of a dance hall, a salesgirl, anything with a skirt on. If I went out with my friend MacGregor in his car—just a little spin to the beach, he would say—I would find myself by midnight sitting in some strange parlor in some queer neighborhood with a girl on my lap, usually one I didn’t give a damn about because MacGregor was even less selective than I. Often, stepping in his car I’d say to him—“listen, no cunts tonight, what?” And he’d say—“Jesus, no, I’m fed up . . . just a little drive somewhere . . . maybe to Sheepshead Bay, what do you say?” We wouldn’t have gone more than a mile when suddenly he’d pull the car up to the curb and nudge me. “Get a look at that,” he’d say, pointing to a girl strolling along the sidewalk. “Jesus, what a leg!” Or else—“Listen, what do you say we ask her to come along? Maybe she can dig up a friend.” And before I could say another word he’d be hailing her and handing out his usual patter, which was the same for everyone. And nine times out of ten the girl came along. And before we’d gone very far, feeling her up with his free hand, he’d ask her if she didn’t have a friend she could dig up to keep us company. And if she put up a fuss, if she didn’t like being pawed over that way too quickly, he’d say—“All right, get the hell out then . . . we can’t waste any time on the likes of you!” And with that he’d slow up and shove her out. “We can’t be bothered with cunts like that, can we Henry?” he’d say, chuckling softly. “You wait, I promise you something good before the night’s over.” And if I reminded him that we were going to lay off for one night he’d answer: “Well, just as you like. . . . I was only thinking it might make it more pleasant for you.” And then suddenly the brakes would pull us up and he’d be saying to some silky silhouette looming out of the dark—“hello sister, what yer doing—taking a little stroll?” And maybe this time it would be something exciting, a dithery little bitch with nothing else to do but pull up her skirt and hand it to you.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was dubious at times whether I was in her or she in me. It was open warfare, the newfangled Pancrace, with each one biting his own ass. Love among the newts and the cutout wide open. Love without gender and without lysol. Incubational love, such as the wolverines practice above the tree line. On the one side the Arctic Ocean, on the other the Gulf of Mexico. And though we never referred to it openly there was always with us King Kong, King Kong asleep in the wrecked hull of the Titanic among the phosphorescent bones of millionaires and lampreys. No logic could drive King Kong away. He was the giant truss that supports the soul’s fleeting anguish. He was the wedding cake with hairy legs and arms a mile long. He was the revolving screen on which the news passes away. He was the muzzle of the revolver that never went off, the leper armed with sawed-off gonococci. It was here in the void of hernia that I did all my quiet thinking via the penis. There was first of all the binomial theorem, a phrase which had always puzzled me: I put it under the magnifying glass and studied it from X to Z. There was Logos, which somehow I had always identified with breath: I found that on the contrary it was a sort of obsessional stasis, a machine which went on grinding corn long after the granaries had been filled and the Jews driven out of Egypt. There was Bucephalus, more fascinating to me perhaps than any word in my whole vocabulary: I would trot it out whenever I was in a quandary, and with it of course Alexander and his entire purple retinue. What a horse! Sired in the Indian Ocean, the last of the line, and never once mated, except to the Queen of the Amazons during the Mesopotamian adventure. There was the Scotch Gambit! An amazing expression which had nothing to do with chess. It came to me always in the shape of a man on stilts, page 2,498 of Funk and Wagnall’s Unabridged Dictionary. A gambit was a sort of leap in the dark with mechanical legs. A leap for no purpose—hence gambit! Clear as a bell and perfectly simple, once you grasped it. Then there was Andromeda, and the Gorgon Medusa, and Castor and Pollux of heavenly origin, mythological twins, eternally fixed in the ephemeral stardust. There was lucubration, a word distinctly sexual and yet suggesting such cerebral connotations as to make me uneasy. Always “midnight lucubrations,” the midnight being ominously significant. And then arras. Somebody some time or other had been stabbed “behind the arras.” I saw an altar cloth made of asbestos and in it was a grievous rent such as Caesar himself might have made. It was very quiet thinking, as I say, the kind that the men of the Old Stone Age must have indulged in. Things were neither absurd nor explicable.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “All right, I’m not a slave. With me it’s more a matter of love.” She was just barely aware that she was pitching her voice higher and softer than it was naturally, so that she sounded like a cartoon girl. “It’s like the highest form of love.” He thought this was really cute. Sure it was nauseating, but it was feminine in a radio-song kind of way. “You don’t seem interested in love. It’s not about that for you.” “That’s not true. That’s not true at all. Why do you think I was so rough back there? Deep down, I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with you, that I’ll need to be with you and fuck you…forever.” He was enjoying himself now. He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers. On one hand, she was beside herself with bliss. On the other, she was scrutinizing him carefully from behind an opaque facade as he entered her pasteboard scene of flora and fauna. Could he function as a character in this landscape? She imagined sitting across from him in a Japanese restaurant, talking about anything. He would look intently into her eyes…. He saw her apartment and then his. He saw them existing a nice distance apart, each of them blocked off by cleanly cut boundaries. Her apartment bloomed with scenes that spiraled toward him in colorful circular motions and then froze suddenly and clearly in place. She was crawling blindfolded across the floor. She was bound and naked in an S&M bar. She was sitting next to him in a taxi, her skirt pulled up, his fingers in her vagina. …and then they would go back to her apartment. He would beat her and fuck her mouth. Then he would go home to his wife, and she would make dinner for him. It was so well balanced, the mere contemplation of it gave him pleasure. The next day he would send her flowers. He let go of the wheel with one hand and patted her head. She gripped his shirt frantically. He thought: This could work out fine. Something Nice“What’s your name, sir?” The freckled woman wore green stretch pants, and had her red hair tucked under a neat pink scarf. “Fred?” She was making her naturally coarse voice go soft and moist as warm mayonnaise. “I’d like you to meet my girlfriends, Fred.” The four girls stared at him. Two sat up and smiled, holding their purses with tight fingers, their legs pinched together at the knees. A beautiful black-haired girl, with jutting cheekbones and a lush, full mouth, lolled in an orange beanbag chair, her long legs sprawled rudely on the floor, half open and tenting her tight silk dress so you could almost see between her legs. She gawked at him with open disgust.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Cousin Abercrombie was so bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the carrot. At least, that’s how Curley related it to me. He was an outrageous liar, to be sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yarn, but there’s no denying that he had a flair for such tricks. As for Miss Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways, well, with a cunt like that one can always imagine the worst. By comparison Hymie was a purist. Somehow Hymie and his fat circumcised dick were two different things. When he got a personal hard on, as he said, he really meant that he was irresponsible. He meant that Nature was asserting itself—through his, Hymie Laubscher’s, fat circumcised dick. It was the same with his wife’s cunt. It was something she wore between her legs, like an ornament. It was a part of Mrs. Laubscher but it wasn’t Mrs. Laubscher personally, if you get what I mean. Well, all this is simply by way of leading up to the general sexual confusion which prevailed at this time. It was like taking a flat in the Land of Fuck. The girl upstairs, for instance . . . she used to come down now and then, when the wife was giving a recital, to look after the kid. She was so obviously a simpleton that I didn’t give her any notice at first. But like all the others she had a cunt too, a sort of impersonal personal cunt which she was unconsciously conscious of. The oftener she came down the more conscious she got, in her unconscious way. One night, when she was in the bathroom, after she had been in there a suspiciously long while, she got me to thinking of things. I decided to take a peep through the keyhole and see for myself what was what. Lo and behold, if she isn’t standing in front of the mirror stroking and petting her little pussy. Almost talking to it, she was. I was so excited I didn’t know what to do first. I went back into the big room, turned out the lights, and lay there on the couch waiting for her to come out. As I lay there I could still see that bushy cunt of hers and the fingers strumming it like. I opened my fly to let my pecker twitch about in the cool of the dark. I tried to mesmerize her from the couch, or at least I tried letting my pecker mesmerize her. “Come here, you bitch,” I kept saying to myself, “come in here and spread that cunt over me.” She must have caught the message immediately, for in a jiffy she had opened the door and was groping about in the dark to find the couch. I didn’t say a word, I didn’t make a move. I just kept my mind riveted on her cunt moving quietly in the dark like a crab.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He has let me overwhelm him. He has constantly feared to disappoint me. He has exaggerated my expectations. He has worried about how long and how much I would love him. He has let thinking interfere with our happiness. Henry, you love your little whores because you are superior to them. You really have refused to meet a woman on your own level. You were surprised how much I could love without judging, adoring you as no whore ever adored. Well, then, are you no happier to be adored by me, and doesn’t it make you infinitely superior? Do all men shrink before the more difficult love? For Henry, everything is flowing as before. He did not observe my hesitation when he suggested we go to the Hotel Cronstadt. Our hour seemed just as rich as ever, and he was so adoring. Yet I had the feeling of making an effort to love him. Perhaps he has just frightened me. I expected him to be impotent again. I didn’t have the same wild confidence. Tenderness, yes. The cursed tenderness. I recaptured my happiness, but it was a cold happiness. I felt detached. We got drunk, and then we were very happy. But I was thinking of June. Driving home after much white wine: Fourth of July fireworks bursting from the tops of street lamps. I am swallowing the asphalt road with a jungle roar, swallowing the houses with closed eyes and geranium eyelashes, swallowing telegraph poles and messages téléphoniques , stray cats, trees, hills, bridges. . . . I mailed my surrealistic piece to Henry, adding, “Things I forgot to tell you: That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you. That when June comes back she will love you more because I have loved you. There are new leaves on the tip of your already overrich head.” I feel the need of telling him I love him because I do not believe it. Why has Henry become to me little Henry, almost a child? I understand June’s leaving him and saying, “I love Henry like my own child.” Henry, who, before, was a gigantic menace, a terrorizer. It cannot be! Cabaret Rumba. Hugo and I are dancing together. He is so much taller than I that my face nestles under his chin, against his chest. An inordinately handsome Spaniard (a professional dancer) has been looking at me like a hypnotist. He smiles at me over the head of his partner. I answer his smile, I stare into his eyes. I drink in their message. I answer with the same mixture of sensual enjoyment and amusement. His smile is lightly sketched on his face. I experience such acute pleasure to be communicating with this man while nestled in Hugo’s arms. I am planning, as I smile at him, to return to the place and to dance with him.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I gave myself to that moment with frenzy. I think I am losing my mind, for the feelings it aroused in me haunt me, possess me every moment, and I crave more and more of Henry. I come home. Hugo reads the paper. The tenderness, the smallness, the colorlessness of it all. But I have Henry, and I think of what he said, wildly, while he was coming. I think how I have never been as natural as I am now, have never lived out my true instincts. I didn’t care today that Fred saw my madness. I wanted to face the world, shout to the world: “I love Henry.” I don’t know why I trust him so much, why I want to give him everything tonight—truth, my journal, my life. I even wished that June might suddenly announce her arrival so as to feel the pain the loss of Henry would give me. I went to have a massage. The masseuse was small and pretty. She wore a bathing suit. I saw her breasts when she leaned over me, small but full. I felt her hands over my body, her mouth near mine. One moment my head was near her legs. I could easily have kissed them. I was stirred madly. Immediately I was aware of the frustration of my desire. What I could do did not seem satisfying enough. Would I kiss her? I felt she was not a lesbian. I sensed that she would humiliate me. The moment passed. But what a half hour of exquisite torture! What torture to want to be man! I was amazed at myself, aware of the nature of my feelings for June. And only yesterday I was criticizing the vice of what Hugo and I call collective sexuality, depersonalized, unselective, which I now understand. To Henry: “Persecutions have begun—they are all pained, injured, that I should defend [D. H.] Lawrence. They look sadly at me. I look forward with impatience to the day when I can defend your writing, as you defended Bunuel. “I am glad I didn’t blush before Fred. That day was the high peak of my love, Henry. I wanted to shout: ‘Today I love Henry.’ Perhaps you wish I had pretended casualness, I don’t know. Write to me. I need your letters, as a human assertion of reality. One man I know wants to frighten me. When I talk about you he says, ‘He cannot appreciate you.’ He is wrong.” To Henry: “This is strange, Henry. Before, as soon as I came home from all kinds of places, I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write to you, talk with you.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He was so full of knowledge, the old buzzard, that one day—I suppose purely to amuse himself—he built a bridge which no living mortal could ever cross. He called it the Pons Asinorum because he was the owner of a pair of beautiful white donkeys, and so attached was he to these donkeys that he would let nobody take possession of them. And so he conjured a dream in which he, the blind man, would one day lead the donkeys over the bridge and into the happy hunting grounds for donkeys. Well, Veronica was very much in the same boat. She thought so much of her beautiful white ass that she wouldn’t part with it for anything. She wanted to take it with her to Paradise when the time came. As for her cunt—which by the way she never referred to at all—as for her cunt, I say, well that was just an accessory to be brought along. In the dim light of the vestibule, without ever referring overtly to her two problems, she somehow made you uncomfortably aware of them. That is, she made you aware in the manner of a prestidigitator. You were to take a look or a feel only to be finally deceived, only to be shown that you had not seen and had not felt. It was a very subtle sexual algebra, the midnight lucubration which would earn you an A or a B next day, but nothing more. You passed your examinations, you got your diploma, and then you were turned loose. In the meantime you used your ass to sit down and your cunt to make water with. Between the textbook and the lavatory there was an intermediate zone which you were never to enter because it was labeled fuck. You might diddle and piddle, but you might not fuck. The light was never completely shut off, the sun never streamed in. Always just light or dark enough to distinguish a bat. And just that little eerie flicker of light was what kept the mind alert, on the lookout, as it were, for bags, pencils, buttons, keys, et cetera. You couldn’t really think because your mind was already engaged. The mind was kept in readiness, like a vacant seat at the theater on which the owner has left his opera hat. Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck. Evelyn, on the other hand, had a laughing cunt. She lived upstairs too, only in another house. She was always trotting in at mealtimes to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the first water, the only really funny woman I ever met in my life. Everything was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff prick that laughs too is phenomenal.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  My mom threw herself into that scene. She was always out at some club, some party, dancing, meeting people. She was a regular at the Hillbrow Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Africa at that time. It had a nightclub with a rotating dance floor on the top floor. It was an exhilarating time but still dangerous. Sometimes the restaurants and clubs would get shut down, sometimes not. Sometimes the performers and patrons would get arrested, sometimes not. It was a roll of the dice. My mother never knew whom to trust, who might turn her in to the police. Neighbors would report on one another. The girlfriends of the white men in my mom’s block of flats had every reason to report a black woman—a prostitute, no doubt—living among them. And you must remember that black people worked for the government as well. As far as her white neighbors knew, my mom could have been a spy posing as a prostitute posing as a maid, sent into Hillbrow to inform on whites who were breaking the law. That’s how a police state works—everyone thinks everyone else is the police. Living alone in the city, not being trusted and not being able to trust, my mother started spending more and more time in the company of someone with whom she felt safe: the tall Swiss man down the corridor in 206. He was forty-six. She was twenty-four. He was quiet and reserved; she was wild and free. She would stop by his flat to chat; they’d go to underground get-togethers, go dancing at the nightclub with the rotating dance floor. Something clicked. I know that there was a genuine bond and a love between my parents. I saw it. But how romantic their relationship was, to what extent they were just friends, I can’t say. These are things a child doesn’t ask. All I do know is that one day she made her proposal. “I want to have a kid,” she told him. “I don’t want kids,” he said. “I didn’t ask you to have a kid. I asked you to help me to have my kid. I just want the sperm from you.” “I’m Catholic,” he said. “We don’t do such things.” “You do know,” she replied, “that I could sleep with you and go away and you would never know if you had a child or not. But I don’t want that. Honor me with your yes so that I can live peacefully. I want a child of my own, and I want it from you. You will be able to see it as much as you like, but you will have no obligations. You don’t have to talk to it. You don’t have to pay for it. Just make this child for me.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “No, it’s okay, that’s good enough.” She sat on the bed and stared at him, her small face gone suddenly grave. Her eyes were round and dark. Her muddy black makeup looked as if it had been finger-painted on. He sat down next to her and put his hand on her thigh. She ignored it. He felt as though he was bothering a girl sitting next to him on a bus. His hand sweated on her leg and he took it away. What was wrong? Why wasn’t she pulling her dress off over her head, the way they usually did? “Do you come to places like this often?” she asked. “Not too much. Every month or so. I’m married, so it’s hard to get away.” She looked worried. She reached out with nervous quickness and picked up his hand. “What do people do now, mostly?” she asked. “What do you mean?” “I mean I’m new here. You’re only my second customer and I don’t know what I should do. Well, I know what to do, basically, but there’s all these little things, like when to take off the dress.” He felt a foolish smile running over his face. Her second customer! “But you’ve worked before.” “You mean done this before? No, I haven’t.” He looked at her, beaming greedily. “What do you do for a living?” she asked. “I’m an attorney,” he said. “Corporate law.” He was lying. He felt cut loose from himself, unmarried, un-old, because of the lie. “How old are you?” “How old do you think I am?” She smiled, and her black eye paint coiled like a snake in the corners of her eyes. “Fifty?” “You’re exactly right.” He was fifty-nine. “How about you?” “Twenty-two.” She looked as though she could be that age, but he had a strong feeling that she was lying too. “Why do you come to places like this?” She lay across the bed, her head on her hand, her legs folded restfully. “Do you not get along with your wife?” He leaned against the headboard, his naked legs open. “Oh, I love my wife. It’s a very successful marriage. And we have sex, good sex. But it’s not everything I want. She’s willing to experiment, a little, but she’s really not all that interested. It can make you feel foolish to be doing something when you know your partner isn’t an equal participant. Besides, this is an adventure for me. Something nice.” “Is it something nice?” “With you it’s going to be very nice.” “How do you know?” “What a strange question.” She crossed the bed to adjust her body against his, to put her head on his shoulder. She stroked his chest hair. “It’s not so strange.” “Well, I just know, that’s all.” They kissed. She had a harsh, stubborn kiss.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She had the gift for transformation; almost as quick and subtle she was as the devil himself. Next to the panther and the jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the flamingo, the swan in rut. She had a way of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing immediately on the tidbits—the heart, the liver, or the ovaries—and making off again in the twinkling of an eye. Did someone spot her, she would lie stone quiet at the base of a tree, her eyes not quite closed but immovable in that fixed stare of the basilisk. Prod her a bit and she would become a rose, a deep black rose with the most velvety petals and of a fragrance that was overpowering. It was amazing how marvelously I learned to take my cue; no matter how swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap, bird lap, beast lap, snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to tip, feather to feather, the yoke in the egg, the pearl in the oyster, a cancer clutch, a tincture of sperm and cantharides. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus, Saturn, Uranus, et cetera; love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, clutch this, clutch that, clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust. Come food time I could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the egg cheep-cheep, blessed omen of the next meal to come. I ate like a monomaniac: the prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who is thrice breaking his fast. And as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring her young. What a blissful night of love! Saliva, sperm, succubation, sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the cavern world where even the wind is stilled. Out there, did I dare to brood on it, the spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men lulled, exhausted by centuries of incessant slaughter. Out there one gory encompassing membrane within which all activity took place, the hero-world of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heavens with blood. How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to bury in with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife or scissors, no scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard burns, no scalded lungs. Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect womb life. But the hole was there—like a fissure in the bladder—and no wadding could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off with a smile. Piss large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, the silence unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the doom of the “other” world?

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I believe everything you tell me, but I know also that it will all turn out differently. I take you as a star and a trap, as a stone to tip the scales, as a judge that is blindfolded, as a hole to fall into, as a path to walk, as a cross and an arrow. Up to the present I traveled the opposite way of the sun; henceforth I travel two ways, as sun and as moon. Henceforth I take on two sexes, two hemispheres, two skies, two sets of everything. Henceforth I shall be double-jointed and double-sexed. Everything that happens will happen twice. I shall be as a visitor to this earth, partaking of its blessings and carrying off its gifts. I shall neither serve nor be served. I shall seek the end in myself. I look out again at the sun—my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on the rooftops. Everything above the horizon is clear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the goal—the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendor while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow. . . . September, 1938 Villa Seurat, Paris

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I knew her quite well because I was giving her lessons for a time, and I used to do my damnedest to make her admit that she had a normal cunt and that she’d enjoy a good fuck if she could get it now and then. I used to tell her wild stories, which were really thinly disguised accounts of her own doings, and yet she remained adamant. I had even gotten her to the point one day—and this beats everything—where she let me put my finger inside her. I thought sure it was settled. It’s true she was dry and a bit tight, but I put that down to her hysteria. But imagine getting that far with a cunt and then having her say to your face, as she yanks her dress down violently—“you see, I told you I wasn’t built right!” “I don’t see anything of the kind,” I said angrily. “What do you expect me to do— use a microscope on you?” “I like that,” she said, pretending to get on her high horse. “What a way of talking to me!” “You know damned well you’re lying,” I continued. “Why do you lie like that? Don’t you think it’s human to have a cunt and to use it once in a while? Do you want it to dry up on you?” “Such language!” she said, biting her underlip and reddening like a beet. “I always thought you were a gentleman.” “Well, you’re no lady,” I retorted, “because even a lady admits to a fuck now and then, and besides ladies don’t ask gentlemen to stick their fingers up inside them and see how small they’re built.” “I never asked you to touch me,” she said. “I wouldn’t think of asking you to put your hand on me, on my private parts anyway.” “Maybe you thought I was going to swab your ear for you, is that it?’ “I thought of you like a doctor at that moment, that’s all I can say,” she said stiffly, trying to freeze me out. “Listen,” I said, taking a wild chance, “let’s pretend that it was all a mistake, that nothing happened, nothing at all. I know you too well to think of insulting you like that. I wouldn’t think of doing a thing like that to you—no, damned if I would. I was just wondering if maybe you weren’t right in what you said, if maybe you aren’t built rather small. You know, it all went so quick I couldn’t tell what I felt . . . I don’t think I even put my finger inside you. I must have just touched the outside—that’s about all. Listen, sit down here on the couch . . . let’s be friends again.” I pulled her down beside me—she was melting visibly—and I put my arm around her waist, as though to console her more tenderly. “Has it always been like that?”